50 years ago many of us came to agriculture, with a belief in the infallibility of the technology of the day. As we pursued our studies and later our professional careers, we saw this technology change as new scientific knowledge was discovered and was then brought to bear on every challenge we faced. It was a sort of unbridled optimism that there was no obstacle we couldn’t over come with new knowledge gained from meticulous research and that progress was linear, onwards and upwards. As an economist the statistics bear this out, agricultural productivity has increased relentlessly, year in year out. More production from the same, or less, inputs. We now feed twice as many people in the world as we did when we started in agriculture. 7.9 billion to be precise as opposed to 3.4 billion in 1966. (Thanks Google)

If we cast back to those student years in the late 1960’s, the concern was that in many parts of the world people were unable to feed themselves. Drought caused periodic famine in India – in 1976 Sulo and I landed in Madras, as it was then called, (now Chennai), and 3 million people were living on the streets of the city, having come in from the countryside because of drought. Drought was a constant cause of famine in the Horn of Africa – Ethiopia and Eritrea. Millions perished in China in the early 1960’s from Mao’s forced collectivisation of agriculture and later the disarray of the cultural revolution. Images of starving children in Biafra still vivid today I’m sure for many of us. And so, it went on.

In the early 1970’s, not long after we graduated, the Club of Rome issued a report (The Limits To Growth (1972)) in which it claimed exponential population growth would soon outstrip the world’s capacity to grow enough food to feed this population. Because the key resource required to grow food, land, was fixed; demand, as a result of population growth, would quickly outstrip supply. With more pages of charts and tables, than the evidence the cops presented to convict Arlo Guthrie of littering in Alice’s Restaurant – remember that? – the report of the Club of Rome, made us all feel depressed about never ending population growth. China adopted a one child policy, India forced sterilization. Paul Ehrlich an American biologist enhanced his career by touring the world with his doomsday scenario of mass starvation, putting the fear of God into everyone and the press lapped it up.

But what happened – Dr Norman Borlaug and a team of agronomist working in the Rockefeller funded CIMMYT research institute (Spanish Acronym for International Centre for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat) in Mexico developed high yielding wheats. The Green Revolution. As the technology diffused around the world, famine largely became only a by-product of war or civil unrest, not a lack food production capacity. Stanley Johnson (yes Boris’s father) wrote a small but very interesting book on it, if anyone is interested. The Green Revolution Harper Torchbooks 1972) Science and technology saved the day. In fact, much to chagrin of my wife the problems of the next thirty years were not, not enough grain production, but too much and as a result low prices for unsubsidized Australian farmers. Subsidized overproduction was the key problem, not lack of supply.

From this potted history it is easy to believe that science and technology must be the answer to all our problems and in one way it can be. But when you are dealing with natural systems every intervention has both positive and negative consequences. Australian agricultural output has grown in both volume and value consistently over the 50 years our involvement. But as a farmer I see the problems that Hemingway talks of above, everywhere. Yes, we avoided the dust bowl he speaks of – just – I still remember some horrendous dust storms carry millions of tonnes of red topsoil from out west across our farm and even as far as Melbourne – but ‘conservation farming’ as it is called – killing weeds by chemical means rather than mechanical, saved us from perpetuating that disaster. But we are still mining the soil – organic matter on many farms, especially cropping farms, is extremely low and not being replenished. Many broadacre cropping paddocks frequently contain little as 1% carbon or less. Duane informed me yesterday that soils at the time of Strzelecki’s exploration of inland N.S.W contained 7-9% carbon and the wetlands, which have largely been destroyed by European farming methods, as much as 14-15% Mono-cropping using moisture conservation techniques such as killing summer weeds is creating a sort hydroponic media out of the soils on grain farms – dead soils – no microbiological activity. Injudicious use of chemicals is creating parallel problems of weed resistance and inert soils. Fungi, remember those strange and wonderful organisms, largely gone, thanks to excessive use of yield improving, fungal disease controlling, soil incorporated chemicals. Now to maintain yields more and more artificial fertilizers are applied. Our increased productivity comes at a cost only some of which is measured in the farmers profit and loss statement. The other costs – what economist call externalities – are not measured. These are the run- down of our natural capital that Hemingway alludes to in the quote above.

Well, what do we do about? We can’t go backwards and adopt older technologies that may be less exploitive, because if we do, production will decline and some of those 9 billion won’t have a meal tonight.

My view is we have to better understand how systems work and tailer our interventions more carefully. Broadly we have three basic system we deal with in agriculture - the natural system, the economic system and the social system. Within each there are numerous sub-systems. Each complex and each interacting with other systems, which means interventions in one system have spill over effects on others. 50 years of agriculture and farming experience have convinced me that it is a waste of time trying to fight nature – I now try to work with nature. Still using existing and new technology, but trying to apply it in such a way that I maintain or improve my resource base, in particular the soil. And it is possible to do this. Interventions can have positive effects.

The concept working with the system dynamics, not against them, applies to every system. Every system has a stasis toward which it will trend, if left unfettered. In nature it is an ecological balance, in economics an equilibrium, in society some utopia without want or wars. While there may be some stasis or equilibrium the system is tending towards, it almost inevitable never achieves it. This is because the systems are dynamic and in a constant state of flux, regularly knocked off balance by some outside cause which results in continuous perturbations. So, the point is to understand the forces driving the system, not the stasis My view is if we can identify what that stasis condition is and understand the forces driving the system toward it, then any intervention we make that works towards the stasis, or at least is not antagonistic to it, is desirable and likely to be successful. But interventions that work against the internal dynamics of the system will end up failing and often cost more than the benefit they were designed to produce.

To my mind, the most important things we can do for creating a better world than the one we inherited; is to understand how the relevant systems work; appreciate the fine balance in the dynamics of most systems; be extremely cautious in applying new technology and be cognoscente of the potential for adverse consequences - but that is not to say we give up on science and technology.