In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World I am joined by the legendary Darren Doherty – a 5th generation land manager and trainer from the Bendigo region of Victoria, Australia.
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
He’s developed his own regenerative farming training platform, the Regrarians (Regenerative + Agrarian), inspired by many practices including PA Yeoman’s Keyline Scale of Permanence, Fukuoka, Allan Savory’s Holistic Farm Management, Permaculture and others.
Darren has trained thousands of people in 50 countries and been involved in the design of thousands of properties. You can find his thinking in the Regrarians Handbook and associated training programs.
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Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-Making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble, permaculture educator, and global ambassador, filmmaker, eco villager, food forester, mother, practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life, we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever and even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on, so our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection? What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking, community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the permaculture educators program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online jewel certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global PERMA youth programs. Women’s self-help groups in the global south and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the permaculture education Institute and our permaculture educators program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and, and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join our wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
My guest today on this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast is none other than the legend, Darren Doherty, who’s a fifth generation land manager and trainer from the Bendigo Region of Victoria Australia. He’s an absolute regenerative farm innovator. He’s also the writer of the Regrarians handbook and a filmmaker with his wife, Lisa Heenan of Polyfaces. So Darren has been involved in the design and development of well over 3000 projects, mostly broad acre projects on six continents. He integrates permaculture with Keyline and carbon farming and all kinds of different sorts of regenerative agriculture approaches. I’m absolutely delighted to be joined here today by Darren. I’m absolutely delighted to be joined by Darren here on the show today to talk about regrarians and his approach to permaculture design, especially on this broad scale that he works in. This is actually the first time that we’ve ever had the chance to sit down and have a chat. And I just loved it. So I hope you enjoy listening in .. Well, welcome to the show, Darren. It’s so great to have you here.
Darren Doherty:
I don’t know that we’ve met before, have we?
Morag Gamble:
We have met, oh my gosh, it must have been Atherton Tablelands permaculture conference, whenever that was.
Darren Doherty:
It was 11 years ago.
Morag Gamble:
Something like that.
Darren Doherty:
I remember it well. There were lots of people and it was a good vibe, wasn’t it?
Morag Gamble:
It was great. So I think that was the one and only time that we’ve ever met, but being in the world of permaculture I’ve been seeing your work for very long time, I’ve always looked to see what you’re doing. You are one of those big picture thinkers, big landscape thinkers with a global vision. It’s hugely inspiring the work that you’re doing. So I’m so glad that you’ve taken the time out of your busy schedule to have a chat with me today. Wonderful.
Darren Doherty:
Thank you. Well, thanks for the opportunity.
Morag Gamble:
So, for those listening, Darren Doherty is the founder of something called Regrarians and so maybe that’s something that we could just begin with right there. There’s so many things that you do, but maybe let’s just start there. What is Regrarians and what does even that word mean to you? Because it’s a beautiful word.
Darren Doherty:
Thank you. Well, there was a word that came on the rebound, it was sort of like, broke up a love affair with a few other characters, which was called Regen Ag, which was another brand I came up with. And when that went, I went, oh, that’s such a good brand, I’m going to come up with a new one and it took a while. So I developed this platform, which was developed, which was based or adapted from PA Yeomans scale of permanence, which at the time I was calling the Regen10, which is sort of the best, which is a shitty brand and the best I can come up with. And I don’t know, I actually have a point. I’ve got it in one of my notebooks somewhere where I was doodling on a plane or whatever you do at some point, I was like oh, that could work. And so it’s really, it’s a portmanteau of regenerative and agrarian, because ultimately, when we look at who a lot of the people that we’re working with, as I put it to, I’ve just finished a webinar with Ricks and, you know, people are in a transition to what I call now a regenerative agroecology. So they want it that they are aware wherever they are right now and they want to go somewhere. So, it’s sort of like a restart as an agrarian, because being an agrarian as such over the history of agrarianism has not necessarily been a great thing. It’s not resulted in fantastic planetary outcomes. And so it’s another, yeah, let’s reboot that, let’s reboot what that actually means, what does our relationship with land management and so on. So really it was just one of those things that came out of a brainstorm, I suppose it went from there.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Sorry for butting in there. I was just going to ask you who the main people that you find that you’re working with, because I know that you’re, it is more the bigger landscapes, isn’t it?
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, as most of us would know that most of the farmers and agricultural production on the planet, I can’t remember the figure, it might be over 70% or so, is with paper who have land, who are managing landscapes of less than two to five hectares. They’re not really who we work with and most of the people like to say, people, well, our audiences, mostly those of either, of colonized nations, and including here in Australia and other places like Mexico and Chile and Argentina and Brazil and so on and then all across Europe and the United States and Canada and so on. So it’s those places and most of those places are not, most of the people are people who have reasonable amounts of land. So it’s usually 50 plus hectares. So we sort of go from 50 to about a hundred, I think we’ve got a few people at the moment on our books who are about 150 to 200,000 hectares. So everything in between that, but yeah, you’re right. It’s mostly for that. I wouldn’t say, it’s partly intent, but also partly how it’s gone.
Morag Gamble:
Isn’t that where you grew up? On a farm?
Darren Doherty:
Well, yeah. I didn’t grow up on a big farm, so it was a relatively small one close to Bendigo. So, but it’s just like, I suppose, you know, like here in Australia, if you’re going to be, so-called productive, economically productive, viable person in agricultural enterprise and agriculture, there’s a scale to which that can occur and so of course, in my exposure to the permaculture movement, that suggests that certainly you can be, productive as a unit on a smaller acreage, but would that generally make a living for you as well as is a whole other question. And I suppose that’s the big distinction I would make with a lot of people that would be say, classically in permaculture versus the world that I kind of occupy, which is, you know, got the commercial part of it, which makes it difficult, which then creates the scale that we work with.
Morag Gamble:
I was reading in your kind of vision statement there, that you’re working towards creating the potential for people to be informed about the regenerative economy and then went on to talk about other things. So really it is, you know, agriculture is a subset of this broader regenerative economy that you’re talking about. You just want to speak about that, like a bit about what is your global vision? Cause I know you work around the world and you have, you know, like what you’re doing is not just about consulting to farms, there’s something behind that, which is what drives you on what is your, I guess the core purpose of work, isn’t it?
Darren Doherty:
Well, it’s a love of the planet, I mean. You know, again, as a permaculturalist, I’m sort of not the permaculturalist that I used to be, and I’ve certainly said sort of quite a few people. I don’t do permaculture anymore. It’s not that I don’t do it, but I don’t do it in the way that some people are aware it’s their methodology. It’s like for me, it’s one of the methodologies which really goes to impart what David Holmgren said that nature is an equal opportunity employer and with that, from it, from a methodological perspective, the problems of the world aren’t going to be solved by one methodology and there’s a lots and lots of things that people can do. And I suppose that’s the love of this world. and all of the natural systems that exist within it and trying to have them. So there’s more of them because there’s a naturally inquisitive person who loves all of that, I mean I want to see more of it. Luckily, as a boy who didn’t leave Victoria until I was 18, and that was to go over the river, which I can’t even do now, because I’m going to that illegal state of New South Wales, that I have been pretty lucky to travel as much as I have and seen the things that I have. So that part of me is kind of nurtured, but, you know, we’re just trying to see everything realize this potential. I mean, there’s that great statement in the Judeo-Christian, Abrahamic tradition of, you know, life begets life and, that’s really what we’re saying here, whether that’s someone themselves being in a current position and then us helping them to self-determine within a community context, the whole future for them, which is a new life, or whether that’s just seeing an ecosystem turned around from being in a relatively poor state to one that’s abundant, as it were, is amazing. And that’s what drives me, I suppose, is being able to see that being a good earth citizen, who wants to see this place with, you know, you just think, oh my God, all this stuff that’s been pulled together, as far as the chance of earth, if you like, depending on what your belief system is. But the chance of all of this coming together with all the fact that you can sit there with a, with a dross or opposite of just, what do you call it, the plant living beside you there is just a, that’s phenomenal, that’s outside of all of this. So yeah, that’s what really draws me. It’s pretty simple. Really.
Morag Gamble:
Yep. So you mentioned that permaculture is one of the sort of suite of methodologies that you draw on in the work that you do. And you also mentioned PA Yeomans’ work as well. What are some of the other things that you’ve just, that have inspired you and that you’ve been able to sort of stand on the shoulders of, in order to create your model?
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, again, I’d probably go back to the start. The farm that my grandfather and grandpa, my grandmother and grandfather developed was inspired by PA Yeomans’ work as so many people were, but not directly so that when I first talked to my grandfather about PA Yeomans’, he goes, Who’s he? But then, and this is the power of his work is Yeomans’ body of work is that, his keyline work of the forties, fifties, sixties was so powerful that people were doing his work without knowing it was actually from that source, which I think is incredible. And he could look to that with some of the permaculture stuff, which has permeated into the land care movement and vice versa and so on. So there’s a whole lot of, you know, Andrea Bassan’s work in rational grazing has morphed into all of these other things where people don’t know the source and on it goes. So, PA Yeomans’ work is really big and it’s sort of, you know, when I started out, I was just looking for whatever was available. Like I didn’t find out about permaculture until really until 1992, or three, up to that point, I was in buckets. Fukuoka was what turned all of this on for me when I was about 18 and a mate gave me this book and I read it and then I bought the other two.
Morag Gamble:
Which one did you get first? One-straw revolution?
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, the one-straw revolution. And my friends unfortunately passed now, but there was a comment, Whoa. I took the doing nothing thing in a different direction, but, and a predilection for big cigarettes with different ingredients, but, all of that had its phase. But, and then the keyline thing, because, and then Permaculture came along and then holistic management came along, all fairly early, I put to one side, holistic management, thanks to a conversation or no thanks to a conversation with Bill Mollison in his library one day at Tyalgum, I was standing there with him and I pulled this book out called Holistic Resource Management, the first edition by Savory and Bill just happened to be beside me. And he said, put that away, that stuff’s destroying Africa. And I went, Oh, okay and that was that. And I didn’t question until later, well, why did he have the bloody book in his library then?
Morag Gamble:
You know why he thought that ?
Darren Doherty:
Well there was a narrative going around at the time, which you see in videos, if you look at the global gardener, for example, he’s in Africa and he’s seeing that people put fences everywhere, which is all right, but that had nothing to do. That was just ranked colonial pastoralism. It had nothing to do with the holistic management plan rising. It was quite, which is quite very, very different. So I think he just equated the two and perhaps to a person of similar age and a similar, I wouldn’t say similar lineage, but another person on the scene and perhaps it was the ego system working instead of the ecosystem. Anyway, so those sorts of things came together and it wasn’t until we did the tour, we did a tour in 2007 of the world, um, which went for 13 months and while we were there, I called that my interview with the planet, because at that stage, I’ve done a lot of work in Southeastern Australia doing a lot of contracting work, but we did go to Vietnam for a few years to work over there, but pretty well, everything up to that point at burning one part of the world, just doing design and development. And I had, you know, like I said, there was the permaculture, there was the keyline, which is, you know, keyline and permaculture, very close. And then the whole farm planning stuff that I learned from the University of Melbourne and a few other bits and bobs, and that was pretty well the frame. And then when I started to travel around, we started to travel around, it exposed me to a whole range of other things that other people were doing around the planet. Some of which were a version of convergent evolution as philosophies. So I saw Bill Sienkiewicz in Arizona and New Mexico, which was an analog of what Peter Andrews was doing in Australia, right. Very similar pathways of, you know, might save riparian restoration, but developed without knowing each other., right. So there was all of that and then meeting Elaine Ingham and so on and Paul Stamets and meeting him. I was, you know, I’ve got to meet a whole lot of these really cool people and understand our whole, and probably most powerfully the late Eugenia Grassi, when I went to Mexico and started working with him and that whole world of Latin American soil biology and bio fertilizers and all that campesino empowerment. And I remember again on another plane, I was sitting there and I was doodling and I just put all these circles together and each circle was kind of like a Facebook disc, you know, like a profile, but it was each of the methodologies. And I was just thinking, well, there are so many methodologies that are out there and that started to really frame in my mind, the integration of methodologies, which to that point and still, a lot of people don’t do those sort of stays, I call it like you have your God. And it’s sort of like that, which I think philosophically plays into the fact that many of us are Judeo-Christian, follow the Abrahamic traditions and, or other religious traditions, which are largely monotheistic. And so we stick loyally to that tradition and at the sect within that tradition. And, I think that carries through with the methodologies that we follow as well, or sort of averse to not just be a permaculturalist and not just be a biodynamic this or whatever, or not just be a holistic manager. That’s just not the way the world works, the world and the array of solutions that we, or problems that we have out there, need some really, really integrated solutions, which are not necessarily from one band.
Morag Gamble:
I’ve been having some really great conversations with a lot of different people recently, which is one of the reasons why I sort of love the possibility of having podcast conversations about crossing into different worlds. And so I had a chat with, um, Stuart Andrews, Peter Andrews and so that’s something that you do a lot of when you’re going out into landscape thinking about hydration, isn’t that? I mean, that’s kind of, so when you go out into a landscape, what’s the first thing that you start to do and where do you begin to turn around incredibly degraded landscapes? Like, what’s your, what do you see and what do you start to imagine when you enter into that space?
Darren Doherty:
Well, it’s not just a matter of saying it’s also a matter of feeling. It’s a lot of the time these days, I don’t actually get to go, but that’s okay to an extent, because a lot of my role now is helping people to learn these things themselves, to becoming more sensory. So, perhaps I’ll start with myself and I’ll look at it that way. But myself, when I go out into the landscape, I, well, it’s all sensory. It may be, and it’s often when you’re doing it for someone else or with someone else on someone else’s landscape or another landscape that, it’s a one or two day affair. It might even be a one or two hour affair and that’s it. And so you’ve had, it’s not, and therefore it’s, you just taken a really small sample of all of the permutations. So it’ll be, you know, feeling the wind, it will be feeling the energy of the place in terms of how it radiates, all of that, what reflections. I mean, we’re pretty sensory organisms, which is cool. And then from a site perspective, I’ll be looking first off at the soil surface. Well, that’s a great thing. A lot of people don’t understand that the soil surface reveals to you so much of what’s going on. It’s as though there’s a film that someone put out years ago called the first millimeter, and it’s that millimeter of interaction between the atmosphere and the lithosphere, it’s that, you know, what does it look like? What does it say? And then imagining what happens when a raindrop falls on that? How does that raindrop then interact with that? Because that’s where all the action starts, it’s one raindrop at a time and then they all gang up together. Well, if they can, then they can just, as they have in Europe, wreak enormous havoc. And if you’re not there, when that flood is happening, or when that, or the corollary of that, when the drought is happening, well, then you’ve got to be there and sort of go, well, I can see how this could go in one direction or another. And then more broadly, of course, is the site extends to the horizon and the shape of the land and how it’s been formed. And what that story is telling is to find the interaction of the geology of that landscape and what its mineral composition is, and then how that’s interacted with time and the climate that’s been developed. And then what are the tree species? What are they telling you? And that’s one of the wonderful things about the journey, I suppose, of experiences that you start to read the trees and read other organisms to then tell you what the climate is like, kind of like you’re doing paleo botany or paleo anthropology, or any of those paleo enterprises or disciplines where you’re there it’s live and you’re actually reconstructing, in a sense what the whole picture is, but then what the picture of possibilities are as well. And then there’s sound, the sound of your feet largely. Unfortunately, I wear boots. So, you know, a lot of indigenous people, first nations people don’t wear footwear. And so there’s the temperature element of that feel as well, which is something, I know Allan Savory is, that’s something that he’s really big on. So you’ll see with a lot of videos or when you see Allan in the field if you’re doing it bare feet. So there’s that, and then we try and build that into the understanding of others, cause like I said, we largely trainers days those or facilitators. And so having people understand that same learning, but they’re on, they have, they’re usually only interested in their own place that’ll allow so we’ll say go out and camp on it, you know, go out and feel it, you know, see it the way the flame burns it, how hard is it to light the fire? You know, all of that sort of thing and how it all sort of interacts. You’re able to be out there when it’s pissing down, right?, or when it’s super dry, you know, what’s happening with that, pay attention rather than suddenly run some animals through your system. All of that stuff, which goes back in a way to Fukuoka where he said, Take the time, don’t rush. Mollison said the same thing and others.
Morag Gamble:
I’m hearing you saying a lot of being about your senses as the observer, as the designer. I haven’t heard you say anything about going and getting tests or anything yet. It’s very much about you in relationship with the land and what it is you reading, like understanding the language of what the soil and the trees and the ecosystem is telling you and what its possibilities are. And that’s a completely different approach. And what we’re hearing in, where agriculture is going in, you know, in a lot of that.
Darren Doherty:
In a lot of other high analysis. Yeah. Well, and there’s a role for that. You start at the heart, you start at the low resolution and then come on down because you know, you haven’t even talked to the people yet. I mean there’s a whole other thing, you know .
Morag Gamble:
In working with the farming community, how are you able to communicate this as being something that is the direction to take instead of like another direction or is it just simply the proof in the pudding and they go, well, actually I want that.
Darren Doherty:
We stopped advertising a long time ago. We stopped more or less even doing social media and I got rid of all my friends, perhaps even you, I found a bot that got rid of 5,000 friends on Facebook because it’s just all noise. And trying to be more efficient as a person and part of that is when we come to these places is, trying to frame it in a way that I say that just enables everything, you know, like people come and work with us because they’ve heard about us. So we have the imprimatur of invitation and like I said today in a webinar we did this morning, part of that is that people have different points at which they will transition or are causes for why they will make a transition. So if you live in town and you’ve had this ambition to always have a rural lifestyle or blah, blah, blah, well, that’s going to be built on something in your life that’s caused that. Some agrarian vision that you have with when you visit your grandpa or your uncle or your aunt or whatever it was. So there’s that sort of category and then there’s other people who’ve had something go wrong and so on. So you see, you’ve either got people in a way who are coming new to a landscape or who are on an existing landscape and want to change. So both are having to go through some sort of a transition and both have got a reason for why they’ve pushed the button of interest. So I find that I, you know, because the idea of proselytizing and being evangelical about that is I could just spend a whole lot of energy doing that rather than working with people who are already at least halfway there. And I’ve gone to the trouble of saying, Hey, can you come and help? So that makes it a lot easier. So what we do as a result is the first thing is we just say, here’s the world. There’s a lot of people doing some amazing stuff. Yes, they’re doing it in a different climate or a climate that’s slightly different cause that’s always the thing too, especially when you’re working with traditional land managers is they’ll go, Oh, that won’t work here because they get more rain or that, you know, it’s always, the grass is always greener, so whatever that is. So a lot of psychology goes into this in terms of the same way people are asked. And then, and again, you question about going into the landscape part of that too, is like I’ll drive up something. As soon as I get to, like i’ll drive, I’ll get to their fence, if I know it’s them, I’ll stop and I’ll look and I’ll go, ah, and then I drive up the driveway and I can see exactly how much money they’ve got by the time I get to the house or how much they’ve spent or how much they’ve got left. Right. Cause I’ve got a, you know, as the local produce store being the font of all land management wisdom for them because they’ve sold them everything that they got a whole bunch of new gear, or they got a top as their whole place, just to a repository of every piece of farming equipment that’s been released since the second world war, right. Now, you can, it’s a terrible form of judgment, but you do find yourself in that position and that then frames where you can go from there. And I use my power, with enormous respect and because I do have power, but, and you’ve got to do that in a way that really honors the outcome. So I’ve got my outcome, but then they’ve got their outcome and how are we going to come together on that? And largely our work on the belief on the practice of self-determination, which is really what I learned really strongly when I was working in places like Vietnam and Sri Lanka and sort of development systems is where, because before that, I was the king, people would hire me, I’d come in and I’d do the master plan.
Darren Doherty:
I’d do it all for you, it was my plan, not yours. I want farm forestry in your place so I’d pitch farm forestry, I want that so I’d do all that. But then I realized that that’s actually a sht way of going about things. And so self-determination and participatory processes are definitely the way to go because they’re much more empowering and you’ll run with it for your life and it’s yours and you can’t blame me if it all goes wrong.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. I mean, in so many different ways, it makes so much more sense. So do you have like, are you training people to go out and do this work as well? Or is it mostly just you training people to do the work on their own?
Darren Doherty:
So what we do now is we basically do farm planning training. So we’re effectively a trainer source, you might say that’s our primary product. So I’ve just started this week. If I could just plug a little moment at this slightly. So this week, we’ve got our third eight, we’ve just started our seventh, 13 week online farm planning program. So we’ve got about 400 people or so from around the world who are on that and they’re both alumni and people who are new. So we’ve got about a hundred or so new participants. And then we’ve got about three or 400 other people who have been past participants of this program and they continue to have access because what we’re trying to build is a peer to peer network and peer to peer social learning platform. So with that, that means that we facilitate through the delivery of our program, this sort of how to be a farm planner using our particular framework, which as I said before, is informed by all of these other methodologies as necessary. And when they do that, then they learn how to, with a guiding hand, do a farm plan. So like when you do a PDC say your permaculture design course, or like when I did a whole farm planning back in the mid nineties, it was all about, well, you learn how to do something and then with guidance and assistance and facilitation from someone who’s been there and done that, then you have someone to then exchange on where that’s going. And so we do that quite incrementally and over a year, because again, you know, it’s too ambitious. And I found this out with a lot of permaculture work again and keyline and other, that the kind of the idea of the master plan being able to be pulled off in one go, I think is sht. I don’t even use the word master planning anymore. If someone comes to me with a fully blown, beautiful plan, however it’s informed, I go, Yeah, do you really think that’s going to work? You see, that’s smart. I was gonna say even, but you know, people like you and I have had a long period of experience and blah, blah, blah, we realized the complexity involved and you realize, Oh sht, I wish I hadn’t done that because you just, your ego system is going into overdrive. So we really pulled back on that and just start, and try and have people focus on what the priorities are. And we do that with, through the lens of our layers, our platform layers. So you may need to focus completely on your family life right now, right? Because that’s, it might be, and you really need to focus on the economy layer. There’ll be weak links in each of the layers and so we try to have people learn about all of that, learn how it all comes together and learn what a transition looks like. But then also pragmatically go, actually, you need to focus on this right now or these layers right here right now.
Morag Gamble:
I was going to say, sounds like we’ve both come to a similar point in terms of where we’re offering things. So I offer something called the Permaculture Educators Program. So actually trying to support people to become permaculture educators, trainers, facilitators, mentors, it’s a year long process. And through that, there’s a very, like a deep dive into many of the different areas and, and pulling in, like, I’ve just kind of used permaculture as a Trojan horse to be able to pack in a whole lot of other things as well. But I totally agree, you know, you can’t just do, it’s an introduction to be able to go and do an intense course, sort of opens up a lot of doors, but to actually get into it and to be able to have that the time and the spaciousness to be able to do the observation and get the information you need. So, and then also having the learning community, I think this is one of the gifts that the online world has given to us. And I think it is an absolute gift actually, to connect people around the world in this..
Darren Doherty:
It’s not a gift for a sore ass but,
Morag Gamble:
But you know, in terms of the learning community that can be created from that and people knowing that anytime, anywhere they can be tapping into this enormous wealth of knowledge and experience and it’s brilliant.
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, it is. We’re very pleased with how all of that’s rolled along for us.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. I wanted to ask you, like, you’ve been in this for a while now. How have you seen the shifts and change in terms of growing awareness? Like in the thinking, in the action or the shift and change that you’ve seen in landscapes? Like, how is the regenerative agriculture movement progressing? Is it stepping forward at the pace that it needs to be? Or what, where are you when you’re thinking around that?
Darren Doherty:
Well, I think it’s moving ahead at the post whether it needs to. I think it needs to all go a lot faster than it does. Well, it seems clear to me that the Steve and Jay put on a podcast, I listened to recently, we’re in the, we’ve moved from the Anthropocene to the piracy, you know, we’ve got a burning planet and, you know, I have friends, unfortunately in Europe at the moment of finding that out and the West Coast of the U S and so on and Canada. So, yeah, we do, I mean, that’s far as really, we don’t need to be getting rid of any, we don’t need to be combusting rapidly without biological transfer, or cycling any biomass at all, we don’t have that luxury. We need more biomass because the carbon cycle was too much carbon up there in a particular form. It needs to be in a living form then here or in a cycling form down here. So that’s not happening anywhere near quickly enough. And, you know, with agriculture being the biggest land user, and that’s my pragmatism in this as well in terms of you come back to my motivations. When I thought about it, you know, a couple of decades ago and thought, alright, where can I be of most use to fulfill the core goa, it’s in agriculture, cause it is the biggest land use and the most powerful and the most pervasive land use. So that there’s been in the last 10,000 years and it’s been responsible for massive species destruction, and it’s ultimately responsible for the society that we have because without agricultural society, this computer doesn’t exist, right? So there’s a big responsibility and, but there’s a big potential. So in terms of how it’s all riding, the other part of the pragmatic part of the journey is that to safely navigate a transition, as you know, when you look at what agriculture’s primary purpose is to produce food, fiber and energy products for the world particularly for humans, right? So humans’ food, fiber, energy supply system, and to transition immediately over to something which throws the baby out with the bath water as it were, when I say the baby at the moment is conventional agriculture to do that really rapidly, but there’s a lot of possibility on that front, but then we’re dealing with humans and humans all have just stuff like different debt to equity ratios. You know, it’s like this core stuff that makes up the complexity of human life and you can’t just go and click a finger when you’ve got really bad debt and so on. So if you’ve got bad debt and a landscape, which is in bad debt, then that’s not necessarily a fast way out. And that’s not to say that if you change the financial circumstances with a bit of impetus and help, then you know, the land part is the fast part, I would say, because we see this time and time again, the human part is a lot more complex and slower to sort of move than the land part, which is, there’s a lot of upside on and we see that all the time. I was just working with Leanne and Barry O’sullivan who are inland from Bowen in North Queensland and they’ve got 32,000 hectares. I first became aware of them at a grazing conference that I spoke at, in Emerald, in Southeastern Queensland. And that was awesome and I met them and I watched their presentation. I was like, wow. Because they use ultra high density grazing and so they’ve got 5,000 head of cattle and they didn’t always do it that way, but they had their animals everywhere like everyone does, but they put all their animals into 5,000 head-units. And then they moved them around multiple times a day. So it’s like the wildebeest on the Serengeti. And they do that and the place has just gone Boom and it’s just been one year that they’ve gone, one season of management change, but you know, so that’s, I’ve got so many examples like that in the livestock world or whatever else. And then you come down and you look at people who are doing a similar thing of changing practice with biointensive gardens and all of that. There’s a lot of that, but you’ve got to be as a human, you’ve got to be in the right moment to do that. You’ve got to have the circumstances that kind of provide for that because a lot of people are just in survival mode. They haven’t got to the point where they can shift into thriving mode. Sometimes it takes a little bit to get beyond where you are. And so you’ve got to be attractive and that’s, so I often say, you’ve got to be pragmatic, incremental, and frugal at times in order to be able to get past where you are, which is a self responsibility pathway. And then once you get to that, then you can start to spread your wings, but yeah, I own the goal, but that’ll take a different set of steps for different people.
Morag Gamble:
I wonder whether there’s some things that you’ve noticed that consistently help people to get unstuck. I know it’s different in every single context, but what are some of the unstuck from a landscape level? What are some of those initial triggers to get out of that landscape debt and at the same time like..
Darren Doherty:
Well, I think it still starts with the human because it’s generally for me, and this is what i would, I see is the general pattern is that, the debt that you are in, whether it’s a social debt, it might be a self debt, you need to stand and look in the mirror, but I gotta say to people be an adult because most I’m working primarily in adult education, you might say, or adult support is What do you want out of this life? What gets you out of bed in the morning? You know, look at those core motivations for your being and sort of reset on that front. And then let’s go from there because if you haven’t given yourself the self, if you haven’t self loved enough, to be able to do that, to realize that you’re a perennial species, even if you’re abused yourself terribly, you tend to live for a fair while. My mother smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and she’s 75, it’s like fck hell has that happened. You know, so it’s like, you can, you’re here for a while so put a bit of effort in, right? And if you come to me or us and say, look, I want to do X, Y, and Z. Well let’s, well, that’s fine, but let’s look at you first and see where your capabilities are right now, so that we can have you address the capabilities that your landscape currently has and let’s go together because if you don’t, you’re going to be, you’ll be out before you know it. So you really gotta get your sht together personally and within your family or, you know, whatever the compact is that you have around you, get all of that together. Because you would well know that all of them, I mean, I know all of the relationships that have suffered in my time and there’s a few of them, have been because of a lack of clarity and that’s clarity from me and it’s clarity from them and it’s clarity together. And if you don’t get that going from the outset, what sort of connectivity and clarity you’re going to have with the landscape, that’s going to be able to carry it on. So the other thing too, you asked is well about the, you know, do I see much of a change going on? Oh, hell yeah. There’s a lot going on. I mean, I subscribed to all of the, let’s say all, but a huge number of conventional agricultural journals and all of that sort of thing. And I know I dance those two worlds and that sort of side is moving, but that’s a really, really conservative, rigid, and dominant side orthodoxy that is moving. And there’s been a lot of push factors for that. Climate is a really big one, but also the other thing that’s clear to me is that the dominant player in the world of agriculture is the consumer. Like if you look at the US, the last time I counted, there were 125 consumers to every full time “agriculture is my primary profession” farmer in the United States, right? So that means that the consumer has a lot of power to drive what kind of production system that producer will have. So at the moment, they support a production system which produces ethanol, high fructose corn syrup and all of the soil derivatives, and CAFO beef and CAFO-confined animal feedlot operations. So that’s what they support right now, they could just, the same, start to support a different pathway, which would then require those farmers to then produce in a different way. So that’s largely why we do the sort of awareness stuff that we do. Like when we produced the Polyfaces film. It had a very explicit purpose, and I don’t wanna be binary about this, but to convert the American soccer mum, because she, way we looked at it is that she is the well, they are, however they’re framed, the most powerful consumer on this planet because their decision-making then influences agricultural policy in the most agricultural nation of the world and the most dominant scientific nation of the world, which then goes on from there. So..
Morag Gamble:
It’s interesting that you say that, because I was going to ask you whether you felt that there was a need to do advocacy to get policy shifts at a government level to help.
Darren Doherty:
Absolutely, you know, we can actually,
Morag Gamble:
So you know, I guess it’s both, and you were saying, you need to shift their thinking at a community level, but simultaneously work at that level. So is that anything that you’ve been able to talk.
Darren Doherty:
Definitely
Morag Gamble:
What needs to happen at that level? What is the message that needs to be shared and what can be done to help amplify that message?
Darren Doherty:
Well, I think the pathways are pretty well the same, I mean, I’m working, we’re working on an MOU with the state of VeraCruz and the federal government Mexico at the moment, right? And which is really exciting. They really like our platform, I really like this. Mexico is one of those, I mean, I love Mexico. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent there, but it’s one of my favorite places in the world, I love that everyone thinks of Mexico differently, but when you, if you’ve been there, you know it pretty well, it’s like the place with one of the most highest upsides of any place in the planet. It’s just amazing. And, you know, their political class and the emergence emerging political class, they are looking at that as like they finally getting this, their Mexico back in a way, after you know, the multilateral struggles that have followed from NAFTA and all of those sorts of, you know, debilitating and neo-colonial policies that have been inflicted upon them. So they’re finally getting that back and they kind of go, Okay, here, we have this amazing country, what can we do? And they’re looking both inwards and outwards to try and do that. So that will take time to develop a whole range of policy frameworks, which will support that, which is part of what we’re talking about, but where we’re starting is where we always start, self-determined. To me, it doesn’t matter what level you are, you have to get your own sovereignty to use that term, your own personal sovereignty, and then build that upwithout being nationalistic, certainly be patriotic, but not nationalistic about it and realize that there’s a lot that you can do, so self-determine, get your own sovereignty and then have a participatory process. And that might take time, but that’s, that’s what it will be. And that self-determined nomination will then roll over into you. Well, in either individual landholders or collections of landholders, like in Landcare is a great example, and other frameworks like that, where people are coming together, they’re looking at stuff within a catchment level or by a regional level, and sort of identifying the issues, identifying the opportunities and then directing policy and support frameworks, which would then help them to get where they want to go. And it’s, there’s no, Oh yeah, just give him this and it’ll be alright. It’s a journey, I mean, what we find will work now, and what will give it, what will take us through a first set of transitions will then lead to something else that we need to support or build on otherwise. So, yeah, there’s a lot of that, I mean, I found, back when Rudd was the prime minister here in Australia in 2010 when we had the Regen Ag thing going, that the climate change mitigation strategy was called the Farm Ready Program and the farm ready program we used pretty heavily. I think we had 800 places supported, I think at 1500 bucks a pop for different farmers to come and do this series of Regen Ag programs. And that was enormously powerful. See, there’s just so many, like education is a good starting point, but then you’ve got to have other things along the way and partly, it’s sort of okay that you can go along like that, but then if you don’t have the market conditions to support and the regulatory conditions that support particular pathways for, then that can make it difficult. So, this sort of idea of us all, being able to have on-farm processing and you know, farm-to-plate sort of value chain support and everything. That’s the whole government thing, because once you open the lid on, open the door on, the regulatory phase of that, and then you start to realize the slowness of institutional change, and the process that goes through all of that and that does happen. We’ve been involved with that, with that change, but by goodness, you’ve got to put in the effort in, and you’ve got to park other things that you might really want to do while you’re doing that because it’s an all in. Whether it’s going to the feds or the state or the local council, however you do it, you know, anyone who’s in that change agency work, it’s what people have to be good citizens because you can’t just leave it to a few individuals to do it all the time.
Morag Gamble:
And I think that’s it, isn’t it? It really, it’s like stepping up in the capacity that you can, where you can in whichever organizations you feel like you can and that each of those changes or voices makes a difference to the whole. It makes it easy for people who are doing it at the federal level and all of that. So I think, yeah, however you can step up and speak up. Yeah. I like being a good citizen. My question, I was just trying to throw in there in the middle was like, have you noticed that COVID has changed anything for the conversation that you’re having with people?
Darren Doherty:
Well, we were already online, so that helped. So people said, Oh, have you heard of this Zoom thing? I said, yeah, I’ve had it for about four years actually, so I started giving zoom lessons. When we’ve checked in with our membership, at least, which we’ve done a number of times, we did. So I think, well, COVID really hit the world, I’d say early March last year was when it really kicked up, kicked in and people realized that this was something that was going to be quite powerful. I think we checked in around April or May and we had a lot of people coming in who were direct marketers and that sort of thing. And I was saying, Oh, look, this has been the best thing since sliced bread, you know, it’s been amazing. So looking at it quite selfishly from a market access point of view, but then as it sort of bitten on, then the human side of it comes on because, you know, rolling lockdowns that people have been in, so there’s been a lot of, I think it’s been a really positive thing from a social growth perspective. People have started to get them, I remember it was Patrick who wrote the permaculture book in the UK.
Morag Gamble:
Whitefield.
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, Patrick Whitefield, God bless his soul. I was listening to him at a thing that I was at in Germany years ago. And he was saying how he felt that it was not long before he died and he said that, you know, where he’s got to, as he’s realized that humans have to realize that they’re not going to be able to be independent anymore. And this was like, Oh, I’m going to say this was 2011, yeah, it was the year my grandmother died. And they’re going to have to realize that interdependence is, yeah. Cause it’s because, it’s energy, it’s fossil energy and this abundance that we currently enjoy that actually supports that possibility. And you know, in this case, that’s actually being, COVID, a pandemic that’s proven that the weakness of independence, because now people realize, well, they got forced independence where you were alone as a social organism, that doesn’t work. So we found a lot of stuff out about that I think. And that’s been really positive. So it’s easier, I think in some ways for us to talk about what Mollison might have called the woo-woo stuff a bit, they’re not hard woo-woo but softer woo-woo
Morag Gamble:
Well, you’re right. It’s just easier to have conversations about stuff that you wouldn’t normally have. And I think that’s really,
Darren Doherty:
Which I think is, there’s a lot of upside on that.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, you’re right. So, just one or two more questions. One was about, you talked before about the people that inspired you as you were growing the way that you’re thinking. Is there anyone that you’re looking to now, or that you see around you, that’s just like these points of inspiration as well that you think, Oh, that’s really, that’s new and interesting. I’m connecting in with that more recently.
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, I suppose there’s a few people as Ed Bush has become a friend, is one person. I really like his outlook and he’s such a positive force. John Kemp is another person because of his incredible intellect and he’s got a company called Advancing Eco Agriculture and the Kind Harvest platform, an Amish gentleman, who’s just this soil genius. I just loved the way you think, how brilliant his brain is. And Nicole Masters, I love the way that she works and one of the best communicators I’ve seen of anybody, in being able to, again, deal with the sort of operational complexity of commercial agroecology and making pathways for people which are successfully transitioned. So people like that, but then there’s just the individuals and families that I come across, in our membership, the Bert family in Western Australia, who’ve been really wonderful to us in supporting what we do. And just this outlook is like there’s some high net worth people, some of their outlook, but then there’s other people, we’ve got several people that we work with in places, again, like Mexico and, Benjamin Saleh in Somaliland who’s doing this the most amazing job with sheep on a small farm in rural Somaliland, in the bloody horn of African desert and he’s just so excited about all these grasses that no one’s seen forever and species and you know, people like that give me incredible inspiration as far as the pathways of possibility and yeah. And the smiles it brings to them and the ones that are around them, I think that’s pretty awesome. So, yeah, but in the broader scheme, I mean, there’s nothing really, that’s like, there’s no big leaps going forward, there’s no new keyline or there’s no new permaculture or there’s no one who’s really, I think it’s all incremental and that’s cool because I think that as we know, I mean, Martin Mulligan’s book, Ecological Pioneers, I think was a really good one that a lot of people don’t know about because it really framed, it created the frame for the personality type that goes with that kind of innovation that lead that pulse of innovation. And, well, there’s a bit of carnage that often goes with that because of the personality type. So I think it’s a better space in time, again, for us to move, as I said a couple of times from the ego system to the ecosystem and realizing our potential as that. And so for a lot of us who are better enabled, that aren’t featured in Martin’s book for a good reason,it’s a good place to be and that’s it. So it’s like this: it’s not incremental,not in the pulse, although there’s pulses of interruption and disruption that we’re feeling.
Morag Gamble:
And the final question was really about how do people find out more about the work that you do? Well, what are the links that you’d like to share so people can follow up.
Darren Doherty:
Well, just Regrarians. So if you search for Reggrarians on Google or whatever your search engine is, we’ve pretty well dominated it. So, it’s easy.
Morag Gamble:
It’s easy to find. I’ll put all the links down below and I’ll try and scan through these conversations as well for the people that you mentioned and the books that you mentioned, so I can pop some links to those down as well.
Darren Doherty:
Yeah, well, thank you. Well, regrarians.org is where we’ve got, that’s an entree, a font and also
Morag Gamble:
And also the polyfaces film too.
Darren Doherty:
Polyfaces film is a beautiful film. It’s got a high level of currency. It’s just a beautiful story about a family on a journey and it’s not the journey that everyone should follow, but it does. It’s like when I actually came up with the idea and the treatment, before people more capable actually did make it into something. But my original intent with that was to, well the treatment that I wrote was I wanted to combine Australia, the sort of narrative of Australian story and, Australian ABC show in which usually rural peoples lives, remarkable or otherwise, have been depicted. And that really shows the personal narrative of this story and journey. And I really enjoy that. And a lot of people do, and then combine that with really good cinematography, really good film values and whatnot, which, you know, so many of us are capable of now thanks to the technology that’s more broadly available. And I think we pulled that off pretty well. And that was again, because what we saw in the genre of agriculture, permaculture, regenerative agricultural films that are out there though, it was all just talking heads and yeah, and that’s pretty boring, really, I’d turn it off pretty quick. I know a lot of others do it, and we didn’t see anyone really telling stories, human stories, like that and felt a bit disappointed when they saw Polyfaces in a way, because they thought we were going to do an instructional video. Nah, that’s boring. It’s a bit maths, for us, because we understand with our work that it’s a human journey. And whether it’s you deciding as a consumer, as a person who’s in town, deciding how you’re going to live your life and what you’ve got to ingest and what you’re going to rub on yourself and wash yourself from wash your plates with and all the rest of it, how important that was, to then, being a producer, you know, what sort of production systems might you run? So, yeah, it’s a great piece. We really love it.
Morag Gamble:
And wasn’t your family quite involved in that whole process too, wasn’t it? they all grew up on the screen, which is cool.
Darren Doherty:
Yeah. They all grew up on the screen, which is cool. We all work together. We’ve got a restaurant here in Castlemaine, a restaurant-cafe called Creamtown, which is where I’m sitting. I mean, we’ve got a CoLab sort of working space. So I’m in a little corner here, which is my entree.
Morag Gamble:
What was the name of the cafe again?
Darren Doherty:
Creamtown. Yeah. So our eldest daughter who’s 28, Isabella, and middle daughter is Pearl, and Zayn our son, our youngest who just turned 20. They own it and lease it from Regrarian. So yeah. And that’s, yeah, it’s all organic and biodynamic local. It’s great, so I never suffer from good food. It’s a bad expression again, you know people don’t know unless they know, so, you know, points.
Morag Gamble:
So it’s accessible and delicious and appealing in all the different facets. Yeah. Well, thanks Darren, for taking the time to chat with me today.
Darren Doherty:
Oh, please. Thanks for the invitation. I really appreciate it and it’s lovely to see your face. I’ll remember it again this time. We probably only just said hello.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. It was an impassing thing, but your influence and the work that you do is just so important in the permaculture world, you know, it’s looked to as being such, you know, when you think about big landscapes, everything points towards the work that you’re doing. So, you know, just thank you.
Darren Doherty:
Which is lovely, but I think, you know, it’s always my role in this is really just to help others. I mean what I do would be nothing without the people who are out there every day doing, doing the work. So, it’s really all credit to them. Just a bit of a means on the way, I suppose. Thank you. Thanks a lot for the invitation. That’s wonderful. And I appreciate all the work that you and your family are doing as well.
Morag Gamble:
Thanks, Darren. All right. Take care. Enjoy your lunch. I guess you’re gonna have some.
Darren Doherty:
I’m going to reveal to myself that I am actually an upright ape and stand up.
Morag Gamble:
Thank you. All right, take care and see you.
Darren Doherty:
Thank you, you too.
Morag Gamble:
That’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you like a copy of my top 10 books to read, click the link below, pop in your email and I’ll send it straight to you. You can also watch this interview over on my YouTube channel. I’ll put the link below as well, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a comment. And if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider giving me a star rating. Believe it or not, the more people do this. The more podcast bots will discover this little podcast. So thanks again. And I’ll see you again next week.