Farm and landscape designer Darren Doherty speaks with John Kempf about principles of design, emphasizing management changes over infrastructure changes, and how to learn from experience in a richer way
John Kempf. Darren, you have such a rich lifetime of work in landscape design and farm planning. Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a farm plan?
Darren Doherty. A farm plan is an integrated piece of planning looking at the layout of a landscape and then layering different planning layers onto that.
It started as a soil conservation activity. People would take an aerial and then they would put a clear plastic layer over that, and then they would draw on all of their existing features — all of the fences and pipelines and water points and buildings and roads and things that make up the features of a farm landscape. And then they would do additional layers where they would look at the land capability classes, of which there’s eight — one being best, eight being worst for agricultural production. You’d mark in all of your water features and water lines and all of those sorts of things, and then contour lines, so that you could see what the topography was like. That’s the base. From there, there’s a bit of art — to try and realign the place so that soil conservation and land protection outcomes were delivered.
That’s how I was originally taught. But I brought in other methods. I was raised on a farm that used “The Australian Keyline Plan” as its layout. We had dams and trees and irrigation systems that followed those kinds of patterns. I also was exposed to the permaculture design method, which was inspired both by soil conservation and by keyline.
Those two methods — particularly Keyline — follow landscape shapes, and when you follow landscape shapes, you tend not to have as many straight lines. Back in the early ’90s and before, that wasn’t as practical, because we didn’t have the kind of fencing that we have now. Plastic pipe was available, but it wasn’t as low priced as it is today. We’re in a really good position now to be able to use landscape lines a lot more than we were.
That’s the nuts and bolts of what a farm plan is. It’s an integrated landscape plan where you’re considering the limitations of the landscape and making the most of the others and trying to supply the needs of all of what you’re doing.
Most of our work has been with livestock operations. We found that very few row crop farmers engage with us because, in the main, they’re working on landscapes that have inherently high capability. And secondly, they’re mostly working with crop rotations. That’s their main planning process, as opposed to a landscape plan.
Kempf. What are the benefits of putting together a farm plan for a livestock operation? When we consider adaptive grazing and intensive management grazing, there are improvements in productivity. There’s lots of motivations and incentives for farmers to adopt those types of systems. But what are the benefits of putting together a farm plan?
Doherty. That’s a question I pose all the time. Perhaps curiously, we often encourage people out of doing the development side of farm planning and to focus on the management — implementing agroecological farm operations. A realignment of practice is actually more powerful than going and putting in more fence or putting in new infrastructure. Now, that’s not to say that putting in that infrastructure won’t be valuable to you in the end, but I think that most western people, especially men, feel like we have to build things or develop something to feel like we’ve achieved something — whereas changing from within is perhaps more challenging.
For me, that’s what management is defined by — changes within, as opposed to changing your landscape or building something. Often you’ll see people run to the shop to buy the tool that’ll allow them to do something, as opposed to making do. We see the same in agriculture — to engage in practice change, people think they have to go and buy all of this stuff. They think they need physical things on the landscape in order to engage in that practice change. We try and encourage people to have a management-centered approach, if they can, because if you change management first, that changes landscape function outcomes.
And as you change landscape function outcomes, then you change ecosystem outcomes in favor of whatever you’re producing. That then gives you the opportunity to take a pause and observe your landscape sufficiently. As Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, used to say, apply prolonged, protracted observation, as opposed to being really hasty about it.
Taking a management-centered approach as a starting point is a really good way to reorient your view about the way you interact with that landscape and whatever agroecology you’re operating on it. That gives you a license to then go and make decisions about how you’re going to reorient things or go buy things.
Kempf. Can you give us an example of a farm you’ve worked with that you’ve walked through the planning process, and what was at the beginning and what were the outcomes at the end?
Doherty. In the ’90s and 2000s, a typical process was that people would contact us, we would send them a questionnaire checklist, they would come back to us — it was all by mail back then — and then we would get the aerial photos, we would do a physical survey, and we would get a one-meter contour or a half-meter contour plan. We would go and do soil tests — both geotechnical soil assays and agronomic through the Albrecht method.
We’d sit down with the client and establish what they ultimately wanted to do. I would sketch up a mockup of what the layout might look like, and that would go back to the client. Then they would come back with any revisions or suggestions. And then we would proceed with a project development or a bill of quantities for development. Over a few years, we would go and do that work as contractors, and that design would be built.
We can still do that, but it’s extraordinarily expensive to do so. Now we start with understanding the people, and we help them to understand themselves, because we firmly believe that if you don’t understand yourself, then you’re not going to be able to express yourself as well as you can in your agricultural and human lives, which are inextricably intertwined. We’ve established that most people want the same things. We’ve literally asked thousands of people these questions — what do you want out of life? What motivates you when you get up in the morning? What do you want to see your life have as its output? And most people want the same things.
So, we start with that now, as opposed to what people want in terms of a physical layout. We find that that has become much more enriching, and it means that people are able to express themselves immediately through a management-based outcome, so that when they do infrastructure, it’s a lot more cautiously and judiciously expressed in a physical farm plan. That’s been the big influence of something like Holistic Management, for example, in our practice.
Kempf. What does it look like to go through a farm planning process and to translate farm planning into management? What does the management aspect look like? How does management change as a result of going through a farm planning exercise?
Doherty. When we go through that initial process of context development, that has people also identify what they do now and what, perhaps, they need to do differently in terms of practice change. It really takes some sort of a self-audit to do that.
If you’re a pig farmer, how do I do pigs right now? Or if you’re a sheep producer or whatever you are producing, how do I do that right now, and what does my year look like? If you do that, as we do, in a relatively open forum with peers, that gives you an opportunity to invite others to make suggestions, including myself, about how that might change. We’re in a blessed time in the world now where regenerative agriculture — better forms of ecological expression — have been around for a while. We’ve got the track record to say, “This person is doing the best thing, and I can see that that would probably work here. Each landscape is different, but fundamentally what they’re doing is something that you could mimic and make your own.”
Kempf. You can learn from the foundational principles
Doherty. Yes. That’s again a transfer of management, as opposed to saying, “You need to buy this, that, and the other.”
These days we put people through what’s called our REX farm planning course, and we do two of those a year. They’re 14 weeks. This is the teaching-people-how-to-fish thing. I supervise and lead that, as do other people who work with us, and a whole community of over 5,000 others. People fill out a checklist based on the 10 “Regrarians Platform” layers so that we understand where they’re at now. It’s a stock take of them and of the physical attributes of the landscape they’re working in, and what their ambitions are.
Then we go through a process which is based on holistic management of creating a holistic context, which is fundamentally where you are asking people what quality of life they want to have, what forms of production they want to engage in, and what future resource base they’re trying to build over time. That includes their own behaviors and changes in them that they want to see over time, and also what sort of infrastructure changes and so on.
Then we go to the physical landscape, and we’re blessed these days to have incredible mapping of pretty much all of the world in terms of topography, and at the very least satellite imagery. And once we build the map, it’s really no different than the way it used to be — we’re looking at land capability, we’re looking at the landscape, we’re looking at all of the features of an existing landscape, and so on.
We start to build that nexus between the human context and the landscape context. The landscape — where it is at now? You and your family or your enterprise — where it is at now? How is that going to come together, and how is that going to be expressed into what you are envisioning it will look like? We don’t try to go too far ahead with that. I think that’s a mistake to sort of “future cast.” Especially early — because you’re still learning, and we are learning about your place. You don’t want to suffer paralysis by analysis. So, we tend to start with prioritizing the really important infrastructure things that are going to generate the most profit for you now, with the maximum bang for buck.
In livestock operations, that’s usually a more flexible water supply and a more flexible fencing system — that and a change in management. Maybe bringing them all into one herd, or looking at your whole operating system in terms of the way you are running animals; maybe changing breeds; maybe only operating during the growing season — so you only do stockers or whatever. It will be some form of realignment, which might be quite radical, or it might be quite subtle. This then allows you to make decisions about what goes where, or what we should change there.
That’s the general pathway. That gives people license to then do the things that we might more commonly associate with farm planning, like “where do we plant trees?” and “where do we build water reservoirs?” and all of those sorts of things. Water supplies might come first. Trees may well come later because there’s too much to plan and too much to go wrong.
There’s that principle in the Holistic Management framework that says, “When you are planning for the environment, you should assume you are wrong.” I think that’s a very powerful thing because it suggests that nature is complex and that agroecological systems are complex. And they are. So don’t get too ahead of yourself.
Kempf. One of the things you just said that I really appreciate is focusing on the things in the short term that provide economic value. You mentioned changes in water delivery and changes in fencing. How do those changes deliver economic value?
Doherty. Many layouts have water supplies which aren’t well delivered, and the water quality is quite low. It’s quite well recognized in the livestock industry that if you increase the quality of water supply, that has immediate impacts on parasite loads and general metabolic health. I think that’s obvious.
That might mean, as a starting point, if you’ve got farm ponds as your primary water supply, that instead of allowing completely unfettered access, you might fence the pond off and put a siphon over to a trough. It might be as simple as that. Then, because the water supply source has been protected from the feet of livestock and their defecation, there’s not the sedimentation, which makes it more difficult for animals to metabolize.
As for fencing, we often work with existing fence layouts. A lot of farms have already been fenced to some sort of landscape capability. A lot of fences harken back to a time when farms were mixed — where there were livestock on cereal operations. But over the past 30 years or so, at least, we’ve had a simplification of agriculture, so that instead of what are now grazing farms producing some cereals, they only do grazing. Or — and this is more common, I would say — cereal farms that used to have livestock now have no livestock, and they’ve removed their fences. If you’ve got the former — a grazing property that used to have crops — often the landscape is subdivided according to some form of land capability. The crops only grow in certain areas.
You can use that existing framework and use temporary electric fencing and maybe, as a transition, have a small network of piped water, which would then allow you to get going. When you do that, then you can have better rotations, you can have shorter rotation lengths, and you can manage rotations better as opposed to continuous stocking.
Kempf. Here in our North American context, we have conversations around agroforestry or alley cropping, incorporating trees or incorporating perennials into our agricultural ecosystems. We have conversations around the word “permaculture,” which frequently is defined as very small scale — it’s not really thought of on a large agricultural scale. Then we have Holistic Management, and we have the ideas that were developed around Keyline farming, which originated on your continent. It seems to me that what you’re describing is integrating all of those pieces together — agricultural skill, permaculture, Holistic Management, Keyline, etc., and turning all of that into one unified whole.
Doherty. Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. I was once described by an employer as an “integrated consultant,” and I thought that that was a pretty accurate description.
I suppose we often pigeonhole ourselves. I think I would classify myself as a leader in the sense that I go first. I’ve always been sort of unafraid, and in doing so, sometimes you need to latch onto something in order to prove yourself. Earlier in my career, I identified myself as a keyliner, or I designed as a permaculturalist or as a holistic manager. You often attach a label to something, but none of that really stood true with me because I was raised to use whatever works.
The second section of the climate chapter of the Regrarians Handbook is called “Regenerative Agriculture and Living Principles.” I’ve found myself being fascinated by principles and directives and those sorts of things. I think that was influenced by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s permaculture design package because it’s got three ethics and 10 or 12 principles. The design principles are, I think, fascinating. Then I’ve started to look at a whole bunch of other principles, and then practices, and I’ve accumulated those — because to just be beholden to one concept, which then becomes your dogma, is never going to work. No one’s got all of the answers. What we need to do is realize that and not put ourselves into a methodological box.
Kempf. You’ve mentioned how a changed awareness, or a changed knowledge base, changes your perception of a place. If you go for a walk with an ornithologist or someone who is passionate about birds, you become hyper aware of the birds in the landscape because they’re a central theme that you focus on. If you walk across the exact same landscape with the geologist, you can get a rich history on the history of this soil from a geological perspective. If you walk across the landscape with someone who is passionate about understanding trees or agroecosystems, you’ll see how those are integrated. There’s all of these different lenses that you can look at an ecosystem through, and any of those lenses is going to give you deeper perception and a deeper appreciation of a place.
You’ve mentioned the importance of starting with management rather than starting with infrastructure, because as you change the management of a place, and as you observe, and as you pay attention, the land talks to you and tells you what it is that is needed. It reminds me of the verses in Job 12, “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” Really, what you’re trying to give people is a different frame of understanding — how to look at the landscape through new eyes or with fresh perspective and ask better questions and make better observations.
Doherty. Yeah, I think that captures it pretty well. I often talk about giving people that license. A lot of people, I think for various reasons — the way they’ve been parented or the way society and its conditions have borne down on them — they often haven’t given themselves the license to express themselves in a whole bunch of ways.
Those biases you mentioned — of things geologists will look at it, that a botanist will look at it, that an arborist will look at — it’s good to have a concentrated intent of observation about things, because sometimes you need to do that. But I want to give people the license — not only in the landscape, but inside of themselves — to express themselves. Men of my generation and older certainly were not super encouraged to do this.
Kempf. Which is interesting, because if you go back in history, there was this celebration of the Renaissance man — the celebration of an individual who was deeply informed in many different areas — people who were well-rounded. They were athletically capable, they were good at art, they were good at physical activities and intellectual activities. They were considered well-rounded individuals. And yet today, culturally, we’ve lost many aspects of that — we celebrate specialization instead of generalization.
Doherty. Absolutely. The other day I was reading about the entrance exam for a civil engineer to Cambridge or Oxford in 1900 or so, and the first two things that were required was being able to speak Latin and Greek. Why do you need to do that? Well, you need to be well rounded, and you need to understand context, and perhaps you need to be able to have the humility to go back and look at the value of those peoples and what they understood.
We often talk about the Da Vincis of the world and other famous people, but what we don’t necessarily understand is how the common man and the common woman at that time were living. It seems to me that a lot of these peasant people were functioning in an extremely rich way, even if they were tenant farmers. And there’s certain ways of being in the Amish tradition that harken back to that time, and they’re extremely good. The family centeredness, the acute discipline of human connection — to me this is extremely good. This is something that every person back in the day would’ve taken for granted. But with the advent of technology, which has allowed us to separate more, we have to be conscious about it.
Kempf. I also think that what makes the Da Vincis of our world particularly valuable is having skills in many different areas: agroecology, geology, ornithology, botany, etc. Rather than being specialists, they have a good working knowledge of many different areas. Scott Adams makes this point — that when it comes to learning new skills, there is this compounding effect where one plus one does not equal two. I talk about this quite a bit in the design of agronomic management systems — that combinations of nutrients with biology is sometimes an order of magnitude more powerful than individual treatments alone.
And the same is true in developing our own skill base. As we add more skills, our observations become so much better and more valuable — not just for us, but for everyone around us as well. We’re able to add more value to our communities and to the people that we interact with.
Doherty. If you are involved in agriculture, you’re involved in the most complex pursuit that humans are currently involved in. I said this at a talk in Ithaca a couple of weeks ago, and a woman in the audience said that she disagreed — she worked at NASA, and they do much more complex stuff. I said, “Well, that’s reasonable in one context, but you are working on one thing.” When you are engaged in even the relatively simplified versions of agriculture, you’re still involved in a whole range of different disciplines, which gives you a skill base and an outlook that is quite different to other people. I’d prefer to be wrecked on a desert island with a bunch of farmers than with a bunch of rocket scientists. It’s important to have a rounded skill base because if you don’t, then you won’t be particularly useful when things go wrong.
Charlie Massey did his Ph.D. on why people transition to what we call regenerative agriculture. In most cases it was because something went really badly wrong. People who are more rounded, when something goes wrong, look at it immediately as an opportunity. They might be down for a moment. I’ve certainly had those moments. But then those people say, “Okay, what am I going to make of this?”
We try and remind people that you’re not the first one to endure hardship. The hardship of the people that got you to this point was probably significantly greater than what you are feeling now. That doesn’t take away from whatever you’re going through, but by the same token, you are made of some good stuff. So take that as your strength, and try and give yourself the license to talk with others. People all over the world are helpful, so do that.
Kempf. Darren, what are some of the memorable moments and stories that really stand out as you’ve gone through this process over the years?
Doherty. I remember years ago when we were doing some training in Tennessee, and this young woman came up to me and my wife, Lisa. Lisa is very gregarious, and people immediately feel safe with her, which I think is a great gift of hers. They just share stuff within a couple of minutes of meeting her that they probably have not shared with a lot of people, if anyone. And this woman came up and said, “My husband just can’t stop innovating. He just cannot stop doing new things.” And Lisa said, “Yeah, Darren used to be like that. He couldn’t stop innovating.”
It’s true — I’m a classic innovator, but I’ve had to put my genie in the bottle. Being an innovator is a really good thing, and a valuable thing, but it comes at a cost. You’ve got to understand what those costs are. That’s part of the journey, I think — to try and pull the levers on your life for what is important.
That’s what being holistic is about — acknowledging a context and understanding yourself well enough so that you can pull those levers throughout your life. You have parts of your life which are not necessarily innovative but which need to be nurtured. Don’t feel like you have to do everything — that’s impossible. People try to create a permaculture utopia. They try and have it all yesterday, and it doesn’t work. A forest doesn’t emerge yesterday. It takes time. Follow the lessons and the patience of nature.
Now, one of Bill Mollison’s principles of permaculture is accelerating ecological succession and evolution. You can certainly do that, but even then you can only go so fast. And that can’t be at the expense of your family. Most people, if you ask them what’s the most important thing in their life, the first thing they think of is their family. If they don’t, that’s a bit of a red flag. And I’ve seen that with some people. I know one person who, in front of his wife and daughter, said that permaculture was more important than anything. Lisa said, “More important than your wife and your daughter?” He goes, “Oh yeah.” And we went, “Whoa.” That to us was a big red flag.
When you ask that question about stories, I often go not to the good times and the wonderful chats that we’ve had, but to the sort of things where you go, “Wow — that’s where people are willing to go.” It’s a warning to be careful about what humans can do.
I’ve joked before that I have to undo Joel Salatin’s stuff all the time. I don’t think that’s Joel’s fault. It’s just that Joel is so exuberant and so excited about what he’s been able to do, and his ministry on that is palpable. He’s just a wonderful, exuberant, spirit-filled individual. But then people go and try and replicate Polyface and all of its layers, and I’ve had to go around and try and undo that. Because Joel is very fortunate that he has his wife and his mother and his son, who are not like him, and who are continually saying, “Joel, that’s a really crazy idea.” If it were left up to Joel, by his own admission, it’d probably be a mess. He needs the counterbalances.
I once consulted for some people who gone on that accelerated Polyface-ization of their farm. It was a mess. The animal systems were starting to lose the proper attention that’s required to get the kind of output they were expecting. They had pigs that were in a position in the landscape that were already damaging that landscape. What they wanted to achieve on that landscape — be profitable, have the land in a better state than when they started, all of those sorts of core values — they were not even being close to being achieved. They were polluting a waterway and getting sediment loss and all of that sort of thing.
So, I said, “This has got to pull up a bit.” They asked me what I would do, and I told them that the next year needed to become boring. I said, you need to stop innovating and adding on all of these different layers of activities. You need to turn your innovation genie into innovating ways to monitor better, to measure better, to reduce significantly the number of layers of activities that you’ve got, because you’ve got a lot of things going and you’re doing them all at about 20 percent of what they could be. Just focus on one or two things and do them 90 or 100 percent.
And so that’s what he did, and we’re friends now, and we’ve often laughed about that. If you look at that operation now, I think he’s got maybe three enterprises going, and they’re all going quite well. And it helped their marriage a lot too. I’m not taking credit here, but I think influences in people’s lives are sometimes important, especially when you have an outside influence come in.
Kempf. Darren, it occurs to me that one of the things that you are perhaps particularly good at is learning. The learning curve for shifting from contemporary ranching and agricultural models to regenerative models often requires a steep learning curve because we are shifting from one operating system to another type of operating system, or we’re significantly shifting the way that we perceive the world and how we think about managing it.
One of the best ways to learn, which we’ve already spoken about, is to ask the land — to just pay close attention, to be very observant and aware. But of course, our awareness shifts and change as we learn, as we grow. So, what are some of the best ways to learn effectively and efficiently?
Doherty. Yeah, there’s different modes of learning, and that’s part of the journey as well — trying to figure out what style of learner you are and then defining what you need to learn more about. What are your weak points or your blind spots?
But generally, we’ve often spoken to people about a few things. One is that your landscape now is not as it will be. This came to me when I was looking at the way that people were using earthworks on landscapes as the first option. “My water cycle’s not working properly, so therefore I have to build a dam,” or “I have to build swales,” or “I have to keyline plow.” People think they have to do something quite surgical. Some in the permaculture field called it “reconstructive earth surgery.”
Even though I’ve done a lot of earthworks in my life, and I see the value of them, there’s a time and a place. When you observe the landscape now, it is not in function generally as it will be later. When your landscape has good landscape function, it’s infiltrating water, it has more effective nutrient cycling, the soil is more stable, and it’s starting to build natural fertility — that’s a completely different landscape performance. When you have that — when you get there — you will know it. And then, when you get to that level, you’ll get that reward — generally just from doing management.
The second part is that you can give yourself more opportunities to observe and learn. We particularly say this with grazing. If you’re doing daily grazing, you’ll have 365 opportunities to interact with your landscape and your animals. You get the feedback from yesterday’s grazing that will inform what you decide to do today — how much grass to allocate. When you rotate through the whole place, you’re probably in a different season, and you’ve seen the feedback.
I had this young, quite well-known farmer in Australia lament to me one day that the farmers in the district were giving him a hard time. I said, “Mate, here’s how it goes. Your neighbors are in continuous grazing. They have 12 interactions with their livestock and their landscape in a year — and it’s not really a deep interaction because they’re just moving from one paddock to the other. They’re not going out and measuring the grass, they’re not doing the monitoring and the measuring and all of that that you are. You are really going on an accelerated learning pathway here. So just bear witness to that and honor that and be enriched by it.”
I also encourage people to do this with minimum infrastructural attention at first. One of the first things that happens when you engage in some form of practice change, or when you engage in new learning, is that there’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is where you go and read a lot, and you think you know more than you do, but you haven’t built the experience-based knowledge yet. But it’s important to go through that. That’s why we tell people, “Don’t just read the books and then go and put in water and pipe and dams and fences and stuff. Go and run the landscape in a cheap way. Get that infatuation out of the way, and then come back and make the investment.”
Kempf. I really like the way you framed this development of experience. We can choose to learn from other people’s experience in some ways, but in some other areas we have to learn from our own actions. With the way you framed the intensity of experience and making multiple observations per year, there’s a quote that comes to mind. I forget who it’s attributed to — perhaps Charlie Walters — but it’s that very few farmers get to have 40 years of experience. Too many farmers have one year of experience 40 times.
What you’re describing — by managing more intensely, and also by observing more intensely — is that you can actually generate experience faster. We tend to think of experience in terms of years of experience, but it’s actually not years — it’s depth and intensity of observations. This is one of the benefits of being a consultant or an agronomist — you don’t get to see one farm in a year; you get to see 150 of them, in different geological contexts. That accelerates the experience and accelerates the learning even more.
Doherty. Exactly.
| Learn more about Darren at regrarians.org. |
