Opinion
FARMERS WEEKLY – farmersweekly.co.nz – April 22, 2019
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COLLECTIVE WISDOM: Simon Osborne, second from right, talks to Murray Thomson, left, with Nigel Greenwood, right, as they check the barley.
Many try farming with curiosity John King
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RE you up to something really interesting but feel you can’t share it with anyone? Meet Simon Osborne, Nigel Greenwood and Jono Frew who are cropping farmers near Leeston. A year ago they didn’t know each other. Today they run an amazing social media platform that gets farmers to open up and share about what they’re doing at home. It’s called Quorum Sense. Every day the Quorum Sense WhatsApp group is alive with videos, photographs, questions, stories and sharing of projects happening on farms. Apart from pictures of tractors and headers the posts cover everything from sowing and fertiliser rates, equipment, post grazing residuals to animal health and alternatives to agrichemicals. Farmers join from all over the country eager to enjoy banter exploring farming with curiosity. WhatsApp works in real time as if someone is there with you. For some it’s brought a sense of fun into their farming operations because of what the group offers. “Farmers can spill their guts,” Greenwood says. “It’s a safe place for them to explore issues they can’t in their communities. It brings them out of themselves because they are suddenly mixing with like-minded people.”
Their stories are similar – farmers doing their own thing in isolation, in this instance mostly trying to figure out how to profit from ecological processes in farming. “I’ve been conservation farming for three decades” Osborne says. “I didn’t even know Nigel was around the corner.”
The industrybased criticism levelled at farmers and professionals exploring regenerative agriculture is why the group exists – support from every professional agency in New Zealand is absent.
Bringing weird ideas into the open exposes farmers to being labelled unreasonable. Instead they can join an online community of like-minded people contributing observations and insights into similar projects and problems. “I know farmers don’t talk any more because as a competitive farmer I was one. Everyone is competition, nobody talks and shares, working things out together,” Frew, the group administrator, says. He puts success down to
sharing things without a filter. “There is no shame with things not working and all having a laugh about it. “I wanted others to realise I was okay being the person who didn’t have to know everything, supporting unknowingness and having a go anyway.” Being okay with stuffing it up while sharing and laughing about mistakes, whether being naive or from acts of god creates a community looking for the fun side of life. In the rush to be better than anyone else farmers neglect the very thing they are working for, family and friends. Frew is the first to acknowledge focusing on farm ownership cost him his wife and kids. It was a big wake up call. His journey highlights how tension between people creates division. While rural communities are proud of how they come together during crisis, farmers are exposed to critical judgment every day when doing something that’s not normal. One thing isolating farmers is when they can’t discuss innovative ideas without being ridiculed by peers and industry professionals. It’s always been there, bound up in customs and traditions threatened by new ideas. Farmers are also their own worst enemies because they are so attached to their own opinions and views. In Quorum Sense farmers stop defending everything they do because they don’t have to be
so bloody perfect or fit what’s normal. It’s an environment where they can separate their self-worth from their trials and tribulations. Letting go of expectations with ideas and projects makes dealing with critical comments easier to learn lessons for next time. And that becomes even more important considering the group focus is regenerative agriculture. Farmers joining are curious about working with nature beyond tree planting and fencing waterways. The industry-based criticism levelled at farmers and professionals exploring regenerative agriculture is why the group exists – support from every professional agency in New Zealand is absent. In Australia the National Programme for Environmental Science released a report last year highlighting New South Wales pastoral farmers working with nature by focusing on soil, plant and livestock relationships. They had less debt, risk and mental health issues than elites in the Holmes and Sachett benchmarking state database. As a result they were significantly more confident in their ability to deal with adverse climate and market events. The research was not done by agricultural scientists and bankers. The drought is now revealing who are the better farmers. Quorum Sense taps into such networks across the globe bringing farmer-to-farmer
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communication and using scientific information from farmer observation and insights. This community develops and maintains farmer confidence for trying ideas and creating farm projects while sharing outcomes for others to follow. It’s a relief for those who join it.
Who am I?
John King is a consultant specialising in holistic and regenerative farming and educator in Christchurch. He is also a Red Meat Profit Partnership facilitator.?
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