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Subtle Agroecologies
2 weeks, I was walking around my farm shooting my very sick, poisoned and starving herd of beef
cattle. Quite a shocking and very sobering introduction to farming in Tasmania!
For economic survival, I became a reluctant dairy farmer. I will skip the many trials and tribulations I endured during the worst decade of farming of the twentieth century in Tasmania. But it was
under this constant pressure that my new relationship with Nature and agriculture was born … and
grew.
What gradually hit me so powerfully was how poorly equipped and uneducated I was to change
both my country and my farming practice in one move. And yet, it was this sheer lack of knowledge
that pushed me in a very different direction. Realising how much I did not know, I turned towards
my hitherto unexplored intuition. Intuition said that if I wanted to learn about pastures and cows,
then I should ask them. Initially, I had trouble with this … but I did it. I walked out into the middle
of a 30-acre paddock and, sitting down, I did my best to attune with the land. I had little idea of what
I was doing, so I focused on my farm, my cows and myself. In those distant days, I had no idea of a
simple universal principle: Where you focus energy fows, and connects, and creates.
It took me a while to fnd a measure of inner quiet, but over a period of maybe a couple of hours
or so, I suddenly became aware of having answers to my varied questions. This shook me. They
seemed to come from nowhere, but the answers carried a fair degree of certainty. How was this
possible? However, in good faith, I applied all that I had apparently learned to the problems I had …
and it all worked. All the deep insights proved to be valid and invaluable. And so a whole new education began.
My cows became my main teachers, beginning with one particular young cow. One of my dairy
heifers had become paralysed as the result of birthing her frst, rather overlarge calf. In the early
1970s, generally, if a cow was ‘down’ for more than 2 or 3 days, she would die. However, I noticed
that no crows hung around her. My observations indicated that if the local crows attended a cow,
she would almost always die, no matter how you treated her. So morning and night, every day for
10 days, I fed and hand-milked her, rolling her from one side to the other. On the tenth day, she
struggled to get to her feet and, with my help, she managed. During this struggle for her life, we
bonded, and she became my ‘cow teacher’.
‘Awkward’ – as I named her because she now had an awkward walking gait – and I spent many
odd hours as companions while she grazed. We would walk together, and when she lay down, I
would sit leaning against her side. It was she who taught me most about the varying energies of the
land. There were areas in a 50-acre paddock where my 100 milking cows would never lie down.
Never. Based on no reasons that were visible, there were other areas they would congregate in.
When I lay down where cows would not, I sensed a feeling of discord, out of harmony with the
land. Not good or bad, or right or wrong, just a strange unsettling feeling of disquiet. When I lay –
carefully – where the cows congregated, I felt fully at ease, in harmony with the land. Conclusion:
never build a house where the cows will not lie down!
I was not able to talk with my farming friends about learning the varying energies of the land
from a cow. I was already ‘the Mad Englishman on the hill!’ Nevertheless, when I sat with Awkward
while she chewed her cud, I would go into a dreamy, half-meditative state of deeper consciousness
and emerge into a very different world of energy. In this world, I was told that the paralysis of
Awkward was not an accident. It was a test to see how I would respond to her situation.
I confess, many times during the 10 days of attending her I wondered why I was doing this. Every
farmer knew that 2 or 3 days was the limit. Despite this, I persisted and I was rather proud of getting
the cow back onto her feet. Now, I was learning that farming was all about the qualities I expressed
as a farmer and the patience and compassion I had towards both the land and my livestock.
Under the tuition of this metaphysical aspect of Awkward, I learned more about cows than any
book ever written could teach me. Certainly, books could and did teach me about the physical
anatomy of a cow, but just as humans are not mortal body/personalities, they are immortal souls,
so also a cow is far more than the physical anatomy. I learned to interpret the body language of all
my cows from an intuitive perspective. I learned to know what it is to be a cow. I learned how the
Subtle Agroecologies
2 weeks, I was walking around my farm shooting my very sick, poisoned and starving herd of beef
cattle. Quite a shocking and very sobering introduction to farming in Tasmania!
For economic survival, I became a reluctant dairy farmer. I will skip the many trials and tribulations I endured during the worst decade of farming of the twentieth century in Tasmania. But it was
under this constant pressure that my new relationship with Nature and agriculture was born … and
grew.
What gradually hit me so powerfully was how poorly equipped and uneducated I was to change
both my country and my farming practice in one move. And yet, it was this sheer lack of knowledge
that pushed me in a very different direction. Realising how much I did not know, I turned towards
my hitherto unexplored intuition. Intuition said that if I wanted to learn about pastures and cows,
then I should ask them. Initially, I had trouble with this … but I did it. I walked out into the middle
of a 30-acre paddock and, sitting down, I did my best to attune with the land. I had little idea of what
I was doing, so I focused on my farm, my cows and myself. In those distant days, I had no idea of a
simple universal principle: Where you focus energy fows, and connects, and creates.
It took me a while to fnd a measure of inner quiet, but over a period of maybe a couple of hours
or so, I suddenly became aware of having answers to my varied questions. This shook me. They
seemed to come from nowhere, but the answers carried a fair degree of certainty. How was this
possible? However, in good faith, I applied all that I had apparently learned to the problems I had …
and it all worked. All the deep insights proved to be valid and invaluable. And so a whole new education began.
My cows became my main teachers, beginning with one particular young cow. One of my dairy
heifers had become paralysed as the result of birthing her frst, rather overlarge calf. In the early
1970s, generally, if a cow was ‘down’ for more than 2 or 3 days, she would die. However, I noticed
that no crows hung around her. My observations indicated that if the local crows attended a cow,
she would almost always die, no matter how you treated her. So morning and night, every day for
10 days, I fed and hand-milked her, rolling her from one side to the other. On the tenth day, she
struggled to get to her feet and, with my help, she managed. During this struggle for her life, we
bonded, and she became my ‘cow teacher’.
‘Awkward’ – as I named her because she now had an awkward walking gait – and I spent many
odd hours as companions while she grazed. We would walk together, and when she lay down, I
would sit leaning against her side. It was she who taught me most about the varying energies of the
land. There were areas in a 50-acre paddock where my 100 milking cows would never lie down.
Never. Based on no reasons that were visible, there were other areas they would congregate in.
When I lay down where cows would not, I sensed a feeling of discord, out of harmony with the
land. Not good or bad, or right or wrong, just a strange unsettling feeling of disquiet. When I lay –
carefully – where the cows congregated, I felt fully at ease, in harmony with the land. Conclusion:
never build a house where the cows will not lie down!
I was not able to talk with my farming friends about learning the varying energies of the land
from a cow. I was already ‘the Mad Englishman on the hill!’ Nevertheless, when I sat with Awkward
while she chewed her cud, I would go into a dreamy, half-meditative state of deeper consciousness
and emerge into a very different world of energy. In this world, I was told that the paralysis of
Awkward was not an accident. It was a test to see how I would respond to her situation.
I confess, many times during the 10 days of attending her I wondered why I was doing this. Every
farmer knew that 2 or 3 days was the limit. Despite this, I persisted and I was rather proud of getting
the cow back onto her feet. Now, I was learning that farming was all about the qualities I expressed
as a farmer and the patience and compassion I had towards both the land and my livestock.
Under the tuition of this metaphysical aspect of Awkward, I learned more about cows than any
book ever written could teach me. Certainly, books could and did teach me about the physical
anatomy of a cow, but just as humans are not mortal body/personalities, they are immortal souls,
so also a cow is far more than the physical anatomy. I learned to interpret the body language of all
my cows from an intuitive perspective. I learned to know what it is to be a cow. I learned how the