review: call of the reed warbler by charles massy

In interviews since its publication, Charles Massy says his Call of the Reed Warbler, a book about regenerative farming, was written over seventeen years. Reading this work, I am reminded of the wonders of the printed book when I estimate that it would have taken Massy between 8,000 and 12,000 hours to write this book (I have included some calculations below) and I can sit down and reap so much from that experience in the few dozen hours it takes me to read it.

When I was in high school during the mid 1970s, unsure of what I wanted to do after leaving school, I had read somewhere there was an emerging field of study called ‘ecology’. It sounded interesting but, at that time, I had little idea of what lay behind that word. Such was the lot of a teenager living in the outer suburbs of Sydney at that time where so many of the groovy things going on in the world were way beyond our horizon (fyi, after a degree majoring in philosophy, I drifted into the health food industry and later government). But how the times have changed. 

I lapped up Massy’s rich account of major twentieth century efforts in the fields of ecology and regenerative farming. He structures the book about the five landscape functions: 1/the solar energy function; 2/ the water cycle; 3/ the soil mineral cycle; 4/ dynamic ecosystems; and 5/ the human-social aspect. Early on, he documents the work of some great thinkers of the past who, sadly, were often voices in the wilderness at the time, though they did lay a solid groundwork for those who were to follow. The book is built on dozens of in-depth accounts of farming families across Australia and overseas, many through the 1970s and 1980s, families who, after suffering drought and general degradation of the land through years of poor practice, questioned accepted industrial farming practices such as monoculture and the use of harsh chemicals on the land etc etc etc. Many of the people in those case studies faced a huge unknown future with little more than a feeling there must be a better way. Fortunately, in each case, there was enough information and enough people around to encourage these modern day pioneers to stay the course to that better way of doing things. And so we are feted with many wonderful success stories despite the numerous challenges those farmers faced, including financial uncertainty, the gradualness of real change, limited knowledge and experience, the weather, and just dealing with a sleepwalker tradition that had been handed down to us, labelled by Massy as the Mechancial Mind.

And these stories are not just about farmers finding ways to turn a profit. Massy explores in great detail the importance of healthy soil and how it relates to healthy food going to market which of course leads to healthier people and a healthier society heading in a better direction. Each page offers quotable quotes from so many sources. Its not easy to summarise, though three acronyms that spring to mind as I write are: NSA (natural systems agriculture), SLM (sustainable livestock management) and FWF (farming without farming). I do recall a friend who was studying landscape architecture in the 1980s and she introduced me to Richard St Barbe Baker (1889-1982) who founded Men of the Trees which is still active today. I was surprised this grand daddy of regeneration didn’t get a mention though much has happened since his time. Apart from gaining a better understanding and a greater appreciation of the efforts at large scale regenerative work going on across Australia (and the world) and the growth of this trend, I feel a strong resonance with all that Massy says even as I live in my suburban Sydney home and tend a small garden, for after all, Massy is talking about developing better attitudes to our relationship with the land and with nature and with the food we grow and eat. 

While reading, I was prompted to consider how much time he put into producing this work. If we were to assume he gave an average of ten hours a week to this work, over seventeen years, this would amount to 8,800 hours. But given that in some years he worked more intensively, travelling for interviews and meetings etc, we could imagine he gave 20-25 hours per week so that all up he may have worked at least 12,000 hours. So between 8,000 and 12,000 hours would equate to 4-6 years of full time work. The following estimates were compiled with the assistance of AI.