Natural Farming: a practical guide

By Pat Coleby

Natural Farming carries a simple but widely overlooked message: healthy soil makes healthy plants, which in turn make healthy animals and healthy people. The book explores the consequences in the soil of applications of superphosphate and other artificial fertilisers over decades, and explains soil chemistry in terms that every farmer can understand. It describes the exact role of each mineral and vitamin, both in the soil and in the body. And it explains how to prevent expensive disease outbreaks and minimise the use of costly artificial sprays and fertilisers.

The prescriptions are simple and can be applied to any farming enterprise market gardens, orchards, broadacre crops and pasture to restore the natural balance and fertility of the land, improve soil health, and increase productivity. The book is enlivened with accounts of spectacular successes in regenerating degraded land and curing animals that, in many cases, had been given up for dead.

Natural Farming is an essential handbook for any farmer, with detailed information on:

• understanding a soil analysis
• establishment and management of pasture
• treatment of compacted soil and erosion
• alternatives to artificial fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides
• the significance of weeds
• strategies for drought
• diagnosis of diseases and deficiencies in stock
• remedies for common diseases, including Johne's disease and immune-system disorders
• rearing orphan animals.

 

Natural Farming equips the farmer to get the best from the land using environmentally sustainable methods that save time, expense, and worry — and to supply the rising global demand for pure food.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Jul 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781761385865

Book preview

NATURAL FARMING

Pat Coleby was one of the pioneers of natural farming in Australia. She died at the age of 87 after a lifelong love of looking after the wellbeing of farm animals. She was passionate to share her discoveries and left a living legacy in the form of books. This, her most comprehensive work, draws on her fifty years of experience and her broad studies to explain the basis of farming without chemicals.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2004

Reprinted (with corrections) 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 (twice), 2021, 2022

Copyright © Pat Coleby 2004

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

Edited by Janet Mackenzie

Cover image © Australian Picture Library

Cover design by Miriam Rosenbloom

Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 920769 19 2 (paperback)

978 1 761385 86 5 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

1 Farming Naturally

2 Soil and Health

3 The Chemical Burden

4 Managing the Land

5 Stock and Pasture

6 Trees

7 Soil Analysis

8 Regenerating Land

9 Diagnosis and Treatment

10 Minerals

11 Vitamins

12 Remedies

Appendix: Suppliers

Notes

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Figures

4.1 Double trenching and bastard trenching

7.1 Negatively charged colloid particles

8.1 An aerator can be used to stop a gully eroding

8.2 Profile of lasered ground

9.1 The Spanish windlass

12.1 The site for an intramuscular injection

Tables

5.1 Characteristics of some African grasses

5.2 Common weeds

7.1 A soil analysis: Farm 1

7.2 A soil analysis: Farm 2

9.1 Conditions and contributing factors

Preface

Nature has no sense of unfair play; she is ever-true, ever-serious, and the errors and misconceptions are always man’s. *

[* Goethe in a letter to his friend Eckerman, quoted in Journal of Natural Science, April–June 1998.]

This book is for those who want to live on the land, and leave it afterwards in a better condition than it was when they arrived. It shows how we can benefit ourselves, our land and the stock we keep, and make a reasonable living.

When I showed two milking goats recently, the only ribbon they won was for milk production. The judge asked me at the end, ‘Why do your animals look so very well?’ I replied: ‘They are kept on land as perfectly balanced as I can make it, they have no contact with artificial sprays, chemicals, drugs or vaccinations, and all their food comes from a good, certified, organic farmer. Perhaps it makes a difference.’

The previous edition of this book came out in 1999 as Natural Farming and Land Care and was a greater success than I could have imagined. It appealed to broadacre farmers, Permaculture gardeners and hobby farmers right across the spectrum. Because I never stop learning, there is a great deal more material in this new edition, not all of it good. If we work with — not against — nature, she is remarkably generous with her rewards. We now know how to undo some of the unfortunate results of chemical farming, and restoring the land to its full health is a fascinating process.

Natural Farming complements the other books I have written, which deal with specific kinds of stock and how to keep them healthy. This book explains the underlying requirements for stock health and how they all interact. Unless the land is in top health neither animals, plants nor trees will grow as they should. Nowadays we can add the best of the new knowledge to the best of the old. In 1999, Acres USA republished André Voisin’s great book, Soil, Grass and Cancer, with its handwritten introductory page by Dr William Albrecht. It was Albrecht who led us back into the ways of sound farming after so many years of chemical abuse of the land. He explained soil chemistry in a way that can be easily understood by untrained people as well experts.

I learned all I know by study, practice and experiment. I was under pressure to make my agriculture work, because I was supporting four children and a husband in poor health. I cannot begin to express the debt I owe to so many people and books. Friends and acquaintances have supplied me with snippets of information, many of which have been the catalyst that crystallised the answer to a so-called incurable condition.

My thanks to Gavin Nicoll of Beaumaris who took the trouble to take the two soil analyses mentioned in chapter 1 and sent copies to me. Robert Pickering of the Lloydd Corporation (NZ) backed up the information I’d assembled on copper sulphate and added materially to it. The Druries of Newstead reminded me of some of Hungerford’s early work on B vitamins. The late Malcolm Adams supplied interesting information that I might not have seen otherwise.

I am grateful also to Dr Alan Clarke for many discussions during the last thirty years and for testing and advice whenever I needed it; Bob Crauford, Albury, for information on footrot and keratin; Owen Dawson for his knowledge of plants and great fund of livestock common sense; Dr Richard Evans of Wangaratta for information on ‘the yellows’; Jo Hortin, my youngest daughter, woolclasser and farmer, for help when I needed it; Ted Mikhail of SWEP Analytical Laboratories for patiently clarifying various points of interpretation in soil analyses; Mark Purdey, for taking the time to ring and check my precis of his research documents; John Williams, Ubobo, for making available the blood serum tests from his animals that resulted in the Basic Stock Lick.

My books were written for Australia, but I have been besieged by stock owners the world over about ailments that did not exist 50 years ago. I have found that many farms overseas are in a state similar to Australia’s, and for much the same reasons, even though they started with land much better than ours. The regenerating techniques appear to be similar the world over. Analyse the soil, pull the land back into balance and give it all the help you can. Only then will those who live off the land be in optimum health. In Australia we are limited by ancient, thin soils, but we seem to have helped them on the downward path with enthusiasm. The remedy may seem utopian, but it is achievable. Sound natural farming methods, husbanding our resources, and taking the best possible care of the soil and everything on and in it — this must be the answer.

Pat Coleby

Maldon, Victoria

Chapter One

Farming Naturally

A personal journey

In 1959 my husband and I arrived in Australia with our three children aged under three years, soon to be joined by number four. It was an incident at this child’s birth that first made me wonder about this country. I was in labour when the matron of the little bush hospital came into the ward and said: ‘Give me your teeth, dear.’ Somewhat indignantly I said they belonged to me and I could not.

‘Now don’t be coy, you can’t go into labour with your teeth in.’ Whereupon she got hold of them to take them out. Her indignation when she could not was palpable: ‘I have never heard of a women having her fourth child at your age’ – I was 32 – ‘who still had her own teeth.’ She was really quite upset.

In due course I learned why — for the same reason I took the children to the doctor with colds and bronchitis nearly every time we went shopping. Australia almost alone in the world has inherently low lime minerals in the soil.

My husband’s health had been one of the contributory reasons for our emigration to a warmer climate. We chose Australia because he had served with many Australians in World War II. With four young children and an ailing husband I was needed at home, but I had to earn something to augment our very low income, so I started a goat dairy. I intended to use my knowledge and experience in animal feeding and husbandry to make a go of it with these animals that were totally strange to me. I had no idea of the struggle ahead. Luckily I equated their systems with those of horses, not cattle — and it worked. I did not realise that at that time no-one else in Australia had many ideas on the subject either.

Goats were a good species on which to learn the art of producing milk commercially because, like all browsers, their mineral requirements are extremely high. Leaves and twigs contain far more minerals (especially copper) than pasture. In Australia it is necessary to meet these mineral needs artificially in many cases because the soils are so poor and degraded. At the beginning of the twenty-first century dairy cows all over the world need supplementary minerals. ¹ In those early days the requirements were a fraction of what they are now; the downward spiral in soil quality has been extremely rapid and alarming.

Thinking back to 1960, when I began the dairy, I remember our landlords’ stock horses which we worked. Initially these were grass fed with occasional hay and a handful of oats, and it was all they needed to work hard and look well. By 1967, mineral deficiency diseases like colitis X and avitaminosis were appearing, and a mare fell ill. It was my good luck that there was a Welsh vet working at the University of Melbourne Veterinary Clinic at nearby Werribee that year. Colitis X is merely a massive shortfall in necessary minerals, and therefore vitamins (avitaminosis). Dr Rees picked this up at once, and had me pouring gallons of mineral-laced intravenous fluid into the mare; this not only saved her, but her foal four months in utero as well. His comments alerted me to the problem: ‘I do not know what is missing in this country. When you have been here longer, you will probably find out. Unless you feed her mixed minerals ad lib, she will not live to foal, and I advise you to do the same with the goats.’ I was learning!

However, the illnesses that arose among my goats were another story. The Veterinary Clinic at Werribee helped me with advice and various teat dips, washes and medicines that were considered necessary. We went the gamut of various chemicals and drugs, each one in its turn failing its intended purpose. The question from me was always ‘Why are these things needed?’ The answer was simply ‘germs’, which made no sense. These health problems had not been around in my youth in Britain. My father had farmed Ayrshire dairy cattle between the world wars. They seemed to be singularly trouble-free and bore out David Mackenzie’s statement: ‘Properly fed goats [and other stock] do not need drugs and vaccines.’ ² It applies right across the board.

David Mackenzie, an English doctor, was the author of Goat Husbandry. He wrote for Britain, where the soils are much stronger, and his goats also lived on the coast. The book was published in the late 1950s and was the only goat bible obtainable here at that time. Mackenzie suggested that goats needed up to six times as much minerals as any other lactating animal; and also that animals who received the right minerals did not get ill, nor did they need vaccinations. I believed both claims, and have found them to be true. I have never joined the vaccination bandwagon, nor found it necessary to do so.

But, because Australia has inherent and ongoing mineral deficiencies, the task of keeping any stock healthy required much more work than it did in Britain. At one stage of the battle the vets arrived with a bag of what looked like small green granules: ‘If you feed all your goats a teaspoon of this every day they will never be sick again.’ This was too good to be true. Enquiry elicited that it was auromycin; I was appalled that anyone should even consider feeding an antibiotic on a permanent basis to any animal, and said so. I was selling milk to parents whose infants were sick in many cases, and they therefore needed pure unadulterated milk. Of course now we are paying the price of these antibiotics and other drugs entering the food chain — most of them have passed their use-by date.

I learned more about the value of good diet and balanced minerals through a painful family time in 1974, when our youngest son became ill with (so-called) terminal cancer. The late Dr Glenn Dettman, the co-author of Vitamin C: Nature’s Miraculous Healing Missile, was the pathologist who helped in the diagnosis. In reply to my horrified enquiry about children and cancer, he told me the rate was then one child in four. I did not believe it at the time but, as I came to meet many workers in this field, I found that it was indeed so. Eventually we reversed the terminal tag for our son with naturally grown food and an incredibly strict regime that excluded chemicals, processed food and first-class proteins, accompanied by large amounts of supplementary minerals and vitamins; but it was a hard time.

I later learned that the probable cause of my son’s cancer was the large numbers of X-rays that I had prior to sailing to Australia in 1959. ³ The X-rays were required to check for tuberculosis, but it was difficult to get a clear picture of my lungs because I was breast-feeding my third child at the time and the milk obscured them. Cancer in children up to the age of sixteen is thought to be prenatal; after that it probably has an environmental cause.

The perennial problem in most Australian soils is inadequate supplies of calcium and magnesium, particularly the latter. I first heard this expounded by the ecologist Peter Bennet in a lecture at Bacchus Marsh High School around 1966, and immediately the problems I was seeing in livestock and our family started to make sense.

At that time Bennet was one of the most influential figures in soil regeneration in this country. He had trained as a doctor, but three-quarters of the way through his course he had to quit because of ill-health. He used the knowledge he had gained to become a vocal, effective and easily understood ecologist. When I attended his lecture I was accompanied by my whole family. Because we were migrants, outings were all or nothing — we had no child-sitting relations! The young ones, aged from seven to eleven years, sat completely spellbound for the full four hours of the presentation, as did their parents.

Bennett explained that calcium and magnesium are low in Australian soils, and that a lack of these essentials causes respiratory problems in all living entities. The lecture included slides of magnesium-deficient skeletons from the desert country in the north of South Australia, showing the spurs and malformations generally associated with poor levels of that mineral. Now, 40 years on, I see evidence of it in all livestock — deformed bones, soft teeth and general musculature problems due to the inadequate muscle attachments. Yet, as we will see, the remedy is surprisingly easy.

Anyone doubting the extreme importance of calcium and magnesium should study the works of Dr W. A. Albrecht, the great soil scientist who studied and taught at the University of Missouri. ⁴ Magnesium deficiencies as we know them are extremely rare in the United States, where Dr Albrecht did much of his work, yet he still drew attention to the need for that mineral. Dr Albrecht did a brief Australian lecture tour in 1948, and he recognised the problems that we had here. He pointed out what should be done — but there is no record that anything transpired as a result!

As it used to be

Australia was part of the original Gondwanaland, as explained by Mary White in her book The Greening of Gondwana. It was joined by the great continental plates as part of Antarctica and the Asian continent. That was back in the mists of time — even before the dinosaurs, which is as far back as possible for many people. About 80 million years ago the continents sorted themselves out and Australia finally moved to its present position, by then detached from the continental mass, with whom we still share a few plant species.

White explains that the last Ice Age missed most of Australia. During an Ice Age the land goes on hold for several millennia. Great glaciers form, and as they flow they pick up rocks, grind them together and powder them, so making new soil to replenish the old. This is how it worked in much of the rest of the world, but in Australia the soil did not have a chance to build up its minerals again. So Australian soils have a basic shortage of the two minerals necessary for healthy life and healthy land, calcium and magnesium.

The continent in the shape we now know started on the long process of evolving to the present-day landscape. Research in our great inland dry areas confirms that they were once covered in primeval forest. Only after we separated from the northern lands did these forests die out from lack of water as the arid parts of the continent were forming. In her second book White relates how our huge dry inland areas came into being. ⁵

Even as I write, archaeologists are pushing back the dates at which Homo sapiens was making artifacts and buildings to before the last Ice Age. The Aboriginal people are believed to have come to Australia across the land bridge from the great continents of the north thousands of years ago. No-one has so far linked them with any other race in this part of the world, but the various islands were separated by enough sea for the different races to have evolved in comparative seclusion.

Most of these aboriginal races learned how to live with their environment. In Australia they lived well, until the first trickle of white invasions commenced in the middle of the last millennium. The lifestyle of the Aborigines was totally suited to the country and rarely, if ever, left scars. Very occasionally the fires lit by Aboriginal peoples got out of hand, and the marks can still be seen. The Keilor plains north-west of Melbourne were apparently covered with thick natural bush until about 500 years ago. A fire lit by the locals escaped and burnt too hot and deep. As has happened many times since, it killed the trees, roots and all. But the bare plain that could be seen in the 1950s is now covered by many trees, mostly planted by the despised hobby farmers! These have in their own way contributed to the revegetation of many denuded areas.

The beginnings of white people in this country go back about 500 years, when the Portuguese touched on the continent, ⁶ followed by the Dutch, the French, and finally the British. Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778 heralded the build-up of the invaders’ numbers, and permanent settlement began soon after. The Aborigines, like the Amerindians, had to give way before the white flood. The process was not, thankfully, as bloody here as it had been in the Americas, both north and south, but nonetheless just as sure. ⁷

When white people arrived in Australia they found areas of great apparent fertility, both in rainforest regions and on savannah country. In the early part of the nineteenth century Edward Curr, a pastoralist and later a squatter, moved his great herds of merinos from Sydney to Portland, on the south-west coast of what later became Victoria. He kept a comprehensive diary of the exercise, which he later published as Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (1883). Curr reiterated again and again his astonishment at the incredible fertility that he found everywhere. He encountered many different tribes of healthy, well-fed Aboriginals, native grazing animals and above all unbelievably fertile, deep topsoil. The organic build-up must have appeared inexhaustible, similar to the better parts of his native country, England. But even he, seeing how quickly it broke down and disappeared under the heavy grazing and the wheels of the wagons, started to realise its fragility. He then recognised that the soil was not as strong as he had imagined — too late.

A similar understanding came to William Evans, author of The Diary of a Welsh Swagman (1975), who wrote in the late 1880s. He had been a leading farmer in Wales, where the rules of proper farming were well known. Evans reported the great fertility of the soil in central Victoria in the early nineteenth century after the first clearing of fairly heavy bush areas to sow wheat. Presumably this was planted in a seedbed that was close in fertility to the soil that Edward Curr had seen. Warden wheat was a variety then popular in England because it had good straw, suitable both for fodder and thatching. In Australia, Evans reported, it grew 2.3 metres high the first year. The farmers, forgetting how they had maintained soil fertility in their home countries, thought they had struck agricultural gold, and they replanted again — and again. After eight years of monocropping, Evans observed, the wheat struggled to reach a height of 20 centimetres (p. 158 of Diary). It was by then trying to grow on earth denuded of all organic matter and, as we now know, on basic soil which never has carried the necessary lime minerals. The Welshman bemoaned the fact that none of the farmers put back anything into the soil as they had all done in their countries of origin. Like Curr, they were deluded at first by the apparent great fertility. Even now this attitude persists. Potato growers say to me they never have problems with the first crop they plant, but after six or seven years all the usual (chemical) props are required to keep them going and stop the diseases and pests which are the inevitable accompaniment to sick plants and monocropping.

The pioneers who opened up the inland country of Australia judged it, not surprisingly, by the conditions of their homelands. It could not have been more different. For one thing they did not realise at first that the fertile lands were only round the coastal edges of Australia — later the inland deserts came as a rude shock to many. On the plains country these would-be settlers found a farmers’ paradise for growing crops and pasturing stock, or so it seemed for the first few years. They forgot the basic rules of agriculture which William Evans was always expounding. Originally those who grazed their sheep on the new pastures obtained 100 per cent return on their investment. When the return fell to 10 or 20 per cent, they walked off that land and took up another parcel, which they used until it was played out in its turn. After that, the subsistence settlers — in some cases hapless soldier settlers back from the wars — came in. They had little if any chance of making their farms work, however hard they toiled.

Because of Australia’s mild climate, the white settlers did not have to yard their beasts in winter, so the land was never rested. They forgot the huge heaps of manure that they had been obliged to spread on the fields in their countries of origin. They did not realise that the manure was still there — but in a more fragile form, where their grazing beasts had dropped it on the paddocks. No-one thought of the liming which had traditionally followed the spreading of the dung in the early spring. It was a time-honoured system which had become a sustainable form of agriculture in the northern hemisphere. So the ground in Australia became poorer, and the rains ceased to soak in as the low lime levels caused the ground to harden.

It has to be understood that most of our soils are in a delicate state, and some have reached plain disaster. What the settlers failed to realise, or perhaps did not care about, was that the great fertility they found at first had been built up over thousands of years, and that it was a finite and fragile resource. Australia did not, and does not have the depth of soil that exists in Europe (except in a very few locations like the Atherton Tablelands, and farming did not start there until some time after settlement). Once the pastoralists moved on and the cropping farmers followed, the decline in fertility was, as the Welsh Swagman noted, extremely rapid.

Inevitably that system of exploitation reduced thousands of acres to the state that we know today. It was a process that took anything up to 80 or 90 years. Soils have now reached a state of degeneration that would have been unthinkable in those early days. I find that even now, many of the worst soil

Reviews for Natural Farming

[henrimoreaux · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Never before in my entire life have a read the word re-mineralisation so much as I have in the last few days. I get it, minerals are important but it's really not necessary to cram it down the readers throat as well as provide mocking stories about how you warned people they suffered losses then saw you were right.When one speaks of natural farming, typically it is farming within the confines of natural processes, in this book natural farming refers to industrial farming using 'natural' chemicals applied with heavy farm equipment.There's some reasonable concepts in this book, but there is a lot of rubbish and clutter. Crap like vitamins, minerals & good diet curing cancer, or homeopathy being wonderful, negative reviews of Bill Mollison's permaculture ideas because mulch is a fire hazard (apparently!).Can't say I'd recommend reading it, the few tid bits it does have can be found elsewhere with less opinion and more facts.