Breeding Local Landrace Crops
As our May Club Night Guest Speaker, we will have Dr Shane Simonsen.
Shane has been working on his zero input farm in Cooran for the last decade, researching, trialling, selecting and breeding crops which could feed local communities in out uncertain future. Australia passed from foraging to supermarkets with little in between. Discovering locally adapted crops and livestock that love the soild and climate we have is the key to a truly sustainable future.
Entry: Free for members, Guests $5.
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Shane has a prodigious output. When he’s not writing his substack on Zero Input Agriculture – this means no water, fertiliser or pesticides, and the former of these is seriously impressive when you know he lives in subtropical Australia – or recording his Going to Seed podcast with Joseph Lofthouse, or writing Taming the Apocalypse as a non-fiction view of how the world could be if we got it right, or converting this into fiction in Our Vitreous Womb… when he’s not doing all of this, Shane is farming in the aforesaid sub-tropical zone of Australia, exploring the means of production in their most grounded sense; creating parrot-resistant maize or hybrids from Bunya Nuts and Parana Pines – species that haven’t been on the same continent together since the tectonic plates last shifted and Australia became separate from South America.
Shane is a polymath’s polymath: he has a PhD in biochemistry which means he can trace down ideas to their roots and then extrapolate back up and join them with other ideas to create something new. He celebrates the old gentleman scientists of Victorian times who may have been innately colonial products of the trauma culture, but they played at science, they did things that weren’t obviously oriented to producing the next paper or winning the race to the next patent: they had fun, they followed their intuition and most of the really big advances in our technologies arise from them. Shane is also aware that most of the big advances in human evolution came when we were under serious pressure as a species…. kind of like we are now. So he’s made it his life’s task to find ways we can feed ourselves with low technology in a changing world. What species will survive and how might they grow? What hybrids can we intentionally create that will open up new spaces of possibility? How can we – how will we – transform ourselves in this changing world?
