Farmer Profile: Save Our Soil
An interview with Mark Rathbone from the biodynamic farm, Save Our Soil.
This week I had the pleasure of sitting down for a chat with Mark Rathbone, who, if you’re a regular at farmers’ markets around Melbourne, you may know as the man behind Save Our Soil.
Save Our Soil is a 50-acre farm growing certified biodynamic vegetables to sell direct to consumers, but perhaps even more than that it’s a hub of information on natural farming methods. Terms like biodynamic and regenerative can feel like a bit of a black box, but Mark is a passionate educator and does a great job explaining what he does and why it’s important.
Be sure to check out saveoursoil.com.au for more information or @saveoursoil on Instagram to see which market Mark will be at next.
Tell me a bit about what you do, about your business and maybe why you picked the name “Save Our Soil"?
Mark: Well, I was brought up on a dairy farm and we went through the 2000 to 2010 drought. It was quite devastating as it was for most of the dairy farmers in our region - some of the family farms that we grew up with now no longer exist because of that time. During that time the water changed hands and went from land ownership to the person owning it to corporations and things like that. So that was a great, big water upheaval. I, in my wisdom, decided that land without water was not very good, especially for dairy farming.
Basically we were paying for the cows to produce milk, because it was so expensive to feed. It was costing us money, and so after you've been in a family business and you have 10 [drought] years like that, you start to re-evaluate what you want to do with your life. We were getting like half our water right or less. And you just can't run a good dairy farm like that, you’ve got to grow grass and if you can't grow grass then you’re paying for the stuff.
We had a neighbour who was a big corporate basically and there were these water deals going on - if you shut down channels, there was big money per kilometre of channel to shut them down. He was able to pull a deal with the water company to buy four farms around the area and shut this big channel down and Dad had the opportunity to get out of a drought situation for as much money as he would get if it were a good season. So he never really asked me if I wanted to take the place, he assumed that I didn't and he was correct!
So he decided to sell and take that opportunity to retire at 73 years old. I had a 50 acre block over the back which was my own, they left that off as surplus land out of the 400 that we had, and so we segmented that off, and I started to grow vegetables, and I got part of that water money to build a bore so I had my own water supply as well as the channel system, so I have more than enough water to grow vegetables.
I'd always wanted to sell direct to the public, and I've been growing veg since 1996 part time, and upped it and became quite good at it by, even in the drought started with selling vegetables just for my own personal income because we just weren't making any money out of the cows whatsoever. So that's when I started my own business back in 1996.
I was going to call it The Real Food Company but my second choice was Save Our Soil and The Real Food Company was already taken. The reason I chose that name is I want to keep my mind on the goal of looking out for a soil biodynamically speaking, and having it there for future generations. If it's not my generation, there'll be somebody else's. So, yeah, in 2009, I started at the farmers markets full time and doing it ever since.
You mentioned biodynamics, can you give a bit of an explanation of what biodynamic farming actually is?
People think it’s a rather new thing, but it's quite old, actually. In the 1850s to 1890s, water soluble fertilisers started being made, that's things like super phosphate and nitrogen. Basically, they're chemical reactions that make those elements water soluble so it sits in the soil water, and then the plants when they drink the water from the soil, they suck up those nutrients by default, no choice. Some of the farmers after 40 or 50 years of these fertilisers, they're having troubles with animal health, the product wasn't tasting very good and there's some issues with the whole thing.
Some of the richer farmers in Europe went to a guy called Rudolph Steiner and said look, we're having these problems, how can we fix them and go back to our organic ways? And he came up with what now is called biodynamics. Rudolf Steiner conceptualised it and over the years, it's come about and basically it's using a set of preparations, which for the most part are biological.
The main one is 500, which is cow manure put in a cow horn over a few months in the wintertime, and then it comes out in springtime as this lovely humus-like material. We mix it with water and the microbes in there are spread out to the pastures and onto the paddocks and they aid in the digestion of all the organic matter. So they eat up all the root systems, all the leaf matter and the manure and turn that into what we call humus. Humus is nature's fertiliser - broken down organic matter in its fullest form. The roots just attach themselves to the humus and when it wants some sort of nutrient that's what it sucks up.
It's not just the preparations, it's also a series of techniques, including cover cropping, deep ripping, correct tillage, pasture harrowing, rotational grazing, and there's a bunch of other composting preparations that we use.
In the 1950s, Alex Polinsky brought biodynamics to Australia and he successfully did it for 10 years. He started doing talks about it around the 60s when my father was having trouble with his soil. My father was having trouble in that he was putting on super phosphate and it was just making the soil go hard and the water wouldn't go in, it would just sit on the top and go smelly and horrible. So Alex came along and showed him biodynamics. My father started biodynamics in 1965. Over time he was able to improve the soil structures, all the root systems went down and down and within a year or two of doing that, his soil started sucking in the water again, and functioning well.
There's a lot of generalisations thrown over organic or biodynamic. I don't agree with that because I believe in going to a farmers market, talking to the farmer and seeing what he does, and if you like what he does, just go for that.
What encourages you about food trends that you're seeing today? Do you think that people are becoming more aware of the risks that are associated with conventional agriculture?
I'm torn because I've been doing it so long, like 50 years, and I've been pretty much growing veggies since I was 10. There's probably a good number of people that have actually taken organic or biodynamic products home, which is encouraging, they're trying it - but it's still a very small percentage of the population.
But what does encourage me going to farmers markets is young people in their mid 20s, coming to the markets and selecting good food, and I see that a lot. What I also see is a lot of young farmers starting out with a small acreage and they're trying regenerative, they're trying biodynamics and trying organics or a mixture of all of that. That's where I think the change is going to come, those little tiny farms succeeding and then moving through the system.
How can people find out more about biodynamics and what you do?
I look at myself as more of an information company than I am a food company because when I go the markets and take my watermelons there, and people stick it in their mouth, they're instantly sold on biodynamics. They know something is different about this food. And that's why I do the farmers’ markets so I can give samples there and teach them about biodynamics. I set up a website called www.saveoursoil.com.au, where I'm trying to come up with information products so farmers and consumers can learn more about biodynamics.
For example, I am surrounded now by grain farmers who like to use various herbicides and chemicals. They're good, they always spray downwind and are very considerate of my position but rather than complain about it, I decided to make an audio book which they can listen to on their tractors. It's called Growing Grain Without Chemicals. So every time I have a bit of a beef or a bit of a complaint I try to come up with something to educate because I believe that it's an education point.
I've also got another website called Bio Soil that has quite a few of our Victorian farmers on there and their stories. So people can just look up and see oh there’s a beef farmer there, an orchard there, there’s me, and a family who has pomegranates and all that sort of thing. All those links are there and they can go and see someone who's doing what I do and know more about it.
Thank you to Mark for taking the time to tell some of his story. If you’re in Melbourne, make sure you head to @saveoursoil on Instagram to see which markets you can find him at next!