Out of the Scientist's Garden: a Story of Water and Food
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OUT OF THE SCIENTIST’S GARDEN In the Scientist’s Garden Richard Stirzaker <title page to come> OUT OF THE SCIENTIST’S GARDEN A STORY OF WATER AND FOOD RICHARD STIRZAKER CSIRO Land and Water Australia Senior Research Fellow CRC for Irrigation Futures © CSIRO 2010 All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Stirzaker, Richard John. Out of the scientist’s garden : a story of water and food / Richard Stirzaker. 9780643096585 (pbk) Bibliography. Crops and water. Gardens – Irrigation. Agriculture. 630 Published by CSIRO PUBLISHING 150 Oxford Street (PO Box 1139) Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia Telephone: +61 3 9662 7666 Local call: 1300 788 000 (Australia only) Fax: +61 3 9662 7555 Email: [email protected] Web site: www.publish.csiro.au Front cover photo by iStockphoto Back cover photo by Brad Collis Set in 10.5/16 Adobe Myriad MM and Optima Edited by Janet Walker Cover and text design by James Kelly Typeset by Desktop Concepts Pty Ltd, Melbourne Printed in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd The paper this book is printed on is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) © 1996 FSC A.C. The FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests. CSIRO PUBLISHING publishes and distributes scientific, technical and health science books, magazines and journals from Australia to a worldwide audience and conducts these activities autonomously from the research activities of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of, and should not be attributed to, the publisher or CSIRO. Contents Prologue: Entering the scientist’s garden vii Acknowledgements ix Part 1: The view from our garden 1 1. The colour of water 7 2. A year in the vegetable garden 15 3. Intrigue in the orchard 23 4. Feathered thieves 31 5. The lapsed organic gardener 39 6. Outsmarting pests and disease 47 7. Flavour 55 Part 2: A journey through soil 63 8. The tale of Clever Clover 69 9. Soil and soil scientists 77 10. The Machingalana is talking to me 85 11. Watering grass 93 12. Grey water and the washing machine 101 13. At the end of the river 109 14. The Goldilocks principle 117 Part 3: Feeding ourselves 125 15. A short history of agriculture 131 16. What we eat 139 17. To till or not to till 147 v 18. Permaculture to agroforestry 155 19. The road to Tompi Seleka 163 20. Simplicity 171 21. Saving water 179 Epilogue: Reflections in the scientist’s garden 187 Chapter notes 189 vi OUT OF THE SCIENTIST’S GARDEN Prologue: Entering the scientist’s garden One of the first things I learned in science class at primary school was the difference between renewable and non-renewable resources. Oil was a non-renewable resource. One day we would suck the last barrel out of the earth and there would be no more. The oil price skyrock- eted through the 1970s and has been doing so again, along with predictions about how many years’ supply we have left. Water was different. It was continuously renewed in an endless cycle of evaporation and rainfall. A picture in my school textbook showed wavy arrows of moisture rising up from the sea, feeding huge clouds that rained over the land. Forests grew from the wet earth, returning water to the sky. Rivers carried the remainder back to the ocean. Burn oil and it was gone forever, but water keeps evaporating, condensing and evaporating again. Ultimately, it cannot be consumed. Oil will run out someday, but so far no petrol station has stopped me filling my car. I am, however, forbidden to turn on my garden tap and water the tomatoes in my back garden – at least on every second day. The great renewable resource is not being renewed fast enough where I live. I was born in the city of Cape Town, at the southern tip of Africa. Through my growing years, I answered with ease the question most asked of children by adults: ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ I wanted to be a farmer. My desire to farm started with a primary school experiment. We each had to bring some seeds to school, and from the day mine germinated I was hooked. I started a vegetable garden and have grown one ever since, first in Cape Town where I grew up, then in Sydney through my university years and now in my home town of Canberra. I never farmed, but my job as a research scientist revolves around turning water into food and how the wider environment is affected by the way we farm the land. I also spend part of each year running experiments and teaching postgraduate students in Africa. Over a couple of decades I have witnessed all means of applying water to crops – from the latest drip irrigation technologies to women and children carrying water in rickety carts drawn by donkeys. Through all this I have maintained my own fruit and vegetable garden, and it has become a laboratory and a sanctuary; a place to think and learn about how we use water to grow food. When I got the chance to write this book through a fellowship from the research corporation Land and Water Australia, I knew immediately what I wanted to say. vii My garden is the place where I mull over the things that have troubled me during the working day. My concerns coalesce around four issues. First, it is surprisingly hard to use water well. We have become used to having lots of it and we are not well-placed to face a world of sudden scarcity. Second, the way food is produced has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, with most of our food grown by very few people on large, specialised farms. Unlike the garden, the modern food chain is long and complex, and supplying the supermarket shelf uses far more fossil fuel energy than we derive from eating the food we buy. Third, my time spent in Africa has exposed me to the precarious life of the small-scale farmer. We do not have enough ideas to lift the productivity of the resource-poor farmers, and the neediest of all are hard to reach with the ideas we do have. Finally, I am troubled by my own profession. We seem to be drifting into a culture of short- termism and managerialism, just at the time we need to nurture the creativity and boldness required to face up to a bewildering array of global problems. My troubles are only eclipsed by the wonder of a garden. At home we call the month of August the start of the hungry gap. We have finished the fruit preserved from summer, emptied the store of onions and potatoes and eaten through the greens planted the previous autumn. The garden beds are cold and bare. But then comes the renewal of spring. The fruit trees burst into blossom and the crops emerge from the warming soil. Soon the first produce is ready for harvest – food and flavours of which I never grow tired. This book is written for anyone who wants to understand water a little better – for those growing vegetables in a garden, food in a subsistence plot or crops on vast irrigated plains. But it is also for anyone who has never grown anything before and who has wondered at the pas- sion of the gardener or farmer. It is also for anyone who shares the troubles I have outlined above, of a world with shrinking resources feeding a growing population. The book is divided into three sections, each containing seven essays. Part 1 ‘The view from our garden’ contains stories about why things work the way they do, through the lens of my backyard fruit and vegetable garden. Part 2 ‘A journey through soil’ explores irrigation, soil, land, rivers and aquifers and how to navigate the fine line between productivity and degradation. Part 3 ‘Feeding ourselves’ takes you on a brief history of agriculture, discusses how the world feeds itself and explores some of the conundrums of modern agriculture. Each section deals with soil, water and food from different perspectives and scales, but you will quickly see that they are all part of the same tapestry. Each essay is a story in itself and the book can be read in any order, but I think you will find that each builds on the one before, creating a bigger story – the story of turning water into food. viii OUT OF THE SCIENTIST’S GARDEN Acknowledgements I wrote this book whilst on a fellowship provided by Land and Water Australia. The intent of the fellowship was to sponsor a reflective piece of work by ‘freeing up’ the time of a mid- career scientist from the constraints of their everyday chores. I enjoyed every minute of this fellowship, and am incredibly grateful to Land and Water Australia and to CSIRO, my employer, who supported it all the way through. For most scientists, writing is an important part of their job. But we write for academic journals – a terse and precise form of writing, painstakingly argued and meticulously refer- enced.