Voice of Real Australia: Getting back to grassroots

On Charles Massey's farm near Cooma in south eastern NSW, kangaroo grass has started to come back.

It's a hardy, perennial native that probably carpeted Severn Park - Charles's Monaro farm - at one stage. I've talked about it before, the Dja Dja Warrung near Bendigo, Victoria, are trying to cultivate it. You can buy kangaroo grass bread in places, and they use it to make beer in some trendy microbreweries.

The native grassland here and in large parts of Australia was transformed for stock and lost - less than 0.5 per cent of the native grasslands on the NSW Southern Tablelands remain and it's classified as critically endangered. But it's coming back on Severn Park, and Charles is gleeful about it.

Charles has been big on regenerative agriculture for decades. "Regen ag", as he calls it, is for him an extremely hopeful way of life. It's an admission that yes we've done a number on a lot of landscapes but if we let Mother Nature regenerate, she will. And he says the kangaroo grass here is proof.

He didn't plant kangaroo grass, it just came back slowly when he stopped broad-scale spraying his paddocks. The seeds must have been in the soil, dormant, for decades or a century, waiting for the right conditions to return.

Grasslands are brilliant at storing carbon, too. Grasses are deep rooted and open up the soil, providing a rich, spongey home for microbes, insects, and worms. There's a lot more water in the soil too - Charles reckons he goes into drought later and out of it sooner than his neighbours.

We've been discussing carbon farming on this week's episode of the Voice of Real Australia podcast, and whether it could save the world. Charles isn't a carbon farmer - not in the sense that he's paid to sell carbon credits and goes through the red tape and rigmarole of getting certified by the government. But a lot of the techniques he uses - he doesn't plough, has planted thousands of trees, and spends his life nurturing the ground cover and biodiversity on his property - are straight out of the carbon farming playbook.

Carbon farming is being touted as a way to slow down and reverse climate change. The idea is that you can suck carbon from the atmosphere and store it in plants and the soil.

But critics are concerned the carbon credit system doesn't work - farmers are getting paid for junk credits, our soil can only hold so much carbon, and focusing on carbon farming distracts us from the real work of reducing emissions - but even if it isn't a panacea, farmers believe the added carbon in their soil will result in healthier landscapes, livestock, and people.

It's a hopeful way of life, and if it means the swaying orange green of kangaroo grass - a landscape devastated for over two hundred years - can come back, then that's a hopeful thing too.

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