Call of the Reed Warbler
A New Agriculture – A New Earth
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Fully updated and featuring a new author's note addressing recent, major progress in regenerative agriculture. Call of the Reed Warbler will change the way we farm, eat and think about food. In this groundbreaking book Charles Massy explores regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health. Using his personal farming experience as a touchstone, he tells the real story behind industrial agriculture and the global profit-obsessed corporations driving it. He shows how innovative farmers are finding a new way, regenerating their land and witnessing astounding transformations. Evocatively, he captures what it truly means to live in connection with the land. For farmer, backyard gardener, food buyer, health worker, policy maker and public leader alike, Call of the Reed Warbler offers a clear vision of a sustainable future for our food supply, our landscape, our health and our Earth. It offers hope and a powerful affirmation of our potential for change. Now is the time for a grassroots revolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Massy (Breaking the Sheep's Back), a veteran Australian sheep farmer, provides a thorough and illuminating exploration of the movement for sustainable and regenerative farming gaining popularity in his country. The process, he writes, eschews pesticides and other chemicals, and aims to restore carbon back to the Earth (instead of the atmosphere). Its major practices include "holistic grazing," water-cycle management to prevent erosion, and soil maintenance to enhance nutrient retention. Massy takes readers through a history of Australian agricultural developments, highlighting in particular the wisdom of Aboriginal practices and the increasingly harmful evolution of industrial farming. The regenerative system also stresses an essentially hands-off approach to wildlife and other organisms, with an overall awareness of "the complexity of interrelationships in a coevolved landscape"; it requires an overall shift in human thinking from the "Mechanical mind" (dependence on machines) to the holistic. While the subject may be relevant to everyone on Earth, Massy's account is geared to readers unintimidated by, for instance, a discussion of the microbial intricacies of soil. Massy's root message, however, that farmers should "work with, and not against, natural ecosystem function," is well articulated, and his evidence for this message is irrefutable.
