A few years ago, Shane Jacobson was guest speaker at the VFF Grains conference dinner. He’s the actor who shot to fame with his film ‘Kenny’ about the plumber working for a porta-loo rental company.
Shane was a terrific dinner speaker, full of funny stories about his family and career. Shane spoke at length about how his ‘overnight success’ came after 20 years of working in all aspects of the entertainment industry. From the age of 10 he had worked as a roadie, in theatre, on radio and as a stand-up comedian. He’s even written an autobiography titled ‘The Long Road to Overnight Success’.
That night came to mind recently when I heard someone describe no-till in the Mallee as the overnight success that took forty years to eventuate (and yes, it might be Chris Sounness I am quoting here).
It is actually over 50 years since the very first introduction of direct drilling technologies into Australia. A great agronomist who was one of the many, many people involved in the early development of this ground-breaking system change, is Professor Timothy Reeves who spoke at the Australian Agronomy Conference last year.
All great inventors and developers stand on the shoulders of the people and ideas who have come before us. Whilst at school you often only learn about the one person who supposedly had a ‘light bulb moment’ and became a famous inventor like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, but if you bothered to read the text book a bit closer there is often a rival closely competing to release their prototype first and always a raft of people whose work contributed to the final piece.
Before the early 2000’s when it really started to take off, no-till farming adoption in our part of the world had been tried and failed by numerous early adoptors. The reasons for failure were many and varied, often unexpected, complex and driven by local growing conditions and farming systems.
At the time, diesel was cheap, chemicals expensive and expertise not available locally on how best to use the chemicals, especially around the rates and use of trifluralin with knife points. Paddocks became swamped with weeds, and there was heavy reliance on selective chemicals.
The varieties available and our knowledge of nutrition was not as good. We forgot the first principles of Mallee farming – preserve and conserve moisture – and were encouraged to let paddocks green up before applying pre-emergents, which works fine in higher rainfall areas but in the Mallee created a green bridge for pests and diseases whilst using up valuable moisture.
We didn’t yet understand the impact of not disturbing the soil on movement and availability of micronutrients, so crops struggled with low phosphorus and zinc. Our knowledge of the machinery needed to sow with minimum soil disturbance, and how to maximise water harvesting to achieve good germination with limited rainfall, all needed to be developed.
Direct drill and no-till cropping is a great example of where there’s so much more to invention and adoption than one person’s great idea. Some new technologies are easily and rapidly adopted on farm, behaviour change is simple when the benefits are obvious, the risk is low. However, complex, transformational system changes like a switch to no-till farming can only occur when many ducks are lined up requiring a huge amount of learning, capacity building and good timing.
When Shane Jacobson wrote and starred in Kenny, he’d been working and learning for over 20 years. When he did it he enlisted the help of not just friends and other people in the film industry but also his brother and his father. Just like no-till, he needed time, to build capacity and help from others.
