Back To Earth

From Australian Story, ABC, 1 June 2009

'Dr Maarten Stapper is a man with some fascinating ideas on how to manage our land better. He is unconventional, stubborn and difficult. Not even a near fatal car accident could slow him down in his mission to feed the world using less chemicals.

As an advocate for biological farming, Dr Stapper has paid a high price for promoting a greener, cleaner way to grow food. Originally a CSIRO scientist, he left when it became clear his views on biological farming were incompatible with his employer.

Today, he travels the country to educate farmers on how to use less chemicals in their soil and on their crops.'

'DR MAARTEN STAPPER: ...we have to start with the soil, the genes don’t make the crops better, it's the soil. I seemed to be the only one that was asking questions in the system. With the whole GM silence surrounding me, and me speaking up, I felt like a voice in the wilderness...the 15 years that I had worked on crops, on pastures, on paddocks, on farms, to improve the management on the farm the big missing part of that research was the soil biology that drives the whole system. We have to care for the soil biology to make the system work...So instead of chemicals we use the soil organisms, the microbes to feed the plant and to protect the plant and those microbes make minerals from the soil available to the plant and they feed the plant. It’s a wonderful system of nature where everything is balanced.'

'PETER COOK, FARMER: I believe that the biological way was getting back to what was done probably 50 years ago, in dollar terms I don’t really know how much we’ve saved, but probably in the vicinity of $20,000 a year in chemicals but the exciting thing is that we’re looking after the property, then if we’ve got good plants, then people are eating good food. There are good minerals passing from that food into the people. I’ve got a totally different outlook on it now, and I want everything I sell to be as clean and green as I possibly can.'