This is my story

My story will give you some idea how do I know what I am talking about. In fact, I am just a "Simple Country Dirtdoctor" who has spent years walking about paddocks, helping farmers with all sorts of problems. Of course, it wasn't always that way, nor was it what I expected my life to be.

My name is Peter Brown and I have been working in agriculture and horticulture for more than 35 years and I have a Diploma of Horticultural Science, a Bachelor of Science and Diplomas in Dairy management and Small Business Management.

Back in the late 1960s my story began when I was struggling through my last years at High School (not the best of students), I was looking for an easier route and thought “Horticulture! That should be easy enough”. Of course, I was wrong about the ‘easy’ part, but I soon discovered what would become a life-long passion and one of the first things I did after starting my new studies, was to set up a vegetable garden at home.

It was a bit of a disaster actually. The soil was heavy and hard, the weeds were ferocious and production was somewhat less than optimal. Still, I was encouraged by the rapturous responses I got from my family whenever I was able to bring some food from the garden (although I think they were rather less than impressed by my efforts with mushrooms under the stairs).

My story continues today, I still have a vegetable garden in my backyard, but vegetables are no longer the only food from the garden at my place. I have extended my journey to explore various other possibilities with free-range egg production, beekeeping, silk production (not food, I know, but the Mulberries aren't bad!) and aquaponics. I have even learned how to tame the hard and heavy soil that I struggled with so many years ago.

Many of the discoveries I made along the way have taken me by surprise, as they often seemed to disprove the conventional wisdom I learned at College.

After all my studies and experience, however, I remain relegated to the "Lunatic Fringe" of the industry. This is because I have devoted so many years to things like Organics and alternative crops that few others could be bothered with. Which really has become the story of my life - always siding with the under-dog and choosing the project that would leave the World a better place even if it actually did me no real good, but more on this in a moment.

I have also learned that much of what we do to produce food from the garden (or the farm) is done only because that is the way it has always been done (or more often just because we have been told to do things that way). As old as horticulture may be, not everything handed down from our forebears actually works. Separating the good practices from the not-so-good has also led to discoveries about modern research that is too often overlooked because it goes against traditional thinking.

So it is that, over the years, I have become something of a walking library about old practices that work (that may have been forgotten) and new research that you would otherwise may never hear about – and even some relatively modern research that has become lost in the avalanche of information that floods the World these days. But of course, as we all know – nobody bothers with Libraries any more!

In fact, my story continues today with some research projects of my own. You can even read about my progress with these projects here.

So here I am telling my story on the mighty Information Superhighway – preserving what I have learned and sharing it with anyone who is interested to come and read about growing food from the garden.

This position is certainly not what you might have expected if you had met me 20 or 30 years ago. Originally, my aim was for a career in zoology, but I missed. So imagine my surprise when I found myself totally fascinated with Botany, Soil Science and Horticulture. Even more so, when I got to University and also discovered the joys of Genetics. Then, my aim was to become a plant breeder, but I missed again.

Back then, I would have thought developing GMOs would be the coolest thing in the World. I even worked briefly on developing a synchronous chromosome transfer method. Now, I'm rather glad that never became part of my story!

Following a less than spectacular finish to my academic years and a string of jobs, each offering less success than the last, I found myself somewhat out of the mainstream (Boy is that an understatement!).

It was at this point I found there were others who had been shunned by conventional science. Those involved in organic and alternative agriculture were often referred to by "real" agriculturists as the "Lunatic Fringe". Collectively, these 'lunatics' were aware of flaws in the revealed wisdom of conventional science, but could not describe them and lacked the resources to do anything much about it.

I then had the chance to work with kelp and humic acid products to show what their real activity was. Later I also had the chance to contrast these products with conventional fertilizers to get a better idea of how they actually worked.

I also looked at a variety of alternative systems like Albrecht, Reams, biodynamics, permaculture, keyline. I found common threads running through them all. However, each of these systems seemed to promote itself as being the only right one, while all its competitors were treated as being absolutely wrong. Given the similarities they shared, this just didn't make sense.

In spite of all this confusion it became clear that a whole-system approach was essential and that the soil is actually a living system, rather than a simple mechanism that could be managed according to various rules-of-thumb.

The problem seemed to be that no one could properly describe this system. Each of the alternatives above could be shown to produce good results in one place or at one time, but indifferent results elsewhere. As with most things, it turned out that all were looking at the same thing from different points of view and that the answer lay in what bound them all together - not what made them different.

The person who finally cracked the problem and who has helped to add some of the most important facets of my story is Ted Mikhail - a soil scientist whose interest was in soil physics, in contrast to the 'nutrient-centric' view of most others. This is why the Mikhail System he developed is a big feature of the soil section on this site.

However, the really big problem I have been struggling with for many years is how to get what I have learned to an audience (farmers and gardeners) who are mostly convinced anything can be fixed with with some kind of "Silver Bullet" a bit more fertilizer or perhaps a new chemical - no wait - maybe a GMO!

If you would like to know more, here is my view on the subject of GMOs.

So how do you find people who are open-minded enough to listen and what is the best way of giving them good information? Ultimately, this is where my story has led me and this website is a part of the solution to this problem and it forms the center of a home-based business I am developing. After all, how many jobs are there likely to be for a worn-out old dirtdoctor from the Lunatic fringe?

If you are interested in having your own home-based business you may find it helpful to read my story. It is still a 'work-in-progress' however, so like most other things on this website, you will see changes as they happen and read as my story continues, with both successes and failures. I really hope you find all this of value in your own adventures with food gardening, but please let me know if you think of anything more I can do.