The following was written by Barb Howard, a recently accredited Holistic Management Educator based in Australia. The original post can be found on LinkedIn.
Retraining My Brain
In March 2021, a group keen to find out more about Holistic Management came together at the Muresk Institute near Northam, Western Australia to begin their four-month course. Closed borders and no local educators meant the expansion of Holistic Management education in WA had come to a screeching halt two years earlier. Once Brian Wehlburg from Inside Outside Management was ‘allowed’ back into the state we enthusiastically engaged in what promised to be a challenging few months bending our minds around concepts like creating a Holistic Context to guide our decision making, which is applicable to anyone who makes decisions!
I soon realised that understanding the meaning of this ‘foreign’ language would unlock the fundamentals for everything else to make sense to me. It was clear that managing holistically where we consider the environment, our social connections as well as our finances is complex and not something that adult humans are naturally good at doing or are raised to consider. Even after studying Sustainable Development at Murdoch University it was really going to take something to retrain my brain.
Compassionately Reviewing the Past
Following the first workshop I dived into reading the third edition text book by Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield called Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment (2016). I quickly discovered that Holistic Management was the beginning of a journey to unlearn before any real learning could begin. I hoped that if I persisted and stayed with the tension of this new way of thinking, a transformation would come to me that would help me understand why my own early experience of managing land in my 20s had not worked out well for me or the land. This was challenging stuff to get my head around. I went on an emotional roller coaster ride looking back at the ‘girl’ who was full of aspiration to farm better than her own parents without the ongoing financial struggles and a pervading thunderous atmosphere under the farmhouse roof that could almost literally be cut with a knife.
Planning is the Key
During my high school years, in the early to mid 1980s, my father stopped eating dinner with us. He was fixated with following the nightly news commentary around ongoing interest rate hikes and the long-range weather forecast predicting yet another drought. He regularly spoke in jest about shooting the bank manager or himself to get out of ‘shitters ditch’. It was the last day of the third 2-day Holistic Management workshop when it finally dropped into place for me that our issue had been to focus almost exclusively on managing livestock and not on soil and pasture health. Holistic Planned Grazing literally turned my world upside down and I am sorry my father did not get to have his world turned upside down in the same way. What a difference it would have made to our experience of family life and of farming if he also got access to this one simple but not easy planning concept.
Ongoing Learning Together
In June 2021, at the completion of the course our group was more environmentally, socially, and financially literate and aware. We knew that to get the most out of what we had learned though we would need to keep in touch with each other in the weeks, months, and years to come. Community dynamics is an essential ecosystem process and my area of both experience and passion. Many of the newly minted Holistic Management practitioners were keen to explore each other’s properties so we formed a learning group, and I took on its coordination. It seemed like a fun opportunity to get to know people better and get out into their paddocks. It turned out coordinating this group would provide me with so much more than simply an opportunity to socialise with like-minded people in the WA regions.
We visited Rod and Katrina Butler’s property at Perenjori over the March 2022 long weekend to look at how they are rehydrating a dry landscape using livestock and Holistic Grazing managment. Rod has also been deeply influenced by the work of Fred Provenza author of Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom (2018) and Will Harris author of A Bold Return to Giving A Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food (2023) and owner of White Oak Pastures in the US.
What Unfolded Next?
A conversation with Brian Wehlburg a few months later had me take my first step on the Holistic Management educator journey. At the end of the course, becoming an accredited associate educator was not something I gave any thought to. I came into the course feeling disenfranchised with farming because my experience had been largely a single-minded focus on making money at the expense of the environment and the community. After spending years training with people like Ashkan Tashvir and Ariya Chittasy from Engenesis (Ontology) and Sue Langley from the Langley Group (Positive Psychology and Wellbeing) to my mind leadership development was the only way I could make a difference to the farming mindset. Yet in this one conversation, another pathway opened up for me. Management requires an in-depth knowledge of the technical aspects of the practice whereas leadership is all about supporting people to shift their way of thinking. Management and leadership must go hand in hand if we are going to make a lasting difference and the younger we learn this the better. I realised my vision for the future is to empower young adults, as early as possible, to consider farming as a way of life that is enriching in so many ways, not just financially through Holistic Management and regenerative leadership.
Transforming Our World
What transpired from those early conversations about educator training is now a cohort of 16 educators from around Australia – including five from Western Australia – all committing to an 18-month learning journey to really embed the teaching of Allan Savory. Fast forward to early 2024 and the five of us have now completed the training program led by Mark Gardner, and supported Glen Chapman and John King author of Curiosity: Farmers Discovering What Works (2023) and others and have successfully past the exit (or entry) interview to be Savory Institute accredited Holistic Management Educators (on the first rung of the ladder). My husband Bernard Callus, PhD joined me and he is also a Savory Institute accredited educator.
About Barb
Barb Howard is a consultant and coach who works with women and men who think big and are committed to leading in the regenerative agriculture sector. She believes right now is the perfect time for us to regenerate our relationship with the soil. This means approaching our transition with a growth mindset and willingness to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
Barb Howard
Institute of Regenerative Leadership
+61 417506 389
