MATTHEW & PARETO don't believe in sustainability

I've always been interested in natural patterns and rhythms. And one way I've described my work is a pattern interpreter. And what we do with this type of farming is look at patterns in ecology and apply them to our production landscape. And I've always had a fascination with that. And I'd like to talk a bit today about the Pareto or Matthew principle and why it is that sustainability just can't exist in farming systems. We're either going to into exponential regeneration or exponential decay. The most interesting thing about patterns is seeing how they translate across scale, the scaling laws we see across nature, and how they apply just as much to our internal psychological process as they do to the external physical world. I wrote a lot about this in a chapter in my book called A World Made of Patterns. And it's something I spend a lot of time talking about on our educational trainings. Because really, if we start to see the world through a pattern lens, then we can start to adapt and translate productions that we see elsewhere into our own circumstance, regardless of the climate, economic situation, etc. One such pattern I've talked about on here before is that pattern of patchy intermittent disturbance, the governing pattern of regeneration in ecosystems. Whether that's a hundred million bison coming snorting through a grassland, trampling all the dead matter on the base of the grass plants, covering the ground with urine and manure, and then leaving it for a long period as they're moved around by pack hunting predators. That allows the grass to be rebooted and kickstart the process of building soil, capturing more carbon into that grassland ecosystem. Same is seen in the forest ecosystem. Here in Sweden we have wild boar and they will come through and have what appears to be devastating impact on the ground, but then they don't come back for a long time. And that process allows each little microsite within the forest system to go through a process of succession. That pattern of change in ecological communities over time, where the annual and perennial herbs, the weeds get kick started to hold the earth together and start fixing nutrients again, making them more accessible for higher organisms. And then quickly that goes up to slow growing canopy trees again. That process happens at different speeds in different climates. Obviously it's a lot faster process in the tropics, where you have a lot more moisture and a lot more heat. But the process and the pattern of change is the same. And succession is a really important one, because if we're not working with it, we're going to be fighting against it. And nature's got mechanisms evolved over millions of years. To fix our damage. Farmers tend to make most of their own problems, as I've said before. And so that's why we look to pioneering approaches for producing vegetables without tillage or grazing animals, mimicking how herbivores were moved around by predators, etc. Or even behind me, with our silver pasture systems, preparing the ground in a way that supports fungi, primarily because they're governing the forest systems, even if it's a thin alley in the pasture, which is a bacterial dominated soil. But you can translate that through to the human experience. A simple way you could think of that is think about big impactful moments in your life, a big accident or a big trauma, a loved one dying, or something like this that really shakes you up and makes you evaluate what you prioritize and value. It's very easy to get stuck in a rut with life. And certainly as you get older, that becomes more and more deeply entrenched. And it's those patchy interconnects, intermittent disturbances, that become the most interesting parts of our experience and they shape and define us. So this is a universal pattern that we see across the board at all scales. Over the years, I've put a lot of time into time and motion studies and really highlighted the importance of that regularly on YouTube, in my book and with the participants at trainings here. And what's always struck me is how the levels of our productivity differ so much, where a small percentage of people are responsible for most of the output. And that seems to be another fundamental law that we should think about. I first came across this over a decade ago through Gaia University, where I did a Masters in Ecosocial Design and Communication. And there it was a common language within the university presented in the way of smashing out perfectionism with the idea of this is also called the 8020 rule or leverage rule. The idea that if you can put out work at 80% of your best in 20% of the effort, then you'll be five times more productive. And the idea was if it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first and refining over time. And I found that really impactful at that point in my life because I was enjoying getting really into systems thinking. And that was where I met some of the finest systems thinkers on my journey. And I'd really been brought up as a perfectionist or had conditioned myself to be a perfectionist. And I see now, looking back that really perfectionism is the total death of creativity. And personally I don't enjoy working in that way or working with people who are in that frame of mind, because it totally thwarts the creative process and productivity. It's a law that's been talked about in business a lot, where 80% of your income comes from just 20% of your products, or 80% of the complaints come from 20% of the customers. So this idea of leverage, of how to leverage away problems or more productivity or whatever, but it seems to apply across the board to all things we create. You could think of it in terms of, like, how many artists. I have a lot of friends that are musicians, but only a tiny percentage of them make money in that industry. And the ones that make money make nearly all the money. And it's applied across all domains in that way, even to how the mass of stars works or how big cities get. And I find it really interesting to think about. It's even reflected as early as in the Bible, in Matthew 13:12, where it for the one who has more will be given and he will have abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. So it's a law of accumulation. It's why we see in the economy the top 1% own nearly all the wealth of the world. And naturally there's inequality. And it's really interesting. I was triggered to think about this the other day because, well, working in this field, I've often met particularly young people who are very distressed about money and are choosing to avoid it and not participate in the system. And on one level, I can sympathise with that. But in another way, I feel it's in blatant disregard of the natural distribution of things. And you can, you know, there's been a lot of social science experiments on this. It seems that no matter what you do, there will always be inequality, particularly in monetary terms. But it applies to anything we create. Like I said, I can certainly relate back to being a teenager and having similar kind of thoughts as a kind of phase in life where you're rejecting the things that don't seem all whole and good. But. But I noticed I don't really believe in that. I actually believe in good business and taking responsibility. Now, I don't have any answers to the natural inequality that comes about through excesses. The way I've governed that in my life is to only run business that benefits everyone involved at every step. And for me, that feels like a great starting point to then build on from there. Something else I've also done is shared my surpluses and helped other people get started and lent money to people and shared a lot of free resources, etc. And I feel like that's all I can do. I'm not an economist and it's not my job to fix a problem, but it's interesting to see that it's only been two real circumstances that have ever affected that wealth distribution, and that would be major warfare or major epidemics. But then quickly those resources become unevenly distributed again and that seems to be the way it is. Whilst we don't necessarily know what to do with it. And I mean, I don't think anyone knows what to do with it. If you look at history, the societies that tried to intentionally create more equal distribution of wealth failed rather dramatically with the results being far worse than the original situation. So I don't feel like a complete rejection of our system is a responsible or forward thinking perspective. I feel like it's much more empowered to find a way to create businesses that benefit everyone involved. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I expect this will be really stimulating for some people and people have totally different views. But I'm just sharing a bit of my thoughts because I'm thinking about this in a pattern of ecology sense. If you take that principle from Matthew, which has been coined the Matthew effect by economists, and you drew that out on a graph, it would look like two exponential curves in opposite directions. And that caught my attention because that's exactly what I see going on in nature. There's literally no such thing as flatlining, stasis or sustainability. And I wrote about this in the pattern chapter of our book Regenerative Agriculture, because it really is clear to me that you're either putting back pieces of a jigsaw and it's exponentially getting better and better, or you're getting in the way of nature and it's going to get exponentially worse, which is what we see with modern industrial farming. You know, feedlots that are basically like medieval villages that are only kept alive through a massive pharmaceutical industry or overgrazed pastures and soil flying off into the atmosphere and desertification spreading over huge amount of the earth's land surface. Something that really has struck me on my journey into agriculture and production landscape management is we often take too much credit for the things that we think we do. You know, we get very excited about our vegetables or animals or trees, but I feel like they do these things themselves. Our jobs are just to conduct the symphony. We're not playing any of the instruments, as it were. We're just putting things in the right place in relation to each other and timing our interaction with the ecosystem around us and observing it very closely. So let's think about grasses. Now. Grasses are very unusual and they're a great way to think about regeneration. Grasses are unusual because their meristems are down at the base of the plant. That's the new growth from the last year. If you see the trees behind me, their meristems are out at the ends of the branches, characteristically a lighter colour wood until they harden off in the winter. So a child with his own logic could see that this is a plant that co evolved with animals, loads of animals, because they needed the aerial part of the plant to be taken away to allow the new meristems to see the sunlight and shoot up and start replacing the energy that was taken off in the material that was sloughed off. We know that all plants are releasing between 2 and 50% of their hard earned carbohydrates. And we also know another pattern in nature is that nothing's for free and nature doesn't do altruism. They're specifically feeding these short chain carbohydrates into the soil food web to feed primarily bacteria and fungi, etc. As well as the whole soil food web, which makes conditions around the root zone. The rhizosphere quickly turn anaerobic and nutrients are released right outside the cell wall where the plant wants it. It's a fantastic design. They're not giving away nutrients out of generosity, they're looking after their own needs first in the service of the whole. And that's the default pattern of all life that I've understood. So what happens if we turn up in a grassland that's overgrazed like most farmland you go to, and we start bunching animals together with electric fencing as a proxy for previous herds of herbivores moved around by pack hunting predators. Well, they will trample a lot of the old plant material down on the ground, like mulch. That directly influences what happens to raindrops and eliminates the percussive impact of a raindrop on the soil surface, which leads to clay particles landing and compacting the top surface of the soil, which leads to much lower levels of infiltration, rapid runoff, flooding, etc. So that is part of the carbon bank that we're putting down on the surface all the time. It also means that the ground is grazed evenly across the whole area. Animals are much less fussy when they're in a tight space because they're mouldering around trying to eat before the others do. So they get to eat a much broader spectrum of Plants because they can't be fussy and picky and go around choosing the ice cream grass only, as Joel Salern would say. And so then their manure covering and urine covering is much more evenly distributed too. And then because they're always on the move, that grass has a period of rest. So what does that do under the ground? Well, having a dense litter on top of the soil protects it from the elements, the sun, the wind, etc. So life goes on very rapidly on the soil surface, especially with all the urine and manure. And so you get a flurry of microbiological activity. That grass that's been grazed off on the top sloughs off some of its annual roots to balance the hydrology of a plant, as above, so below plants are hydrological, so they need to balance their hydrology. And that further starts kick starting the soil food web. That's carbon in a very stable form. It's not moving around in the carbon cycle very quickly. It's very stable in the ground for potentially thousands of years. And it's the basis of part of the start of the soil food web. And so life begets life. You know, regeneration is exponential because once you start doing this process, putting the right pieces of the jigsaw back together, as it were, it will get exponentially better. And it's why I've always said if you want to call what you're doing regenerative, you need to be able to demonstrate that you're building soil, increasing habitat, having predator species come back onto the farm. That's how one day we'll measure the success of our production landscapes. It should be visibly demonstratable. And we've always had this great opportunity here to show that by showing the land around us that hasn't had livestock. And it just doesn't look anything like the way our land looks now. We started with what were the worst pastures in the village, and now we have incredible growth and resiliency, like you saw in the great drought in 2018, where we still had timothy and cocksfoot, the grass species, up to my shoulder height in rampant photosynthesis when everyone else had gone yellow and dry in early June. So about this time two years ago, it's pretty amazing to witness that resiliency. And that's all come about through intelligent farm planning and then timing of livestock particularly. Likewise, if we take away the protective surface of the earth's covering, expose it to the elements, we'll lose carbon into the atmosphere, we'll lose soil as runoff. One millimeter of topsoil loss is 10 tons per hectare and that's deemed okay. Even in organic agriculture, if you're plowing and tilling your soil, you're losing soil in the wind, in the rain. We see much more rapid runoff through flooding all around Europe now with the changing weather patterns. And so that process of degeneration becomes exponential because now the first thing that dies off are the mycorrhizal fungi. And then plants can't get the nutrients because the soil life isn't functioning properly. And so they get sick and get attacked by things. And then typically a conventional farmer will use a compartmentalized linear approach to fix that problem, rather than addressing the core using insecticides, pesticides, etc. This is a degenerative cycle because it starts killing more of the soil organisms and plants suffer even more. And then it just goes on and on and on. And I like to point that out because we talk about sustainability, but I've for years now been saying that's not good enough. Like regeneration is exponential and you're either going this way or this way and that pattern applies to your landscape, to your success, to whatever it is in life. That's the way that distribution seems to work. Well, it's just some thoughts I've been mulling over. Didn't really plan to speak about it, so I'm curious what other people think. Let us know in the comments below and you can find out a whole bunch more in our book Regenerative Agriculture that's down in the links below along with our free mini course. 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