Going Against the Grain in the West Australian Wheatbelt

Abstract

The vast wheatbelt of Western Australia marks a disruptive force on an ancient landscape, an upheaval wrought by the dispossessive ecologies of sheep and wheat (Mayes, Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). This chapter asks what transformational possibilities might emerge in this context through a case study of a broad-acre regenerative-farming couple, Di and Ian Haggerty, and their experiments with new ways of knowing, living and farming in the wheatbelt. The Haggertys seek to reconfigure ecological relations within regimes of large-scale production. On the one hand, these regimes of production look much like their neighbours’, as they use the same logistical chains, infrastructure and financial systems as other wheatbelt producers. On the other, their farming practice—informed by a probiotic and more-than-human epistemology the Haggertys call “natural intelligence”—suggests a potential disruption to extractivist commodity agriculture in the wheatbelt and the hegemony of its technoscientific institutions. While regenerative farming at scale could be dismissed as a greener form of settler-colonial agriculture, this case study suggests, or at least creates space for, a cautious optimism that more diverse ways of knowing and doing food might be constructed from within the cracks of global supply chains and that new alliances might emerge from the ground up.