I walked past the shed and the market gardens revealed themselves. A set of overgrown, somewhat intentionally defined patches of all sort of vegetables populated the hill in front of us, all the way down to the dam. Curly kale, potatoes, carrots, eggplants, beans and corn were amongst it all.

The first things I noticed were the weeds: tall, green, juicy and happy. Blooming wherever there was room to grow. The corn patch was the most striking, the flowering tips hardly making it above the amaranth and fat-hen weeds.

This is Moon Acre, a small farm on the Southern Highlands of NSW. A place of glorious organic produce cared for by award-winning farmer Phil Lavers and his team. Here produce is revered, and it shows, as some of the best chefs of Sydney are amongst their clients, taking advantage of flavours that cannot be compared to industrially produced greens.
Phil puts it down to the dirt, and the careful consideration that a farmer has to have for his main resource, that thin layer of topsoil that covers our earth made alive by a gazillion bacteria interacting with trace elements, in every single tablespoon of it. Soil.

Phil does not have an issue with the tall weeds in his cornfield; he does not think that they are stealing nutrients from his main cash crop. Indeed he is one of the many farmers that are starting to reassess the idea of ‘weeds’, and pay more attention at the ecological services that those pioneer species provide.

 In a classic book written in the 50’s, Weeds, Guardians of the Soil, American farmer J. Cocannouer lays out a well-researched argument undermining the rising dogma of monoculture. Back then the industrial agricultural revolution was gaining momentum and post-war development focused on yield above nutrition and soil health.
It was then that our relationship with weeds deteriorated rapidly, with the advent of chemical fertilizers (NPK) and herbicides. The firsts were used to do the job of pioneer species in replacing the trace elements extracted by crops; the seconds were used to clear off competition all together, by killing the weeds.
Little respect was offered to the biological reality of the soil. The organisms that allowed for prosperous plant life were destroyed in the process of weed-killing and replaced by man-made Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potassium (NPK).
Up until then the concept of weeds was very loose, specific to a small set of plants and relative to the seasons. It was common practice until very recent agricultural developments, to allow for fallow fields: let the soil grow weeds so as to heal itself from exploitation.

So what happened? Why is it that we suddenly decided to destroy biodiversity in favour of a diminishing number of species? What happened so that now we have such a distorted vision of ‘useful plants’ that limit the possibilities of diversity to the tiny number of species available commercially?

Weeds. It is funny to think that all of the plants that we grow in our agricultural fields are glorified pioneer species. I.e. weeds. And yet we have such a strong opinion on what belongs and what does not. We not only destroy the land, the soil and the life that lives in the soil, but we then also demonise the plants that come up to fix the damage we have done.

The concept of weeds is at the same time old, new, culturally specific and a fallacy.

It is old, as the practice to suppress unfavourable behaviour using the metaphor of problematic plants dates back to biblical stories. This concept has been exploited extensively since, defining proper social etiquette: you’re either good or bad like a weed that needs to be extirpated before it gets out of hand. Eventually, the narrative device was so universal that all of the plants labelled as weeds started to suffer unfair judgement. The concept of ‘weed’ became so disconnected from the biological reality that it outgrew the original farming reference. We know that the fields of early agriculture were indeed expanses of several companion species: fields of happy weeds coexisting in fallow fields left to rest, and yet the metaphor was so strong that we started to inflate the real threat in order to serve the narratives.

Weeds, up until recently, were just a handful of problematic plants that were managed but still appreciated for their ecological services at the garden’s edge or in forests surrounding the shallow-ploughed fields.

These days the term ‘weed’ is a culturally specific concept that when we conjure it up in our mind provides for quite different visualization in different languages. In Italian, erbaccia (bad behaving grass), is a term used way more specifically, to describe a narrower spectrum of botany, mostly grasses (Poaceae family), that get out of control in the garden or crop fields. Definitely no tree or shrub is referred with that term. It is the same in French, mauvaise herbe, meaning bad grass and Spanish, malas hierbas (also meaning bad grass).

But then there is Russian, where ‘weeds’ translate to вдовий траур (vdoviy traur), meaning widow’s mourning.

And English where the term is akin to curse and disease, a plague that needs to be controlled at all cost, setting off crusades of well meaning ‘warriors’ ready to sacrifice their time, resources and money to control an otherwise imminent invasion. So yes, it gets messy.

When it comes to Australia then, the polarized vision of ecology aggravates it: native vs exotic. In those terms pretty much anything that is not perceived to belong pre-1778 is a public enemy. Apart from farm crops, garden plants, pretty flowers, lawns and anything else that we decided to be exempt from citizenship assessment.

Even the argument of bio-diversity loss is eschewed and misguided, sheltering us from scrutiny while offsetting our culpability to other species.

According to WWF Living Planet Report 2020 the picture is grim, with an estimated 45% decline in biodiversity in the past 50 years. And that is a conservative estimate, as the report states that the assessment is incomplete as the decline is soil biology is grossly under documented. Modern management of the environment is the main driver of such decline and human activity is the driving engine of biodiversity loss, with 50% of species loss due to modification of habitat: monocultures, mining, sprawling suburbia and deforestation. A further 24% biodiversity loss is because of overexploitation: fishing, hunting, commercial harvesting and the by-catch of these industries and 6% is lost due to pollution. Only 13% of biodiversity loss is due to pest, weeds and disease and yet they get most of the blame. See here for the full report>

So why do we hate weeds so much? Why do we bundle up vastly different plants in one big pile to chuck gasoline on and burn?

I understand that there are extremely problematic plants out there causing severe impact, but the current list is only about 30, see here. And yet harmed with poisons and slashers we decide that everything else that we don’t like can be bundled up in that list. How convenient.

Many of the plants that grow uninvited can be eaten, they are our ancient medicine, they fix the soil and improve fertility, they work with the rest of the ecology to maintain a diverse biome and need no help or resources to do all that.

Years back, I was speaking about the cultural value of pioneer species at the Victorian Weeds Society Conference, where a fellow speaker, John Dwyer presented a paper that considered aspects of human psychology involved in our responses to weeds and problems associated with the ‘war on weeds’. It argued for a better understanding of weeds as part of nature, and for a cessation of hostilities.

At the very same conference, David Holmgren defended the marginal ecologies and argued for the need to differentiate between weeds and wild nature, as not everything is there to take over the land. On the contrary, there are some pretty useful pioneer species out there. Some of which are also yummy. 

With a change of perspective, the field of corn overtaken by weeds at Moon Acre farm suddenly becomes a successful three species cultivation: corn for starch, fat-hen for minerals and vitamins, and green amaranth for protein. All three happily co-existing.