In the Wimmera Mallee town of St Arnaud in 2023, around 300 residents joined a tractor rally through the streets to protest renewable energy infrastructure. At a community meeting about the proposed VNI West transmission project, government representatives were heckled until Victoria Police advised the meeting be adjourned. More than 80 landholders signed a declaration refusing survey access to the company responsible for building the transmission line. Many of them had first learned their properties were in the proposed corridor through a QR code in a local newspaper.

A follow-up to Monocultures Are Dumb by Design

Let me be direct about where I stand.

I work in technology. I have spent over two decades building open-source infrastructure, mesh networks, and digital tools designed to put capability into communities’ hands rather than extract it from them. I believe in technology that serves people. I have seen it do exactly that.

And in the contest between family farmers and the Monsanto playbook, I have no difficulty choosing a side.

My father farmed in Carinthia, Austria, and I grew up working alongside him. He was not a man of many words. When he did speak, it was measured, the kind of thing worth sitting with rather than answering. I was not particularly good at sitting with things. Two generations of men on a farm: we had the stubbornness in common, not the patience.

One thought stayed with me: that we were not owners of the land but custodians for a generation, obliged to hand it back better than we found it. Soil depleted by one generation becomes a liability for the next. Varieties lost cannot be recovered. Knowledge not passed on disappears. He never liked monocultures, and chipped away at alternatives steadily rather than making radical changes. My instinct would have been to reject the whole model outright, go further and faster at the time. His approach turned out to be the more long-term sustainable.