At Mindrum we have always valued good management information and the research that generates it.  We spend a lot of time, resource and effort on it.  It drives our daily  decision making and as a result, we are tuned to the fact that our information picture is imperfect and needs to be continually challenged and refined.  This is not a criticism, but a fact of life.

We support a range of research projects, collect data as part of a deliberate plan, and work hard to understand what’s happening beneath our feet and on the ground.   We seek to support and understand what others are researching and we consume significant quantities of research by the great and the good across the globe, but since moving into a regenerative model, its increasingly clear  that the scientific canon alone doesn’t always inform the questions I need to answer to drive my decision making.

Farming — like any living system — is full of complexity, contradiction, and quiet communication on many frequencies and in many languages (many of which I don’t speak!).  What seems true in one context may change completely in another, because every action we take reshapes the very system we are part of.   The soil, the plants, the animals — even the weather — are all in motion, responding to what we do as much as to each other. It’s less a machine to control than a conversation to stay part of.

That’s why numbers and models and contextual analysis, though essential, don’t always tell the whole story. They offer still images from a moving film. The rest we sense and infer— through sight, sound, smell, touch, intuition. Humans are remarkably well equipped for this: our senses and brains evolved to read dynamic complexity, to notice patterns and shifts long before we can describe them. In a regenerative system, those senses become tools again — not in opposition to science, but alongside it — helping us navigate the living, changing world we belong to.

Sometimes, by following the data too closely, we risk losing sight of the deeper pattern — the relationships, timing, and subtle signals that only emerge through time, attention, and care….or sometimes brutal experience.  We forget, at our peril, that many of these patterns and rhythms outlive our human span by orders of magnitude.

I fear that we are sometimes in danger of losing these nuanced skills and abilities as we become blinded by the bright lights and many incredible benefits of science and technology.  I know I am.  Something I am working on!

This is a nuanced picture, if I have inadvertently polarised this discussion, it is purely a function of my poor penmanship.  Neither approach is right or wrong; each needs the other.

Why the story?  Well…..There’s little more unnerving than the clear gaze of an eight-year-old who’s just asked “Why?” or “How?”— and little more valuable. Children see the world without the filters we’ve learned to add, and their questions remind me how much of farming, and of life, is about curiosity and story. The complexity we live within can’t always be explained by data or charts, but it can often be felt and imagined. That’s why I’ve turned to narrative — to stories that hold both the science and the wonder, the pictures and the listening. Through a story, I hope to give others, especially young people, a way to sense the living patterns beneath our feet — and to see that understanding the land is as much about attention and imagination as it is about analysis.

A story of the Earth and the World – and Two Ways of Knowing…