Vines, olives, wheat and walnuts et. al.

The landscape of much of the Rioja district of northern Spain is characterised by ´patchiness´. Patches of vines, patches of olives and wheat and occasional patches or borders of walnuts or almonds or even apples if there is an irrigation ditch. Wine, olives, oil, bread, walnuts, fruit and vegetables. Not a bad subsistence diet. The contrast is stark between this area and, for example, the Margaret River wine region or the wheat belt of Western Australia. No doubt it is a function of their different histories. Western Australia's resource extracting history need not determine its future, however. Indeed it must not. Western Australia has a lot from its older Mediterranean sibling.

The wines of the Rioja were no doubt widely traded following the establishment of vines in the area by the Phoenicians and the Romans. This did not keep the Rioja cultivator of the vine-tree from developing a robust set of crops. By contrast, the export crops of wheat and wine in Western Australia developed in an historical, geological and geographical context which discouraged such diversity.

The patterns of the Rioja are mostly monocultural paired with the common Mediterranean climate weed- and fire-prevention strategy of absolutely bare earth. Irrigation is mostly by flooding. There are few of the earthworks which might dramatically improve this landscape.

Despite these limitations, the patchy diversity of the Rioja is striking. The patchiness is formed by small monocultures of perennial and annual staple crops. Complemented by the home vegetable gardens which are frequent in the towns and on their outskirts, these patches signify a remarkably coherent cultural and agricultural landscape.

After thousands of years of agricultural productivity, there are signs in the Rioja of the monoculture of the mind by which most of modern agriculture is characterised. In comparison to the steady degredation and destruction of the delicate Western Australian ecosystems, however, the Rioja is a model of stability.

There will yet be a day when patches of perennial polyculture characterise Western Australian agriculture. There is much to learn from Spain and other places with Mediterranean climates in which delicate and infertile soil, scarce and irregular water and intense insolation have been the conditions under which human interaction has yielded millenia of stable productivity.