The Land Was Never the Problem with Nicole Masters | Ep. 021

Nicole Masters gets called out to look at damaged ground. Compacted, crusted, lifeless dirt on ranches and farms across New Zealand, Australia, US, S. Africa, the UK. She is an agroecologist, she has been doing this for more than twenty years, and she is very good at reading what soil is telling her. But somewhere in those two decades she noticed something that changed the whole shape of her work: the people calling her about their soil almost never had a soil problem.

They had a mindset problem. An overwhelm problem. A debt problem. A grief problem. A generations-of-being-told-the-land-is-an-adversary problem. Nicole points out that the products lining the shed wall are named things like Guillotine and Rifle — that a farmer can get up in the morning and, without ever hearing themself do it, ask who am I going to kill today. Decades of that language does something to a person. It also does something to the ground underneath them. So she began troubleshooting the human standing in the field, and the field started to change.

In this conversation Dr. Nasha and Nicole Masters talk about the language of dominance we use on land and on bodies, about grown adults on their knees in dirt laughing for the first time since childhood, about why more information is often more damaging than none at all, and about what it takes to see a landscape — or a life — that you long ago stopped actually looking at.

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