Charles Massy

Following his BSc at ANU (1976), Dr Charles Massy managed various farms and developed a prominent Merino sheep stud business (Severn Park). He still manages the family’s grazing property in NSW while teaching at universities and consulting in the fields of Merino breeding, regenerative agriculture and landscape design.

He has chaired and served as a Director on a number of national and international review panels and boards of business, research organisations and statutory wool bodies, involving garment manufacture, wool marketing, R&D, molecular genetics and genomics.

Dr Massy has engaged in freelance journalism since 1977 and has published four books including The Australian Merino:  Viking O’Neil/Penguin. 1990. 1088 pp; The Australian Merino — The Australian Story: Random House Australia. 2007. 1238 pp; Breaking the Sheep’s Back : UQP, 2011. 400 pp., paperback.

His concern about land degradation and the Anthropocene crisis led to him completing a PhD in Human Ecology (ANU) in 2012. This resulted in his new book, Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth (UQP Sept. 2017; Chelsea Green USA, 2018) concerning the emergence of regenerative agriculture in Australia and cause for hope.