Fire-Stick Farming: The World's First Landscape Agriculture

Fire-stick farming is the systematic use of controlled, low-intensity burning to manage the Australian landscape — a practice documented across the entire continent by virtually every language group. The term was coined by archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969, though the practice itself stretches back tens of thousands of years. It is arguably the oldest continuous agricultural practice on Earth, and it is fundamentally different from every other agricultural system ever developed. Where Neolithic agriculture cleared and ploughed land to plant specific crops, fire-stick farming managed an entire ecosystem to maximise the productivity of hundreds of species simultaneously.

Cool burns — low-intensity fires lit at specific times in specific areas — were used to clear undergrowth, prevent catastrophic wildfire, drive game toward hunters, encourage new growth of food plants, and maintain the mosaic of different vegetation types that maximised biodiversity. Different areas were burned on different cycles — some annually, some every few years, some generationally.

Fire-stick farming is the reason that the Australian landscape produces the ingredients it does. Wattleseed, yams, kangaroo, emu, native grasses — the food system that Aboriginal Australians ate from was not wild. It was cultivated, managed, and maintained through fire over 65,000 years.