Now there's almost 98% agreement amongst thousands of scientists which is very rare that we may only have one generation,
25 years, to turn this around or we'll have a runaway earth and humans become extinct, that's how serious this is. There's so many scientists talking about the bad news of the anthropocene but I see the regenerative ag story as unbelievably exciting because regenerative agriculture has some of the best, if not the best solutions
to those seven biophysical earth systems so a key factor that's just not discussed behind all that exponential rise of all our modern
diseases is what we're doing to our soil. I grew up an only child my mother died when
I was four and a half so I was left to my own resources pretty well which was terrific. 5-6 year old you go rabbiting with dogs have the day to yourself almost and then as I got
older I used to spend a lot of time in the bush. I was probably 10 or 12 I was quite happy to camp up there on my own. I ended up going to university after a couple years at home working on
the farm. So I went off to ANU, I did science but also the first course in Australia, and about
the third in the world, on holistic thinking called human ecology. So both those experiences and education had a big impact. When I had to take over the farm at 22,
the best farmers around the district were all into 'high input agriculture', that meant putting on lots,
and in this district lots, of fertiliser. Australian soils are very ancient and the soil biology is
really clever at rapidly cycling small micro amounts of scarce elements like phosphorus etc.
You put on a huge overdose of super phosphate phosphorus and it's just a massive killing
off of any soil biology and function and then herbicides began to come, to put in pastures. So spray out your healthy grassland kill everything you then just have a few particular
species and then you'd pile on the fertiliser. Things were going well got interested in
sheep genetics and then we walked into the four year drought. Four plus years of the 79-83 drought
and by then I had a merino stud and I said 'well we've got to defend these genetics'. So we kept too
many animals, had to buy in grain, it was a shocking drought. Got ourselves into debt for the first time
and belted the landscape. There was a tension then between my love of nature, my biophilia,
and what i was doing to our landscape and then by the early 90s I heard of
new holistic grazing movement and did a course. I realised what I've been doing for
in reality, a couple of decades, had been harming the very thing that sustains agriculture;
which is a healthy soil in its systems I'm a fourth generation merino breeder. I grew up
on Glenwood and have my wife Pip and five kids who have also grown up on Glenwood.
At the time when we took over the merino industry had just been through a
really tough time for prices and the farm and the business was carrying a lot of debt. Pip and I have
probably always been inclined to want to manage things more holistically. When we did the holistic
management course we realised that we could change not only our financial situation but also the
risk that we had within the farm, as well as we were able to improve the landscape of the farm
over time so it really appealed to us. There's a lot of talk about regenerative agriculture. The
word regenerative is all about renewal leading to greater health in a system. A farm, a paddock,
a landscape, is a complex adaptive system. A complex healthy adaptive system has within
it the solutions to any problem if it's been damaged or simplified and there's really four biogeophysical systems that operate. There's a solar system that drives everything, that then
drives the soil mineral system, the healthy soil biology and recycling, and then there's the water
cycle and system and the fourth one, that's also indivisible is biodiversity and then I guess when
I wrote my book and got thinking about farming as a complex adaptive system we'd missed one ingredient.
The fifth one is square foot of real estate. How humans look and handle and treat and understand
that farming system. In my case that system's thinking got me at the stage I was almost scared
to go out and interfere with this system because I understood its complexity and
the implications of doing the wrong things. There's three basic principles in the holistic
grazing management and the first one being that we're only grazing a paddock or an area for a very
short time. The second one is that we want to rest it for a very long time so that those plants can
recover and any new plants, the seedlings and so on, can establish themselves before they're grazed
again. The third principle is that the animal impact disturbs the soil and allows more plants
to germinate and also invigorates those plants as they're grazed to re-shoot and regrow their
roots underneath the ground as well. We saw the more we got into holistic management that the way
we were going was better for our land and we could actually leave our landscape in a better state
than when we took over. Where we are on the Monaro, we're in a rain shadow from the main mountain
range so the other side they'll have a wet winter and when those fronts come through and the
winter turns into snow and we don't get much. You know Australia is the land of floods, fires and drought basically. So we need to have a strategy in place that allows us to
manage the drought both environmentally for our landscape but also financially. Since we've
started managing holistically the principle is for us is that we want to be the last into drought
and the first out of drought. We've just come out of a nearly four year drought, just shocking drought. A
neighbour across the front road did what I did in the 80s just kept the numbers. They destroyed all
the ground cover until the dust started to blow and so the biology was dead. There was no
protection from the sun and the dry and the wind. No water cycle and then the drought breaker
came in July last year and I said to my wife Fiona let's go for a drive. It was about 15-20 mils into
that rain, the neighbour's country is just brown water and mud sheeting off. The soil couldn't
hold any more. Our country wasn't running water Then I went for a drive when the rain finished.
His country was still pouring and we hadn't shed one drop of water. It had all gone in. Now
that's no-brainer stuff, I mean what drives our whole ecology and farming is water in ground. We're
starting to see, after savage overgrazing and huge rabbit predation, we're now starting to see the
succession of those desirable natives increasing and the natives as we go into a warmer climate
for native grasses that are adapted to it. So biodiversity is really as i said this
long co-evolved process of ending up with this interrelationship between a whole
range of critters from the biggest to the smallest that we can't see all in balance.
To maintain it, I mean it's fundamental to a healthy agriculture. If we want stable
functioning landscapes that don't erode, that yields this huge plethora of micronutrients
and nutrients in our food we need biology for that. When I took over management my father said about
every seven or eight years we'll be wiped out with wingless grasshopper float. Instant drought. And
that was because it was a simplified landscape. They've been overgrazed, there's bare patches. The
wingless grasshoppers lay their eggs. There was no predation on them and within a few years of us
shifting to regenerative grazing we didn't have any and we haven't had since any wingless
grasshopper plagues. Whereas not far away they still get them and so once we've got our
tree breaks and our patches and mosaics developing at 60 well over 65 000 native trees many of them
seeds of this country, we're starting to see the diversity and spiders webs and the insects
and the birds and all that sort of stuff. By keeping the ground covering grazing and
then getting biological function for pest control with increasing tree breaks and spiders
out on the grasslands and all that and so nature now controls what was once a really devastating
regular event. Okay well what we're looking at here is one of the iconic grasses of eastern
Australia; Kangaroo Grass 'Themeda Australis' so all of this in Australia would have had this and
prior to European settlement if you looked across this landscape at this time of year when it's
in seed our landscape would have been orange. But now that, through overgrazing and
mismanagement most of this has disappeared. You've now got a white landscape of the inferior,
if you like lower succession, native grasses. To me this is an absolute indicator,
like a healthy pulse rate or whatever, of an ecosystem coming back and we're now getting
lots of this kangaroo grass re-emerging. The good regenerative farmers around the world,
that I've seen, it's not just something you pick up a textbook and you apply. If you're going
to become a really good regenerative farmer it involves the whole world view change of how
landscapes and nature and the earth systems work. True shift to regenerative farming is the mind
and heart process. A paradigm which is the whole construct within your mind and your neural self
is very powerful and we all grow up and and to suddenly change and jump ship is not easy
and it takes courage and you can be isolated. So I went back to uni and did a PHD in my late 50s asking that question. What's behind it, this resistance to change. But also why these
regenerative farmers are in a totally different paradigm and so I interviewed 80 of the leading
regen farmers in Southern Australia and the key question was what made you change and in 60
of the cases there's been a major life shock, making them open to new ideas. For some it was
a marriage break up, others it was burnt in a bushfire, others it was a big drought. Because
that sort of thing made them sit down and say there's got to be a better way or a different way
and the other forty per cent of the cases it had been a series of little incidents or they were
already that way inclined to a more natural way. When we first did holistic management we were
right out there you know we were probably frowned upon by the general farming community and they
probably thought we were mad and I'm sure that that was the case with many people who back in
those days started practicing holistic management. Today it's more mainstream and it's
accepted by the farming community as something different but still we're
in the minority for those people that manage this way. I think regenerative agriculture
now it's not mainstream but it's it's got past you know the early phase, the innovators and the early
adopters. I think we're into that early majority phase. So we're standing in a paddock here that's
called Brian's which is named after my father. On Glenwood there's been a long history
of Saffron Thistles in particular dominating pasture over the summer period. With
the change in our grazing management we've seen a very visible decrease in the amount of thistles, weeds in the landscape. But after the drought we've seen them come back with a vengeance. In particular
saffron thistle which makes it very hard for stock to move around and for us to move around in
the landscape. In the past we might have sprayed those out but today with our changing mindset
and what we're trying to do with the landscape, we believe those weeds are there for a purpose.
So for instance saffron thistle will have a very long tap root so they're breaking up that ground.
They're are successional plants so they're making room and they're creating an environment
for better plants to come up behind them and if you look down here at the at the soil surface
you'll see that the saffron thistles are now dying and we've got a lot of Warrego grass and other native
perennials coming up underneath it. The Warrego's come back because of our grazing management
but also because we've been able to maintain ground cover even through what's probably the
worst drought in my lifetime we've been through. That's one warrego plant shame you're
tearing the roots off underneath it isn't it. Yeah i guess why I spent a lot of time writing
and talking about regenerative agriculture is that those practices have terrific hugely important
implications for both family farms. It makes them more resilient and profitable in my view and the
implications for planetary health and human health are also enormous. So my experience
of looking at the best regen farmers is that their profitability has gone up. One
big reduction that we were able to find was labor efficiency as well as the way that labor is
used on farms. So in the past it was spraying weeds, pasture renovation, spreading superphosphate,
ploughing the land that sort of stuff. Today we spend a lot of time on livestock management,
moving those livestock through the landscape as well as fencing and subdivisions. The
other big cost reduction has been around the inputs that we use such as superphosphate
chemical and pastures, so we do none of that now. And in all of that our productivity hasn't
changed so we're still achieving the same outputs as far as wool and meat and surplus
sheep sales. But our profit is a lot bigger because, and a lot more sustainable, year in
year out because we don't have those inputs. If you clear country which is what
industrial agriculture is based on, you plough or you spray. You can then control what
you plan what you're doing is releasing enormous amounts of carbon not just in the chemicals
and the fertilizer but once you clear or spray you're letting carbon go up because you've
killed your plant photosynthesis. So regenerative agriculture is all about having more plants on the
ground for as long as the year as you can to keep pulling that carbon down through photosynthesis
and when you have healthy soil biology they're the critters that bury that long-term carbon. I
mean that's a direct example of where regen ag has the best solutions to climate change. But
the other aspect that's not talked about enough is the role of the water cycle. Now
what's called the hydrosphere, the amount of water in the earth's atmosphere and on earth
and stuff, it's probably about 80 the key player of regulating the planet's cooling and the more
we bare country, put up more carbon dioxide and interfere with water cycles the more we're
we're negatively affecting the whole water cycle and the cooling potential of what's
called the hydrosphere of the planet. So the two big issues of healthy landscapes; pulling
down carbon and then enhancing the hydrosphere, the cooling effect of the planet. regen ag by country
mile is the best way to address those big issues threatening the planetary survival
that so-called enlightenment process and the scientific revolution for all its wonders all
that brilliant thinking and philosophers and stuff. What it did was separate us from mother earth
compared to an indigenous society whose societies are usually very sustained and long-living. If
you look at the modern human health diseases in delayed fashion by about 10 or 15 years they
show exactly the same exponential rise and we now know they are most of the cause of that not all of
course is related to the chemicals we're putting into our food and our body like glyphosate, we
know it gets in, and the stripping out of the healthy nutrients that our bodies need replacing
them with only a few simple man-made chemicals. We co-evolved in landscapes to have a huge diversity
of not just your minerals and all your you know 90 odd elements but the tens of thousands of
phytochemicals that are in forage plants which in a healthy landscape your animals are eating let alone what the biology is pulling out of the soil. One of the key soil biological factors
in a healthy soil are your root fungus. They're called micro hazel fungi, now you know
in a healthy soil these guys have a really unique symbiotic partnership with plants.
They're part of a bargain in symbiosis to go off and pull in all the nutrients and
micronutrients hundreds of them, back to the plant and if that's a forage plant for meat or a crop
those nutrients are into that food. In a healthy cubic meter of soil with root fungus those feeding
tubes are the fungus bringing all those nutrients, could be 20 000 kilometres of them. If
we come along and plough, spray, overgraze those root fungus go and you've just got this
drug addict dose of few simple minerals. So a key factor that's just not discussed behind all
that exponential rise of all our modern diseases is what we're doing to our soil. So the
importance of regenerative agriculture is just, you can't even state it, it's the best
solution to a planetary and human health crisis. There's no doubt about it the understanding
that of what industrial agriculture and modern pharmaceuticals and stuff is doing
to human health. It's opening up a greater awareness amongst consumers that healthy food off
healthy landscapes is the best medicine you can have and people have only got to taste
food that comes from healthy biology, what the micro fungi deliver and all the
rest of it and it's a totally different food. The consumer around the world is now a lot more
switched on to the way where their clothes are coming from, where their meat's coming from, where their vegetables are coming from. So there is a general shift in the world around sustainability
and today, regenerative agriculture. Today the wool fibre which is processed into next to skin
wear and garments and jumpers and whatever else is probably the only natural fibre when managed
holistically that can regenerate the landscape. People in the city young and old can play
a role here, you can shift where you can, if it's not too expensive to food that's full of
you know organic farms or local food gardens really smart well-researched consumer decisions
and that applies to beautiful natural fibre like wool life regenerative farms
that doesn't use any chemical get informed about if you go to one of the big
supermarket chains just how crap some of that food is and it's health destroying. Experiment
even if in a small way with growing your own and go to some of the local food markets,
the organics, and just taste the difference. I'm friends from university with some
of the leaders in the world systems at ANU and elsewhere who work with
Stockholm Resilience Centre and they are, if I can use plain language, they are
[ __ ] scared about what's coming and the leaders, now that's almost 90 something per cent agreement
amongst thousands of scientists which is very rare that we may only have one generation, 25 years,
to turn this around or we'll have a runaway earth and humans will become extinct. There's
so many scientists talking about the bad news of the Anthropocene, the human rate next
phase of earth but I see the regenerative ag story as unbelievably exciting because of all
the solutions around regenerative agriculture has some of the best if not the best solutions
to those seven biophysical earth systems. I suppose what we're doing here is a form
of regenerative agriculture but there's so many different ways that people are practicing
regenerative agriculture out there. What we're doing is practicing holistic management which
does promote a regeneration of our landscape and that's important to us because we want our future
generations to be able to come onto Glenwood and have a future both a financial and a lifestyle
future here on Glenwood and it's also better for our our animals and it's less stressful for
us if we manage that way. We don't want to revert our landscape back to what it was 200 years ago
we think we can improve on that and we can have, by encouraging a diversity of perennial plants
we're going to have a very diverse flora and fauna landscape. How do I see this farm in 30 years,
which I won't see, it's going to be I hope quite different, you know, we planted over 60 000 trees
and shrubs into the over cleared grassy woodland so by then it will be mature and diverse and
we would have planted a lot more by then so it'll look stunning in that respect. Going
for a drive we're starting to see the original beautiful perennial native grasses
kangaroo grass starting to come back. I would hope in 30 years as well as the grassy
woodland starting to come back in big mosaics and patches the grasslands would starting to
look predominantly orange and underneath that will be this huge diversity of what was there
before with all the function that goes with it.
