When I turned 50 I started looking back
at what my behaviour was leaving as a legacy for the planet and I just didn't
like what I saw at all. We are all sick. Because of the way we eat and because of the way we farm. I was inducted into if you like the industrial
farming paradigm. And it was only after the 1982 drought that I realised there
had to be a better way to avoid debt and harming the landscape and so I began
to study alternate methods, which led me to regenerative agriculture. People often ask me what changed when
we changed the way we run the place. I think it's just it's just one word and
that's mindset. We changed from being stock managers to being land managers. Regenerative agriculture covers a
variety of practices from ecological grazing, to agroforestry, to using
biological inputs in cropping, things like permaculture biodynamics. It's a
wide range but they're all around regenerating how the landscape works.
We humans can actually allow nature to improve herself if we enable her. Through
improving your landscape health you improve the resilience you ride out the
droughts and it's ending up being a lot more profitable. The latest research is
showing it's much better for human health mental and physical. Lots of the products we were applying to the land on an annual basis have a
negative effect on life. Now what the world needs for the future – what human
beings and all life need humans to be doing – is to have an agricultural system
that the consequence of management is to increase diversity not diminish it.
Without that we're in a real dilemma. Out of my own farming journey, having made
all the mistakes and then realised there's some wonderful solutions where I
could do it easier without debt and regenerate landscapes – I was always
passionate about nature – I ended up going back in my late 50s to University and doing
a PhD looking at all this and why farmers had changed. And out of that came
my book "Call of the Reed Warbler". The books really about these wonderful
farmers David Marsh for example. He's one of the leaders in regenerative grazing,
holistic grazing in Australia. Sometimes there are quite big
differences between how conventionally managed farms look compared to those
that have been managed holistically. What we see with regenerative grazing
practices you graze the plants for a very short period of time and you've got to
have a fencing system that allows you to move the animals around so that you've got
enough recovery time for your paddocks to recover.
Whereas when you've got stock in every paddock and you've got it grazed down
really short, the plant roots are very small, those little insignificant falls
of rain that are very important for a regenerative system, in a conventional
system they seem to do nothing because any growth that happens is being grazed
immediately. So we're allowing plants to get big, which makes the root systems
invade a bigger area of soil and puts a lot of organic matter into the soil,
which helps it hold water. If you've got plants that are useful for grazing they
evolved here, they're reestablishing here, there's a diversity of them, they'll take
advantage of rainfall at any time of the year, that's incredibly valuable and we
haven't spent any money putting them here. Some people get confused when we
talk about the new ecological grazing. It was actually developed by an ecologist,
a guy called Allan Savory in as it was then Rhodesia, watching those giant animal
herds in the millions migrating. And you'd think that such huge numbers,
disturbing and eating would degrade a grassland but he found the opposite.
It was the healthiest grassland you'd ever find. Led by him but others they've
now refined a management systems for we farmers on commercial landscapes to
replicate that ecological impact so you make more paddocks, get as bigger mobs
as you can, doing the same thing but this time under human management. We went through nine years of drought
from 2002 to 2010, and we didn't spend a cent on feeding. That saved us between
half a million and $800,000, which is a massive amount of money in a farming
business. We've learned how to estimate how much grass we've got ahead of us all
the time so that we're constantly adjusting our stocking rate so that
we're not over stocked. That means that you don't have to spend any money
feeding so that is a massive change from the past. You know instead of feeling
anxious and out-of-control debt spiralling and that sort of thing.
We're not going through that. Not far from where I live is a friend of
mine Charlie Maslin. And he's doing some remarkable stuff. He's got a running
creek through his property, which hasn't been functioning all that well because a
lot of the water disappears or erodes in big storms. And he's set about using
what's called Natural Sequence Farming. And so by slowing down the water and
holding it, he's now rehydrating his landscape. We're really trying to recreate
the water systems that existed prior to settlement. When I came
home it was at the end of a fairly long four-year drought and our creek corridor
was just a dry barren weed infested corridor. One of the things we've done on
the place is installed leaky weirs in a lot of the streams. And a leaky weir
is basically just a structure in a stream, so that when water comes down
with runoff in a flood environment it slowly leaks through and continue on
downstream at a much much slower rate. What we're trying to do with putting the
weirs in is just to hold back more water at the top end of the place, so
that when it does get dry and the stream stops flowing, there's water there to keep
slowly making its way downstream. And that's – in this dry country with very
sporadic rainfall – that's the way we need to keep our streams flowing. The biggest
thing I think is probably managing the stock that are in this area. Stock are a
great thing as a healer of the banks with lots of intensity, but then for
every bit of intensity of stock being in there you need a lot of rest. And
under normal grazing systems a lot of streams don't get rest. By taking the
stock out all the profusion of life that you can see here now just wouldn't have
occurred. Giving a lot of these holes much more life and it gives a chance
for plants to grow. It's also handy for the stock and for birds and for the
Platypus and for all the animals that live along the creek. Nature works
wonders if humans are kept out of it for awhile and animals are kept out for a little
while. Not far from here some friends of mine
Beatrice and Tobias Koenig, who are leading biodynamic farmers in a fairly
tough environment, growing healthy biodynamic soils. And that's all through
getting your soil biology going, accessing all the nutrients that industrial
agriculture shuts out by killing that soil biology, so it's fairly simple
stuff but it's profound. You know we have flavour. There are plenty of people who say that our potatoes are fantastic and our garlic is really good and Beatrice's
vegetables. You address the chemistry in the soil and then you address the
biology. So the biology is addressed by using cover crops and compost teas,
including biodynamic preparations. All the nutrients we think are needed, which
does for instance include lime or gypsum or we use a lot of fish, we use a
lot of seaweed. That's a fairly small plant and that root system. And it's ... and
every single root is surrounded by soil and what that actually tells you is that
there's soil biology happening. What I mean by that is that they're not only
the necessary nutrients in the soil but there are microbes and fungi and all
little critters and earthworms working in the soil cycling stuff. If we would go
into another paddock that we haven't worked anything on you wouldn't you
wouldn't see that. You would see a few roots and they would be pretty much
bare, no soil. Agriculture is hard work, but it can be very very rewarding if for
instance you've got people telling you that your produce is not only tasteful
but actually nourishes you rather than just feeding you and if you if you see
that the place is getting better. It's just very rewarding. The big question: How important is
regenerative ag in addressing the biggest issues of our time?
We now know in five continents for example ecological grazing is
regenerating tens of millions of hectares. We now know that the very best
way of pulling down excess carbon from the atmosphere is through healthy
agriculture, regenerative plants, regenerative systems burying carbon long
term in the soil. One of the questions I get asked is how are we going to feed the
world without industrial agriculture industrial inputs? People forget that 70
percent of the world's food comes off 5 acres and less of peasant farms. And
interestingly the majority of those farmers are women. But on the rest of
it where there was once industrial farming, regenerative farming is more
than capable of filling the gap with all the added benefits. The question of
change is the big one in in this moment in time on earth
as we're rapidly racing down this economic rationalist industrial paradigm
consuming more and destroying more... How do we change the question? There are a lot of what
I'd call industrial farmers who have an ecological conscience, but
they don't really make the connection between ecology and complexity and how
that relates to their business. And we've found that that our business has gone a
heck of a lot better since we've been making decisions towards the environment.
I think a lot of people are worried about feeling marginalised or ostracised.
It's a courageous thing to swim against the tide. It's not about saying, "I am biodynamic
and therefore I'm better". No. We have to be open to everything and actually
create an environment Where my neighbour is not offended by what I'm doing but interested
in what I'm doing. And it's the only chance to get it to change
the whole situation. The thing I want to emphasise about this story where I've really
highlighted how regenerative agriculture can help save the planet and
human health is that that's only half the story. The other half is we need
urban people to start connecting with the regenerative ag movement and
they can do that either by supporting farmers markets or
buying product direct. But they can also do it in their own power, growing their own veggies is a hell
of a start. It's got to be an indivisible connection between people out there in
the urban areas getting acquainted with what's going on out here but also
how it integrates with what they can do and are doing. We've seen ourselves as outside of
nature for a long time for probably a couple of
hundred years, but really we're just another species. Sometimes people
think that evolution's all about competition but there's a heck of a lot
of cooperation in the change of evolution over time and adapting to
circumstance.
I've been luck enough to have customers who are studying and working in this type of work.
I've been given great information, and have spent the last few months watching lectures on no till land rotation and management.
To put it simply, farming used basic maths. Would assume if you plant something there is a subtraction of sulfur, phosphates, and other nutrients. When the lectures I am watching actually shows the opposite.
The farmers went from having 3 crop rotations on a field to about 10 and up.
Not to mention it's really good to think about land management as building a city under the ground, and the ground needs "Armour" which is simply just leaves and hey to protect from the sunlight hitting the surface and killing a lot of surface dwelling microbes and creatures that are needed to prevent pests.
Our old farming practices were sterile and actually counter productive.
New farming practices are holistic and can potentially add so much value to the land that we can turn this entire country green if you just had the programs to teach and get people involved in fixing waterways/watertables and naturally occurring processes that have been destroyed by poor practices.
If you want a lecture to get started on Here is Gabe Brown talking about the experiments he has had with this system.
The resources I was given by these customers were more Australian agriculturalists who say the exact same thing. Lets all get active with this and understand and even just make our own yards highly sustainable.
I was thinking about inventing a hybrid soil/hydrophonic setup just to experiment with a nutrient resovior delivery system but the ground is a second layer of support.
If someone tells me that we cannot reverse ecological destruction it just gets me so angry that they choose to be so closed to a solution that needs to be used.
Well worth watching, I’m passing it on, thanks.
Went to see eating animals last week, they featured a little short film at the beginning too which looked at ideas like this. It is exciting and hopefully gains more momentum because industrial farming is pretty fucked.
I support regenerative ag but it is not enough. Broadacre farming can not feed the growing world population. Newer technology is required such as virtual farming, advance greenhouses and Agrobots.
Ffs. It’s easy to regenerate land. The hard bit is making money off it in the meantime because you want to eat.
I read this article recently after hearing of regenerative agriculture too many times this week and have no idea what to believe.
Is this the real deal or just a bunch of buzzwords and gimmicks? Or is it just a broad way of saying "be less intensive as a farmer", and there just happens to be outlandish claims associated with the practice that reduce it's credibility? I'm skeptical and it's hard to find the answer.