Regenerative Farming a Farming Revolution in Australia - Multi Species Roller Crimper.

i mean for me until i started looking at it oh say five or six years ago um i didn't understand the whole system of what nature actually does and all that because no one's ever out there to tell you like that's the you don't learn it at school i mean if you go to if you go to a um become an agronomist or something like that and study it the chemical companies are in behind the universities teaching it so they're always feeding on their information so you're really you're really in a bit of a jam as far as you know you've got to come back to things like christine jones's stuff and all that you know gabe brown's all those people in the world that have done that sort of stuff that to actually get the information you really need yeah and that's what i find well actually i'll ask you questions so with this how did you get um involved with the malta species i mean i'd seen stuff of gabes and that so certainly through some of those youtube kind of videos and that um became aware of it and then my sister jenny she actually made contact with christine and through that whole process i guess that's what started that thing happening in toowoomba so it was then just a few conversations emails back and forwards in that line that kind of started the process for us this year i mean i was keen to do it a few years ago but never really had the season to do it in so it was a case of this was a year where we had some moisture had a bit of a chance of actually getting somewhere and so yeah that's why we've ended up where we have this year and then obviously with paul um he he got the seed organized for us so initially it was a bit of a battle to try and get uh you know all the ducks to line up as far as where to get the seed from what was sort of the right stuff not that i'm saying we got this right at all but uh to get those things all happening and working um it was kind of the year that it sort of fell into place for us i suppose so yeah that's that's what got us started initially was i guess my sister's contact with christine but then um from there on yeah just obviously you know had wanted to make it all happen um going forward for for a number of years but just the seasons really hadn't allowed it to work so and how do you feel now that you've i mean this is a pretty successful crop yeah yeah for sure yeah and that's only season driven i mean we've had a really good start of the year so um i think for six weeks in a row we had rain every friday you know which is very unusual to get it wasn't big rain like 10 and 12 and 15 mil sort of stuff but enough to kick things along and and really yeah if we couldn't make this crop work this year then i'm not sure when it ever would work you know so that's um that's been good to see the success of it and and obviously knowing what it can do in a good year will then you know if it doesn't do so well on a bad year you know it's not the crop scenario it's just the season that's driven the problems you know yeah and were you quite surprised with the variety that has come up because i know some some people have trouble getting all of the varieties up yeah definitely yeah so this was a 12 species mix and we reckon we've got 11 of the 12 up um chicory's probably the only thing that we weren't too successful at getting up and in saying that that's probably a good thing because i'm not sure i'd put chicory back in only from the point of view that it um apparently can be problems if it's seeds and that you've kind of got it for a long time so uh that's that's the only reason why i wouldn't grow it again or have a go at it but certainly when we weren't too successful in getting it out of the ground so it's probably one that doesn't really suit our situation i guess yeah um like buckwheat buckwheat went fine but obviously got frosted we got a pretty savage frost on it when it was up you know a foot or so high and it was certainly protected in the crop in the canopy here but um it's the one thing that didn't really survive the frost too well so it's it's not um you know you can't find it easily in the crop at the moment anyway so but otherwise all other things i think have done quite well uh faber beans probably haven't grown the big plant like they potentially can but i guess it's not always about what's above the ground it's probably more important what's happening under the ground and they've certainly been i can imagine they've done a good job in the ground itself and what about the turnip yeah turnip have done well they're actually currently choking up the crimper so someone's gonna have a job digging that out later on i haven't seen a turnip included in a multi-species was that just a bit of fun or was that earth oh well actually uh paul at snw said yeah they've done some work with that and people have put put um turnip in so it's that certainly they've grown well i mean there's no doubt about that oh you know they've done a really good job but um yeah whether it's not the smartest thing to include i don't know but anything crimping yeah it might be a bit yeah yeah yeah it's difficult it's i mean it hasn't given us any dramas yet so far the crimper hasn't but i mean it's not to say it won't by the time we get all this done so they seem to be soft enough to break up okay but so that's the thing though if you would you choose to have livestock in here um yeah it'd be great if we had the scenario where we could but the trouble we've got is the condom on river is a problem for flooding and it's only a kilometer away over there so our dilemma is um you know and what do you do with your cattle when you get two foot of flood water across your place um so i know our neighbor does he and neighbor's got them along the river there but when the floods come he has to move them out and get them to high ground so um it's not always ideal so yeah we have haven't gone down that path i mean it would be great too because everything i understand about this whole soil health thing is that you know the sooner you can get animals into the system the better so would you be open if for a sort of adjusting yeah look i guess it's a possibility it's certainly not something we'd think of straight away but if somebody came knocking on your door though it's a it's a possibility yeah i guess it's something the the biggest issue is um bringing weeds onto the place with something we're pretty careful with from the point of view of growing seed so we need to really be you know be on to that be careful not to introduce other things that we don't have which obviously i've just introduced 12 things that we don't normally grow so what does that tell you about my thought process at the time but you know that's just how life goes on and you we're actually you're crimping this before it's gone to seat yeah that's the home yeah yep so we've got certainly got uh triticale flowering and all the brassicas are flowering but hopefully anything that is starting to feel grown is still immature enough that it's not going to be an issue going forward yes as long as the crimper does its job then hopefully we um we stop anything actually going through the mature seeds but i'm not sure how we're going to go where that where the crop's quite thin and hasn't really done you know as good a job because of being too wet for most of the season a lot of those plants aren't probably mature enough to die properly with the crimping so just not sure how that's going to leave us but anyway we'll know in a month or two i guess what are your plans because this is all trailing for you isn't it yep absolutely yeah yeah so back into this with a summer crop multi species again if we get the moisture and we're just going to keep with this 17 hectares that we've got in that crop this year um we're just going to keep going with that and do as many multi species as we can over the next you know two three four years until we really start to notice some difference with the ground and you know with water holding ability and all that sort of thing and obviously then once we know that we're on to something we'll enter and roll it out right throughout the whole um whole place um so some people would say well where's your profit in that if you're going to put this over to cover crops for four years that's a fair bit of hit really isn't it yeah definitely yeah yeah so that's um always a consideration but um we kind of figure if we can't afford to take this out and try things differently than we probably shouldn't be farming so yeah no doubt it's a hit but you know if we don't give it a go we'll never know and um going forward but i am keen to try multi-species crops that also have um you know a cash crop included in that that we can harvest so that we can try and get some cash happening in the process as well as growing that diversity of things and you know seeing if we can actually really improve the soil so yeah that's going to be something that's uh certainly we'll learn along the way i guess and we'll no doubt make plenty of mistakes but if we can see an opportunity to grow a cash crop as well as have something beneath that that's going to do us some good well i you know i think it's well worth going down that path yeah and that's the different way of looking at it is yeah you might not have any profit as in financial profit but there is so much more profit that's happening hopefully the whole moisture retention and what's actually happening to your soil yep the shading and and yeah just the nutrients and the whole the whole big picture yeah yeah exudates and all of what they're doing in the soil and yeah it's definitely definitely not just the cash you put in the bank at the end of the day it's hopefully something you're putting in the bank in the soil and that's um hopefully will reward us yeah long term going forward so so after your four years are you going to go back to the monoculture then if if you've tried the cash multi species crop not necessarily unless it doesn't work as a multi-species with a cash crop so we've trialled some loosening with wheat this year on another property i'm not so sure it's the most successful thing to do but certainly the loosen's going okay but maybe there's better things to put in with the wheat um in future but yeah certainly that's that's the aim is to um probably try and always have a multi-species scenario happening in in a wheat crop or whatever that you might have traditionally grown as a monoculture but actually start to build that diversity that you can that works within the crop you're growing so you can still manage it as a harvestable crop or whatever you're doing that's my thoughts but a long way to go yet so not really sure we were going to end up with all that but um yeah that's what what we're aiming for so it's probably the next biggest thing for us now is to really understand what are the best things for us to put into those mixes that are going to work with things like wheat or sorghum or you know barley oats chickpeas whatever it might be that's the next big thing we've got to work out is what are the best things to incorporate in that program how many growing seasons do you have here ah really only two so just winter and summer so yeah it's a winter you know generally i suppose most stuff would get planted may june july and summer you know i suppose september through to christmas is kind of your two planning windows and that obviously depends on your rain and yeah definitely yeah it rain and um you know obviously how cold it is or how hot it is soil temperature and that sort of thing so you know we were planting sorghum uh in the first week of september last year but this year we certainly wouldn't be able to because it's been too cold so we'd need soil temperature to lift a bit before we can actually take advantage of you know any spring plant so to speak so yeah just it's all determined by moisture and and also the seasonal conditions so moving on now to the roller crimper this is your first time you've used it yes correct yep first time and are you fairly happy with the results on a multi multi-species because normally it's used on a monoculture okay yeah right yeah so no definitely happy so far especially where the crop is is really thick and has grown really well it's i think it's done a magic job um it's not doing as good a job where it's thinner but um i guess that's not the fault of the crimper that's the fault of the crop that we haven't been able to achieve where it's been too wet so but definitely yeah it appears to me to be doing a good job but i don't know anything about it so i guess i'll know in a month's time if this has all died really well obviously then it's um it's done its job well if it's half it's grown back again then i'm not sure how that works but anyway we'll have to deal with it again we're going across the normal way that you work your paddock i don't know the technical term yep um and some people would say that you know that's not very good because of the whole control traffic and the compaction what are you why are we doing that uh so we're crossing at about a 45 degree angle the lines that we would normally plant on mainly to get the crop to properly cover the i guess the dirt that's in between the rows that we've planned on so we're roughly 20 inch spacings and the problem is when we were going directly with the rows that we planted we weren't actually laying the crop across the the soil in between the rows so we were tending more to light on the row itself rather than cover the gap so by going on the angle we're we're laying it over and really reducing the amount of soil you can see at this point so hopefully um we're getting better shading and and hopefully we don't have too much trouble planting back into it because obviously we're going to plant back on the lines that we planted this crop on so with the disc planter hopefully we can just cut through that trash and and still get back on our original lines but in the meantime hopefully the trash does a good job obviously it's shading the soil from a moisture point of view but um also to show the soil for any weeds that might want to come up hopefully that reduces their weed load until we get enough rain to plant on so and will you be putting any biological stuff on here between now and when you plant yeah yep so um we have got some stuff i picked it up on on tuesday oh sorry monday morning in toowoomba and it's currently brewing in a shuttle at the moment so there's 100 liters of active fert and 100 liters of molasses in 800 in with 800 litres of water so it's we only got that sorted out yesterday so it sort of was completed at lunchtime yesterday so it'll take a week or ten days or so to do its process and then we will come back in and spray that across the top of this to um you know trying to help speed up the process of breaking down the the um cover that we've got not that i want it to break down too quick but obviously if it's become going to become a management issue for planning back into i guess the sooner we start to break that up a bit the better so yeah with the timing then um so it's basically the beginning of september when are you looking to plant back into this um so with what i was thinking of putting in um look anytime i saw temperatures above sort of 15 or 16 degrees so i guess yeah realistically you would say not for another couple of weeks yet not that i've actually done a soil test but just scratching and i know it's fairly cold so i don't really know where the temperature is right now but i'd imagine we'd need at least a couple weeks to get it up to be warm enough but also we really need probably 50 mils of rain to get us to the point where we'd even think about planting so not for a little while yet but certainly you know weather permitting i would put that next drop in in this paddock in this in september if everything lines up to be right if i had it ready to go i couldn't see any reason why we couldn't spray that on tomorrow kind of thing from the point of view of the crop but yeah whether that's the best time to do it i'm not sure whether the whether it needs to be dried out a bit more to help i don't know i'll have to ask some questions on that one but by the time it's right to go it's going to be dried out no doubt so um you know that'll we won't have a choice to put it on green because the crop should have already dried out so if i've got that right or wrong i don't know but um yeah so put the boil well g on there and then um wait for ryan and and uh get into it then have a crack at putting the next crop in um only only from the point of view of trying to keep a living root in here as often as we can as such but limited by the fact we need rain to be able to do it yeah and these are all trial plots so did you treat them differently and how did you treat them differently at planning yeah so the only difference was we did a little bit of neutral soil worm juice for one of a better term so we did some of that as a liquid down down the slot with the seed and also some fish hydrolysate as well and then just just some water so we we kept the the liquid rate the same it was just the additives that went in that change and can't really pick any difference anywhere um that we've done it certainly not above ground but not to say that there hasn't been something happening below ground that maybe you know it may be a benefit that we can't actually sort of measure those applications um are you going to use that again one with the next lot of planting yeah definitely yep yeah that's kind of in our program now that we'll always try and add add a you know some sort of biology natural product in the system we'll even try stacking them so we you know we don't just do one or the other um yeah let's start stacking them up and see whether we actually get a a more defined benefit from that rather than just you know it's it's you're kind of creating a monoculture in your liquids you're putting down and we're when we're building diversity so why not build diversity in the liquid liquid form as well and i mean if if five or six or seven things in that mix uh makes a benefit then why not do it and i have heard as well um using those things that there's a point where you actually don't see any change yeah apparently so yeah when you when you get further down the track yeah it doesn't make a lot of difference apparently yeah which is interesting you'd sort of wonder why but that's when i think people think that oh well there's no point in using it because it's not doing anything yeah but they don't need to use it then that's right yeah the system's working and it's done its job so they don't no longer need it one thing that's interesting in the paddock here is the amount of um insect activity that's that's happening in it like the butterflies and all those sort of things which obviously you don't get in a monoculture crop like wheat or sorghum so much it's only in these kind of things that you really notice the difference of and when you stand in the crop like the smell and just the feeling you get it's so fresh yeah yeah um and the smell like you want to stay in there there's no chem you know there's no chemicals it's not yeah nothing nothing chasing the other paddocks and it is lovely to see broad acre with so many insects yeah and that's a real contradiction really isn't it oh yeah yeah for sure i mean you know conventional farming's all about trying to kill things in it rather than encourage them and um i guess it's hard to it's hard to keep the beneficials and kill the ones that are a problem so you're going to make a decision at that point but yeah we'd rather not have to throw too many chemicals around if we can avoid it there's a total total difference there between green and brown and then from one side of the fading to the other it's just like yeah i love it though i i love the fact that you can it's just such a definite thing that you can see yeah yep yeah it's the two extremes isn't it heaven and hell yeah yeah so from your point of view and your experience you uh have you seen crops similar to this and the and the and the massive material it says it's compared well funnily enough this is actually my first real life encounter yeah i've been in you know plenty of conferences and seen photos and videos and things um people talking about it but yeah yeah and i did try and grow my little patch of um multi-species and only canola came up yeah i learned off martial but um it's because brassicas like bacteria dominating soil and of course mine's really compacted and yeah which we are here too yeah so yeah that's why it's no trouble to get them up and going yeah um but i'm it feels good here it's there are so many it's not just the butterflies it's the there's different ranges of um of insects and and the bees are here yep and it's there's moisture of course there's a lot of moisture um but the soil's dry and and that's the the bit that you have to get your head around is that that all this moisture that's in here that you call well now is trash will just lock it all in and and it will decompose and feed and and so if you can get your head around that you go yeah as long as you can plant into it yeah which you will know soon hopefully if i ring you and go 1-300 help come and get me out of trouble you know what's going on and uh yeah i i'm i'm really impressed the turnip gets me though i just um i just it's like it's in the way yeah it's because it's not a serial crop that i would think yeah but but i guess um again in saying that like um you know those things are probably highly new nutrients in there now that they've pulled up from down wherever that as they break down they'll probably release that so um you know like i'm not i'm not worried that we've got it in there as such it's probably not the smartest thing when you're trying to run a crimper through it but um you know look all plants do their thing don't they so the fact that they've done whatever to the soil that they've done and if the radish and the turnip can release whatever they've collected back into the soil i guess it's always a good thing they certainly came up well like there's enough there's enough of them through the paddock and um and big and healthy and none of them have been attacked by insects yeah yeah yeah yeah you know the whole the whole paddock actually there's very little disease in anything really a little bit on some of the oats but basically um you know mice are actually probably the biggest drama we've got the any of those deadheads you can see through it that's mouse damage they're going in in the bottom of the plant and they've chewed to chew the stem and stop the flow of nutrients and that's it so yeah any of those like there's dead ones just down there yeah yep that's all mouse damage and it's in patches it's worse in some patches than others but but the beautiful thing is you're not worried about that because really it's just started the decomposition process yeah and you're not harvesting it so yeah yeah that's right there's no cost to us as such see i think this this worked out at about 40 dollars an acre for the cost of the seed roughly it was we planned it 20 kilos a hectare and the mix was just under five dollars a kilo for the average of the average of the mix so um yeah 100 yeah just under 100 hectares so 40 dollars an acre of it yeah so is that okay like oh yeah i mean like wheat i guess conventional wheat would be um conventional wheat so it's probably 15 dollars an acre as against so you know say uh 37 bucks a hectare that's against 100 a hectare or fort like you know so so yeah with that then it sort of stings when only half your multi species has germinated yeah definitely yeah yeah yeah so you know i guess realistically it's probably not quite three two and a half times as expensive to plant this as it was to plant wheat yeah in the same thing and and and probably the financial hit will be um just in raw dollars and cents is probably 15 to 20 000 off what we've got in this crop this year which would not necessarily be the normal all the time you know i'd imagine their yields will be higher than average this year so in an average year you could probably drop that figure back um you might only be you know 12 to 15 000 not 15 to 20 but anyway hopefully we've put 21 thousand dollars back in the bank in the soil there you go but also with that crop that was cheaper per hectare you've then got to add the additional input fertilizer yeah definitely yep yep all those things well we didn't do any of that here so yeah yeah so the net effect is per acre it's it would be no dirt to do what we've done here only that we haven't got a cash crop involved with it yeah yeah so your expenses have probably been about the same yep yep but yeah it would be really interesting to see how much better your cash crop is yeah after we've done a bit of this yeah yeah definitely yeah and how reduced your input is yep yep and and and hopefully how much like hopefully the cash crop that i say we did go back in with the monoculture wheat crop in three or four years time compare that to the same mono monoculture wheat that you grow in a conventional paddock that hasn't had this it would be interesting to see them what the difference is in the obviously the input cost which there'll be no fertilizer i would be hoping no fertilizer no chemicals only your seed costs as against your conventional and see what the return is the other end yeah to really know the difference you've achieved and then yeah on top of that you could do a little bit more of a boost by actually having a niche market of wherever you sell it to if you could do because it's been grown this way not that way yeah yeah because that's when it all falls apart is especially with the livestock way of being um like that regenerative grazing um when you're just selling it back into the same market yeah for the same price yep yeah that's right yeah yeah you can't i think for everything to work well you've kind of got to find that niche where you can really up the value of everything you're doing if you're putting the effort in here yeah you need to see that other end exactly come along otherwise it's um you're getting the benefit there hopefully but you're not getting the full benefit at the other end where you might be able to just it just makes the numbers work so much better doesn't it yeah yeah and again i think a lot of farmers fall down there because they're stuck in that rut and they're just like well i don't know how to yeah yeah that's right create that extra bit of business the other end yeah yeah and that that can be challenging because sometimes if the market's not really there or if you're not organic certified or you're not biodynamic or whatever where someone's got you know audit processes in place or whatever to just go down this path and believe in the system and not have to go through all that it's hard sometimes to convince people at the other end that that's where where you're at and that it is perfectly good and healthy and wonderful and all that yeah but you've got to get them on board too yeah and look maybe in the next 10 years that'll change i the one guy that wrote in here before he on the motorbike he um he's he's into you know full-on chemical and all that sort of stuff and i was sitting you know what what farmers are going to have to watch is um what we do is not going to be driven by what we think is the right thing to do or what or what intertek pivot or monsanto or anything right it at some point it will be the the bloke that walks into the shopping center and goes well i'm not buying that i'm behind that yeah that's what's going to drive it and once it hits that point you want to hope you're on your game then because it'll move very quickly and that's why we're on this path now because i want to be at the point where i know what i'm doing with it if it gets to that point um that i'm there to take advantage of it full-on rather than rather than be trying to play catch-up ten years time you

Channel: Farming Revolution

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Id: bPe6SOYtMTc

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021