Love thy Neighbour

[Introduction Music 0:00:06.4]

Amanda:

And welcome to number five in our series of seven webinars, that’s Farming Together learning together series. Tonight we’re really excited to bring you Love thy Neighbour, neighbouring farms joining forces. And we’ve got three fabulous presenters for you tonight, they’re all farmers, two of them are neighbours. And one of the things that I think speaks to us very loudly at Farming Together about this webinar tonight is that it talks about the power of collaboration, and the importance of regenerating the landscape, two key things that we see as very important for the future of not only agriculture, but the landscape and the country as well. So our three speakers tonight, our first speaker is Glen Chapman, who’s the CEO of Southern Blue Regenerative. And our other two speakers are actually farming neighbours; we have Rachel Ward who’s a farmer, actor, writer and director, and her neighbour Mick Green, who’s also a farmer who will share their collective stories. So welcome again everyone, it’s great to see so many people that are interested in such an important topic, and I really look forward to hearing the presentations. Welcome Glen, I’ll hand over to you.

Glen:

So welcome everybody, and thank you Simone and Amanda for inviting me along to talk tonight. Just a quick intro for myself, as I said I run Southern Blue Regenerative, and we’re an education and consulting and training company, as well as we have our farm [Audio Cut Out 0:01:58.5] part of our operation. The farm, we’re only a small farm, 65 hectares, we run sheep and we’re doing boxed meat direct to our customers within our local region. And our education stuff, I’ve been involved with regenerative farming, sustainable farming for more than 20 years, and I’ve worked for some of these other major consulting firms, and I’ve been running our own courses and things for the last four or five years.

We do a lot of tour work and we’ve taken tours, this bottom picture here is a tour group with Joe Salatin in the States that we took a number of years ago, so we do that so we can expose people to a whole range of regenerative stuff. But for tonight talking about our experience with working and collaborating with neighbours, I grew up always collaborating with neighbours. My father and grandfather were always sharing tractors and doing all sorts of stuff around the region, and I remember as a kid driving the tractor up and down the road to the neighbours to lend them the tractor, or borrow the trailer or whatever else. For us when we purchased our property, we’ve only got 65 hectares as I said, and we’ve got a road on one side, and two neighbours are two large corporate neighbours, one’s 2,500 hectares and one’s 13,000 hectares.

So they’re quite large, very different priorities, very different budgets to what we’ve got. But right from the start when we bought it we’ve tried to work with those guys on a very collaborative basis, so that we’re communicating all the time on boundary fences and stock and pest control, and all those sorts of things. But I just wanted to share one specific thing that we’ve done with one of our neighbours, the smaller of the two, and that was with regards to a floodgate and boundary fencing that we had to do. As I said because they’re larger corporates they’ve got a different priority from us, we’ve only got a small budget, we’ve got our budget pretty much set for each year on our fencing and everything else, but there was one floodgate that was a pretty interesting one.

This just to give you a reference, this is the Chandler River east of Armidale, and our boundary here it’s a give and take boundary with the river, and at the moment we actually have most of the river in our place. But this river, especially at this time of the year, we’ve got storms coming through right now, it can actually be a raging torrent bank to bank across where the green area is in the bottom, so floodgates are very difficult to maintain within this area. So in this little section there was a floodgate across where that red line was, and it was constantly being washed out, bits of barbed wire and electric tape and all sorts of bits and pieces that kept getting washed down, and we’ve had to clean up the river to get rid of a lot of–that’s been there for many many years.

So our neighbour Charlie Coventry and I got together, he came and said ‘well we need to sort it out’, because he needed to be able to more effectively graze these hills on the other side. And we were looking at where we might be able to relocate the floodgate, and this pool here was perfect, but that actually then took in a fair bit of our country, and that’s a pool that we use for some of our tourism operations on the farm. But we came up with a solution that rather than change the give and take, so one of us lose and won of us gains, we actually came up with a solution where we could both gain in a way from this. So on our side of it we’re actually looking at changing the boundary so it comes down into the top side of this pool where the blue lines are.

And I’ll show you the aerial, where the original floodgate is where that yellow is, and the red lines, the dotted line is now where the boundaries will be between us, but it’s a shared grazing paddock. What it did is it gave us a pool at the top and a pool at the bottom for us to do some really easy floodgates, but instead of one of us losing and one of us gaining, we came up with this so this paddock in here is actually shared for a space to graze, and we’ve got an agreement to graze that on a year about basis. So the other part of this which is quite good from working with a different size operation is we’re responsible for the fence on our side and they’re responsible for the fence on their side.

So if they want to replace it and put in a major fence then they can, as long as we maintain ours in a stock proof format then everybody’s happy. So to get this going we had a couple of onsite discussions, we wandered around, we looked up and down probably two or three times onsite, mapped out this option, and collectively put together just a one page agreement document that just outlines what the lot numbers are, who’s responsible for what parts of it, when we were going to put our components up, and the grazing availability of that year in and year out. And we made sure that that agreement was related to the actual lots, so if one of us sell or something happens then it goes on for the next owners.

Because giving back boundaries are quite common in rural areas and we do a bit of mapping, and a lot of people who are new to rural land don’t actually understand what give and take boundaries are and how they work. So this simple agreement, no solicitors really involved, it’s two collaborative and professional farmers just getting together and being sensible about what we’re doing. Charlie’s actually part of a company structure so he has to dot the I’s and cross the T’s as far as what he does, but this agreement is simple, we both know what we’re doing and everybody’s happy, so now that fencings coming up and we actually are able to utilise some of that paddock now for our grazing.

The other things that we from a collaboration point of view do, beyond just our farmers is collaborating out in the community. So we run training programs and we have field days, we have one on our farm next week, and when we’re doing those we utilise the village store to do the catering and things for our guests. And we like to do that because we want to support that local community, we live very close to the village, and having that hub within the village there is really important for that community, and we like to support it so we can make sure it gets turnover. We did a lot of work with Southern NE Landcare and the land care groups within the area, and whenever we’re looking at workshops or they are looking for places to host their training programs and things then we’re happy to do that.

We’re just in the last few weeks working with another boxed vegetable company in Armidale, and we’ve formed the Organic and Regenerative Food Producers. It doesn’t have any structure at the moment, but it’s just a collaboration within the Armidale area to try and get more food operators and local producers together, so that we can help each other work out where the gaps in the market are, and improve the delivery of produce and stuff for the local market, so help each other. Carrying on from that, one of the things that we’ve done with our boxed meat business, we’ve only just got that going in the last couple of months, but what we’ve done within the region is we’re partnering with the wholefood stores in the region, and using them as our pick up hubs.

So our customers come to us to pick up their boxes, we don’t go and deliver to their homes, so we actually host those at those wholefood stores, so that when people come and pick up their box of meat they’re more likely to go into that store and actually purchase and do their whole shop, so they’ve all got fruit and veg and things like that in there. Some of those are also buying some meat from us wholesale, but it really works quite well in that they’re out promoting our product and we’re promoting them as well, and it’s a real focus around the local manner of what we’re doing. So that’s just in a nutshell a quick story of what we’re doing, but there’s all sorts of ways that we can work. And the idea of collaborating with our neighbours, I think I had a slide back there earlier, we also borrow machinery from our neighbours.

We don’t have a tractor on the farm, we’ve only had the place for the last three years, and the capital investment of a tractor is quite large. But Charlie has two big John Deere’s with buckets and everything on them, so he’s quite happy for us to borrow that. We maintain that machinery when we borrow it, we provide some labour and contract labour between the two of us when he needs help, we also had offers and we’ve offered agistment to neighbouring properties as well, so that when we don’t have enough stock or we’ve got excess feed we can do that. The Livestock Impact Opportunity was an interesting one, in that there was another producer that we knew that was on the long paddock recently, and we saw an opportunity for them to overnight stock in a paddock and get some animal impact into a paddock.

So we had 350 head of cattle in a hectare and a half for 12 to 16 hours, so for them it gave them another place, we provided the water and everything for them, and for us we got some experimentation and some animal impact in an area as well. So there’s lots of different ways we can collaborate, and we just make sure that we have a good working relationship with our neighbours. Because there’s things that always come up, and especially with bushfires and wild dog control and all these sorts of things, that we need to know what each other’s doing. And so we talk to each other on a regular basis and we keep the communication channel open, and the shared paddock we’ve got is just a small example of something that was mutually beneficial for us. That’s all I’ve got Simone.

Simone:

Wonderful, thanks so much Glen. It’s such an interesting and valuable story, I’m sure we will have some questions from the floor. So if anyone would like to pop a question in the chat box, or as I said you can raise your hand, use one of the Zoom functions, and we can get some mics on too if you like. I’m going to make a start if that’s okay Glen, I knew I’d have a couple of questions. You talked just at the end there, and it did come up a bit earlier for me around good working relationships and you mentioned communication. Do you think there are other skills or other qualities that really foster and enable those good relationships to flourish?

Glen:

Well just being open to communicate. Sometimes I think people are worried about–especially we’re only 65 hectares, and these major corporate neighbours, who are we to be talking to them and whatever else. But we’ve got boundary fences and things that we border onto them, and so to just pick up the phone and say g’day, and when we bought the place that’s what we did. Our previous owner didn’t necessarily have good relations with some of the neighbours, but we just all went well we’re going to do this differently. And so right from the start we were proactive in introducing ourselves, talking to them and just regularly catch up and say g’day. We’ve also purchased surplus fencing equipment from one of the neighbours as well, they had Kiwitech stuff that rather than us ordering it they had some surplus stuff, so there’s all sorts of opportunities that come up if you communicate.

That Kiwitech purchase saved us probably about 30% on the purchase cost of stuff that we could’ve ordered directly, they had ordered a big lot, didn’t need it anymore so it was sitting there. But they’re also looking at what we’re doing from a regenerative point of view, we’ve got different management styles and we look at what they’re doing. You know they deal with a lot bigger mobs of cattle and things than we do, so we’ve got things that we can learn from what they’re doing, and they’re starting to look over the fence at what we’re doing. And so unless you’ve got that communication open there’s not opportunity for people to say ‘well hang on how are you doing it, how are you handling that problem, what’s happening with that weed’.

Unless we go beyond what we’re managing in our business and our farm to how we interact with those around us, we won’t survive. Charlie [0:16:09.1] for example are uphill from us so every time it rains, rain comes down the hill onto our place, so there’s all these interactions that happen. The river flows from theirs down into ours so he’s always concerned about weeds coming down, so we’re monitoring that, we let them know those sorts of things. So I think communications just that key and just to step up and say ‘g’day here I am’, and if you don’t know something just go ‘look I’m new to this, I don’t know about that, can you help me’, and people will generally go ‘yep we’ll give you a hand, that’s fine’.

Simone:

Yeah amazing. It sounds so simple doesn’t it, you know oh my gosh we just communicate and it all works out, but it is such a key to relationships so I completely agree. We’ve got a question in the chat from Michelle, is there any chance that your huge neighbours will downsize?

Glen:

I don’t know, we’ve made indications that if they did want to downsize a little bit there was some [0:17:17.0] that we’d be interested in having a look at purchasing. I think from [0:17:28.9] and Charlie’s point of view I think–because they’ve got a partnership with a wool grower in Italy as part of that operation, so they’ve got a pretty big focus on what they’re doing and the scale of operation that works efficiently for them. The other neighbour which is Wollomombi and Jeogla stations, that’s very large corporate owned and they’ve got a lot of other diverse investments and for them the property is part of their investment portfolio. But those properties are always changing hands, we’ve had a number in the district that have changed hands, so I’m not sure whether they’ll downsize but there’s still plenty of other places.

We are one of–you know within five kilometres of us there would be another six or seven properties that would be less than 100 hectares in size. And I know from my parent’s property which is west of Guyra, we’re one of the last major properties in the area, we’ve got 7,000 acres there, and when we purchased that property 40 years ago we had I think five maybe six neighbours, and now we have 26 neighbours. So all those properties around us have divided and split up, so when you’re in that situation and you’ve got 26 neighbours, then knowing who they are and if you’ve got a problem, because all sorts of things happen, neighbours dogs and stray sheep and all sorts of things can happen. But having that community so that you know who’s doing what generally and getting together is really important, because stock turn up and you don’t know where they’re from, and they could be any one of those people. And biosecurity these days is really critical for us to make sure we’ve got a handle on it, so that’s part of that as well.

Simone:

Yeah fantastic, thank you. Linda’s asked how you went in the bushfires?   

Glen:

We were fine, it wasn’t near us at all, but it was within probably five or ten kilometres of us. My brother-in-law’s property was directly affected within a couple of hundred metres of their house. But all that country that’s Cathedral Rocks area and it’s slowly recovering, but they’ve got sections on their property where because it was so dry leading into the bushfires and they were quite intense that it’s had some fair impact on it. So I see there’s a question there from Scott.

Simone:

Yep. Communication sounds key but what would be the ramifications if your neighbours didn’t share your regen approach? Would you anticipate your property would be adversely affected by the use of chemical intervention if they were more industrial in their farming methods?

Glen:

Yeah well our neighbours, I wouldn’t say–well they’re not probably regenerative, their focus is not on regeneration, their focus is on profit because of their corporate nature. But they still have, and inherently most producers have a focus on looking after their land. We do have a different approach to them; they are using sprays to look at controlling African lovegrass directly across the fence from us. We’ve got a patch that’s on our side of the fence within ten metres of either side of the boundary fence, they’ve sprayed theirs, we’re looking at using compost and things to see whether we can have an impact on ours, and we’re using our biological monitoring process to see whether our decisions are actually moving that forward.

Now again it was just communication, when he was on the post the other day I just talked to him about it, and I said ‘right well this is what we’re trying’ and he went ‘oh that’s interesting, I’ll be really keen to see how that works’. Because inherently I can be very confident that they would want to reduce the cost of how much they’re spraying on their property, regardless of the impact on the environment, from a cost point of view their motivations might be different, but the outcome might be the same in the end. So we’re very careful with our discussions with any of our neighbours, I really don’t like fence line photos because they don’t show you a really good example, and you don’t know the context or the situation that different properties are in at different times.

And we’ve got a monitor of one of our fence lines just for our own use, but we know that we both grazed them at different times and different intensities. So doing things like making sure you don’t put those things out on social media and stuff, it’s about just talking and saying ‘well look here’s an idea and this is what we’re doing, we’re experimenting, we’re giving it a go, this is what we’re doing when we’re monitoring it’, which is one of those keys, is to make sure that whatever decisions we make we monitor, so that we know we’re actually going to be progressing in the right direction. But I do know of some other people we’re working with that have got timber plantations right next to them, and the timber plantation is uphill and it’s just been cleaned clear fell, and they’re not the type of organisation you could really talk to.

So you’ve got to take it down in your own management and planning, so that you can say well actually when you’re doing your planning of your whole under management that’s an influence from outside, how are we going to manage it, what are we going to do, do we need to put buffer zones in, those sorts of things. But we’re here to showcase what we’re doing and give people ideas, so we try and treat it that way and not what you’re doing is wrong and what we’re doing is right, because I don’t think either of us are maybe right or wrong, we’re all learning where we’re going.

Simone:

That’s an excellent philosophy, it’s one of my favourites actually, no right or wrong just learning, it’s so true.       

Glen:

Well there’s a good quote we have in our presentations, there’s no right and wrong in nature there’s just consequences.

Simone:

[Laughs] yes and that’s a very good one for parents as well I think.

Glen: 

Yeah, yeah. So you can do things in different ways and nature will react to what you’re doing.

Simone:

Yeah, yep spot on. And maybe in different timeframes to what we’re used to, but it’s always there.

Glen:

And that nature includes our neighbours and us, we’re part of that natural system. So the consequences of what we do, there’s no right or wrong about it, but there will be an outcome, and we need to monitor those outcomes. So if we communicate in a particular way and it didn’t work, then try it differently next time, do something different.

Simone:

Yeah, amazing. Thanks so much Glen, we might leave it there for the moment. But if anyone else has any questions they think of during the space of the next presentation feel free to come back in the next Q&A section. And I’ll hand over to you Amanda if you want to introduce our next guests.

Amanda:

Sure Simone, thank you. I just quickly wanted to add that I think Glen it’s not–I’m getting a sense it’s not just about your frequent communication, but it’s also your ability to find common and shared interests rather than dividing your neighbours, that may have something to do with why you seem to get on so well with all of your neighbours.

Glen:

Yeah, well we’ve got an article that we’re about to publish on community thinking and individual thinking, and it’s a concept that a colleague, a friend of mine and I we sort of talk to this. We all become individual thinkers when we look at what’s the impact on me and how’s this going to happen, and I tend to be one of these as a community thinker, and I’m always looking and saying well if I make a decision who else is it going to impact, or how can I bring more people in to get a result from this. So we’ve actually got an article that’s just being published at the moment that we’ll put out through our newsletter and through the Holistic Management newsletter as well.

Amanda:

Fantastic. Make sure you share that with us please, I’d love to read it, thank you Glen. And now I’d like to welcome our two neighbouring farmers to talk about their shared experience, Rachel Ward and Mick Green, I’ll hand over to you.

Mick:

Thank you very much.

Rachel:

Hello.

Simone:

So are you happy to make a bit of a start in telling us a little bit about your story?

Mick:

You go first Rachel.                   

Rachel:

Oh you go first.

Simone:

[Laughs].

Mick:

Okay I don’t mind, I don’t mind. Well it’s a pretty hard act to follow Glen, but thanks for all that mate. I guess I have to start by just saying where we’ve come from. And I started out farming with my father and we do all the things, share tractors, neighbouring farms, but we just grew to a point where he didn’t want to go on the regenerative path and I did, so I just had to make an exit from that relationship. I still work actively with him all the time and I love him to bits and want to help him and see him succeed, even though it’s not in a regenerative way, but it gives me a conventional benchmark to measure ourselves against. So that being said I had the good fortune of being employed by Rachel and Bryan on their beautiful property, which is neighbouring farm to mine, and there was also a couple of other people that are key in how our arrangement came about.

One is Darren Newbury a good friend of mine and Sarah Schmoder [0:28:11.0], she was also a neighbouring farm so there was an extra farm, but her house was burn out in the bush fires pretty bad and Sarah’s sold her property, so she’s no longer in our collaboration unfortunately. But she was key in helping us get all that started and a lot of the ideas off the ground sort of thing. Now our farms together at the moment there are about 346 hectares, and we have amalgamated our cattle herd together. I had less cattle than the Brown’s obviously, I have less land as well, but we have been able to push our rotation out longer which has given us bigger rest periods, it gives us more animal density, so that’s really how it came about.

I used to manage all the land when it was all separate, but I found myself working extra hard to look after all these different mobs of cattle, so now the cattle are all together that workload has actually decreased. There’s less fences and less water to worry about, there’s just one main mob, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve done a fair bit of infrastructure and water infrastructure, fencing, but at the moment it’s actually really starting to gain a bit of traction now for us. So how’s that for a start?

Simone:

It’s a great start Mick, thank you. I’ve already got some questions, but also did you want to keep going Rachel?

Rachel:

Yes, hello and thanks everyone for joining, and great Glen, great to see you, Glen’s been helping us with some consultancy. And I just keep thinking how bloody blessed I am to have Mick as a neighbour, because he basically introduced me to this holistic way of farming. And he came to us about two years ago and just said this is ridiculous, I’m doing the same thing on my farm as you’re doing and it seems like we’re just doubling up on everything. Let’s follow this regenerative idea, let’s join our herds, let’s break our paddocks into smaller planned grazing and have a go at this, what do you think. And I’ve really been quite hands off as a farmer, we’ve had the farm for 35 years, and I’m having off farm incomes and careers, and very much left it in the hands of managers, of which one was Mick’s father, who did a beautiful job managing our property for about ten years.

And before that the man who we bought the property off then turned around and managed the property, so just continued with what he’d been doing. And I wasn’t really a particularly interested or a responsible custodian, because I basically handed over to whoever was managing and I didn’t really have a clue. I knew that we loved our farm, we had wonderful times there, but I didn’t recognise how complex–I didn’t really acknowledge the soil really, I had no concept of it being a sort of living entity. I mean I was far more focused on the cattle and the prices we got for the cattle, and how good the cattle looked and how good our property looked aesthetically.

And really Mick and Darren Newbury completely opened my eyes to what was going on underneath the surface, and just absolutely introduced me to this whole world of farming really. I just feel more and more blessed every day, because I’m just so motivated and inspired and excited by the challenges and by what we can do on farm and with the environment, with introducing greater biodiversity, holding water, pulling carbon, all of those things that just at first seemed too good to be true. But I have to say the more I learn, the more I go on webinars, the more I listen to podcasts, the more I go down the rabbit hole, the more absolutely–I feel so rescued by it actually.

Because I felt almost existential despair really about the world and about the lack of action, and about my impotence really to do anything really positive about throwing myself into the solutions, and when Mick proposed this and I read Charlie Massy’s book Call of the Reed Warbler, it was like a life raft coming along. And I went this is something that I can not only join in because I have a farm, but I can join in because I’m a consumer, and I can use the power of my purse and what I buy to support the farmers that are best practice farmers in my books. So that’s where we are and we continue to learn, we look at Glen like one day we’ll get to his level of knowledge.

And I think the great thing about doing it together Mick and I, is Mick’s certainly been doing it for longer and reading about it for longer, but we are newbies, so we’re excited like almost two kids in second grade who are just still knocked out by what we’re finding in our paddocks. And Mick says ‘come and look at this, I haven’t seen this before, and this is new and this is what’s changing’. And then we get setbacks, like we did some monitoring the other day and our water took forever to go through. And we’d had the Land to Market verification process going on, and we’ve had one field that the water had disappeared in seconds and we thought oh we’re home and dry, we’re there.

And then we did our monitoring and we were still sitting there after ten minutes with the water not going through. And like Glen said we just haven’t had enough rain lately and we just see ourselves getting drier and drier, so nothing changes, we’re still farmers praying for rain.

Simone:

Yeah amazing, thanks Rachel. Do you want to add some more there Mick?

Mick:

No just Rachel said she’s blessed but I feel I’m blessed. Because Glen touched on it before about communication, and that’s one thing that Rachel brings to our collaboration in spades. Now she’s a great communicator and she’s got so many things that I don’t have in my toolkit, so it’s just another example of how good collaborations really pay dividends.

Rachel:

It’s such a tricky thing isn’t it, because anything can go wrong at any moment with collaborations, and when you’ve got such investment together, and when you’re stumbling through it a little bit, it’s so essential to keep the mutual respect going and also bringing different things to the party. I mean Mick and I are together greater, we’re greater as a whole together than we are singularly, and I think that as long as we can still equally bring things. I mean Mick does all the farming; Mick is the one who’s completely up to speed with regen methods, methodologies and practices. And because I’ve got off farm income I can support a lot of the ideas and maybe move it forward faster than we might have been able to do it otherwise. But I think it’s such a unique and exciting thing that we happen to be, Mick manages but he has a farm beside me so we are walking this together.

Simone:

I know you said before you’re both newbies in the field so to speak, and it’s an interesting space to be newbies I think, because there are so many people wanting to make this transition and to go through that process themselves. And quite often I know that people can be a bit hesitant to share their stories when they’re in infancy, because they get worried oh what if it’s not a success, what if it doesn’t work out. And I think that’s something really powerful about you sharing your journey at this early stage, is to share what the process is like now, so people can get a very real and tangible idea about what it looks like in practice in those early beginnings, rather than from someone who has maybe got the wealth of experience down the track. Which is equally valuable don’t get me wrong, but to be able to connect with people who are at the start of their journey I think is a really powerful part of your stories, so again we really appreciate that you’ve both come on to share that part.       

Glen:

Simone just to interject there sorry, because that is one big thing with people starting out, is they tend to look at the gurus and those people that might be 20, 30 years down the track, and go well I want to do that tomorrow. But every one of us have gone on a journey of beginning to understand what we don’t know, and starting to implement things and trial things. And each of our journeys are different and we can’t expect to jump way ahead, and if we start to do that it’s when we can make some big problems for ourselves. But be confident that those little–we’ll call them failures, are important for us to learn and to move forward, but don’t try and look at someone that’s 20, 30 years down the track and go well I’ll do that tomorrow, because it doesn’t work that way.

Amanda:

Absolutely Glen. And I think also I love the reality of hearing obviously the power of collaboration, but also the messiness of it too, because it’s not necessarily always an easy thing to do. And as Rachel said, you’re sort of both stumbling along together, and there’s going to be points there where there’s a lot of tension, about finding the way to work through and navigate through. I imagine underpinned by it sounds like a lot of trust and mutual respect and a long term foundation and relationship there, and working towards that shared goal where you can actually see the benefits, why are we doing this, you know the power of doing this together. So I think that’s important, the reality of it as well, it can be messy.        

Glen:

Yeah. And I think one of the key things in starting that communication is rather than trying to tell someone all about what you’re doing, the first step is to really try and find out and understand what they’re doing. The more we understand someone’s motivation or their reasoning or just to learn about their management system, allows you to find that common ground, that you can then use as the steps to move forward when you’re communicating with them and working together on projects. And it might be just one little project like ours, fixing the floodgate, which means that we’re walking over each other’s properties going oh well what are you doing here, I see you put these fences here and you’ve got different [0:41:41.3] and stuff, and we can talk about that.

And an example just like that is when we were putting in our fencing, Charlie came on and he said ‘oh I see you’ve got all those temporary gates’, he said ‘we went down that track with temporary gates with Kiwitech’ and he said ‘if I did it again I’d put in permanent gates, because I spend more time maintaining temporary gates then it would’ve cost me to put in permanent gates’. So there’s a huge learning for me to go oh okay, because the cost of the gate can be a fair cost. But from his experience amortising that cost for maintenance–and if we don’t talk about those common things, we can’t talk about the things that might challenge each other.

Simone:

It’s a great point Glen, and it speaks to a comment we’ve got in the chat from Jean Gabriel, he said well said Rachel, we too have seen the light, but we feel holier-than-thou with our conventional neighbours and we need some degree of humility. So I think that’s exactly what you’re saying there Glen, through that understanding it does enable those relationships to go much deeper than just surface level where one’s better than the other, and the understanding that everyone’s got different experiences and different contributions to bring.

Glen:

Yeah and different context, and their different financial situation, and the different family situations, and different communities and land, and this complex thing that we all operate in, there is no simple solution to it, it is messy as everybody said.

Rachel:

One of the things also that was very novel to me in a way, was I did the Holistic Management course with Brian Wehlburg, hello Brian, I think you’re out there. And one of the things we learnt to do–we talked about doing was writing up our context, which is trying to express what your values are, and how you see yourself going forward and what you want to encompass. And it didn’t just take on board the production entity or the environmental entity; it took on board the social entity, which hadn’t really occurred to me before. And Brian would talk about the fact that well there’s no point being a little isolated holier-than-thou person sitting on your little square patch, everybody is connected, all your neighbours are connected, and their neighbours are connected with them.

And it made me really think about our little community in Utungun and how deeply connected we are, particularly when we had the fires, we were all majorly affected by the fires and we needed each other so much. And all of my neighbours were out fighting the fires and contributing, and the ladies were in the hall providing the sandwiches and the water and the reprieve, and you just realised how grateful and how much you needed each other in that regard. And this year we’re having a big Christmas party and all the neighbours are coming, and in a way it’s sort of been an essential thing to do, and I can’t imagine being on the farm and being isolated in your little tiny bit, I can’t imagine–not that we have done it, but I can’t imagine why we haven’t done it [Audio Cut Out 0:45:19.3].

Simone:

Oh it’s just frozen there a little bit Rachel; you might drop back in in a minute.

Rachel:

Impacts on us, on each other, so we’re infinitely connected, so we might as well find a way that we can all communicate and talk about this in case there are any differences.

Glen:

Yeah.

Amanda:

Absolutely Rachel. We’ve worked with some farmers working together for the last five years, and if there’s anything that we’ve seen–there’s a lot of farmers out there that are isolated or feeling isolated, but the power that you can get from coming together and we need to do it more.

Glen:

I’ve got a really simple little story. Where I grew up on my parents farm we used to have regular tennis matches with the local community, and we’d have a once a month church service and things in one person’s house and things like that. And there were a couple of key people that kept that going, and when they retired off the farm some of that disappeared. But my dad and two or three of his neighbours formed up to start playing golf together in Guyra, so they had their golf team, they were just playing twilight golf, it was pretty casual. And one of the neighbours was a bloke I went to school with, he’s a year or so younger than me, but he was a real workaholic on the farm. He was working seven days a week working for his own properties, as well as working for other places around him, trying to buy places and things.

And dad invited him along to play golf and he’d never played golf before, but he invited him along and said ‘come and play golf or have a few beers, and we’ll have a chat and walk around the golf course’. About five years on we were at a party together, and he pulled me aside and he said to me ‘if your dad hadn’t of actually come and asked me to go and play golf with him I don’t know where I would’ve been now’. Because for him that connection then with the other blokes that he had–because he was really isolated in his work, and it was something that took him off the farm to do something that was very casual, no pressure, and meant a huge thing to him from a mental health point of view. And now they’ve got quite a community of people that they continue to play golf with, and their team’s all farmers, so having that connection like Rachel was saying with her community that came together around the bush fire, trying to find those and foster them is really important.

Simone:

We’ve got another comment in the chat around that actually as well Glen from Carol. Oh for a neighbour like you Mick, we have been raising Angus cattle for over 40 years but have neighbours who want to do their own thing, right down to one who declared themselves organic and biodynamic, but merely stopped drenching their cattle. Need more land than we have in order to justify the fencing and water points required, we should be retired but would love to see more of this happening close to us in the Adelaide Hills.

Mick:

Yeah, I guess Glen might be more qualified to talk on some of those ones, but I really get excited thinking about the collaboration that could be out there. I see here on the east coast anyway there’s so much subdivision, and with de-centralisation you’ve got people coming out of the city and possibly less active farmers, but the need for regenerative farmers on this land is paramount. All these little five and ten acre blocks could be so utilised, but yet everyone’s buying a zero turn mower and spending half their weekend mowing it. There could be a farmer next door and you could just say ‘look you look after the fences and you include this in your rotation’, job done, and how much better for the environment is that. I think I heard figures in the US there was something like 30 million acres of lawn all mechanically mowed, irrigated, fertilised. If we could just invite the regenerative farmers in, and it wouldn’t matter how small, you’d be surprised how small a paddock you can make things work. I don’t think size–like my farm is about the same size as Glen’s farm, but here I am with a bigger neighbour giving me a bit more clout. So I definitely think keep your eyes open for all of your neighbours.

Amanda:

Oh I love hearing this Mick. We’ve actually just been working with a community group and this is exactly one of the things that’s been spoken about as an opportunity, and it’s got such potential. There are a lot of landholders out there who they do want to look after their land, but they don’t know how to do it, and their neighbouring farmers who are looking for the opportunity to farm more land and combine that with regenerative practices, what a fantastic solution.

Mick:

Yeah, it’s brilliant.

Amanda:

It gets me excited too.

Mick:

There’s more than that too. I’m quite passionate about seeing young people get a leg up into farming, it’s no good keeping it all to ourselves, we have to start planning succession now. And all our ageing farmers they need a gate opener, they need young kids that are excited about agriculture sitting in the truck with them, learning all the things that they need to be taught as well as some new stuff. But we just need to collaborate more effectively and on many different levels.

Glen:

And Mick I’m the same, we’re looking at trying to find opportunities where we can bring younger people on to do stuff. And I get enquiries on a regular basis now from people going well look I want to get started in this, how do I get started, do you know farms that I can go and work on, I’m happy to work for free because I’m going to learn. So I think there’s organisations like Young Farmers Connect and Joel and Tony Brown who help facilitate that, and they’ve got networks right across Australia, I think that’s a really good way of getting younger people together to collaborate. But I think the missing part is linking them with people like Mick, who’s really willing to share and teach and learn, and can teach that person so they can learn and just teeing them up. That’s probably the bit that’s missing, and how we can facilitate that and make it really effective. So I saw there was a question about water retention?

Simone:

Yeah, there’s one from Niki Cooper there, and it says hi I’m curious about how you monitor the water retention in the soil, doing this job alone with your neighbour must be a great bonding and learning experience.

Rachel:

I have to say it was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time [Chuckles]. We were pacing out our ten metres and banging in the stakes, and then sitting on the ground counting the number of grasses, which didn’t take very long at the moment, but in about three years it’s going to take us a lot longer. And then monitoring the water and–we were so absorbed in this ten square metres of land, and it was such an opportunity to get to know it intimately, and I sort of have such a different perspective of it now, I just feel I know. And then I would make assessments about how much food I thought was in that little square metre, and then Mick would put his hands in and separate the grasses and there would be this bit of bare soil. I don’t know it was just a wonderful thing to do together, and just have your land bond you in a way, just have your land give you such common ground. And I felt his deep affections for it, and I hope he felt my deep affection for it, and it was a very really lovely bonding day of such absorption. It was ridiculous, I sort of afterwards pinched myself that we basically spent all day sitting in the grass picking up the cow poo, looking at whether the beetles had come back, and I just now can’t imagine a better way to spend a day.

Glen:

So Niki specific to your question, so what Rachel was doing, part of the Land to Market and the Holistic Management Training we do is doing biological monitoring, doing landscape function monitoring. So that we can make sure that the decisions that we’re making around changing our management or doing things differently is actually moving us in the right way. So there’s a checklist that you can go through, and what Rachel’s talking about is creating a transect, you walk out along that and you actually count how many plants you’ve got and look at soil and things. For the water infiltration what you do is you get a 100 mL piece of PVC pipe about four or five inches tall, and screw that into the ground so it seals on the ground, and half fill it with some water and measure how long it takes that water to infiltrate into your soil.

And it gives you an indication of the porosity of your soil, how much organic matter’s there, and if you get rainfall how quickly can it go in, it’s really good to do that as a benchmark. And then as Rachel and Mick are doing, you do that on a regular basis every 12 months or so to see what’s improving, is the water infiltrating faster, is it different in different paddocks. Because you’re doing something different in those areas there are going to be geology differences with the soil, but if you get a benchmark and monitor that as you go you can see how it improves. It’s a very simple tool that you can do, and I do a video on our Instagram this week about setting up our little monitoring spots, and I’ll actually be doing a field walk with our local Landcare group next Wednesday so I’ll actually video that as well. So we’ll put that up so people can have a look at it, and I’ll go through the sheets and everything else.

Niki:

Great, thank you, thank you.

Simone:

And that’s Land to Market isn’t it Glen that does the verification process that you were talking about?

Glen:

Yeah, so Land to Market Australia’s run by the Australian Holistic Management Co-operative, and they have a process called Environmental Outcome Verification, where they work with farmers to come on and set up monitoring, both long term and short term monitoring sites. And it has a very rigorous measurement process, which gets collated through the US through one of the universities, so it’s independently verified. And it measures you as a baseline, and then 12 months and five years, it measures how you’re performing against that. And as you are verified as regenerating and improving your landscape function and regenerating the land, you could actually use the EOV Land to Market verified logo to say that you’re actually producing that.

Mulloon Creek Farms have just been verified in Australia as one of the first farms that have been verified, they’re actually regenerating the land, and there’s a number of commercial partners that the Land to Market Australia are bringing on board for distributing product and things like that. So from a holistic management point of view, when we do the training and the course we teach a basic biological monitoring process which mirrors the same type of process, so you can do it yourself. And then once you get to a point where you go well okay I want to actually verify this and be part of that program, you can join the Co-op and you can be independently verified in that process.

Simone:

Brilliant, thanks Glen, I’m sure lots of people will find that really useful. Carol’s just popped another question in, most of our soils need more organic matter, top soil’s too exposed, greys too hard often unintentionally at the wrong time of year. Summer’s much hotter, winter’s cold then no growth, what would you suggest to increase microbial activity at the lowest cost?

Glen:

Ground cover [Chuckles]. Maintaining ground cover is the key, whether it’s [0:59:17.4] or whatever else that’s the first step. The second step is living roots and keeping living green plants in there as long as possible. So we’re Northern Tablelands, our property’s at 960 metres, we get an average of 45 frost days a year, we got frost down to -8 this season and I had six taps freeze and bust just one night, so we’re in the extremes of what happens here in winter. But what we did this year from a low cost point of view, and it’s a bit of an experimentation for us and it seemed to go well, is we casted out winter turnips and oats into our paddocks. Because winter’s the time when we’ve got the least amount of feed that’s green and growing, so we don’t have a seeder, we don’t have a tractor.

So we did some experiments and said okay well what happens if we bought–and I think we bought something like $60 to $70 dollars’ worth of oat seed. And we coated that with a homemade compost just to give it some biology on the actual seed and just broad cast that out. The first bit was with a little hand spinner, garden fertiliser spinner just walking across the paddock, and we did about three or four hectares just as a trial. And we got really good results, we got grass growing, and what it actually did for us in maintaining ground cover, is it gave our winter pastures grasses that were there a bit less pressure from our grazing, because there were other green things in the paddock for the stock.

And then as we came into the spring, again those grasses weren’t impacted as high, because we had more of the oats and things there. So it’s a bit of a trial for us, it seemed to work, we work with a lot of people doing what we call safe to fail areas, which are small areas you might fence your farm to look at putting high impact animal grazing on on a very small area, to see what happens and giving it a very long recovery. Or we’re working with dairy farmers and others to say well okay let’s try utilising a different management practice in a small area to see what happens, and monitor that from a landscape function as well as a production point of view, and that gives you a way of testing things without it making a big impact on your operation.

Because everybody’s environments are different, and everybody’s climate and rainfall and economic situation and social situations are all different, so what works for us might not work for someone else. But have a go; test it, trial it, set up a little trial area, there’s plenty of really good Facebook groups and other groups around where people are sharing their ideas and what they’re doing.

Rachel:

I think it’s very important too to find other practitioners that are in your area, because where we are in the mid North Coast we’re semi tropical, so we’re very different from places like where Glen farms. And we were connected to other people who were practicing regen in our area through Landcare, through Landcare field days, Landcare community meetings. And you can usually find–I mean we certainly did, we found someone who had had many more years of experience in regen than we had in our area. And so it’s fantastic to be able to confer with him about if we’re worried about the number of grasses we’re getting, or winter feed not running away or whatever, we very often ring our friend Marlon and ask him how he’s doing.

And it’s very reassuring for when we get back ‘don’t worry I’m dealing with the same problems’, or ‘have you tried this’ or ‘I know from years of practice that that happens, it will turn the corner so have faith and hang in there’. And I think that really helps reduce the risk that you take when you start out on something like that. And so I would say that find in your area–and I didn’t know how the land changes so radically from one hill to another practically, so if you can find someone who’s got the same soil and the same climate you can usually share your challenges and your successes.

Glen:

Yeah. I’d also say we do a lot of work with our groups, like Rachel she did a Holistic Management course, and she’s got a graduate group that she gets together on each other’s farms, and they regularly meet three or four times a year to look at what each other’s doing. As important as finding someone in your local area that you can see what’s happening, it’s equally as important to find someone completely outside that does something different. Because that’s when you open your eyes to why are they doing that differently, and what’s making them do it, and can I apply that in my situation, and that creativity comes from looking at really really different things. When we do our tour programs we take people to a whole range of farm types, from one hectare through to thousands of hectares and all different production, because of exactly that, we want to show people huge diversity to open their minds to the possibilities of what can happen. But finding someone in your local area like Rachel has to go is this normal, is really important for your own mental health, to know that you’re not going crazy about something not working.   

Simone:

Yeah thanks, I think Jean Gabriel’s just contributed again; we too need to practice diversity. And I’m getting a real sense of that from all our conversations tonight, is just absolutely celebrate our differences rather than focus on them as an area for conflict, how can we actually use our differences and our strengths to support each other to have some really amazing outcomes. And having Rachel and Mick both on the call tonight, you can see that level of appreciation and respect they each have for each other, and the strengths that they’re bringing to that collaborative partnership and relationship, which has been really a wonderful thing to have on our call tonight.

Glen:

It’s nice working for them because I’m learning from them as well, as to how they’re doing it and how they’re working on a joint basis.

Amanda:

And I think again the point that both Rachel and Glen have made, is there’s two types of working together here that we’re seeing that’s really effective. And the first one is to have a really close knit support network around you to share your ideas, to learn together, to fail in a safe space, but to also have connections and be working with people outside that that are doing these diverse things to bring in those new ideas and that innovation. So I think both those kinds of working together relationships are really critical and fundamental for growth and development.

Glen:

Yeah, yeah definitely.

Simone:

Well I know we’ve just gone a little bit over time tonight, I don’t know if there’s any final words from our guests that they’d like to share with the audience before we sign off?

Glen:

I’m fine thanks.

Rachel:

I would just say that I think one of the things I’ve experienced–and while regen is still quite–the regen community is incredibly accessible, and it’s so easy to be part of a community that’s joined by a fundamental philosophy, so that everybody really is infinitely interested in this particular area. And it’s sort of small enough that you can really feel a sense of belonging in it still. And of course we want it to go much much broader, and we want it to be taken up on a huge scale. And one of the great things about Australia is we can work with this, obviously the immense scale of the pastures that are out there. But in a way I will miss the collaboration and the sense of belonging that comes with a new and exciting movement that it is at the moment.

Simone:

Yeah that importance of community isn’t it Rachel, yeah.

Rachel:

Just always looking out for things that join you, that bond you, that connect you. And sometimes it’s very hard to find things that are connecting; I mean everybody does it in their own way whether it be knitting groups or whatever. So certainly for me it’s been a real revelation to find this fabulous community out there of very likeminded people, who are conscious consumers I suppose would be a way to collectivise us in a way. That we all care about what we’re eating and what we grow and to take responsibility for that, and I’m very happy to be walking with my mate Mick.

Mick:

Yeah likewise. I’d just like to touch on one thing that Glen said earlier too with his conventional neighbours, and how we tread around them and don’t alienate them, because they care about their bottom line, and essentially they’ll care about their land, even if they unwittingly are travelling back. But see they’re probably not doing the monitoring, if they were monitoring their land and just making that one step towards wow actually why is my filtration going backwards, they would turn around real quick if they thought they could achieve similar things. But there are plenty of collaborations to be had with conventional guys too, so I’m trying not to step on or make them feel the ‘them and us’ thing.

Glen:

And Simone my last thing leading on from what Mick said. To be regenerative is a step along a journey, by starting monitoring and making a change in your decision about what you do today or tomorrow. And you are regenerating your land if you focus on groundcover, or you start looking at your soil organic, you’re regenerating. It’s not about particular practices that you do or don’t use, it’s about adhering to the principles of monitoring and thinking holistically, thinking collaboratively, looking at polycultures and things like this.

But it’s not about whether you spray or don’t spray, or put fertiliser or don’t fertilise. Like Mick said, if we monitor and we can say look I’m improving my landscape function, I’m improving the quality of the water, I’m improving the soil, I’m improving the quality of the food that’s coming out the other end, even if they’re in very small incremental steps, then that’s a step along being regenerative. You are regenerating and being regenerative, and I think there’s too much well it’s an end point, and if you’re not doing this or that then you’re not doing it. But everybody can do it, and they can start tomorrow by making one little change.

Simone:

It’s such an important point. Thanks so much Glen, and thank you Mick and thank you Rachel.    

Mick:

My pleasure.

Simone:

I want to say it’s been a very generative discussion and contribution to our series tonight, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. And you’re getting a huge amount of thanks through the chat box as well, if you want to take a moment to appreciate everyone’s excitement at your stories and a lot of appreciation in there too, so thank you.

Rachel:

Look thank you very much too, and to Southern Cross as well for facilitating this, fantastic, good on you.

Simone:

Thank you.

Amanda:

Thank you.

Simone:

I’ll hand over, Amanda do you want to say anything?

Amanda:

Oh no I was just going to reiterate that it’s just been a really inspiring discussion tonight, so thank you so much to our wonderful guests. I also find it’s just given a lot of hope, not that we don’t have hope for this future, but just having champions like yourselves with such passion and wisdom, and willingness to share your stories and your failures along the way with others. It really reiterates our theme I think for this webinar series which is learning together, and for me that’s really what it’s all about. So just a deep and heartfelt thank you for being willing to stand up and share your stories and inspiring us all, it’s just been fantastic.

And we look forward to keeping in touch, and I just wanted to make a point if there’s anyone that was listening tonight that does want to get connected more with other regenerative practitioners in the region, feel free to reach out to us at Farming Together, we can help. You’ve obviously got introductions to our guest speakers, but we’d be really happy to help you find connections to other practitioners in your area, that’s what we’re all about at Farming Together. This webinar will be recorded so that will be available on our website www.farmingtogether.com.au, and it’ll also be made available on email, is that right Simone?

Simone:

Yeah, you’ll just get an email link to the website where you’ll be able to find the webinar; it should be up in the next couple of days.

Amanda:

Absolutely. So once again thanks so much to our great presenters, and I just want to give a little intro into our topic for next week. For those of you who are interested in tuning in it’s the same time same place next week, and it’s 10^th of December, oh my goodness it’s getting pretty close to Christmas isn’t it. So our story for next week we’ve got Noongar Land Enterprise Group, which is an Indigenous group who’ll be sharing their stories on Indigenous collaborative farming. So they’re an organisation that works with a number of Indigenous farmers across WA, they’ve got fascinating stories and it’ll be a really interesting webinar. So we’d love to see you all again next week, and thank you very much for joining us and making it such a fantastic evening, thanks to you all.

Mick:

Thank you very much.

Rachel:

Thank you very much.

Glen:

Thanks Amanda. Thanks Simone.

Simone:

Good night.

[End of Webinar]