A quick note as I haven’t mentioned our upcoming Intro to Holistic Management course with Kirk Gadzia that starts on the 1st of November.
>> Holistic Management with Kirk Gadzia: 1-3 November @ Milkwood Farm, NSW
Having worked side by side with Allan Savory for many years, Kirk knows a thing or two about using herbivores to heal a landscape. What’s more, he’s an amazing teacher, the likes of whom I haven’t yet encountered. So it’s a pretty special opportunity to have him back. Read More
A week or so ago Nick had the opportunity to hang out with Allan Savory, the founder of Holistic Management, way out west at Brewarrina. He was in the car and off before I could say ‘biological accelerators’.
7 hours of driving into the great flatness of the Aussie outback later, Nick and his mate Trev were in the middle of a crowd of farmers from all over the country. They’d all gathered to hear what this venerated pioneer of regenerative agriculture had to say. It sounds like it was an inspiring trip. Read More
Floyd un-hooks the ends of the electric fence to let the sheep into the next cell
Flat ground. Seemingly simple, but oh so full of implications. We didn’t really think about how cool flat ground was until we calculated that it made up exactly 10% of the total landmass of Milkwood. That means 90% hilly bits. Hmm.
Flat ground is very precious – you can do all sorts of things with it which are just not suitable for steeply sloping ground. So we’ve been trying to figure out how best to use it. Main crop with hedgerows? Chook-clock market garden? Pastured poultry? Food forest? Read More
pasture cropped oats growing in symbiosis with native perennial pastures at Col Seis’s farm
Grain cropping is something that, for the vast majority of us, is someone else’s problem. We just eat the results; certainly every day, and nearly with every meal. Bread, rice, corn, soy, beans and so on. Produced somewhere out there, by someone else.
So a portion of our every single meal is coming from a grain crop, somewhere way out west. We wish it were grown organically, and in a way that doesn’t destroy too much of our topsoil. But we’ll eat it regardless of the farming practices, really. It’s in our diet. It’s what we do. Read More
Grazing animals bad, undisturbed grass good. That’s how we personally thought regeneration worked, five years ago. And we were not alone. You could be forgiven for thinking that any and all grazing animals (particularly of the introduced kind) have no role whatsoever to play in regenerating pastures, soils and land, simply because we know how much damage badly-managed grazing and animal management can do.
And we as a society do love a good bit of polarity, especially when it comes to nature. Perhaps it’s our quest for simplicity. At the same time, we inherently know that an ecosystem cannot be simplified down to a set of polar opposites.
However we frequently farm the land and expect it to give back without much thought or consideration for the complexity within the pastures, the biological relationships, the edge effects, the soil. The results of this approach speak for themselves – widespread desertification, aridity, loss of topsoil, salinification and the introduction of a catastrophe of chemicals and hormones into the food chain, which our grandchildren will not be the last to bear the legacy of. Read More
