The Conscious Farmer

THE PRACTICALITIES OF COVER CROPPING – Planter Setup

15 March 2015 / 0 comments

If we can achieve a thick, deep mulch of material on the soil surface from a cover crop, it is great for weed control, and for preventing soil moisture loss. But, what is the best method for planting into this thick mat of cover crop residue?

I will share with you what Jeff Moyer, Farm Director from the Rodale Institute in the US has done with his planter to adapt it for planting his grain crops into the mulch, created from a rolled down cover crop. The Rodale Institute are conducting cutting edge research into organic no-till practices, in the US.

If you haven’t already done so, I suggest reading my past cover cropping blogs The ‘New’ Cover Cropping, Experiences from the U.S. – Cover Cropping and last week’s The Practicalities of Cover Cropping – Crop Termination.

Jeff has a Monosem planter. They are a double disc precision planter, favoured in the vegetable industry due to its ability to plant a wide range of seed sizes with precision. Jeff has added an extra couple of tool bars to the planter, to aid with planting into the mulch of a cover crop. Continue reading “THE PRACTICALITIES OF COVER CROPPING – Planter Setup” »

THE PRACTICALITIES OF COVER CROPPING – crop termination

7 March 2015 / 2 comments

Multi species cover cropping always raises quite a bit of interest when I talk about it, and the potential that it has for improving soils and resiliency in a cropping enterprise. It doesn’t matter how great the expected outcomes of a technique, if it isn’t practical to incorporate into current systems then the idea is likely to be discarded. So, I want to share with you some practicalities of cover cropping.
To begin, if you haven’t already done so, I suggest reading blogs The ‘New’ Cover Cropping and ‘Experiences from the U.S. – Cover Cropping’,which are about the many REALLY wonderful benefits of multispecies cover cropping and the experiences of a couple of pioneering Americans.

The two main things that may prevent the adoption and implementation of cover cropping are:

Ensuring the successful termination of the cover crop
Planting the cash crop into the bulk material of the cover crop.

This week I spoke with Jeff Moyer, who is the farm director at the Rodale Institute in the U.S. The Rodale Institute is a non-profit organisation committed to research in organic agriculture and to improving the health and well-being of people and the planet. Jeff was a speaker at the Acres USA conference that Derek and I attended in December last year.

What I love about Jeff is he is very practical. His interest in cover crops comes from the need to control weeds in an organic zero till production system, while avoiding the destructive constant tilling of the soil (the traditional way of controlling weeds for an organic farmer). Continue reading “THE PRACTICALITIES OF COVER CROPPING – crop termination” »

THE MICROBIAL RAINMAKERS

28 February 2015 / 0 comments

I am constantly amazed at the importance of microbiology and the places that it crops up as being useful and necessary in our environments, soils and also our own digestive system. I feel it has been somewhat overlooked and greatly underestimated in its importance, and to the detriment of our own health and the health of our land and its capital value. I’d like to share with you another way in which it impacts our environments – of which you may not be aware. It relates to rain, something we know is ever important to us as farmers.

It seems that rainfall production is a little more complicated than what I learnt in year 10 geography. What I didn’t learn at school is that each raindrop needs a nucleus around which to form. These nuclei come in the form of atmospheric dust, soot, or pollen, but can also be microbial in nature – bacterial, fungal or algal. In the atmosphere, water will either condense around these nuclei (to form clouds – cloud condensation nuclei), or freeze around them, to form rain (ice nucleators).¹ This is how many raindrops begin – as ice crystals, which melt as they fall to form rain or they remain frozen to fall as snow.^{2 Continue reading “THE MICROBIAL RAINMAKERS” »}

CONVERTING CROPPING COUNTRY TO PASTURE

19 February 2015 / 0 comments

As I mentioned last week, I have been asked by a subscriber that has visited our farm about how we transitioned country from full zero till cropping to perennial pasture. We have two alluvial self-mulching black soil paddocks that have had two quite different approaches, with different outcomes in the short and long term. Sharing these examples with you may offer some helpful learnings. The outcomes – after a few dry years are worlds apart right at the moment.

In 2008, Derek and I decided that we wanted our business to be solely grazing based. This decision was made after Holistic Management training and discussion about what we really wanted out of life (but that’s an aside in this article). I would like to share with you how we took two different paddocks from cropping to pasture, and the current outcomes of each.

When we chose to take land from cropping to pasture Derek and I considered the best way to go about it. We were aware of situations where farmers had left country and allowed natural succession of plants to occur in order to establish a pasture, while more often others choose introduced pasture mixes, planted at considerable expense. We did a bit of both. Continue reading “CONVERTING CROPPING COUNTRY TO PASTURE” »

A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MINDSET

2 February 2015 / 4 comments

If we want to be successful business people it’s not all just about doing the right thing in the paddock. We need to be good planners, good budgeters, etc, but something we often overlook is our mindset. The good thing about improving our mindset is that it not only improves our businesses, but also improves all aspects of our lives! Derek and I have been on a path of improving our mindset – and I suppose mindset is fairly apt to regenerative farming, because we are in essence regenerating our minds and this can have really great outcomes for our business.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that we only use 10% of our brain. Now I’m not sure if this is right, but what this is getting at is that we rely so much on our conscious minds and forget the role of our subconscious. (All of our teaching, schooling and universities are all aimed at developing the conscious mind). The subconscious mind is where our emotions come from (among other things), most of which are generated as a reaction to things around us, and are ideas and reactions formed from earlier life experiences. Some of these reactions will be positive and supportive while some of them hold us back. It is highly useful to be aware of these reactions when we are communicating and making business decisions. The tricky thing is, and what I’ve come to realise, is that we are rarely conscious of these reactionary emotions and THIS is what can make them difficult to identify and to change or improve, ultimately leading to an undermining of our success.
So we have to actually be more CONSCIOUS in the short term in order to re-train our subconscious in a more supportive manner. “Consciousness is observing your thoughts and actions so that you can live from true choice in the present moment rather than being run by programming from the past.”¹ Continue reading “A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MINDSET” »

WATER SPREADING BANKS

29 January 2015 / 0 comments

If some of our most marginal grazing country can be regenerated from 5% groundcover to 80% groundcover, then surely there is the ability to regenerate virtually all our agricultural land. The marginal country I’m talking about is in western NSW, northwest of Cobar in Australia. I mention this marginal country because the McMurtrie family have used water spreading banks (combined with thoughtful grazing management) to help regenerate areas of their property and I thought this was a good flow on from last week’s topic.

I will first point out that water spreading banks are NOT keyline farming as I talked of last week – where water is spread from the valleys to the ridges. Water spreading banks however, have a similar purpose in that they aim to alter water movement and runoff, spreading and slowing water movement so that there is more opportunity to infiltrate rainfall into the soil.

VALUING EVERY DROP OF RAINFALL – with Keyline Design

19 January 2015 / 0 comments

What Mark Shepard has achieved at New Forest Farm is truly inspiring, admirable, provides hope and is enviable to anyone interested in nutrient dense, chemical free food production and consumption and most certainly to farmers – with its low inputs and high outputs. But it is also daunting, overwhelming and, honestly, in the past has actually made me switch off to a degree, because its production system is so far removed from our current beef cattle grazing operation or from the monoculture cropping enterprises of current agriculture. Do you ever feel a little like that?

It’s like I haven’t been able to bridge the gap on a ‘how to’ basis between what currently is and this pinnacle of agriculture of what could be. But let me describe it to you and see how we could apply some of the techniques to our farms.

New Forest Farm is a perennial permaculture farm in Wisconsin, USA that grows chestnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, apples, asparagus and other fruit, nuts and berries, as well as raising cattle, pigs and turkeys (see above image). It has been regenerated from what was a degraded, eroded, chemical intensive monoculture cropping farm. Rich, dark, humic soils have been built from degraded, hard setting, dead red-clay soils. All this regeneration and production has occurred without the use of pesticides or artificial fertilisers. The farm is “agriculture redesigned in nature’s image” as Mark described it to me. Continue reading “VALUING EVERY DROP OF RAINFALL – with Keyline Design” »

TREES AS PRODUCTIVE BIODIVERSITY

22 December 2014 / 2 comments

If there is a consistent message coming out of regenerative agriculture practices of all kinds it is the need for soil biology, and for a diversity of this. We gain this from a diversity of species of plants, as well as animals.

I used to think about biodiversity as diversity in the soil, or in our pastures or of native fauna – all of which might have benefited and supported the production of one product from an area of land – be it beef, lamb, goats, wheat or corn. But of late, (as well as the wonderful benefits that biodiversity can offer to a current traditional production system), I have started to consider biodiversity from the point of view of the number of layers of productive biodiversity that we can have. Continue reading “TREES AS PRODUCTIVE BIODIVERSITY” »

OPPORTUNITIES IN PRODUCING CLEAN, NOURISHING FOOD

14 December 2014 / 0 comments

It’s always great to get off the farm as I find I think in fresh ways and from a different perspective. Mix with this being surrounded by people equally as passionate about farming in a conscious manner and it’s a pretty good combination – as we found at Acres USA. I will share with you some detail of practices and growers techniques in time, but today I want to discuss where our food producing systems have gone wrong and that this creates opportunities for us as growers.

I am always aware of how our crop and livestock production systems affect the quality of soils, our animals and our food and, in turn, the health of us and our families. After all, this is one of the reasons we changed the way we do things on our farm. With young children, I wanted them to live in a safe, clean environment and I wanted to produce a product that is safe to consume. As well as chemical free, I want to produce a mineral dense food that nourishes our bodies.

Despite being well aware of the problems with conventional production systems and the associated health problems, (and even changing our practices accordingly), I am still shocked as to the seriousness of this problem when I hear people like Don Huber of Purdue University speak. Don shared the science behind why we should be concerned about the impacts of Glyphosate and GMO’s on the health of our soils, plants, animals and ourselves. Continue reading “OPPORTUNITIES IN PRODUCING CLEAN, NOURISHING FOOD” »

SEQUESTERING CARBON IN THE FIELD WITH MELANISED FUNGI – will it work?

1 December 2014 / 0 comments

I wrote a few weeks back about the impressive initial outcomes of research undertaken with melanised endophytic fungi (MEF) by Sydney University. The trials resulted in soil carbon increases of up to 40% in the university pot trials. What we want to know however is if the findings will translate to the field and can such fungi strains be isolated and packaged to farmers for inoculation of our crops and pasture.

You may recall that researchers proposed a process by which the fungi place stable carbon into the soil – depositing carbon rich aromatic melanin compounds into the anaerobic interior of soil aggregates. The significance of this is that when placed there, the carbon is protected from loss by oxidation or from decay by microbial enzymes. So, it has potential for increasing ‘stable’ soil carbon in cropping systems.

Work at the university involved inoculating soils with subterranean clover in pot trials – the treatment with some strains of which resulted in significant increases in soil carbon. Guy Webb, agronomist at Forbes, picked up on this work and wanted to test this inoculation of broadleaf crops in the field, along with determining if there were any resulting increases in soil carbon over untreated plots. This is with the view that if ongoing field trials are supportive of MEF sequestering carbon, that there may be opportunity to develop a ‘farmer ready, soil carbon sequestration inoculum package capable of reliably, rapidly and significantly increasing soil organic carbon and reducing nitrous oxide emissions in cropping soils”.1 Continue reading “SEQUESTERING CARBON IN THE FIELD WITH MELANISED FUNGI – will it work?” »