During his mentorship, Josh had participated in pasture cropping trials with John Schwarz. They were covering big areas, and in their region of South Australia, the approach worked well in good years. In an average year they could break-even, but quite often they didn’t get their seed back with pasture cropping and it was a time-consuming process. At the time, John and Josh agreed that they were not seeing the kind of consistent results they needed to see from a cropping enterprise.

While pasture cropping wasn’t an entirely successful experiment in terms of grain, it benefitted the livestock and Josh saw potential based on other positive impacts within the larger farming system. For example, they were saving money on diesel because they didn’t work the ground as much. And because they were not leaving soil bare, there were benefits both for the soil and their livestock over time, as Josh notes, ‘pasture cropping spreads enterprises out in effective ways’. Josh began to see a bigger picture that was not focused entirely on the quantity of grain per annum but a longer-term set of benefits that could be both profitable and healthier in essential ways. The benefits they observed after further pasture cropping trials from 2015 onwards were increased native summer grass cover and resulting pasture availability, and reduced wind erosion.

During the first phase of practice change, Josh and Peri began to question the legitimacy of cropping certain areas within paddocks that had been previously farmed, such as on gypsum ridges and shallow rock. Instead, they saw new value in facilitating the growth of perennial native grasses. From 2015 onwards, they began to leave these areas to native pasture and to utilise them within the livestock cycle, rather than ‘wasting seed’ to plant them out, and expensive diesel to harvest crops not well suited to the conditions. This had multiple benefits, including reducing erosion and saving money on diesel, which is one of their greatest expenses.

Josh and Peri inherited an approach to weed management within the cropping routine that involved an opening pass with a one-way disc plough and a long bare fallow in preparation for the next year’s winter crop. The process began in September following a rain event, and would continue in order to keep the weed burden under control until the planting window in late April-May. The aim was to plant quickly to out-compete the weeds. However, multiple passings compromised soil moisture levels and they often didn’t get the clean crop they hoped for. Peri recalls, ‘it just felt like we were fighting this losing battle.’

They began to explore alternative approaches to weed control. One of the first things tried was inter-row cultivation. Josh trialled inter-row cultivation because, ‘everything we had been doing for weed control before was pre-seeding,’ and he wanted to find a way to control weeds during the growing season.

Inter-row cultivation required a change from sweeps to points for seeding, so that at a certain stage in plant growth Josh could go through with an inter-row cultivator which they had leased for a couple of years. While these early experiments gave the McIntoshs ‘another tool’ for dealing with weeds, over time, Josh came to think: 

Inter-row cultivation is definitely a tool that’d be handy to have, but as something that you rely on as a foundation, it doesn’t work. It’s like the icing on a cake, it’s not what the cake’s made of. And so, it’s back again to the whole system.

As Josh continued to look for alternative approaches to weed management, he was influenced by an organic farmer in the UK, John Pawsey. Pawsey suggested to Josh that ‘you don’t want to be chasing weeds in-crop, you want to be managing to control weeds before you put your crop in.’ Pawsey had shifted his own practice from inter-row cultivation, into long ley pasture, ley fallows, and then intensive cultivation. Pawsey’s advice made sense to Josh and he could see how the approach could work for them in the long term. From 2017 onwards, they began to control weeds like rye grass the year before the crop, not in crop, through multispecies cropping, slashing and grazing. 

In 2017, the McIntoshs began trialling mixed cover crops for the seed market, seeing potential in terms of diversifying to include mixes suitable for dairy feed ration and mixed cover crop seed. Based on their observations of increasing customer demand, their plan was to supply to the growing market. During this period, they explored possibilities for separating and preparing ratios that particular customers need. For example, in their “H2” paddock they sowed peas and oats together, and harvested this in 2017 with great success as cover crop seed mixes.

In 2017, Josh decided to move away from using a disc plough and began to work instead with a disc chain. Using a disc chain allowed them to ‘prepare ground quicker, which meant we didn’t have to start so early.’ At Border Park, the ‘timing of tillage operations is critical’ and shifting to a disc chain allowed Josh to prepare soil at a rate three times quicker than their previous range of machines, as it could be done in one pass instead of three passes over several weeks, when conditions were optimal. While the depth of tillage was shallow, the aggressiveness of the tillage action could be controlled to suit the conditions better. Using a disc chain conserved moisture after tillage better than any other machine they had, and it induced a vibrant germination of seeds in the surface without burying the seed below germination depth.

One of Josh’s favourite observations of the immediate changes to soil after the disc chain was seeing the activity when the bulk plant residues were mixed back into the shallow surface layer of soil. Because they are only working two inches deep, Josh noticed: 

Right where the activity is, it’s warm, it’s moist and the microbes just go crazy in that. And even though it’s working intensely, it’s mixing all that stuff together and it’s like a paper mâché type consistency rather than it being fine and dusty and blowing away. It’s kind of counterintuitive to me that we’re working more intensely but we’re getting more wind resilience with that method. And a greater sort of protection I guess from the heat too like summer. The soil temperatures are really high if you’ve got bare fallow.  

The disc chain could better incorporate mature plant matter into the soil to prevent it oxidising, and the disc chain finish was like a garden mulch instead of a bare fallow because the surface matter is not mixed deep but concentrated in the top 40 to 60 mm. The McIntoshs were also observing longer term benefits from the disc chain. Firstly, the disc chain enabled better overall weed control. When using it on grazing land, Josh noticed that it ‘reset’ the species mix from ‘woody perennial dominance to a strong stand of palatable species like medic and ryegrass,’ which were not seeded, but grew from naturalised seed. An added benefit was the proliferation of native grasses in the following spring that began to grow from seedlings and from deeper undisturbed native grass crowns that survived the shallow tillage.

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The McIntoshs experimented with a range of products and home-made inputs, including composts, liquids and seed coatings. They started with liquids and formulating foliar sprays, informed by Elaine Ingham and John Kempf, to understand how plant roots were interacting with the soil through biology. Based on what he was learning, Josh trialled worm juice followed by worm castings. They used pelletised worm castings in 2018 to put a rye crop in along with the seed, but there was so little rain that season, Josh recalls:

The whole season the pelletised worm castings stayed as a pellet form up near the surface, and there wasn’t enough moisture for the plant to access that fertiliser.

Josh has since observed that with rainfall, pelletised worm castings are ‘good stuff’, as long as it cycles through and is accessible to the germinating plant. While experimenting with worm-based products, they also began brewing their own biostimulant liquid inoculants. The liquid was a broad-spectrum soil microbe, including plant symbionts and inoculates mixed in an aerated, temperature-controlled brewing tank. At this time, Josh was thinking of broad-spectrum liquids as a way to introduce food for soil biology (rather than chemistry for plant nutrition), and they used this liquid both as a seed-coating and in-furrow liquid injection.

In 2018, the McIntoshs wanted to improve the balance between their cover blends and cash crops. Their best biomass-producing cover blends were predominantly either triticale and peas, or rye and vetch. All of these species need to be terminated properly to avoid subsequent cash crop contamination. The McIntoshs couldn’t carry enough livestock to effectively terminate the cover crop with grazing because they ran their animals without supplemental feeding, preferring grain-free pasture, and they were cautious in managing numbers to avoid damage to the land. They needed to find a way to ensure all the cover crops were properly terminated, so they slashed a mixed-species cover crop and grazed the regrowth after the slashed bulk had mostly broken down into the soil. This method increased biomass production, provided ground cover, reduced problematic seed-set and also benefited the livestock. The McIntoshs found that slashing with optimal timing stopped seed set of the cover crop species, and that grazing could then be used effectively to tidy up late heads and regrowth. 

Josh also slashed volunteer non-palatable perennials to promote more growth and used them as a soil builder. This would add a layer of mulch on the soil surface as a soil builder and feed soil microbes. He began to find that ‘even the slashed material can oxidise too much and not assimilate with soil as much as I’d like,’ so he began to also consider trying a ‘spray application’ of a microbial based solution combined with a ‘spiked disc chain pass to lightly incorporate the material to promote better microbial breakdown of the slashed material.’

An important consideration at this time involved the timing of plantings – before or after rain – and these decisions overlapped their efforts to find effective weed management alternatives. Josh recalls how, ‘we needed to build up what we were working into, and what we were expecting to grow into’, and to develop a ‘bigger sponge’ in their soil profile with greater capacity for water retention, which is something they have worked on since.

Over this period, Josh and Peri learnt how to utilise the equipment they had available on farm, they made changes to existing equipment, and they leased and bought equipment as one-off investments. Peri reflects:

We can’t just rely on one type of seeder or one type of spreader or whatever. We have seen that because the years are so variable and our soils are so variable and the different seeds that we’re doing, we need to have a very diverse range of equipment.

Equipment and facilities are generally a significant cost in cropping. Josh and Peri’s decisions often came down to prioritising what was manageable and financially viable given they were only spending what they had available as savings. Peri is grateful they didn’t get ‘locked into a certain set of practices’ because they didn’t invest heavily in products or equipment early on (a common challenge for farmers). In hindsight, Josh and Peri now know more precisely what they need to invest in, and they didn’t go into debt buying equipment they don’t use. This approach kept them agile and responsive to changing circumstances.

The McIntoshs were struggling with lower production and profit during the severe drought of 2018-20. They heard about a government funded opportunity to work with a business analyst, and decided to approach them. In 2020, they established a benchmark for farm finances and planning for a five-year trajectory. Gaining greater knowledge and clarity about their finances was affirmative and hopeful because they discovered that they were in a relatively strong position, despite the challenges they have faced. The outcome built their confidence in terms of where to invest their energy because it confirmed the importance of building soil health. According to Josh, the process ‘all pointed to soil health, which was really good’.

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