If you’re a long-time listener to this podcast, you’ll be used to our in-depth episodes co-hosted by Grow Love Project’s Susie Kable and Soils for Life’s James Diack. We’re continuing to make these episodes, but from time-to-time we’ll be bringing you shorter interviews with farmers doing interesting things to regenerate soils and landscapes. This is the first of these interviews, with actress-turned-farmer Rachel Ward and farm manager Mick Green.

Mick and Rachel jointly manage a farm in the Nambucca Valley on the NSW mid-north coast. As newbies to regenerative farming, they decided to make the most of Rachel’s lifetime of experience with film making to produce a documentary about their journey. That documentary – called Rachel’s Farm – is out now on limited release.

This is a broad ranging conversation about getting started in a new approach to farming, working as a team, learning from friends and neighbours, and dealing with pests and extreme weather. Most of all, we enjoyed hearing about Mick and Rachel’s incredibly humble and curious mindset – always questioning, never afraid to admit to a mistake and learn from it. We hope you enjoy listening to this conversation. And just a note, you’ll hear some references to ‘Normy’ in this podcast – Normy worked with Mick and Rachel during the early days of their journey, and was the ideas man and inspiration behind many of their shifts.

If you have any feedback or questions about this podcast, or suggestions of topics or people you’d like us to include in future episodes, please reach out on social media or via [email protected].

Thank you to Rachel Ward and Mick Green for sharing their story and their wisdom. Hosted by Eli Court from Soils for Life. This podcast has been produced by Soils for Life, and edited by Michelle Watts.

Building cropping resilience through diversity

In this episode we hear from croppers who are growing multispecies crops as a way of building soil health and improving diversity. We discover why and how these farmers are moving from growing monocultures to establishing polycultures.

Find out more about how croppers around Australia are regenerating soil and landscape health by reading Soils for Life’s new cropping case studies.

The industrialisation of agriculture has created large paddocks of monoculture crops and increased the chemical burden on farmers and their environments. Global herbicide use has continued to increase as farmers have shifted to no till practices and adopted herbicide-tolerant crop cultivars over the last 30 years. One result of this is that the list of herbicide resistant weeds is growing. 

Some farmers spend huge amounts of money on herbicide and scarce time removing weeds; Meanwhile, exactly how much damage is being done to native plant species and soils is not yet fully known. Either way, the current model is not sustainable

In this episode we are exploring a paradigm shift to an ecological systems approach to weeds with Soils for Life agroecologist Sarah Fea. We visit four farmers to understand their changing relationship to plants. Including a grazier, seed producer, a farmer who has enlisted the help of goats and another who has developed no kill cropping. 

We take a fresh look at weeds and how we can benefit from seeing them through a different lens. We hear how specific weeds germinate to heal damaged soils, showing us what the soil needs and how we can help them heal it.

Agricultural scientific research is really good at honing in on specific issues in the sector to investigate targeted solutions. But nature doesn’t always work that way. A fundamental principle of regenerative agriculture is to observe landscapes as a whole system and to build resilience by embracing ecological complexity.

The importance of farmer and researcher collaboration is highlighted in this episode with the need for research models and questions to meet with the complexity of farming with a whole systems and holistic approach.

In this episode we ask how the experience of regenerative farmers can contribute to research and build a strong evidence base for regenerating agricultural soils and landscapes. We will hear from two farmers that have transitioned to regenerative farming practices and two researchers working in the space.

Australian agriculture currently has a labour shortage of over 100,000 people. It’s not an easy gig for someone to start from scratch on a farm and many younger generation farmers are moving from farms to urban areas. We rely on farmers to sustain our way of life as they produce our food and fibre. It’s critical that young and new farmers are encouraged and supported to supply for our needs in a way that regenerates soils and landscapes.

Some major barriers and challenges that young and new farmers are faced with include access to land and capital, climate change issues and access to learning, particularly learning about regenerative practices.

In this episode, learn from a researcher, writer and farmer who has walked the walk, and started her own regenerative farming practice. Be inspired by an additional six young and new farmers who embraced a regenerative mindset to overcome these challenges.

The 8 families farmer group formed more than a decade ago after a holistic management course. Since then, the group has evolved and experienced transitions in all the businesses and families.

In this episode we explore environmental markets through the lens of two members of the 8 Families group. The 8 families explain how their motivation to build natural capital was not primarily to gain market outcomes, but rather a desire to fulfill their Holistic Context.

This includes building the productivity and profitability of their farming systems, as well as an intrinsic desire to rebuild the function and health of their landscapes in their roles as soil and landscape stewards.

We’ll hear from some of the group about how and why they came together, their consideration of environmental markets and the benefits of working through those together.

Farmer, forester or conservationist. It might seem like you need to choose one but more and more landholders are challenging this. With the right management, trees on farms can provide better farm productivity and forest products and increase biodiversity. But in many ways forests are still treated as either conservation reserves or plantations, making it difficult for farmers to take this path.

In less than 100 years as a nation we have gone from removing trees to wanting to plant them back. Tree planting programs are not achieving the scale of restoration required to repair Australia’s landscapes. We need to rethink how we support landholders to invest in trees.

In this episode we hear from two farm foresters who have approached farming trees very differently, as well as a scientist and a forest policy professor. They discuss why more farmers have not adopted forestry, how trees can be managed for multiple outcomes and what mindset and policy shifts are required to move to a whole-of-landscape approach.

There are millions of hectares of degraded soils in Australia’s agricultural landscapes. But there are a billion reasons why compost offers a solution to this problem, teeming with micro-organisms and organic matter that can help regenerate soils. But not all composts are the same and there is still a lot that we’re learning about this precious, carbon rich resource. How can governments, farmers and industry work together to return organic matter to the soil and close the loop from paddock to paddock?

Soil carbon offers so many benefits both above and below the soil surface, from improving farm productivity to revenue raising in carbon trading. But while the case for building soil carbon is clear, the carbon market is still evolving. So what’s the potential, what are the risks and what can be done to unlock the potential of soil carbon as an enabler of better farm management and soil stewardship? In this episode we talk to farmers, scientists and policy makers to explore the soil carbon opportunity.