Contrary to common practice ‘for the last 10,000 years’, the first principle is to sow when the topsoil is dry.

Bruce learned that creating a one cm-deep and a half cm-wide disturbance to drop in the seed is ‘the perfect seed-soil contact.’ Bruce describes this principle as a ‘10 meter start on the hundred meter sprint’, he typically finds three or four cm of growth four or five days after a rainfall events, while ‘the competitors are just starting because you haven’t disturbed anything else’:

If you wet sow, you’ll always have to do something about plant competitors as they are getting a start ahead of what you are trying to grow; while you are having to wait to get there with your machinery for sowing, they’re germinating as soon as the moisture and temperature is right, and they’re growing and going, going, going. Whereas with No-Kill Cropping, as soon as we got rain, the seed sprinted out of the box.

Bruce observed how this minimal disturbance changed the types of plant species growing in the paddocks. Previously, when they were tilling, they would see plants such as thistle or Mexican poppy grow, whereas with very little disturbance, ‘uneconomical plants’ like that would ‘revert to mostly a background or virtually none at all’. Bruce suspected that if they went back to tilling and plowing, he’d get some ‘very pretty paddocks of Mexican poppy.’

In addition to beneficial cropping germination rates, Bruce observed the soil benefits of cropping dry. The comparatively light-weight ute pulled the disc machinery when the soil has maximum strength, which minimises soil compaction. Alternatively, ‘with wet sowing in conventional systems, we were going over the soil when it is most vulnerable, just like road builders when they moisten soils before compacting it’.

During this time, Bruce also recognised that the opportunities to grow a large amount of commercial crop were more limited in his No-Kill approach, and No-Kill Cropping was relying on ‘in crop rainfall’ and water holding capacity of the soils (as compared to other practices using transient water by how they managed their bare fallow periods). But, in the first few years of this over-sowing approach, Bruce really started to grasp the potential, thinking:

My goodness, this approach can reinstitute grassland function everywhere. We can still crop and even if we’re just interested in animals, we’ll grow more biomass at a tiny economic and resource cost.

In Phase 2, Bruce observed soil and economic benefits from the straight-running disc machinery. The straight coulter discs minimised the disturbance of the above and below-ground communities, and limited any carbon loss of his soils. In addition, the straight-running discs experienced such little resistance while sowing in the dry season, he used far less fuel, with significant cost savings.

Bruce experimented with growing different winter cereal crops, pasture species such as legumes, and summer crops like sorghum and millet, but mainly stuck with oats, as it was easy, consistently cheap, good animal feed, and he hadn’t seen any major disease from planting the same annual year after year (because of the hundreds of types of other grassland plants in the paddocks).

Bruce’s main goal was to avoid simplifying the landscape, so he did not use chemicals or pesticides. Bruce also applied this rule to his seeds, sourcing seeds that hadn’t been pre-treated with any pesticides.

In addition, he did not want to give an advantage to introduced annuals over native species, so he did not use fertilisers. By cutting out these inputs, his costs were lowered, and he believed it took out some of the economic risk of his operation.

Heartened by one of his inspirations, David Tillman, a scientist from University of Minnesota (who found that ‘once they got past six or seven species in a plot’, it became very hard to transmit disease), Bruce considered every plant as valuable to rebuilding the grassland and soil health.

Bruce started to see how cropping, grazing and landscape diversification could all work together as a whole in synergistic ways, and so effective grazing became an important principle of No-Kill Cropping.

Prior to 1995, Bruce wouldn’t put stock in paddocks after harvesting, as there ‘wasn’t much left but spilt grain and straw’, and it ‘seemed like a lot of trouble for not much gain’. But by introducing crops over the top of grassland, Bruce widened their grazing management options throughout the whole year. Instead of harvesting the cereals and feeding them back to the animals in tray-feeders, it was ‘financially and logistically attractive’ for the cattle to ‘harvest the high-quality stand-over feed in the field as a self-feeder’ at the time when it best suited the animals and Bruce financially. Essentially, Bruce was increasing the size of the ‘haystack’ in the field for the animals to feed themselves, telling his parents, ‘We’ll leave that crop and get the four-footed harvesters rather than the rubber-tyre ones.’

The Maynards found it ‘a lovely surprise’ to be able to transition from a ‘checkerboard of distinct cropping and grazing land to a much more integrated and fluid situation’. Bruce exclaimed, ‘this goes to the heart of my laziness’ because seeing the cropping and grazing as an interconnected whole provided him with more options and less stress, while saving time and resources compared to how the grain was grown and fed to the animals previously. Because of this approach, people called Bruce the ‘lazy farmer’, but his philosophy is that ‘we shouldn’t be busting our bum’ as farmers, and he embraced the term. The animals, in eating and recycling plants, were adding nutrients back into the soil, and also doing better at rehabilitating the grassland for more diversity, without heavy intervention.

Not only was it important for Bruce to be less stressed, but he wished the same for his cattle as part of effective grazing management. Building on the work of Temple Grandin’s positioning (Level 1 stock handling) and Bud Williams’ low stress handling (Level 2 stock handling), Bruce began to explore livestock behavioural science. Through his reading and farm experiments, he developed and codified a method of ‘Stress-Free Stockmanship methods’ in 2000 as a Level 3 behaviour management technique. His goal was to help animals learn positive behaviour in order to benefit the landscape.

In addition to the cycling of nutrients and microbial diversity to the soil, one of the other benefits Bruce found for the landscape and the animals was the change in the total livestock diet. His cattle would now eat novel and diverse foods by choice. Because the oat crop was ‘high energy and low toxin’ food, the cattle would then complement the crop with the other ‘componentry’ in the field, which might be ‘higher toxin, low energy plants’, such as Patterson’s curse. In other words, Bruce found that a high nutrient, low toxin crop mixed with many grassland plants in close proximity allowed for the animals to eat more diverse foods. Bruce observed that these increases in novel foods, along with the decrease in stress, increased the cattle’s health, and that increasingly, some customers are willing to pay a price premium for the taste, nutrition and ethics of animals raised in a low stress environment.

Over these years, there were several considerations of whether to harvest, harvest and graze, or just graze the crop. Bruce would consider a slew of factors, such as the life cycle stage of the cattle or sheep, the vegetation phase, the value of the commodities and meat markets, the weather events and volume of the cropping growth. For example, if Bruce had ‘some lambs for a contract that needed better performance,’ he’d ‘do the maths on opening the gate and letting them into the paddock versus the opportunity cost of harvesting’. As he had sold the machinery, he would also calculate the yield to consider whether to ‘bother getting a contractor in’ for harvest. In other words, he scanned his multiple options for the highest performing avenue.

While Bruce occasionally sold ‘a bit of crop off farm’, the numbers often pointed to ‘transforming the grain where it sat’ because ‘I put it in cheaply.’ Whereas previously the costs of sprays and treatments would have sent him on a ‘narrower and narrower set of train tracks’ towards maximising grain yield, in this new system, Bruce could still ‘sacrifice the crop even if it was looking good, as it went in at $10 an acre.’ He refers to his crop as ‘the cream’, because of his lack of ‘sunk costs’ during growth:

If I’d put in the grain expensively, I would’ve had to have gone to harvest, which was going against what I wanted to do personally, but it also didn’t show me the numbers at the time.

Even when there was a marginal decision of cropping being a little bit better economically, it wasn’t enough for Bruce to proceed, so he ‘put most of the crops through animals’ and the cash out point was largely the sheep, wool and beef.

Moving on from the earlier saltbush plantings in 1990, Bruce also began experimenting with alley plantings (1998), target saltbush plantings (2004) and spiral saltbush plantings (2005). In addition to animals learning how to browse shrubs and thus adding diversity to their diet, Bruce learned over time that each type of shrub arrangement – block, alley, spiral – offered a unique benefit to their cropping/grazing system.

To continue the vision of an integrated, complex wood-shrub-grassland, Bruce also undertook significant tree plantings, including the ‘why-bother tree planting method’ (e.g. placing trees in the ground in wet conditions, 2001); direct tree seeding (2001); advance tree seeding (2002); and carbon tree plantings (2007). Around 104,000 trees were planted as part of the carbon sequestering project in 2007, which were also selected and planted to offer shelterbelts, shade, biodiversity and improve capital value. Importantly for Bruce, it was negotiated for the payment for carbon value to be made upfront (because, as discussed in Phase 4, it is believed that Passive Chemical Exposure drift is now influencing the health of these trees).

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In 2009, working with and inspired by the work of Dr. Fred Provenza, Bruce created a self-replacing herd of sheep, lovingly called Maynard’s Mongrels. He wanted to make use of the incredible diversity he’d put back into his paddocks, and realised that, rather than just one breed, locally adapted animals would be ‘the go’.

During this time, Bruce had hair breeds and shedding breeds of lambs, as well as conventional meat breeds. They had 15 different breeds introduced including Vanroy blood with a taller frame, compared to Dorpers, with the logic being that taller frames would feel more comfortable in an increasingly hotter climate. Having their own animals also offered more self-reliance. As the breeds they selected are non-seasonal, they have three lambings every two years.

After seven years of behavioural science collaboration with Dean Revell, Bruce co-pioneered Self-Herding processes of livestock (Level 4 behaviour management). Instead of setting up permanent fences and infrastructure for cell grazing of animals, Bruce and Dean trialled signals – such as sights, sounds and smells associated with the potential for a delicious reward. As ‘anticipation is a bigger driver than the reward itself’, they set up addictive behaviours to use the anticipation of reward to move animals across the landscape,’ depending on the needs of the animals and the land.

In addition to the decreased need for expensive and potentially vulnerable infrastructure, this approach has many benefits. It facilitates moving and positioning animals in ways that are directly responsive to their needs, and the needs of the land. It also better allows the animal to self-medicate using their instinct, which Bruce also supported by growing a variety of medicinal shrubs in 2013.

From 2018 to 2020, the Maynards ‘got down to some extraordinarily bad rainfall’, around ’85mm for the year in a 500mm zone’, and the whole landscape suffered.

Bruce decreased grazing to ensure sufficient ground cover and protect the soil surface. Eventually he had to stop grazing, but desiccation, soil deterioration, and ground cover loss continued. Eventually becoming bare soil, Bruce realised minimising soil deterioration was ‘out of my control.’ Bruce didn’t bother sowing, and reduced his lambs to 200 ewes, which was ‘still 199 too many.’

When the drought broke in February 2020, the landscape’s recovery provided a telling lesson to Bruce in terms of grazing management. He felt that his No-Kill Cropping management enabled a shorter recovery time, because he ‘left things more intact and had more landscape function there and ready’:

Leaving things intact meant we had the whole range of organisms waiting there, whether it was a burrowing frog or a myriad of other little things that have gone to greater depth where there is still humidity. The biology was sitting there waiting for its possibility to fire. The soil was dead-dry, but not dead.

Even so, Bruce waited six months after the rainfall to graze any stock on the property. Looking across the paddocks, it appeared there was ‘plenty of grass, but looking down at the paddocks, Bruce saw ‘everything hadn’t filled in, and it still needed time.’ Bruce needed income coming out of the drought, but he also knew that waiting six months before grazing would be advantageous in the long-term. Fortunately he was able to financially float this decision and allow the landscape to recuperate. When the land was ready, Bruce ‘bought in and bred up’ both the cattle and the sheep.

After the drought, the landscape had shifted. Bruce saw more thistles but still sees this as an improvement from before regenerating the grasslands, when they had ‘crops of thistles’. He also understands that the thistles are likely providing a function, like holding dry soils with low living plant mass together; and his landscape-adapted sheep will nibble the thistle when it is in a soft young stage.

In 2019, Bruce’s son Liam started expanding their cropping practices. Liam purchased a new tractor, which is ‘big scale’ compared to the 1995 set-up, yet still much smaller in capacity to what is used by other croppers in the area. A simplified design of what Bruce got in 1995, the tractor had a 10 metre wide air seeder fitted with a double disc engagement units, which sowed seeds at 11.5 inch intervals. According to Bruce, even though Liam increased their area of cropped land with this new set-up, the per hectare cost is equivalent to the cost of sowing in 1996 and less expensive when adjusted for inflation.

Using this new approach, Liam planted 800 ha of total crop area with a mix of commercial wheat and some oats in 2021.

Bruce and Liam started small comparison trials of the newer commercial wheat variety and a variety of the Maynard’s heritage grains from the 1930s. Interestingly, the commercial wheat grew really well in a disturbed site, like in their small test plot, but underperformed in a complex grassland community. However, as Bruce said, ‘if you gave the commercial wheat another chance in a different year in a No-Kill paddock’, it might do much better because the retained seed has started to evolve a relationship with the microbiome of the place.

Another reason that the new wheat variety may have had a ‘marginal result’, was due to a water-logged paddock. Bruce felt it was ‘hardly worth running the header over it’, but Liam wanted to harvest for their customers and keep seed for the following year. The benefit of harvesting and keeping the wheat seeds was that it’s ‘already evolved once’. With their on-site operations, they’ve found wheat is much easier to separate than oats. Liam is planning on sowing all potential paddocks every year, and Bruce believes this approach will be much more productive than his previous prior long term average of 700 ha per year.

Liam also bought a baler at a clearing sale, because according to his father, ‘he’s one of those people that can fix things that everybody else has thrown away.’ Liam ran the baler through the paddocks straight after harvesting, and because he didn’t have to wait for any of the green material in the No-Kill Cropping paddocks to wilt down, he created a new product of ‘graw bales’. The mix of grass and straw was a very useful resource during this wet year. It supplied a great amount of roughage amongst all of the ‘soupy wet conditions’. And this food source is low cost again, only costing fuel to go over the top and plastic wrap.

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