I had the great pleasure of talking with highly sought-after farmland restoration and rehydration expert, Natural Sequence Farmer, Stuart Andrews about what we need to be doing to restore Australian farming landscapes, ecosystems, and food systems.
We also explore the close connection between Natural Sequence Farming and Permaculture. There are pure gems in this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed this chance to catch up with Stuart again.
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
Stuart Andrews is a farmer who has dedicated over 30 years of his life to understanding, practicing and teaching land rehabilitation techniques. He was raised at the 1500 acre “Tarwyn Park” in NSW, the celebrated home of Natural Sequence Farming, pioneered by his father Peter Andrews OAM. Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) is now internationally recognized as a significant innovation in sustainable agriculture and land care, and the story of Tarwyn Park has featured many times on the ABC program Australian Story – and here on another episode about Mulloon Farm.
Stuart has been involved in public education for most of his adult life and is passing this gift to his sons too, who now run tours at Forage Farms near Gympie – further down the Mary River from where I live.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
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Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking, the way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Morag:
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I meet and speak with you today. The Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
Morag:
It’s a huge pleasure to share this conversation with you today. I’m talking with a leading regenerative farmer here in Australia, Stuart Andrews. Stuart has dedicated 30 years to understanding practicing and teaching land rehabilitation techniques. With his family, he runs forage farms up here near me in the Sunshine Coast. Actually he says his two sons Lachie and Hamish run it mostly. And he also runs Tarwyn Park Training, sharing natural sequence farming techniques around the country. Stuart was raised actually on the 1500 acre Tarwyn Park Farm, the home of natural sequence farming pioneered by his father, Peter Andrews, who was awarded Order of Australia Medal for this work and Natural Sequence Farming is internationally recognized as a significant innovation in farm restoration and sustainability. The focus is on rehydration of the landscapes on healing the land from the patterns of distraction and disturbance that have taken place. And also by farming differently. In this conversation, we talk about how Natural Sequence Farming restores the land with common sense accessible strategies, so important in this decade of ecosystems restoration. And we also talk about how it perfectly dovetails with permaculture. Essentially natural sequence farming is about how to restore food systems, landscape health, health of the community while creating resilient and ecologically restored farms. I hope you enjoy this conversation just as much as I did.
Morag Gamble:
Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Stuart. It’s such a delight to have you on this show. I know you are paid to speak at the Australian permaculture conference last year that got canceled with COVID and then it’s happening this year again, but I don’t know, it’s sort of a little bit to and fro, but I was looking forward to catching up with you again there at the conference, but I don’t think you’re going to be there either, but we did meet a few, Oh gosh, it was a few months ago at a Regenerative Farming event in Gympie. It just made me really delighted to hear all the things that you’ve been doing. And I’ve been wanting for a long time to catch up with you and have this conversation to see where, where those links are between permaculture and the work you do in natural sequence farming. But also more just to really hear more about what natural sequence farming is so that we can share throughout this global permaculture movement, because the work that you’re doing is like you’re a globally recognized regenerative farmer. And the work that you’re doing is phenomenal. So I thought maybe we could just begin at a little bit of a point of that. What inspires you first to be in this game of trying to change what’s happening in the farming system? Where does that come from for you?
Stuart Andrews:
It helps to be a mild lunatic, I suppose. That would be partly to do with my upbringing, I guess. My father, Peter Andrews. I mean, it all started with him obviously. So I guess there’s a degree of passion that comes from that side. But through my years of farming, I can see where our stumbling blocks are where things are just not working for farmers. And a big part of that is the fact that we spend most of our time fighting nature rather than working with it. And natural sequence farming is all about working with nature, understanding how nature functions and then utilizing that function to the best of our ability so that we can produce a product, which in the end makes the farmer more profitable. So I guess I’m driven in a way to be able to want to be able to help people. That’s what I like to do. I like to help people, but I’ve got two boys of my own and they work with us in our farming operation. In fact, they run one of the farms for us. And so their future is beholden upon us understanding how our landscape works so that we can continue to do this. I mean, at the moment everywhere I drive around, I see landscapes down backwards. And that’s been the case now for more than a hundred years, probably 150 years or more. And so we have to look differently at how are we going to farm so that we are no longer destroying that we are building. And regenerative is the new buzzword. If you said to me regenerative three years ago, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about because it was, it was never a thing. We’ve always spoken about degrade and aggrade, and we’ve always been about our aggrading, which is, I guess, what regenerative, the term regenerative is supposed to mean. It does mean different things to different people. So I’m probably going a little bit of conjecture there as to what it is.
Morag Gamble:
That’s really interesting. Did you want to, so just tell me a little bit more then about that degrade and aggrade. So that’s what you’ve been using for decades, obviously. So What was the key thing of aggrading a farm? If that’s, if that’s a word. What? would you describe that as?
Stuart Andrews:
It’s about building a system. So it’s about building everything is building on onto itself. So let’s talk about plants. Let’s say we have a thistle comes into an area and it grows. And from there that thistle builds a system builds the soil so that the next plant can come in and take its place. So it’s an a aggrading system. It’s an ever aggrading system. So it’s about understanding what do we need to do to get our system to constantly build. So that’s aggrading.
Morag:
I’m glad that you’ve used the thistle example because the thistle is something that depending on your perspective, you would look at it quite differently when you see it in a field. So some people want to just go and kind of take it out, but what role does a thistle play for you in your farming system? How do you see a thistle.
Stuart Andrews:
Well, it’s a primary colonizing plant. It’s a plant that’s coming in to do a job. Every plant – doesn’t matter what it is. Every plant does a job. And depending on what job has its got to play and what plant comes comes next. And that plant tells you what happened before. So, you know, the thistle comes in if the ground has been compacted and it needs a chance to have a risk so the thistle comes in to do that job. Any plant that grows prickles is telling you to keep it out or animals to keep out. That’s why it grows prickles. So there’s three things. They’ll grow a talon, a poison, or a prickle. All of them are about maintaining their position in that ecosystem today, whilst they build. While they grade and change the condition and create that succession. So every plant doesn’t matter what it is. Every plant is playing a role. The thing about the thistle or any plants that have got prickles. When you talk about the dew or the small water cycle, dew forms on the points of plants. The more points you have on a plant, the more dew that plant has the ability to attract. That means you are now building the small water cycle much faster, because you’ve got a plant it’s able to capture more moisture out of the atmosphere. So, you know, the big thing about thistle or any weeds is that they take, they’re taking moisture away from other plants, generally grass plants, if you’re a cropper or grazier, but it actually factors in reverse because those plants that live off the atmosphere that don’t even need to worry about the soil. The thing about it is that they’ll people were using the analysis or they’ve got five thistles in their paddock. And so that those thistles are taking moisture away. Where in actual fact, it’s the fact that there’s no other plants around them, that the moisture’s evaporating, it’s not the thistle. You’ll find under thistle has moist soil and earthworms and biology, all working. So the poor thistle is just trying to keep the thing going, trying to keep the landscape alive whislt everywhere around and is dying.
Morag:
So there’s this whole kind of concept then of the natural sequence farming. So that you’re talking about what, in permaculture, we explore as natural succession. And it’s looking at working towards a more cultivated ecosystem where it’s very much applied systems thinking it’s looking at how we can exactly as you said, work with nature to create systems that are thriving and alive. There’s something very particular about the approach that you’re taking, that you’re focusing so much like it’s led by, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s led by the understanding of this water cycle of getting those water cycles happening and rehydrating the landscape. And then once that happens, then the source systems come alive and the ecosystems come alive and things shift with that. Is that right? If I said that, right?
Stuart Andrews:
Yeah. So I guess, I mean, a question that I’m sure you will ask at some point will be, what’s the difference say between, or what do I see the difference between natural sequence farming and permaculture? The key difference that I see is that natural sequence farming is just looking at how the Australian landscape function prior to any human interference, any human interference, Aboriginal or white. So we go out, we read the landscape and we look for the key components that were there that built this landscape prior to any of that interference. So what we then go about doing is we reconnect those systems, the hydrology that existed prior to any human interference. And then this is where permaculture comes in. Permaculture comes in with the food production system that you can overlay onto that as does a number of other things, you know, whether it’s grazing or whatever, but it’s understanding first and foremost how this landscape function and because Australia is the oldest continent, the oldest driest continent on this earth, it is the blueprint for every other continent on the earth because it’s survived for so long without the services of major rivers, which had lost once it’s separated from Antarctica and its lost the snow-capped Hills or the ice cap Hills that fed it slowly fed it nutrients and water. It lost that 600 million years ago. So it’s had to devise a system of limiting its losses and it did that through what we are saying is this natural sequence. So it’s a natural sequence of events. How did it manage to do that? And what it did was everything that stimulated the next cycle was a rain event. So the rain event might’ve been just a one off rain event or the big rain event that came after a long drought. And that’s the thing that stimulated the change or created that sequence. And the sequence was a rain event, a flourish of plants that came in to rebuild the system and reboot it, and then the hydrology that followed after that is what built the next succession of plants. And so it goes. Yeah, I think that’s how I explain it to people anyway, that do our course isthat what we are looking at doing is re-building or putting back the skeleton of what existed prior to any human interference. So we go back, you know, 60 or 80,000 years potentially. And we’re looking at how did the landscape, function back then? How do we get that same function to work today? Even though it’s in a very much degraded state and it’s as simple as no water, no fresh water left this landscape without servicing plants on its way through. Today, iIt barely services any plants. It just goes out to sea. Well, it was never like that. And so what’s the big change. Well, some of the change is loss of vegetation, loss of our forests, introduction of hard-hoofed animals that are detrimental to the landscape and compaction if not managed correctly with plants and all of those, which is what happened 200 years ago, not understanding this landscape and how it worked caused all those problems. So now we’ve got water rushing into these now eroded the gullys and eroded creek lines and every time that water moves, it’s carrying all of our soluble nutrients and worst case scenario, the sediments, which are our long-term fertility. It’s all taking it to the ocean, which is then destroying the ocean in turn, because it’s overloading it with all this nutrient that there is not the plant life to be able to filter it anymore. So how do we go about minimizing the loss, understanding that will still happen no matter what so long as we continue to farm the way we farm and all around the hard-hoofed animals, it’s still gonna be a problem we’re going to face because the plants that were here on settlement could not and cannot overcome the damage that the hard-hoofed animals do. Now, when you go back to the thistle and you say, where does the thistle fit in. The thistle, a number of them fit in by overcoming the damage the animals do. So they are great at breaking up the soil if it becomes compacted, but they’re also great at keeping the animals out of that area. That’s why they’ve got spikes, keeping them out so the whole system can rebuild and reboot. So those plants came here as nature’s solver of the problem of the introduced animals and the fact that, you know, people go around and say, Oh, it’s not native. So we can’t have it. It’s very frustrating because we need to have those plants to overcome the animals that we’ve introduced. So we can’t, we can’t go and say, Oh, we’ll just introduce these two things. We’ll introduce the humans. We’ll introduce the animals, but we don’t want any of the plants, sorry. Now we want to keep everything natural. No, it doesn’t work that way. That’s gone. Long gone. We’ve got to look at building ecological communities, which involves all of these introduced plants and the native ones together.
Morag:
So there’s so many different things that I want to ask you based on that. One of them is.. So firstly, how do you start to, how do you reboot the system? Like, what are some of the strategies that you put in place? Another one is also, so I might just start with two and you can weave them to get, however you like. The other one is you’re talking about hard-hoofed animals and you know, this is a key part of the farming landscapes we’re at Australia. So that’s like such a big one to start to unpack because it’s about diet. It’s about consumer choices. It’s about export markets, about, you know, economic systems and where do we go with that conversation? Part of the conversation about healing this landscape and changing what’s happening is about the hard-hoofed animals. Where do you.. What’s your take on how we move forward with that?
Stuart Andrews:
That is the beautiful part. I think about natural sequence farming. You can call it whatever you like, but it’s nature really is that if we understand the key components that the animals did damage to and can do damage to, we know now the areas that specifically need protection from said animals, whether it be limit the amount of time they can be there or exclude them, altogether, which is not generally a great way to go about it. But it’s that understanding that they do do damage hiding behind it and saying, Oh, no, they don’t do any damage. That’s a false move because they do. And the other part is that for it to work, we are now relying on a human, the most unreliable species on this planetm humans. So, you know, I base it on, if we’re going to rely entirely on the humans to solve these problems, then we are really going to be in trouble because some people are really good. Some people not. So we’ve got to work with that. So what do we do? So first thing we do is we look for the components in the landscape that allowed this landscape to function extremely well prior to introduction of animals and the people. And these steps, wetland systems. They step landscapes where there’d be pockets, where water was restricted. The ability for that water to flow off of that landscape was restricted. And as a result, sedimentation took place, plants grew there and then the plants managed how the water move off of the landscape. We call those steps. And so the first thing we do is I look for where were those steps located? And that might be looking in the eroded channel today. You can see where the steps are trying to form again. And a step is simple. If you walk along a Creek, when there’s water there and you’ll see there’s a pond of water, and then it might be dry or trickle, and then another pond of water where it’s dry and, or the trickle that’s the step. So this step is creating the pond. The pond is the dissipator of the energy of the water coming in behind it. So the pond is critical that the energy of the system doesn’t continue to break down those steps. Other components that the animals destroy. Cattle, particularly, always liked to walk over that part of your flow line, right where the step is, and that causes it to break down, next flow that comes through, has the potential now to damage it, if it doesn’t have the vegetation there to hold it together. So then that’s looking at the gully itself. Once upon a time that gully, that step was linked to the same step on the ridge line. And that’s the real key part. So what we’re looking to do is we’re looking to this as the old dinosaurs skeleton we’re trying to put back together. So we taking the head, which we see in the gully, the step, and we joining it back to his feet with his body out on the ridge line. So now some of the water , instead of water and nutrients flowing down the gully they now move out to the ridge line where the water could move from a high point, the water and fertility moves from a high point and landscapes are to build from that point. So now what we’re looking at is a contoured system. So if we’re going to protect an area, it’s that contoured system. Everywhere above everywhere below is able to be utilized for our farming system, whatever it might be, whether we’re cropping, grazing, doesn’t matter. And the contour is the rejig. It’s the reboot. Every time we have a rain event, the contoured system starts the process. So it starts the hydrology. It kick-starts the hydrology and it’s managing the fertility. So it doesn’t leave the landscape. And then the next compotent is, this is the toughest one for me to get farmers to do that is that they, should harvest their material from the bottom of their system and take it back up to the top. And by doing that, they’ve now lost nothing, but currently everything just flies out the sea and we bring nothing back. But if we can harvest that material, that grass at the bottom, what we would call the filtration area of our landscape, if you harvest that material that grows there, which may be the gullys. If you can harvest that material, take it back to the top of the Hill. The numbers we talk about is you cite yourself a thousand years. It would have taken a thousand years for that same amount of biomass to be moved by animals back to the top of the Hill. You know, so it’s just so powerful if we can get our head around it. And I mean, I’d think about things on a, I guess, a broader landscape. If you were in a garden and you were going to do a permaculture garden, then you set up exactly the same system, but your contours might be five meters up. They might be 30 centimeters apart. And all you do is you, whatever, you’d grow at the bottom of your 30 centimeters the end of the year, take it back in and put it on top of what would be the mountain, the contour above that. There you go. You’ve just not, you’ve lost nothing. And you rebuilt the city, you rebuild the system.
Morag:
So I came across Martin down in near Mulloon Farm when I was down there. And he was telling me about this, the incise creeks, how we got millions of kilometers of incise creeks about Australia. And he was saying that he’s actually using his animals to try and better back the slopes, because I’d always had this thing. Like, we don’t let animals into the creek. You don’t let them because they do the damage. Like what you were saying. He’s saying is as part of his repair strategies, just in little sections to actually let them so things can actually start to grow there. And then as they’re munching, he takes them. They’d go up to the top, sit up on the top. So is something that works like as a short term strategy of using animals too. It kind of blew my mind thinking about this possibility cause like you’re sort of like, Oh, just keep everything out of that system protected. I don’t know, is that a useful strategy using animals to do that? Or would you rather do it more with putting logs and brush and all sorts of things in it? What’s the technique of actually kick-starting a system that is so degraded that it just really needs rapid transformation.
Stuart Andrews:
Of course I wasn’t there when the conversation, when you had the conversation with Mark. He may well have said this, or you might not, I don’t know, but on his particular place, I’m assuming at the time, he has put in structures. So the structures are already creating the steps. The animals, no matter what you do can never create that. The animals will never recreate that stepping system. So unfortunately, because we are in the position we’re in today that needs to be done with some sort of mechanical use. It may be small. It may be large. It would, it would vary depending on where we have that and the damage the system, the animals I’m assuming that he takes them down in and he lets them graze the area above the pond, but below the step. And then he moves them back up. So they’ll come down, they’ll get a rumen full he’s a cattle man. Then he sends them back to the top where they ruminate, they would have water up there and shade. And then they deliver that material in the way we know them to do out there, back in. And so that is a transfer facility. That is definitely a better, a better way than what is currently happening, which mostly is the cattle spend all their time in the lowest part of the landscape being the gully or the creek. And that’s where they deliver all that stuff out the back end into there, which is definitely negative. If the system is beneficial to your land is as beneficial as moving it. The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why for every one ton of material, we move from the bottom to the top, we now have the ability to hold five times that weight in water. Now we are holding more water and facility in the highest part of our landscape. Unfortunately, the cow has no ability to do that. The cow has the ability to transfer nutrients and then providing. We’ve got a system that’s all fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. That’s all fantastic. That should only be a part of our fix because we’ve got such degraded landscapes that we can’t afford to wait for the cow to transport it back up there. It’s just gonna take way too long. So we need to use something a little, a little better. PA would probably as in Peter Andrews my dad. He would say, that’s a crock of sht – he doesn’t agree with that, but I’m different in that. I do understand that people have to get it particularly, farmers, grazers have to be able to get it comfortably in their head, that if they have to bring a machine in to pick that material up and move it up to there, that it’s gonna be beneficial. Particularly, the farmers that are holistic managers or, you know, guys that are thinking like that they probably want to limit the amount of machinery that they utilize because of the cost associated with it. But all I would say is you just need to trial it. Just trial it for yourself. And then you can determine whether you think it’s worth to your system or not. Even if it was to the point of, let’s say you work and see some cattle over winter, for whatever reason. Feed them at the top of the Hill. And then look at the results. I mean, farmers has been doing this for years. Most of the time, they feed them at the bottom then go up to the top. They always end up with the best quality feed growing the year after, or two years after in that particular side. But I don’t know that we put two and two together. If we do it at the top of the Hill, then gravity is carrying that fertility over our entire place and never cost us at the same.
Morag:
Yeah. That’s just good common sense. Really isn’t it. But it’s like what you’re saying, it’s taking the time to make the connections between the different aspects and that’s that kind of that thinking and the process that you’re using.. because that does just make so much sense. Doesn’t it? When you hear it, it makes sense, but you have to kind of sometimes point it out for that common sense.
Stuart Andrews:
There is nothing, nothing in natural sequence farming, nothing that we talk about that you can’t see as an example in the landscape. You see how that works. You can see it working. That’s what I think is so powerful. It’s not a dreamed up idea. It’s not Peter Andrews idea. It was his ability working with other people as well, along the way, learning how the landscape function. Then the key part is how do we fit our farming systems into that functioning landscape? That’s what’s important because if it’s just about piecing the landscape together and the farmer’s not going to make money well I’m sorry, there’s not too many farmers out there today that are going to take that on. That’s the thing that if we get our hydration, we stop losing our fertility. We don’t need to spend anywhere near the money that we’re spending today on any of the other components of running a farm. The chemicals, the artificial fertilizers, none of those things because the only reason we’re having to add those things on us because we keep flushing everything away. So we go back to the key components we talk about. Water. I think you asked me this question. I probably didn’t answer it, but water is either a friend or a foe. If we don’t manage it, it is our foe because it carries away all of our fertility and potentially soil. If it’s not managed correctly. If it’s our friend, then we need to look at how do we manage it? How do we pacify the water that flows across our landscape? And that was once done by plants. It didn’t need any human interference. Anything done by a human was not necessary, but we’ve now got a dysfunctional landscape. So we must intervene the correct way to help get, you know, to manage the high velocity water that we’ve now got carrying everything away.
Morag:
So can I just ask you about, in the drought, so we just had a little while ago, what did you notice that was happening differently on the natural sequence farms? And on the flip side of that we have floods in various locations. What happens in or after a flood event on a natural sequence farm that’s different from conventional farms. Maybe just for our listeners, if you could kind of describe sort of those extreme events and where you see natural sequence farming bringing benefit.
Stuart Andrews:
What I’ll do is I’ll once again, I’ll go back and I’ll give you an example. And the example was Tarwyn Park with where PA began doing his trial work and the property that Meghan and I ran for 15 years. So when we had, I think about three quarters of the property was what would be determined in this flood plain country. And the rest of it was hill. Maybe it was 70% flood plain and the rest of it was hill type country. Big, massive watersheds. A water shed that went for 40 kilometers further up, so that when there was a big rain event, a lot of water came down, but that landscape, the flood plain never hydrated. The water would flow through within a week, two weeks it’s gone. And the flood plain was still in. So what PA was, he said about managing some of that water. You can’t manage all of it because it’s too much, but managing some of it and getting it back to rehydrate that landscape whislt that excess water was moving through that system. And so that was add the ability to reach on the flood plain, as well as on the slopesi, not just the flood plain, but the slopes at the same time, but the flood plain had the ability to hold more water because it had an aquifer system on that or had the potential for an aquifer system underneath it. So what would happen is that system would recharge in a flood event, which always follows the drought, funnily enough. So the season when we build and when you’re moving into the next dry period, then what I found in my management of that property is we were usually two years behind anybody else suffering from the dry conditions. I mean, I guess some of that came down to management too. So some of my management was different. I would start selling off livestock long before the time came to do that. But I mean, that’s all part of understanding the landscape and knowing the signs to tell you that you’re going into a dry period. So you make this decision, but yeah, so it was, I’ll give you an example of the drought of 2002, which was considered to be a pretty bad one. So in 2000 or 1999- 2000, we had a wet season because Tarwyn park was functioning correctly. The floodplain was hydrated. In 2002, two years into the drought and people go back to their records. They will say, find out that in 2002, that we’re talking about this being worse than the millennium drought. So it was, it was a pretty high. In 2002, can’t remember what time of the year it was, but it was either spring. Nah, it was like summer, February. That’s right. Um, John Anderson, who was the deputy prime minister at the time came to Tarwyn park to see what PA had been banging on about. And he was standing in clover up to his knees. white Clover in summer. On this floodline that was still hydrated from two years prior and still highly productive. By 2006, we were starting to see the effects of the drought. So that was six years after the last event. The dry finished in 2008, I think it was 2010 probably started about 2008 by 2010, we had floods. So for most of that dry period, it was insulated as a result. The Hills, yes, the Hills have dried back, you’d expect that. But that’s the way the system work. The low areas should have always been holding the most amount of water, the most amount of fertility, but they don’t even function anymore. So that gives you a bit of an idea as to how much it can change your farming operation. On the Hills. You’ve probably got two years, maybe three. On the lower areas, six years, maybe more. Most of your dry periods or this sequence of events is over 10 years. So you’ll see that for a period of it’s dry for a period it’s wet and for periods stable. Now this is where the differences, it used to be big length of time, stable, short period of time, dry, short period of time, excessively wet. Now, which way is it? Massive time dry, short period stable and a really short period wet. That’s how things have changed. And so that’s.. The hydrological cycle has changed so much. It’s so broken that we’re getting these long drought. So we get a massive influx of water -gone. Doesn’t hydrate the system. So the system has no resilience in there to grow plants and to build. And that’s what Natural Sequence Farming does. It creates that break point in there where the water is held for a little bit longer in the landscape to encourage more growth so that you get the small water cycle functioning. So that you’re bringing in dew, which is worth approximately 90 millimeters in rainfall per year, which is now shorter amount of moisture, which gets forgotten about entirely. That’s coming back into your system every day.
Morag:
Can you just say a bit more about the small water cycle? And you talked about this at the presentation where I met you late last year as well, because I think this is a really key part. Isn’t it? Often when people talk about the water cycles I think the big,you’re talking about the dew, but there’s also like even with, um, you know, tree crops and like this localized water cycle. Can you just tell us a bit more about that? Because I think it’s a big part. As you’re saying, it’s a big part of the shift and thinking.
Stuart Andrews:
Oh look, it’s the major part. It’s one of the key things we’ve completely missed is that every drop of water that goes out of their landscape via the plant during the day comes back at night. If the system is functioning and that moderates the climate. So it’s got a lot bigger effect than just bringing moisture back to your farm or your landscape. That’s the key. That’s what the farmer is probably thinking well if it’s going to make more plants grow, then it’s going to be beneficial to me. But it’s beneficial to everybody. It’s beneficial for all of the people that are living in this, on this planet that, that is functioning correctly because the evapotranspiration through that small water cycle is also moderating the heat. The heat flux that we’ve got, which is causing all of this heat in the atmosphere and elevating our issues with climate change. So if we get that functioning correctly, we’re moderating the climate at the same time as making our landscapes more productive. It is just so, so simple, but the only way we can achieve that is that we must have green growing plants. We can’t afford to be plant racist and determine that oh we just get to have this one, this plant, we’re just going to have that one. No we need every plant we can possibly get, and we need to get multi stories of the plants. This is the thing that you guys in permaculture is you’re always focusing about the ecology. All these multilayers of plants. Farmers would have picked up on that years ago. That’s what they should be doing. Instead. We’re still hating trees, killing them, bulldozing them, burning them, whatever you want to do. And you know, we need all of that system to be working well. Sometimes you’ll have too many trees. So if for whatever reason, there’s been some change in the landscape and there’s been a whole leap of trees shoot up and it limits the growth on the ground, which is affecting the farmer who needs the grass to be growing to feed his livestock. But rather than just go through and entirely annihilate the whole forest, they could do it more simply and easily. Well, not so much easier, but they could do it more constructively where you still got your canopy trees, you still got your shrubs and you’ve got your grasses. And they’re all working in harmony as an ecosystem. And possibly, maybe we couldn’t run as many livestock. If we did it on day basis, maybe we couldn’t run as many livestock, but what if we could run that number of livestock for a longer period of time? Ha! That’s the kicker for you because now you can run those livestock for a longer period of time because you’ve got the other plant, bringing the moisture back in the feed, the grass, the fertility, to come back in the feed, the grass, which means now you can run the livestock instead of six months, you can run them for 10 months of the year.
Morag:
I’m so glad that you mentioned that because often it’s that factor of time that’s not born into it. Often the issues that we’re facing, if we just took a longer, a broader time perspective, we would see these different patterns. And so I wonder in terms of like farmers economy, have you worked out that that actually makes it more financially viable for them to do it that way? Do you have any kind of evidence or figures for them? I mean, it makes sense, but is there, does that give them better returns? Is that one of your arguments of how you can help talk with farmers about doing it differently? What are the things..
Stuart Andrews:
I don’t go out of my way to tell farmers, this is how much they’re going to make, because it really depends on who it is. Where’s their head at this stage. What part of the journey they’re on? All I simply say is the more moisture you get in your soil, the more nutrients you can capture in your soil, the more productive you will be. Now. I don’t know where your landscape is at today is to what the production will be. But if you’re growing more plants, you are more productive. Are you growing the plants that are going to make you more financially productive today? I do not know. I can’t tell that because I can’t see your individual property. The moment I go onto a place I can determine for that person straight away where they’re at. So I can look at the plants, look at the landscape and go, yep. That’s where you’re at. You property will potentially turn around in a year or two. I’ll go on another place and go, I’d do something else. I wouldn’t be focusing on running cattle on this landscape. It’s not going to give you the returns you need to make you viable. These are your options. These are other things you can do that you’ve probably never thought about whilst that landscape is building. And that’s what’s really important. On Tarwyn park you would see one and a half to two times the amount of production of plants over any of the neighboring places they would irrigate. We didn’t. So with no cost, no fertilizer and one and a half to two times more productive. You know that is enough for me, but I’m not saying that everybody’s going to see the same results because at the time it’s got to determine where they’re at in the cycle and also where they’re at in their own head. The thing that I find that makes it the most difficult for anybody, we don’t just have farmers. We have all sorts of people coming and doing our courses, but it’s their head that’s stopping them doing anything at all. So if we can get between here, the rest of it’s easy. Once they start to believe that they’re making a gain, that’s when the real profits, that’s when they’re real productivity comes in, because then they can’t be stopped. A belief. Believing that what you’re doing is right really goes a long way towards achieving exactly what the outcome you want.
Morag:
The evidence speaks for itself. And so I’m wondering what kind of support is there to help get this work happening much more broadly than it already is. What is the, you know, you’ve said that the conditions in Australian farming landscapes need a lot of help. You have these examples of how you can turn it around and in not a really long period of time, either. What are the, what are the things that are, that are currently helping in this transition and what are the things that may be blocking that, or need to be an unstuck to help make this go like wildfires?
Stuart Andrews:
Well, I mean, some of it is what I said, it’s what’s going on in here. You know, people can’t, they can’t get hold of something and take it unless they’re ready to. It’s just, that’s just the way. It’s either someone needs to change for some reason or another. Whether it’d be financial reasons, not making enough money or health, they want to do something better for themselves and for their landscape and for their family. They’re the things that really make changes and change the way people think and why they want to do something differently. I think too many people want somebody else to pay because potentially they didn’t do the damage to the landscape. So in some ways they feel that it would be better if somebody else paid for it to be done. I don’t believe that necessarily to be true. I think that if you are funding your own way, and if you can’t afford very much, then you only do a little. But the little bit you do is yours and you want it and you’re on a journey and you were learning how it works. Now, part of the training program that we run, the big part of it is actually engaging people and giving them the ability to do it themselves, not have to go and rely on somebody else to do it for them. I don’t think that is our future. If we’ve got to engage other people to do it for us, then I just don’t think it will work.
Morag:
That’s a similarity with permaculture in a way. I mean, a lot of it is about how can we see and understand the landscapes that are around us and how can we restore them and bring them back to productivity and to be growing in abundance and to bring the whole system to life. I mean, that’s kind of what permaculture is about too. So there’s like a real correlation there I think.
Stuart Andrews:
There are too many things that don’t fit together. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about, whether permaculture is more about plants than anything else and it’s all plants, you know, they prepared to bring in all plants to create ecosystems that marries very well with natural sequence farming. I’m no plant expert. You go out into the permaculture world and you’ll find people out there in the permaculture world know 50,000 times more about plants than I do but I know how to get our landscape back together so it functions. Then we bring in the skills of other people that know more about what plants to put in there because farmers always think, Oh, you want to plant bloody trees on my place. But what I say is, what if those trees are fruit trees? They can be producing your product at the same time as doing all this other stuff. And so really what we’re looking at is a marry between permaculture and NSF because the production systems that you guys talk about fits in perfectly with what we talk about with the landscape, and then you can add the farmers’ practices in that as well. So now you’ve got all of this stuff working together and now you’ve got a whole loop of farmers out there that are doing permaculture and natural sequence farming, and they never really thought they were going to, but they’re still running their livestock and they’re still growing crops. It’s all possible. Sometimes it’s a little bit too far out there for some people, but I think that’s changing. I think we’re able to start adding, building all of these pieces together so that it works beautifully together. And yeah. Anyway, that’s the way I see it.
Morag:
Yep. Well my last question was really going to be about like what is it that you see that, where we need to be going and how if you could envision the world that was transitioned to natural sequence farming. What did that look like? And is there anything that you could just throw in a few key things to make that change happen more rapidly? What would they be? So you kind of said the kind of world that you’d imagined, what are the things, what are those key things you think like there was two or three things that we did we could be doing either at any scale. So something that like at a household scale or a farm scale. What are the, is there anything like at a policy level that needs to shift, do you think, or is it, is it all about on-farm?
Stuart Andrews:
All look, let, let’s start with the first part. What could we be doing on a household level and on the farm level. how do these two marry together? Well, that’s a pretty big question, but I’ll try not to get lost. I do tend to get a little bit lost at times with my answers. If we start to manage our water. So even on a household level, if we can be, have little contours in that manage how quickly the water leaves our landscape. So we can hydrate our piece of land before it goes. So it doesn’t go into the storage, the drainage lines of the town and the city, and then run away. So that’s first. The next thing is, as a result of that, we want to grow as many plants as possible. So we want our backyards to be growing a huge diversity of plants. That can be food plants. If you want, just grow plants for the environment. Doesn’t matter. But the more green plants you’ve got, the more you affect a small water cycle and the more you cool the climate. So now you’re playing your part. For the householder in town, if they choose more wisely in how they purchase their food, they’ve now got the ability to change the way farmers think about. So think about buying food that is produced in a way that is building the landscape. So if you’re doing that now, you’re encouraging more farmers to do with exactly that because farmers only do what the market demands. If the market demands cheap food farmers can produce it. If the farmer, if the consumer demands maybe slightly more expensive, but a better quality and a better outcome for the landscape food, the farmer will produce it. Now you’ll notice I didn’t mention governments in there. And there’s a key reason for that. That those two and it starts with the consumer. But those two at that level, wherever you want to call it, they are actually the leaders. So the consumer has all the power, but they don’t realize it. The farmer can create all the change. Doesn’t realize it. The government do nothing. All I do is follow those other two. So if the consumer keeps demanding cheap food, the government will ensure that they get cheap food. If the consumer says, we want our landscapes looked after and we want better quality food, we’re happy to pay a little bit more for it, not excessive, but a little bit more. Then the government will do that as well. So you know, those two people, those two, whatever, wherever you put them at the top of the bottom, it doesn’t matter. They’re the ones that are going to create change for today or for the future, not anybody else. And that comes back to the question you asked me before about how do we fund this? Cause. So people want government and funding. The trouble is government have no appetite to fund this because the consumer hasn’t told them that that’s what they want. If the consumer drives it like they should, the consumer then drives the government to fund the right things, which is about building landscapes, making landscapes function better to produce better quality food so that we’re not popping people up on drugs to keep them alive. We feed them food and it keeps them alive. That’s a big difference, but the consumer holds all the power. They’re the ones that need to change.
Morag:
So I agree. And so my next question was where do we get consumer changed? Like, how do we influence more consumer change at a level that is at the pace that it’s needed? Because there’s an awareness, there’s a growing awareness, a huge growing awareness, but not quite enough yet. Any ideas on how to get that to amplify?
Stuart Andrews:
I don’t unfortunately have the answers to everything. And
Morag:
Ohhh you’re doing pretty well!
Stuart Andrews:
That one I don’t have the answers for, but I’ll tell you what we do. So we run our training program. That’s one. The other thing we run is our farm farming business called Forage Farms up in Queensland. So we produce pastured products, pastured, eggs, pastured poultry, pastured pork, or grass-fed lamb, and grass-fed beef. That gives us the contact with the consumer. So that’s bringing the consumer through food, back to the landscape. I can only effect the consumers that buy from us, which is very, very, very small. My vision would be that if we can influence enough farmers to run farms like this, then we can start to scale it out so that we can have more jobs. There’s quite, there’s a number of farms around like ours that are doing just that. I don’t know that they’re delivering the message that I’m delivering. They’re about probably more about producing a better quality food. Maybe they’re not quite tying it back with everything that I see where we can influence how our landscape’s managed as a result. Outside of that. I don’t really know what to do. I don’t know. I mean, that’s where the permaculture movement has been really good because they’ve been, they’ve got a greater number of people. They are able to deliver a message. I think if there was any criticism to come from it would be that in the past, the permaculture, a lot of the permaculture people have been described as being on the fridge. Which they probably were in the early days. And so they weren’t able to grab the hearts and minds of everybody, which is unfortunate because the ability to create change, we would already be there by now. We wouldn’t be still talking about it. And so I guess, in a way that’s where our message can fit in as like the go-between, you know, still extreme, but maybe not as extreme as the permaculture type message. Although I will say that things have changed a lot in the permaculture movement over the last 20 years. There’s a lot more, what do you want to call them? Mainstream people that are in that perma world, which is really, really good. So that’s all helped create that change. You know, all of that work that started way back when that’s, what’s got us to where we are today. We’ve got to go how do we scale it up? How do we get it to where we need it to be? And outside of doing what I said, where we scale it again, I don’t know, Morag really what else. Influencing government is a potential, but it’s mind numbing. And I really couldn’t be bothered tell you the truth because everything I’ve seen over the years is you spend most of your time banging your head up against the wall and not actually achieving anything. I think the latest issue that we’ve had with COVID-19, I think as bad as that’s been, that will create more change than anything. And unfortunately, that’s what it takes. When our ecosystem breaks down. These are the things we start to see happening. And if people realize that that’s directly related back to how we look after our landscapes, that’s going to affect their health, like directly affect the health. Not in 30 years time, that’s going to affect their health today. And that’s, I think how the universal nature, whatever you want to call it, that’s how it’s trying to teach us a lesson. If we don’t learn from this, I think we are doomed. We are destined for not being on this planet for much longer. .
Morag:
I was going to say, what have you noticed in Gorage farms in terms of your business? You know, I was talking to food connect down in Brisbane. They said their business just took off during COVID because people were looking for something that was more local, more resilient was actually feeding this system. There was like a sense of alarm bells going off everywhere and people were waking up. And even though once things settled down a bit, it dropped again, but it still was above what it was before. Have you experienced something similar with your food system?
Stuart Andrews:
Yeah. Yes. Yes. I think so. Well, particularly our eggs, because we have much more exposure with our eggs that they’re over. That’s probably at this stage, the biggest part of our farming business here. So where our eggs fluctuated a lot more in volume, it’s stabilized considering more gone up more. I think that’s probably a little bit around that people wanting to buy more local, better quality produce. We’re not there with our meat yet. I think that’s still a very growing side of our business. So I imagine it will probably end up the same position as the eggs. I mean, since late last year we haven’t, we were struggling to keep up with our egg supply to all that all of our customers were. In the three years prior. I think we donated to Oz harvest thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of eggs over that period of time. one, because we demand to have high quality. So, lest we’re getting the best, the freshest quality out there. We don’t send it. So we donate it so that somebody else that can use it. So it doesn’t go to waste. But yeah we don’t even have that except for maybe a young bird’s eggs. Everything else seems to be going. And, you know, I think there’s probably two levels to it. One more exposure. People know. More people know that we’re here. Two. People looking at what can they buy locally, but I still think we’ve got off there in likely was covered so far. particularly in Queensland. You know, I don’t think there’s been any anywhere near the setbacks that even, you know, new South Wales or Victoria have seen. And so I do feel that we’re yet to get our side of that. We’ve been, we’ve got off unscathed fairly well. Let’s hope it, I hope it doesn’t happen, but the same time I suspect we really probably needed to wake people up. So what is it that through adversity? I can’t think of what the saying is, but anyway, you know what I’m saying? So through a crisis of some form, we’ll get our sht together really.
Morag:
Yep. And coming back to what you just said before about where does the change happen? Will it changes by getting your system working really well so that it’s just singing and people can see that. People can experience it. They can see that whole systems approach is making a huge difference by sharing the stories of the examples. Like you’re saying like through a drought, you get that extra six years and that’s phenomenal. Like when you hear these stories, when you see it, when it’s this palpable, tangible difference that can be made. You know, the scaling is maybe not necessarily important. It’s about amplifying what you do at each of the small steps and making those connections and having people like the permaculture movement pick those stories up and spread them out through the community too as well. So just as a final thing, I did say final before. How do people find out about you courses, your farm and get in touch with you? Is there, are there particular links that you’d like to send people to? I can put them down in the show notes below, but did you want to mention anything just now?
Stuart Andrews:
Well, our training course is called Tarwyn Park Training. So if you go on there, we have a website, but just Google that. Our training program will pop up. And then of course, we’ve got Forage Farms, which is just put in Forage Farms. And once again, they pop up. My eldest son, Hamish, he’s in charge of our websites. He’s done all the work towards building our sites and all of our meat box sales, which can all be done online. He’s done all of that. And in actual fact that he’s done a lot of work to the training course as well. A lot of that material, which I think is really important because although this all seems logical to me and probably seems logical to you, to the average person they struggled to get hold of it as simple as it seems. It seems to be hard to get hold of. And I find that when I speak, I sometimes speak on a level that seems to be above what other people can handle it, even though it is really simple, but it’s the way it’s perceived, the way it comes across. So Hamish being involved in writing the material. He’s 22. So he now speaks on the same level as the people that I’m speaking to. So they get this information makes a lot more sense to them because it’s been written by somebody who is akin to them. You know, not somebody who’s been around this for 30 years or whatever, and I think that’s really important. Anyway, so they’re the two areas that you can get in contact. We run courses all over Australia. I think this year we’ve got set down to do 16 or 17 courses, which is stupid. It’s too many. I didn’t, wasn’t planning on running that many, but people just I’m very bad at saying no. People say, Oh, could you come around and call us? Here I go. Yeah, no worries. All right. And then I just, yeah, I just keep saying yes all the time, which I probably should say No, because it’s a bit difficult, but there you go. That’s what we do. So we also run tours on the farm at Forage Farms and Hamish and our other son Lachlan, they both work on the farm or they pretty much run the farm. They run the tours. Once again, because they speak at the level that the people over there cause there’s kids there and mums and dads and so forth. So people can come to a tour at Forage Farms. They’ll learn about the animals and what we do, but natural sequence farming as well. And they’ll learn from the boys and they’ll get to see it as they go so and look, I’m all for, I love questions. I love people asking me questions. And if I know the answer, I will give the answer. If I don’t know the answer I’ll endeavor to find out and the boys are the same. So that’s all about just delivering information as clearly as possible so that people can take it home and do something with it.
Morag:
Well, thank you so much for taking the time today, to answer my questions and to be here exploring permaculture and natural sequence farming. It’s just been absolutely delightful to spend this time with you again today. And hopefully I’ll come and visit you soon up at the farm. Bring my family along. That’d be great.
Stuart Andrews:
You’re more than welcome. More than welcome. And thank you for actually asking me to join. I mean, I’m up for a chat anytime I’m told by my family that I talk too much and that’s probably true, but it’s the only way you really get the message out is by talking. I’ll talk to anybody. I’ll talk to a brick wall if it wanted to listen. That’s the why you get the message out. It’s interesting. Funny how the universe works, but we were in town earlier and I went to the cafe. We got a coffee and the lady that was serving us was the lady that arranged that talk that you and I.
Morag:
Yeah. Wow. That is so amazing.
Stuart Andrews:
I’m doing the talk with you. I meet her in the cafe. There you go.
Morag:
There you go! Well, it’s been so great to chat and I look forward to catching up with you again soon. Thanks for taking the time and good luck with all your 17 courses. And I hope your family’s all set up for you. I know what it’s like, you know, when you start traveling around the countryside and you know, like everyone has to kind of hold thought while you’re away.
Stuart Andrews:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve been at this now for the farm, this farm for four years. So for the first couple years it was training everybody, including myself how this operation works and I’ve be running the training courses since 2012. So that’s a little bit all how to handle, I guess. Getting the younger generation trained up, I don’t have to worry about going away. For this year now Megan can travel with me, which is nice. She can do everything she needs to do. She does all the accounts and the ordering and everything for the business. And she can do that remotely. So she gets to travel with me, which is good. So she gets to see other parts of the country and the boys get to run the farm without their parents getting in the way. Which is always positive because I was never given that opportunity when I was a young fellow to do that. And I just want them to grab all of it and run with it and do whatever they can do. Look, everybody makes mistakes. And the only way you ever learn, unfortunately, is by making it. Alll we can do is hopefully minimize the serious mistakes and, and leave them to the more simple mistakes. So, and I’d say that they don’t make many mistakes. So, you know, that’s all part of my philosophy as well. They’re on a journey and I just want to help them on their journey.
Morag:
Awesome Dad!
Stuart Andrews:
Thank you very much for your time. And yeah, we’ll talk again. I’m sure.
Morag Gamble:
Thanks Stuart! Take care. Bye. So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link’s below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new, all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
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LEARNING TO GROW A GARDEN?
If your main interest is getting a thriving and abundant food garden set up, then take a look at my online permaculture gardening course: The Incredible Edible Garden.
Much love
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work – the Gubbi Gubbi people. And I pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.
- Podcast Audio: Rhiannon Gamble
- Podcast Music: Kim Kirkman