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The Sustainable Hour no. 560 | Transcript | Podcast notes
Our guests in The Sustainable Hour no. 560 on 6 August 2025 are Peter Andrews and Martin Royds who deliver a masterclass in landscape function, soil biology, and the power of observation – as well as a refreshing dose of generousity, humility and hope.
In this episode, we return to a conversation in Episode 557 – a deep dive into Natural Sequence Farming with pioneering thinker Peter Andrews. This time, we’re joined by someone who has turned theory into practice: regenerative farmer Martin Royds, whose success story brings Peter’s ideas to life with clarity, humility and practical impact.
Peter Andrews opens the discussion by reminding us of the obvious – and the forgotten. Australia’s ancient landscapes once managed water and fertility naturally, creating productive ecosystems long before colonisation. He explains how we can restore these systems by mimicking nature’s patterns: recycling waste, building water tables, and encouraging the movement of nutrients across the land.
But it’s in Martin Royds’ story that the vision becomes tangible. A fifth-generation farmer from Braidwood, Martin shares how he transitioned from chemical-intensive agriculture to a regenerative system inspired by Peter’s observations. By rehydrating his land, redesigning paddocks, composting local waste, and “letting plants move in”, he has created a self-sustaining, highly productive farm ecosystem.
What once was a 4-metre-deep erosion gully is now a lush watercourse with over 12 species of aquatic plants. What once cost him $10,000–30,000 a year in fertiliser now runs on sunlight, compost, and the natural movement of animals – delivering healthier cattle, lower costs, and a thriving biodiversity.
“We have overlooked the obvious – change is necessary.”
– Peter Andrews
“The whole farm is now designed to be rain-ready. It’s very simple. Sunlight, water, CO₂, compost – and gravity.”
– Martin Royds
Martin explains how his cows now help fertilise the hilltops simply by walking uphill to ruminate and rest. He’s turned erosion gullies into ecological assets. The birdsong on his farm now cues his plants to open their stomata before sunrise – nature’s own alarm clock for photosynthesis.
His bottom line? Huge savings, healthier food, and a flourishing ecosystem. And all achieved by “working with nature rather than against it.”
“The abundance mentality is: there’s plenty. Nature provides. We just need to help it function.”
– Martin Royds
Also in this episode:
– Colin Mockett’s global climate news, featuring EU climate surveys, food-waste maggots in Lithuania, and a critique of Australia’s climate policy delays.
– A closing original song inspired by Martin and Peter’s philosophy: Let the Plants Move In – a poetic celebration of regenerative farming and solar-powered ecosystems.
→ More songs from The Sustainable Hour here
ABOUT MARTIN ROYDS
Martin Royds is an award-winning regenerative farmer from Jillamatong near Braidwood, New South Wales. After being poisoned by chemical sprays, he radically transformed his farming practice. Today, he applies holistic management and natural sequence principles to restore soil, retain water, and build resilience. His farm became a refuge during the bushfires, providing water to emergency helicopters – a testament to his landscape’s transformation.
“I was a chemical farmer. I was a contract sprayer and it’s very easy to go out and kill everything. It’s much more exciting to go out and encourage abundance.”
~ Martin Royds, regenerative farmer from Braidwood
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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org
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Transcript of The Sustainable Hour no. 560
Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (00:00)
The sun is rising on a clean energy age.
Jingle: (00:12)
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson:
Welcome to The Sustainable Hour. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land of the Wadawurrong people. We pay tribute to their elders – past, present and those that earn that tremendous honour in the future. We’re broadcasting from stolen land, land that was never ceded, always was and always will be First Nations land. In the ancient wisdom that they honed from nurturing both their land and their community for millennia before that land was stolen, lies so many answers to the climate crisis that we are currently facing. And we could do well to observe that and to walk together with our First Nations, our brothers and sisters into the future with renewed vigour – and that wisdom.
Mik Aidt (01:21)
We’ve set aside this full hour for yet again a talk about regeneration and farming and natural sequence farming with Peter Andrews. A different perspective on it because we have new guests coming in. But before we begin, let’s hear what’s been happening around the world in the global news seat we have Colin Mockett OAM, who is ready, I’m assuming, Colin, with the news from around the world?
Colin Mockett OAM’s Global Outlook:
Thank you, Mik. My roundup this week begins in Europe, where the European Commission released the latest issue of its Eurobarometer, which has been surveying the beliefs of European Union residents since the EU’s founding in 1993. The latest figures show that across the EU’s 27 member states,
85 per cent of its people described climate change as a serious problem and tackling it should be a priority. Two out of three people – or 67 per cent – said that their own national governments were not doing enough to tackle the problem. The research was matched by another world-ranging poll carried out by the independent company Dinata, which does market research for private and public sector clients.
This one was commissioned by the non-profits Oxfam International and Greenpeace International to carry out a survey gathering opinions from 13 countries across the world’s biggest economies as well as the global South. The Dynata figures showed that eight out of 10 people worldwide said that they were disappointed with their government’s response to climate change.
The specific wording of Dynata’s questions put an extra twist in that popular discontent. Three out of four people, more actually, it was 77 per cent, said that they would be more willing to support a political candidate who would prioritise taxing the super-rich and polluting companies like oil, gas and coal companies. And that, dear listeners, is the exact opposite to what’s happening in the world’s largest economy, that’s America, at this time.
But now back home to a stark warning from the Australian Institute, which points out that now, in the second half of 2025, we are statistically nearer to 2050 than we are the year 2000. And yet our government is nowhere even close to achieving the net zero goal that it set itself for that 2050 date. The Institute’s Amy Remarcus said that the Albanese government was deliberately delaying taking the climate action that every rational thinking person knows is necessary to save the future. And that was putting an end to new coal and gas.
Instead, she says, we’re getting another inquiry into the gas industry. We don’t need it. We know the answers, she said. That is to tax the companies already stripping the land of resources properly and don’t approve of any new projects. You’re always going to have the Barnaby choices of the world yelling at clouds, she said. But how many more unseasonable weather events unprecedented storms, food shortages, algae blooms, animal losses, rising global tensions, illnesses, historic floods and droughts do we have to see before we start realising the future is actually now? ‘The politicians making decisions will not be here in 2050 for the ultimate reckoning’, she said. Some of those who have dedicated their political careers to being as big a barrier to action as they possibly can, won’t even be alive to see the fruits of their poisonous labour. But to pretend that this is all something that will only impact us in the future, instead of the changes that we are all seeing and experiencing every day, is just as dangerous.
But now to the United Kingdom, where the BBC has reported on a revolutionary new way to recycle food waste. Most people are inclined to shoo flies away from their food, and the thought of maggots in your bins is enough to make most people’s stomach turn. But scientists have convinced a handful of European city councils to embrace maggots, more formally known as fly larvae, and their taste for rotting food.
In Vilnius, which is the capital of the Baltic state of Lithuania, fly larvae have officially been given the job of processing the 2,700 tonnes of food waste that the city’s 600,000 residents put out for collection each year, alongside that of the six neighbouring councils. Energismen, the waste management company that began relieving Vilnius of its food waste earlier in the year, doesn’t even charge the city for this service. That is saving the city up to 2 million euros a year. That’s based on a target of processing 12,000 tonnes in 2026. That’s the company’s chief executive, Algerida Blasius, speaking.
Energisman rolled out new orange food waste bags to residents alongside an influencer marketing campaign to encourage more citizens to separate their food waste from their general waste. As the 2,700 tonnes collected is only a fraction of the 40,000 tonnes of household waste the city is thought to generate. Energisman, meanwhile, has plans to turn the fattened fly larvae into a new income stream. That’s why they don’t need to charge for the waste they’re taking. It houses around 6 million flies in a special zone within the Vilnius plant. They mate around every six hours, according to that CEO. A female fly can lay around 500 eggs in her average 21-day lifespan.
So the team are dealing with more than three million larvae a month, which can consume more than 11 tons of food waste in the first hungriest days of their lives. It’s the huge appetites of these tiny creatures that makes them such excellent candidates for food waste processing. The study shows that a swarm of them can devour a large 40 centimetre pizza, that’s the extra large in Australia in just two hours. But then the trick is to cull them before they transform into mature flies. That way the protein-rich fly larvae is converted into protein products for use in animal feed or industrial use, for example, as ingredients in paint, glue, lampshades and furniture covers. Also, their manure, known as frass, can be used as a fertiliser.
The company also has a university partnership in place to supply fly larvae for research purposes and for feeding bacteria. And of course, the larvae are very much in demand from the local fishing industry to use as bait. UK councils are interested and Mr Koch believes especially because weekly household food waste collections will become mandatory in England from March 2026.
And that piece of fly-blown news ends my roundup for this week.
. . .
Jingle: (09:48)
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.
Tony:
Our guest today is Peter Andrews. Peter was on quite recently talking about his, the methods that he’s developed from observing the land, essentially. I was under the impression that Peter’s techniques, suggestions, ideas were well and truly established in agriculture in Australia, but it seems not. So Peter, welcome! Thanks for coming on.
Peter Andrews:
Thank you very much for the offer. It’s an amazing situation, believe, simply because we have the oldest land that has produced the best fire and climate programs for the longest time. And the result from here is it should be a good news message because everyone can benefit from it. It doesn’t matter what your commercial position is. If it doesn’t, and it’s one of my very close practices in this as Gerry Harvey and he said there’s nothing more important than getting the environment right because that’s what we all rely on to go forward and so for the last 40 years he’s been allowing me to meddle with one of his multi-million dollar assets and we have now put all of the pieces in place so I’m not talking about an opinion I’m talking about an opportunity that’s a good news message everyone can take advantage of.
Tony: (11:27)
And what are the bits, Peter? What are the bits that you’ve been putting together with Jerry Harvey and other people?
Peter:
The bottom lines for Australia is that it was able to use water in the most efficient ways. Firstly, it was able to store it without evaporating under a sort of a grass covered layer. And it was able then to move the fertility from high points, which resulted in either floods moving them or winds and transport. But with both the liquid part of the factor and the water, at the root depth of plants so that the two things were the most efficient possible way you could make agriculture work. And so it ran on a water table and the fertility ran on movement by rain events. But once we understand these things, we could get agriculture to work in the same way. One of the things that I thought was so critically important in the early times of this was it would allow us to recycle almost all our… even human wastes and agricultural wastes. But there is fear that that will contaminate the system only if it’s in a flood system or moving without control.
The way the Australian landscape worked was that there was a natural water table underneath these layers and the rest was moved in a natural sequence related to the application of rain events. And although it sounds difficult when you just talk about it, if you’re looking at it, it becomes very obvious to say, of course, that must be how it could work. And of course, I often say people see big piles of mulch, like timber, rubbish, all packed up. And it can be done by a river or whatever, but it’s always above the level of the water in the river. That means that the river is now establishing a water table because it’s sitting there in the river. And any rain event will start moving that liquefied factor of it across the landscape. And it doesn’t matter how high up in the mountains it is or how low down in the system it is. While there’s this ability for the water to be able to create a water table and the liquid factor move over the top of it, the pressure of the water table stops it leaking into the deeper soils like the groundwater or whatever.
And it all occurred to me very, very early back in the 1960s. We put a bore down in Adelaide with our own machines and we went down 260 feet and then into a, which we knew somewhere, this coral seabed was there. And of course, when we got into that, it had water in it, which was higher pressure than the three layers of water we went through, which were poor quality.
So without realising it at the time, I realised that in fact this was a broad process that even our artesian basin was able to be under pressure. So it was able then to hold whatever was underneath it from getting deeper into the soil. Water obviously was under pressure, it was able to push up. And it’s a very critical addition and of course this whole landscape was programmed, because it grew on that principle alone.
It’s the most important thing in the world. But my problem has been over the last 20 years to talk about something that is not written in any statutes. And unfortunately, we’re still trying to realise that good common sense, and I believe that the one thing that is guaranteed, the truth should prevail. And anyone can go out today with the most modern scientific capacity we have, which is enormous at the present time and realise the truth would be available to everybody properly delivered.
Tony: (15:35)
We’ve also got on Martin Royds. Martin, we’ll bring you into the conversation now. What’s been your role? I understand you’ve worked, you and Peter have worked together for or influenced each other for a couple of decades now. What’s, yeah, what’s your role in the scheme of things now?
Martin Royds:
Yes, so suppose my role is I’m a fifth generation farmer in the Braidwood district, and like Peter was saying, the Australian landscape was really productive when my ancestors first came here and it slowly got worse and worse and worse. It could have been sheep, could have been cattle, a lot of rabbits and things like that, but my learning has been that it’s the management that’s caused the problem. So we brought sheep on and we just grazed the entire place the entire time and it was never rested.
And so when I first started farming the land was degraded, there was a lot of weeds coming up, indicators of a poor fertility cycle and that. We had big erosion gullies everywhere and when I first became aware of Peter I was actually in land care at that time in, and I was going to take my land care group up there to understand what Peter was trying to say. And then [ABC’s ] ‘Australian Story’ took off and I thought, I’ll never get near the guy.
Luckily through another friend of ours, Peter Hazel, I got invited to meet Peter at Maloon. And from then on, the process was just such a big aha moment to me. I’d actually studied applied science under Peter Cullen, who was in the Wentworth group and meant to be understanding how nature was degrading and how to fix it, but we were in a very mindset of just understanding bits of it and not the whole and probably not able to read how the landscape was functioning. And the first day I met Peter and he drew his map of how the Australian landscape functioned as a whole and it looked like one of the Aboriginal maps. And I went, ‘My God, now I get it!’
Peter mentioned that Peter Hazel and Paul Cockrum and I started the Natural Sequence Association, which was to understand what Peter was reading out of the landscape and then try and get that into an education process first. for most of us, and it probably took me 10 years till I fully got what Peter was on about, it was a process of us learning from what Peter can observe in the landscape because he tends to get out there and he waves his arms around and we’re a bit lost for a while going, is he talking about that hill or this really close bit or the moon? And then he’s saying, it’s actually he’s talking about the stars. yeah, so there’s all these, his brain expands out and gets so excited with seeing what’s in the landscape.
It takes a while for us who’ve been traditionally trained in a scientific parallel to see what he’s talking about. So then for me, probably the big process was my farm, Jilumetong, had a big erosion gully right through the middle of it, which was draining fertility and water off the farm. And Peter turned up and said, well, if we put some checks in these erosion gullies, and at that stage, he was going to push rocks in and we’re going to create leaky weirs. luckily for me, my system was a second order stream. So I was able to get a bulldozer in and block. And it’s effectively like it was a big incision in the landscape that was bleeding to death of all the fertility and water. And by putting these blocks, 14 of them, right two kilometres down my erosion gully, we totally reversed the system from a degrading eroding system to an egrading building system.
So Peter talks often about a negative feedback loop. The system we got into of overgrazing, draining the landscape, and then to try and get rid of problems over spraying with weedicides, herbicides, fungicides, and then artificially fertilising. We got onto this negative feedback loop that was paying a lot of big companies well.
But agriculture was suffering hugely. And my family got to the state where we were all financially in debt. And once my eyes were opened, I realised we were environmentally in debt. And socially, the communities were falling apart too. So I concurrently did holistic management training, which allowed me to open up and understand what Peter was talking about, and start seeing the real hole we were in. And most of the people who’ve come along with Peter have gone through holistic management training and it just teaches you to look at what your goal is and nearly all farmers everywhere want to leave the land in a better state.
Unfortunately we were told by the various departments that that meant chopping every tree down, burning every stump, killing every weed, et cetera. And then there was other people who’d jump up and saying, ‘You’ve degraded it. You can then buy our bag of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, whatever. And then when your soil’s degraded, you can then put lime and all those things on.’ So what we now call that was our more-on approach era, where the more and more we went down that path, the more and more we had to put on, and we were financially exhausted and clearly we destroyed the landscape functions.
So since then it’s been a very exciting program to start to form positive feedback loops. So everything I do now is focused on slowing water down, understanding more and more about how the Australian landscape used to function so we can replicate those things. One of those is letting all plants grow. I used to kill all my weeds and spray everything and plant three grasses and two clovers. I had a biodiversity of five and then with my set stocking the weeds rapidly came in because I overgrazed it etc. And now we’ve got 80 different herbs and grasses growing. We rest the land and we’ve slowed the water down. We’ve got contour lines high up in the landscape where we capture the water running off the neighbors, spread it out.
Then the next layer has got compost in it. So then you’ve got fresh water lenses, fertility lenses coming down the slope. And we’ve created this positive feedback loop that it actually costs us less to farm, and we produce more and our animals are healthier and don’t need drenches and don’t die of all sorts of things that they used to. We feel better. The landscape looks better because there’s lots of water there. The trees are all growing. Everything’s vibrant. And it’s a program that you do think and I often admire Peter’s tenacity of being able to see this for 40 years and screaming from the hilltops and everybody poo-pooing him. Luckily he’s got a fighting spirit in there that’s this information coming out.
Peter:
It’s a form of guilt. I felt if I didn’t do something, I’d die thinking what a bastard I was for not having tried to get it to happen. So I’m forced by virtue of, I lived on a station in the 40s where everything disappeared by thermal management of the sun because the mines had burnt all the trees. And then we had the very wet period of the 60s. So I’d seen these massive extremes.
And without really realising it, then I moved, because my brother took over the station, I went to a little place at Gawla, and suddenly I had to learn to be a farmer. And we’d never had to deal with weeds, and we didn’t bother about having to worm or immunise sheep. When I got to Gawla, we had to do everything, and costing me a fortune of 40,000 a year to keep just a few horses, a couple of sheep alive.
And so I thought, this is crazy! And then I moved up to the Hunter Valley. So I’d been from the dry interior to the estuarine area and then into a catchment. And the penny started to drop. I thought, dear, oh dear, I can’t believe this, this old landscape. And then I looked at the history of it and I thought, wow, what a chance this is. So then I started to realise, because I’d been sort of practicing looking at progressions and so on from, since I was very young.
And I could see that if the plants built the sediments, it was like a living process that you could understand and reproduce. And of course, for the first 40 years, I was running a business, I’ve bred horses and so on. And I was just copying to reintroduce what used to be. And then I got with Martin and then I kept working out why we needed to do these things and why more people need to understand.
And that got me here at Braidwood, and then at Bungonia. And I disbelieve, as I introduced you, that in fact, if we put something in practice where the damage had been visually available and recorded by previous civilisations, it would be the road forward. It still is, because I can assure you today, because I came here, and I’ve watched the landscape build itself while I was tinkering with it, I learned a hell of a lot more about what everyone else could do that I hadn’t been able to advise Martin in the early days. So he was sort of growing along and he’s been doing his little series of developments as well. But nothing beats what this old landscape used to do.
And if we could convince people that an independent advisory service would guarantee everybody could use it, because I’m sort of saying to people, ‘Well, if you think you’re as smart as a plant, then you can do it!’ – because the plants did it for millions of years actually while humans have been failing for the last 10,000 years. We’ve got no place where we didn’t fail. Not only that, we’ve been back in the same place every 150 years and wrecked it again. And of course we got out here and wrecked this, but you know, we’re confusing ourselves because we think that a group of people didn’t do that. Yeah, they had their little influence as well.
So we need to come back, and all of us need to work together. And I found it that the Aborigines are the easiest to train and the most acceptance of the fact that this old landscape had been giving them a problem too. They had to divide it up into 60 countries, had to do this and do that and do something else. And they had no other means to solve it, so they used fire.
And the only thing I often quote, which doesn’t help me at all, but I’ll do it again, Einstein said, ‘If you use the process that’s caused the problem to solve it, you’re insane’. So, you know, we don’t like admitting that either, but the first thing you do is put your hand up and say, ‘Guilty as charged, Your Honour!’ Let’s get on now, because we know we can fix it.
Mik:
It sounds to me, Peter and Martin, that what you’re talking about in very simple words is that you are talking about farming with nature, instead of farming with products that you have sort of bought from an industry?
Martin:
Yeah! 100 per cent!
Peter:
If we take the simplest pieces of the puzzle, because it’s impossible to understand the complexity. There’s at least three million compounds just in a human body. But if we walked out and look at the sun, we should say: that is… We’ve got an energy crisis in this planet. And that’s the only source of energy that we can use, only if we use a plant to convert it to a product that we want to use. It’s very simple.
I never hear it debated, but try it! Walk outside and then tell me how you could live without that energy.
And then you can’t use that energy until you get a plant, and you can’t get the plant until you manage the water. Pretty simple.
Why that… I thought that would be so simple in the first few years. It’d only take me three or four or five years and it’d all be away and going, but I’m still….
Martin:
And the iron boat mission…
Peter:
Absolutely, I sure wanted it. I’m going to boat… It has only been in the water about three times in the lifetime I’ve had a damn thing. I want to go back onto it. I’m happy to hand it over to the most reliable people who want to deal with the truth because you definitely have the technical ability to do it all. And it’s not going to cost anything. See, people come to me and say, ‘Oh but it’s going to be too expensive’. I say: ‘It costs nothing and it ran for millions of years. How could it be expensive?’
Tony:
Martin, if we can, I’d like to go back and put some metrics on the difference that these techniques or methods made on your farm specifically. So how deep were the erosion gullies? If we go along those lines.
Martin:
Okay, yes, so the actual – the farm I was born on and spent the first 14 years on, it’s got an erosion gully that, and part of it my father did, was to drain a boggy bit, it was 20 metres deep, 60 feet. We called it the Grand Canyon. The farm I’m on here, Jilimutong, it only had a four metre deep erosion gully. So you could drive across and then it just dropped sheer four metres down to the bottom of the erosion gully, but there was probably at least three or four headwall cuts actively eating up and most of those are about a metre deep. So they were… it was going down a metre every couple of years with… or maybe every decade or so. So the potential was to go very deep. We hadn’t hit the base of the rock.
Sorry what was the other question?
Tony:
Yeah, what did you…
Martin: (30:55)
Yes, how do we do it? Peter was saying put rocks in there because there is a law that you’re not allowed to go into a third order stream or above and do structures without getting all sorts of approval. The Maloon Institute’s been working on this and trying to change this because there’s a conundrum there where we’re meant to be looking after the land but we’re not allowed to stop an erosion gully. It does seem a bit strange.
So anyhow, because mine was a second order stream, I was able to get a dozer in there, biggest dozer you could get on the road, a D8. And for the cost of one year’s fertiliser, I built the entire system. So it was $14,000. We went down two kilometres of erosion gullies lengthwise and put these weirs in. And each weir backs up to the next one. So the water that runs around from the top weir falls into water on the next one.
And that was basically where I decided… Peter was extremely busy at the time when I did these. He came once and then I didn’t see him for six months. So I had to do the mostly out of what I understood what he was talking about. I’d chase him around on other talks and get it. Yeah, so luckily most of, well nearly all of my weirs are still in function. I put them in in 2007, and they’re still functioning now.
So one year’s fertiliser budget totally reversed the system. So for the last 18 years I haven’t had to spend $10,000 a year – or now it’d be $20,000 or $30,000 a year – on fertiliser because I’ve got my fertiliser system cycling with on my farm, instead of a drain of fertility and water going off.
Tony: (32:52)
Just on that, Martin, what is supplying the nutrients?
Martin:
As Peter said, most of it’s sun. Most of a plant’s structure comes from the sun’s energy and a bit of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Both of those are in abundance, and now because I’ve got the water system slowed down, I’ve got water, sunlight, CO2, and nitrogen comes out of the atmosphere too. So most of my fertility is just coming straight out of the landscape.
The phosphorus, which we used to put on every year, I’ve actually measured it coming off my neighbours’ at 12 parts per million. And at the bottom of my system, it’s only 4 parts. So we’re stripping phosphorus out of the water flowing onto the property and then recycling it within the farm.
I do have compost heaps now that we put into the contours higher up. So I get a lot of waste product from from the cattle yards in town. I’ve got butcher shops give me their bone waste. I get all the wood chips from the sawmill. Most of the… well nearly all of the products I get come for free. We collect all the waste from music festivals. The National Folk Festival in Canberra a couple of months ago, all their waste comes onto Jillamatong. We compost it down and then put it in the channels high up.
So that’s my inputs which are you know when you put look at it – a pretty small compared to what we used to spend $10,000, 20,000, 30,000 dollars buying and throwing on and then we let gravity move them around the farm and also I’ve changed all the the structure of the fencings on the property whereas before I used to do it on landscape changes I’ve now gone up the slope and so the
I let my cattle come in and drink and eat out of the erosion gully down the bottom, which has now got an abundance of water plants in there. So we’ve got at least 12 water plants in the system now where before it was an erosion gully of bare earth. Those plants are pulling all the nutrients out of the water flowing onto the farm and off the farm. Cows can eat that. Then they have a little bit of dry grass halfway up the slope. And then we plant trees on the top of the slope.
They go and sit in the sun up there in winter, ruminate, stand up, defecate. They’ve moved five tons a day of fertility up my slope. In summer, they do the same, because it’s cooler up there and so, yeah, we just do that. And initially I used to encourage them by putting salt on top of the hill and getting them to walk up and down, but now the trees have grown up, they naturally walk up there. And it’s a very simple process. You know, I’ve running a lot of cattle and a lot of land with one guy three days a week. And so it’s very efficient, very inexpensive. And my profit level has gone through the roof.
Mik:
Is it depending on gravity and meaning a hilly landscape? Could you do the same on a flat landscape?
Martin:
It’s very, very rarely land is flat. It just has to… Well, a good example was down on the bottom of Jillamatong where it does flatten out a bit, there was erosion gullies eating into the landscape and the soil conservation in the 1980s came and put those drains Peter was talking about. They call them contours, but they’re a drain. And they only had a one inch fall every hundred metres. That was enough to keep the fertility washing off my farm. Those drains were still bare earth 25 years after they were built. And we went and just put little structures in there, half a metre high every hundred metres. And the next rain event, all of fertility washing off my neighbours got caught in them and bang, those channels turned into kampungi, phragmites and all these lovely plants growing with the fertility from my neighbours that then we could move to the top of the hill again.
As you said, it is absolutely working with nature instead of trying to fight it, which I did a lot of in my early days. I was a chemical farmer. I was a contract sprayer and it’s very easy to go out and kill everything. It’s much more exciting to go out and encourage abundance.
And just if I can touch on that for a second, one thing I noticed in Peter’s nature, he’s got an abundance mentality, which is there’s plenty of sunlight, there’s plenty of CO2, there’s plenty of water. We just need to get it to function. And if we have that abundance mentality, we want to share and give, which is what Peter’s done all his life, is trying to share his knowledge.
The scarcity mentality, which is how most people seem to function, is that there’s not enough and so I’ve got to hold onto it and look after it and what I can grab for myself I’ll keep for myself. And that mentality is very open to people saying, we’ll sell you a bag of this and you’ll get more or you’ll be able to take more out of the land. And I was in that mentality for many years. You get hooked in this cycle of more and more on, as we call it here. So once you get into an abundance mentality, which when you look at it is where the Aborigines were at. They moved around the landscape. They felt there was plenty of food there. They didn’t need to store it. They did encourage through burning, through bit of management, through sowing yams or whatever they did a little bit. But most of it they said, we only need four hours a day to get all the food we need and we’ll leave some behind on that tree or in the ground for the next people coming by. So it was an abundance mentality and they lived happily with the land. And then along came white man who put a fence up and said, ‘This is mine, piss off!’
You know, we’re going to have, we’re going to take as much out. And historically, if you look at where Australian farmers came from, most of them came in a ship with some fairly heavy mangles around their wrists and ankles. And if not, they were miners coming for gold, or they were police or army people who escaped and ran away from the ship. So our mentality was: ‘What can we take from this land for ourselves?’ and not: ‘What can we give?’
And that’s what I’ve learned through Peter is when you start giving, man, does it explode. We’ve got 50 different birds here that the twitches go. Some shouldn’t be nesting in this area. And that’s exciting. I woke up this morning, you know, an hour before sunlight, you hear the birds tweeting.
Did you know that that encourages the plants to open their stomata and start functioning? So because I’ve got birds on my farm, my plants start an hour before dawn, open their stomata, take in the dew, are all hydrated, ready to grow when the sun gets up. When I didn’t have birds, they were sitting there not knowing when things were going to change.
Tony:
So that shows the interconnectedness of nature.
Martin:
Yep. And we’re just starting to learn. Fungi, bacteria and all that stuff is a world we know a fraction about. Yeah. And that’s very exciting when basically all I do is try and encourage everything to do its thing and sit back and watch the abundance happen.
Tony: (41:17)
Yeah, get a balance there.
Peter:
Just to clarify a point, I had a very long-term association with John Williams, was the chief of water resources in CSIRO. And it was my fault, I didn’t explain it clearly enough, but once our rivers had degraded deeply, it did seem impossible because he would say, we’d have to fill the rivers and so on. So a government that looked at that would say, there’s no way we can fill these rivers, it would cost billions.
So what I did with Gerry Harvey, we had the same erosion pattern in the top of the Hunter and it’s really the most degraded sand bed and all the cliffs are sandstone on that catchment. So it was the least effective resilient landscape on the planet. And so what happened to be able to compensate for that, he allowed me to build a model, so that you could take water off the flow system high up. And our rivers were perched, so they were the highest point. You could take water from that property all the way to Newcastle for gravity. And John had always said, and the government had said, we have to fill the rivers, that’s all impossible, which is probably still in the juggernaut. But by being able to build models, and Martin has seen these examples, which we didn’t mention, we can take water off the tops of catchments everywhere and redistribute it and replace all of the natural systems.
Well, we’ve got, because it used to get too wet every so often, we now have a drainage system so it can’t get too wet if we want it to. But we can make it wet when we do want to. And all of those things are run by gravity, but that’s been a longer term program for me to actually understand how and why we could do that, but it’s definitely available to everyone.
Martin:
One of the amazing things I’ve seen at Peter’s property at Bungonia is he’s got some experiments coming in his drive where there’s compost heaps and then he trickles water into that and so then you can see this fertility moving down and it’s a stark line between where there’s an abundance of fertility and water in the soil and the grasses and everything are growing really well and where they come to what was a sheer into an erosion gully, it’s grasped up where that’s leaching down and it then blocks the water from running out. So you’ve got a biological dam effectively on the edge. Whereas the other, you can just walk a couple of metres upstream where it’s not getting affected by the structures he’s done there and it’s just a sheer cliff that is leaching, it’s a very dispersable soil, it’s still eroding. And so that was just done by putting compost upstream and trickling some water down through it.
And that’s what Peter’s explained there is that you can take water off a stream and have that fertility in the water off stream that then can repair land without having to do all these big structures.
It is a big thing that we’ve known, well, Landcare eventually realised was in most of our repair work, we were focusing on the sides of erosion gullies and not realising that it was stream bed lowering was the real problem. And so now there is a lot of stream bed structures to try and stop that. Unfortunately, the law hasn’t caught up with our knowledge yet, and you’re not allowed to go back into a lot of streams and put them back up to where they used to be. And there’s all who are about it being fish passage and that, but I can show you here on my place. I’ve got golden perch I found 70 metres from the erosion gully swimming out across the paddock. They don’t need all these fish structures like trout do, but we’re doing all this stuff to protect a non-native fish. It seems crazy.
But even with that, the native fish used to go up when a flood was on, and it didn’t necessarily run in seasons. It ran on rain events and flood systems. So they could do it whenever the flood was in, and they’d move up, and then they would spawn accordingly out in the billabongs. And of course, when the water receded, old fish would go back into the river and the young fish would grow out in the billabong. We can do all of those things today because this landscape has shown us exactly how those things used to work and we can artificially make all of those things work at the highest level because we’re manipulating the system.
And I don’t know why that is hard for people to understand, but certainly our scientific group need to get back into the landscape with the ability to understand its evolution rather than just what happened in Europe where we had freezing and thawing. And the freezing and thawing gave us seasons. Our seasons here are rain events more or less. Some parts of it, of course, are going to season them deep south and the deep down the north. But in the middle, I know where I grew up, it didn’t really have a season. We got a cold winter, of course. Everything changed when it rained within a week, just about. So we live on water management rather than the seasonal cycles.
And that’s my whole farm is now designed to be rain ready. So all these contours I put across the farm, a big storm comes and there’s a gushing, and I’ve seen it running down off the mountains that surround my farm, 10, 15 centimetres deep running through the fences onto my farm. And then within 70, 100 metres, it’s all soaked in and it’s… It’s not just what you see, it’s what’s happening underneath the soil. All those microbes, the worms, the fungi and bacteria, they’ve enlivened my soil that it’s ready to take water in. And the channels I’ve got, and just as Peter was saying, I’ve got some weirs higher up that I can pull a plug out and let water go out into contours and hydrate the ground lower down.
If I can see an East Coast low coming down, we’re in a bit of a dry period, everything’s looking a bit parched, but I can see in three days time we’re going to get a rain event. I’ll pull a plug out and then it gets everything already wetted and ready for when the rain comes, everything will grow really quickly.
Tony: (48:44)
I know that a lot of the research in universities comes from Big Ag. Is there much money going into, or any money going into this sort of research at universities?
Martin:
Well, a good question. There’s organisations like the Source for Life, which have been given small funding from the government. went out, oh, what was that, Peter? 12, 15 years ago, yeah, at least 15 years ago. So Source for Life, which was started by Michael Jeffries, was looking at the soil’s been the most important asset that Australia had and we were rapidly losing it as we all know in our agricultural systems and drainage systems. So Dillamottong was one of the first 19 farms that they did and they sent out forensic accountants and scientists here to look at what we were doing and came up with the figures of how much less it was costing us to produce a kilo of beef. And then we’ve been involved in a number of other studies looking at how our biodiversity’s increased, our bird lives increased, our soil carbon levels have increased. Unfortunately, most of the government schemes that are developed to promote building soil carbon, building biodiversity, I’m not entitled to because it always says you’ve got to be doing a new thing.
And when you’ve met Peter and you’re already ahead of the game, I can’t say I’m doing something new because they’ll say, oh, you’ve been doing this for 15 years, so you’re not entitled to any of the grants. A bit unfair, but that’s the way it works. Some government departments are sponsoring those sort of movements. Land care changed in the time I was there from let’s plant trees to let’s do biodiversity to let’s learn from people like Christine Jones, Elang Ingyin, Nicole Masters about soil biology and how important that is for our agricultural systems. I just had two university students here for the last month. They’re studying agriculture at Sydney University and they’ve been coming to people like me now to do a month’s internship.
And it was exciting to hear that these young women, even though born and bred in the city, were very open to understanding soil health, food health, nutrient density of food and things like that. And they’re going to be the new generation, been reading Peter’s books and that sort of stuff. And so they’re starting to understand. So we do have more and more people on the ground learning. As with most of these changes, there’s a group of people in the middle who’ve been talking about their system for their entire career. And it’s very hard for somebody to put their hand up and go, I’ve had it wrong and change.
Succession is probably the best way of changing that group. Interestingly, most of the professors I’ve met with Peter over the decades have been retired professors. They’ve got out of the system, reviewed what they’ve taught, and some of them have said to my face, I taught for 50 years the wrong thing. I met Peter and he’s shown me some of the things I had wrong and then they’ve worked with Peter in building the science up to prove what he can see in the landscape is actually how and why it works.
I’ve always made it absolutely clear that I’m happy to take any group anywhere, do I understand this, but I can honestly say, right from Michael Jeffery through to the only person who really gave me a clear run was Tony Coote and Gerry Harvey. Otherwise, it’s a restricted process and it’s done by hearsay.
And of course, there’s been a bit of a pushback from government regulations that we know how it works. We don’t need to change what we’re doing. And my frustration is it is not at all difficult to get the right people for the technical abilities that we’ve got today to understand what I’m talking about. And, you know, we’ve been completely restricted. And even Martin with his… He didn’t have time to come 100 kilometres over with his students. But this is one of the things that happened, mostly because we’re all fairly busy, I guess.
But there is this serious need immediately for these things to bring together the practical people. My son’s been running around the whole of the country and it took me 45 years to get him established and starting it. He he couldn’t believe that in fact, this silly old bugger that was his father was actually up to something that made sense. Now he’s worse than me in his own way, but you can’t do it on his own. Nobody can. We all have to start to say, we’ve overlooked the obvious. Let’s be really honest and say, we’ll realise that the first thing is we have to recognise change is necessary and let’s get about it.
Tony:
That’s about all the time we’ve got for today. Have you got any parting words, any take home messages that you’d like people to, or our listeners to take on?
Martin:
Mine is start looking at nature and enjoying it and working with it rather than against it and abundance will happen. And then the other big thing I think will be a game changer is if farmers started getting paid for nutrient density of food rather than cents per kilo. Because it’s very easy to put weight into something with salt and water, but it’s not that it wants to put healthy to produce really healthy food with good nutrients in it, you’ve got to be doing what Peter’s talking about. You’ve got to have a system where all those three million compounds are available for the plant to do it.
And the best example is that Roundup, which is the most commonly used agricultural chemical on the planet, works by stopping nutrient getting to the plant. It starves it. And when we eat the plants that have been sprayed, which many of our plants are sprayed before harvest with Roundup, it then gets into our system and blocks the nutrients. And there’s 26 basic nutrients we need. Roundup blocks at least four or five of those every day of our life. And you cannot have a healthy person when you’re missing five or six of the essential nutrients. So bio-organic nutrient-dense.
Mik:
Let’s end the Hour and leave on a song. We’ve actually created a song for you and I’m curious whether you’ll like it.
. . .
SONG
‘Let the Plants Move In’
(Verse 1)
I came to the driest land,
Where no rivers would flow,
Trees were dead, soil cracked wide,
But between the hills, the sun still glowed.
I saw the story written there,
In the roots and in the sand —
If we just give water back,
The plants will heal the land.
(Chorus)
Guide the water, let the plants move in
Let them weave their green through hollows and wind
The earth remembers, it holds it all in hand,
Welcome to our solar-powered, drive-itself land.
(Verse 2)
There were melon holes and crab hole scars,
Where the salt had come to stay,
But a little pond, a contour line,
Was enough to generate a different way.
This is not a war, and it’s not a fight,
No chemicals to command —
Just help the water find its path,
Allow the plants to expand.
(Chorus)
Guide the water, let the plants move in
Let them weave their green through hollows and wind
The earth remembers, it holds it all in hand,
Welcome to our solar-powered, drive-itself land.
(Bridge)
Every little blade of grass
Knows its place, knows its past —
When we listen to the land,
We can make it whole, at last.
(Chorus)
Guide the water, let the plants move in
Let them weave their green through hollows and wind
The earth remembers, it holds it all in hand,
Welcome to our solar-powered, drive-itself land.
(Outro)
Walk out to where the gum trees grow,
Feel the grass beneath your feet,
The quiet work of root and leaf,
Where sky and plants and soil meet.
Guide the water, and let the plants take over…
Our plants are solar-powered,
so let the land drive itself.
. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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