AgVic Talk Season 9

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Resilience, it’s a word used a lot these days. Indeed, some may argue it’s used too much. But it’s fundamental for people and communities being able to successfully adapt and recover in the face of adversity.

G'day, I'm Drew Radford. And in areas that face drought and other natural disasters, resilience is increasingly important. A person who knows this only too well is Michael Gordon. He’s a farmer who's also had a career working with rural and regional communities during emergencies. To delve into why resilience is so important and how to build it further, he joins me for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Hello, Michael.

Michael Gordon:

Hello, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Michael, we want to delve down into your experience in emergency services, and particularly resilience, but you’re also a farmer by trade.

Michael Gordon:

Yes, I’ve run a few woollies, a few Merinos. And have in the past had fat lambs as well, and had a Poll Dorset stud at one stage and did a bit of showing with those. But in more recent times, have concentrated on the wool and just run straight Merinos.

Drew Radford:

You’ve got a foot firmly in 2 camps. Because not only you’re a farmer, but you’ve had an extensive career in emergency services, haven’t you?

Michael Gordon:

Yes. My first job when I left school was working for equivalent of Country Fire Authority in Tasmania, and did 10 years working with the volunteer brigades and looking after firefighting operations in rural areas before I moved to South Australia. And had 4 years over there running the equivalent of the state training centre for volunteers.

I’ve had experience in both Tasmania and South Australia. And part of the work in South Australia was involved in setting up the current incident management system that emergency services use around Australia.

Drew Radford:

You’ve seen the pointy end of obviously dealing with the fire, but disasters like fire, for want of a better description, peak events, the damage goes on for long afterwards and the community healing and the individual healing goes for long afterwards though, doesn’t it? And you’ve been involved in setting up community recovery committees, I understand.

Michael Gordon:

Yes, in more recent times when I’ve been doing consulting work, we have done quite a bit in that disaster recovery area and working with psychologists around that process as well. That’s been an area of interest that’s followed on from the original days where I was actually on the front line on the end of a hose or managing brigades on the fire front.

Drew Radford:

Central to this discussion is resilience – community and personal resilience. What’s personal resilience mean to you, Michael?

Michael Gordon:

It’s about strength, Drew. And part of that strength is something that I read the other day that really resonated with me. It's a chap by the name of Tim Curtis. And he wrote that first there must be some kind of stressor. And second, there must be a better than expected outcome, given the adversity that was faced.

And I think that’s a really interesting concept about trying to achieve what would be seen as a better than expected outcome. And in order to do that, the process of strength is an ongoing building of capacity process, and that’s where I see farmers have got extraordinary capacity.

There’s not many vocations, I don’t think, where on a daily basis you are faced with things like seasons that are completely out of your control. Where you’ve got to make major decisions without knowing what the capacity for the season or external factors to deliver on that is in coming months and years.

It’s those decisions that farmers face constantly. And there’s an inbuilt capacity-building process for farming and rural people that I think is quite different to non-farming people.

Drew Radford:

To maintain that capacity, Michael, how do they go about that? You’re saying that they’ve got the inbuilt capacity for that, but you also need to maintain it and build it further, I would imagine.

How can farmers and families do that and maintain their mental health and wellbeing during times of drought and natural disaster?

Michael Gordon:

Some do it easier than others, Drew.

And from my observation, a lot of it is about looking forward and not looking back. And about focusing on the things that you have some control over, and not getting wound up in the things that you don't have any control over.

Thinking about decisions around, are we going to keep stock or are we going to sell them? Are we going to feed stock? How are we going to feed them? All of those decisions are about looking forward. Where if it’s about saying it hasn’t rained, when’s it going to rain? And thinking about all the things that have got no control over, I don’t think that’s helpful in terms of being able to cope with what is a very distressful situation.

Drew Radford:

Dealing with things that you actually can physically alter, for want of a better description. The bigger picture, you’re entirely right, you can’t make the trees grow back or any of damaged pastures grow back faster, can you?

Michael Gordon:

When you’ve got limited resources and limited funds, there’s still things that you can do that are potentially good for your mental health.

For example, a family where their garden is really important to them is one of the things that will suffer in a drought situation. One of the things that family could do is find a way to end up with the garden being in a much better condition than it could have been by selectively doing things in that garden that is going to help it maintain itself over that rough period.

If the family doesn’t focus on that, every time they walk through that front gate and see the dead shrubs and the different things in the garden, it can add to the level of distress.

It’s not necessarily the big things all the time. Sometimes it’s about thinking about the things that make you happy, if you like, and finding ways to maintain that. If your normal pattern is to go to the netball or the tennis or the football in town on a Saturday afternoon. And when the drought hits or the bushfire hits you stop doing those things that give you pleasure, then that’s part of a decline, I guess, in happiness and the things that give you joy.

Drew Radford:

With the garden example, that’s also a sense of achievement. ‘I’ve had a small win here’, and then those wins can accumulate.

Michael Gordon:

Yes. And part of the situation with drought is that feeling of helplessness, and the unbelievable feeling of seeing hungry stock every day. And when they see the ute, or they see the trailer, that they run to the gate. That’s some of the most depressing things that farmers deal with during drought.

To be having things that take your mind off that and have pleasure and give you some joy is part of managing in that situation.

And part of it too is about getting away from the property. And we’re generalising here. All of this conversation, Drew, is generalisation. I want to acknowledge that and so that this may not work for some people. But finding a way to get off the property and do things that actually give you a break from those hungry stock that look at you every time you look out the window or drive up the laneway.

Drew Radford:

You’re also referencing something there as well, Michael, in terms of getting off the property, and you talked about netball and football. You’re talking about community there.

What’s community resilience mean to you?

Michael Gordon:

Things like drought and natural disasters, like fire and flood, Drew, affect the whole community. And it’s not just the farmers or the people that are dealing with it right in front of their eyes every day. The traders in the town and the whole spirit of the town can become oppressed or even depressed when the people that are part of that community are doing it tough.

And again, I’m talking about that word helplessness. Often, communities feel helpless when they see people around the town and the farming areas doing it tough. That’s a bit of a challenge for the progress associations and the disaster recovery committees and the like. Part of it is about setting up structures and activities during the year that become normal in peacetime, where you try and sustain those when it gets tough. In our local community hall where I live, we have drinks on the last Friday every month, and that’s been going on for years.

If something happens in the community where people are doing it tough, it’s important that people try and still keep coming to those Friday night drinks, because it’s part of that connection and about that feeling that you belong.

And a lot of communities, we hear it all the time recovering from the fires, there’ll be a sausage sizzle on a Sunday afternoon or once a month at the fire brigade shed. Things like that are really important from a community sense about keeping people together.

I heard, it was in Dimboola, I think, they started doing counter teas one night a week after the bushfires. And that was a gathering place where people would go on a Thursday night and have a meal at the local pub. And part of the funding of that bushfire recovery was providing some financial support and some subsidy for that.

But there’s a lot of communities that start those things, and when the funding runs out they keep doing them because it’s just such a good thing to do.

I think the other thing that’s a bit tricky is about labelling people and about drought affecting the farmers and no one else. The sort of things like the barbecue, the sausage sizzle in front of the post office, that’s the weekly or the monthly community sausage sizzle that’s a free snag. That’s the thing that farmers can turn up to and grab a snag on the way to get the mail or buy the stamps and not feel like it’s about them or that they’re getting welfare.

And that pride in farming families and farming communities is a thing. And the communities that get that and manage it well are the ones that succeed in times of adversity.

Drew Radford:

Is that part of your role, is coming in with these recovery committees to say, ‘Well, look, we can do this now, but this is a long-term project.’ Or a forever project, really.

Michael Gordon:

It’s a varying thing between communities. If you look at a community like Pomonal, for example, Pomonal have had a number of fires since the early 2000s. One of their first fires, they set up a community recovery committee. And that community recovery committee is still going today. It means that when there’s another incident or distressful situation in that community, they’re on the front foot and ready to fly because they’ve got the structures in place beforehand.

And as I mentioned before, things like community hall committees and progress associations can play that role; it doesn’t necessarily need to be a disaster recovery committee.

One of the consequences, unfortunately, is that people burn out. Because more often than not, it’s a small number of people in communities that continually put their hand up, often at great personal expense. I don’t mean financially, but personally and family-wise and business-wise. And the capacity to look after those people and share the workload around is a critical part of those structures to make sure that there’s some succession in place.

Drew Radford:

Resilience is arguably more of a newer notion in terms of building that capacity. Have you seen that pay off with disasters hitting communities again after a previous disaster, but they’ve put in resilience plans and building capacity like you’ve been talking about, and have you seen them benefit from it?

Michael Gordon:

One of the communities that come to mind is Sarsfield. And Sarsfield had significant fires many years ago now. That was largely a rural district not too far from Bairnsdale. But the way that community came together and functioned and led that recovery was an amazing effort. And absolute credit to all of the people in that Sarsfield community that were involved in that.

It is an incremental thing, Drew. It’s a bit like being a firefighter, I guess, that you continue to build your skills. And one of the things that impacts on that is if you haven’t got fires, if you keep doing training and you don’t get fires, sometimes brigades can find it difficult to keep people motivated because they’re not out there in anger. The difference after a disaster is that it’s not so much about a firefighter or maintaining motivation, it’s about continuing to build the capacity of the community.

And every bit of adversity that you go through is about building capacity and getting strength. And at some point though, some people don’t want to or can’t do it any more, and that’s when people decide to leave a district or stop doing what they’re doing. And I guess that’s always a choice.

And that in itself can cause grief for communities too. That when someone decides that they’re going to leave, and I’ve certainly experienced recovery in communities where people have decided that this is the third fire that we’ve had in the last 20 years, we don’t want to go through another fire and we’re going to move to another area. And that’s traumatic for them leaving that community, but it’s also a grieving process for the people in the community that say goodbye to them.

Drew Radford:

I guess, Michael, with community resilience, that also needs to take into account that different people within that community face challenges in their own unique ways.

Michael Gordon:

The other aspect that I often think about is the notion of, I’d like to use better words, but I’ll say optimist and pessimist. We’ve got optimist and pessimist in our community, and they deal with adversity and deal with situations differently.

And I think part of strong communities is about nurturing and enabling the people that are positive and look forward and are able to take control, if you like. Accept what’s happening and manage accordingly. And the ones who find it more difficult to accept what’s happened to them, part of the role of communities is about finding clever ways to be there for them and support them to get them through as well.

Drew Radford:

Michael is often assisted in his work with communities by clinical and consultant psychologist Rob Gordon.

Rob has worked with people and communities after traumatic events for over 40 years. Some of these have included the Black Saturday bushfires, the Port Arthur shootings, the Bali bombings and many, many natural disasters. From all this work, he has a unique and insightful perspective on resilience.

Rob Gordon:

I once spent an afternoon looking up this word, and it took me back to a Latin dictionary that I have from my great-grandfather sitting on my shelf. And the original Latin word is connected with reeds that grow in the river.

When I read that, suddenly I could see what the essence of it is. Because reeds are able to flex and deform and bend in the face of the flood coming over them. And then sometime later when the flood’s gone and the wind blows and the sun comes out, those reeds will slowly come up. It’ll take them a while, they’ll come up, provided that their roots stay in the ground.

And if you’ve ever tried to pull out reeds, they’re very difficult to extract. And I think the essence of resilience is that people remain rooted in what’s important in their lives. And that they can make sure that holds them in place so that whatever happens, whatever losses they have, they hang on to the meaning, the value, the purpose of their lives, and then they can rebuild around that.

I think that's the absolute essence of it.

Drew Radford:

Rob, for you, how do Victorians demonstrate personal resilience? Can you share some examples of what you’ve witnessed and observed in your work over the years?

Rob Gordon:

Let me give you a couple of stories.

I went to a small rural area that had quite a nasty bushfire, and I was milling around talking to people beforehand. And this elderly farmer who had a couple of adult sons and daughters, or daughters-in-law hanging around, came up and I started chatting to them. And he said he was quite badly affected. And I said, ‘Oh, what have you done?’

And he talked about how he and the boys, and the other people working on the farm, they put out the fires and sorted everything out, and they were absolutely exhausted after a few days work. And then he said, ‘So I got everyone together and I said, right, I’ve organised for old Bert from the local town to look after the stock for the next little while, and we’re all going to Queensland to have a holiday. And when we come back, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to plan how we’’re going to get through this recovery process.’

And I looked at him, I said, ‘You've been through a bushfire before, haven’t you?’ He said, ‘Yes, absolutely. And I’ve realised that the problem is you waste a lot of time.’

And I think of the New Zealand farmer who was severely affected by a flood, and I visited his community several times over 2 years. And the end of the time when he understood his stress, he said, ‘I understand now that most of what I did exhausting myself, working from dawn till dusk in the first few months was completely wasted, because I had to redo it all because it wasn’t planned according to a strategy that was going to work.’ Now, I don't know what the details are, I think he probably just put fences up where they were and only realised then that the pasture had been lost and he really need to replant his paddocks.

Now, I think the Victorian farmer had learnt that, and I can’t emphasise enough how stress makes us react in a very kneejerk way that doesn’t really look at the big picture. And you need to extract yourself and do that.

And I can give another example of an elderly couple who’d retired down to Gippsland, as it happens, and got caught up in the Black Summer fires. And I went and gave my talk about resilience. And they told me later, as a result of that, they’d actually decided... because they’d lost their house and they had a beautiful garden and growing stuff in their acres. They sat down and they decided they would put the money into repairing the railway carriage they had on their property rather than rebuilding. They’d just fix that up and they’d give themselves 2 years. And at the end of the 2 years, they decided what they would do is instead of actually rebuilding everything, they’d bring forward by about 10 years their retirement plan and move into the local town.

They didn’t sell their property, but they didn’t try and replace what they had. What they did was they took the opportunity to move to the next stage of their life.

And when I met them some years later, they were very happy. Instead of exhausting themselves and probably affecting their health by enormous amount of physical work to replace everything, they’d actually moved in and they were involved in local community activities and so on.

It’s that ability to be open-minded and ask what’s really important, and to take those creative steps. That's, I think, one of the secrets.

Drew Radford:

There’s some great insights, Rob. What practical steps can farmers take to build personal resilience before disaster strikes?

Rob Gordon:

The first thing is to hang on to what is really going to make life valuable, meaningful, and rewarding. Because it’s not uncommon for people to work their fingers to the bone trying to do everything as quickly as possible. And very often it takes many years to bring a farm back to its original productivity after a fire or a flood.

Droughts, of course, are pretty debilitating in a different way. But this notion of trying to do it as quickly as possible is very difficult, because you can’t do it very quickly. And people are easily able to exhaust themselves and their health suffers.

Once you have a significant health crisis, and we’re more at risk particularly at the latter end of life for irreversible health problems that change our quality of life. Not during the stress, but a year or more afterwards. You can think, I’ll go through a couple of years and I’ll get on top of it, and then you suddenly find a year or so later you’ve got diabetes or something.

What’s important is to actually say, ‘I must preserve my health. I must preserve my relationship.’ It’s not unusual for relationships that are struggling a bit to go through a couple of years of great stress. They hang together and get through it, but afterwards things fall apart.

Or the kids. Kids will actually step back and support their parents. But if they’re not getting what they need, when everything settles down, there’ll be problems with the relationship with the kids, and so on.

It’s those priorities of actually realising, I must preserve my health, I must preserve my relationship, and the family, the children, the relationship with my community. We know that to take the effort to go out and connect with your community, and we now know it’s very important to facilitate community activities during recovery, share experience with others.

These are the real assets that help people go through. I think it’s really building these features into the plan of all the practical things that people have to do. I think that’s what I’d emphasise.

Drew Radford:

Rob, are there any common mistakes or pitfalls to avoid when building personal resilience?

Rob Gordon:

Absolutely.

The physiology of and the way our body and our brain work in high-stress situations, starting with the impact of the disaster and dealing with what happens on the day in a drought, it’s of course getting to a certain point of crisis.

But what makes us cope well with the moment is like going into tunnel vision on what has to be done and ignoring everything else. So people will put aside being polite to each other and they’ll yell at each other and be short-tempered and irritable, and so on.

And that illustrates how people use up the goodwill in their family and in their relationships, and that’s what really catches up with them later. I think it’s very important that people try to actually pace themselves slowly and keep coming out of that extreme narrow focus.

I’ve come up with a very simple recipe to counteract that stress state of mind. It’s pleasure and leisure.

Pleasure means getting back to enjoyment. Now, it’s very hard to do that when you’re worried about money and you’ve had a terrible time. A lot of sad things have happened, you’ve had a lot of destruction. But it’s very important to just be able to step aside and relax. And it might not be actual pleasure, but it might be a sense of achievement and satisfaction, and anything that makes me feel I can relax and have a sense of reward for what I’ve achieved. So setting small goals that can be done and then being able to do them and then being able to celebrate them, celebrate them with each other. Any kind of enjoyment.

I notice that people during recovery take on small projects, which they can get satisfaction from. Regrowing their veggie garden, for instance, when everything in the farm is going to take years. Or I quote the example of the tradesman who had a very traumatic event happen in his life and he couldn’t really work, he was not feeling right. And he came along one day and he said to me, ‘I’ve taken up knitting.’ And he showed me a picture of a beautiful little sky-blue cardigan he’d knitted for his new granddaughter. And as a tradesman, he could follow a knitting pattern. He’d never done knitting in his life before. But he worked it out and he felt such satisfaction of that. He didn’t continue knitting, but it just pulled him out of this doldrums of not feeling he could achieve anything. Those sort of things.

And leisure, my definition of leisure, you don’t have to do anything. Now, anyone who’s in a disaster or a drought or something will say, ‘What do you mean? We've got all this stuff.’ No, you can’t afford to work all the time, because your whole being goes into a kind of cramp.

You’ve got to step out of it. You’ve got to step out of it by doing nothing on Sunday afternoon, or maybe all day on Sunday. Or if you can’t manage that, every second Sunday. Because that will enable you to get back to those qualities we lose of being creative, of lateral thinking, of new solving of problems, of getting things into perspective, of getting some positive emotions.

Pleasure and leisure, that’d be my emphasis.

Drew Radford:

Lastly, Rob, where can people go to get further support? Are there specific programs or resources you would recommend to farmers and their families to build resilience?

Rob Gordon:

There’s a lot of information coming out about resilience. If you just look it up on the internet, there’ll be heaps of stuff. And it’s all for different contexts. I would just sift through and see what speaks to you. But there are a couple of things.

First of all, there are lots of written materials and podcasts like this available through various government agencies. It really pays to get engaged in the system. And many people don’t do that and then feel they don’t have time. Maybe their brain is saying, ‘I can't absorb new information.’ Well, download it and put it aside, and have the written material there so that in your moments of leisure you can actually listen to it.

But what underpins that is there’s a huge amount of experience in the community. Experience of people who’ve been through these things before and they’ve all learned things. Either the hard way through doing it wrong or the good way by having found strategies that really work.

Therefore, we know that people who remain engaged with their community and meet and share their experience together, and pass on information, what they’ve all tried out and achieved.

I think of it as a group mind and a capacity for group thinking where you extend your mind outside of the solitary little problem in your own head, into the collective learning that’s out there in the community. And now through the internet you can access people in other states or other countries, or wherever.

We know that there is so much value in people. And one of the things that really changes the quality of our experience is this sense that I’m not alone. I’m part of a group that is going through this together. It takes away a lot of that sense of failure and loss of self-esteem that people often get when their farm or their house has been damaged.

Realising that a lot of other people are in that state helps you to feel better about yourself. I’d say building networks in your community, going to meetings, knowing people, even if it feels like an expenditure of time you can’t afford, I think it’ll pay off enormously.

Drew Radford:

Rob, you do a great job of helping those people build their communities and also their own resilience. For now though, Dr. Rob Gordon, clinical psychologist, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me for this episode of AgVic Talk.

Rob Gordon:

Thanks, Drew, very much. I wish all the best to everyone out there listening.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk.

To access Farm Business Resilience Programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast. The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian Government’s Future Drought fund and the Victorian government’s Future Agriculture Skills Capacity fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria, or your consultant, before making any changes on farm. For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk.

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Simon Lawler:

You don’t know what you don't know.

Drew Radford:

Those are the words of Gippsland farmer Simon Lawler. He used to think it was just a bit of an empty cliché until he joined a farmer group.

G’day, I'm Drew Radford. Farmer groups and networks provide a space for farmers to share their successes and challenges with each other. That’s what BestWool/ BestLamb, and the BetterBeef networks have been doing for many years. Simon was not someone who quickly embraced the concept of farmer groups. However, when he did, he changed his farming practices and, to some extent, him in ways he never envisioned. To find out how, he joins me for this AgVic Talk podcast.

G’day, Simon.

Simon Lawler:

G’day, Drew. How are you?

Drew Radford:

Great, thanks, Simon. Simon, thanks for your time.

Now, whereabouts do you farm, first of all, Simon, and what do you farm?

Simon Lawler:

Well, Drew, I’m in East Gippsland in a place called Omeo, so we’re in a little valley south of Omeo called the Upper Livingston Valley. We run sheep and cattle here, and we’ve been farming here for some 30-odd years.

Drew Radford:

Are you from a farming background, Simon?

Simon Lawler:

Yes, I am from a farming background, but this is not my parents’ property. I come here with an uncle some 40 years ago, I suppose, and I started to work with him. Sonya and I, when we got married, I was nearly a full-time shearer at that stage. We got the opportunity to buy a little bit of country and then we inherited a little bit, and then, since then, we’ve bought some more.

Drew Radford:

Omeo, for me, conjures images of fairly cool climate and fairly wet climate. Is that generally the case or has it been a bit different?

Simon Lawler:

Well, you got the cool bit right. So, Omeo’s and a lot of East Gippsland is high, especially this high country, that spends more time worrying about the winter months than we do the summer months, so the cooler months provide our biggest challenges. Yeah, you’re right. Here, we're about 750, 800 metres in altitude, so yeah, we do get a bit cooler.

Drew Radford:

What about the rainfall, Simon?

Simon Lawler:

Well, that varies from year to year. It was a very stable environment and a pretty reliable little district once, but over the last 20-odd years, we’ve gone through some significant changes back in the nineties when we started farming from that horrendous dry period and drought. We went out of that and it didn’t really improve, and we got a few good years and then it sort of settled down a bit.

But over the last 4 or 4 years we’ve had probably, well, since the 2019 fires, it’s been wonderful. We’ve had wet summers and above-average rainfall until last winter. We didn’t get a lot of winter rain and didn’t have a great spring, but other than that, it’s generally a pretty reliable district.

Drew Radford:

You paint a picture there that it has been somewhat variable, particularly since that drought. What motivated you to join the Omeo and district BetterBeef Network Group?

Simon Lawler:

We first met Chris Mirams through hosting a farm tour and up until that point I’d never really heard about or understood what these groups really did and I found them fascinating. What I really saw was, and a group of people very similar to us in the circle that we work in that were very interested in the same thing, had pretty much the same problems that we had.

The Hereford Society put on a day in Omeo a few years ago, which was ‘Bred Well, Fed Well’ day, and it was hosted by Chris. Really, after that, I said to Sonya, ‘There’s a bloody lot we don’t really know about this job.’ It was quite an enlightening day. From there, our beef group was formed, and it’s been quite a journey for us.

Drew Radford:

I’m intrigued by the fact that you stuck your hand up, came home, and said, ‘There's a lot that we don't know.’

Simon Lawler:

I remember listening to this years ago when my daughter was attending college, you don’t know what you don’t know. I left that evening having a bit of a chuckle about it, but I’ve got to reflect on it a bit over the years and I’ve heard that mentioned a few times.

For me, that ‘Bred Well, Fed Well’ day was one of those things – you don’t know what you don’t know. Because it’s getting harder and harder and more challenging with spiralling costs to keep a handle on things and to actually keep your business floating along or growing and expanding, you’ve got to take the blinkers off a little bit, and have a look around, and see what others are doing, and start broadening your horizons a little.

Drew Radford:

It’s interesting to hear you describe it like that, especially when the perception often can be about farming that it can be quite a solitary pursuit. You’re pretty much within the confines of your property and trying to get on with the job.

Simon Lawler:

Well, that’s probably the sad reality of farming, isn’t it? It really is a lonely place, especially when things are tight and tough, drought’s upon you, and all the rest of it. You do spend a lot of time on your own.

You spend a lot of time pondering what you can and can’t do, trying to manage the things that are out of your control. Unfortunately, that probably translates into where you’re feeling and where you’re headed, and then it’s a bit of a reflection of who you are and what you are at home. For us, it was really getting outside of that and breaking that up.

Joining the beef group, listening to these other people who were coming here, that everyone’s in a similar boat, so if you can have a bit of a discussion, talk about the things that are going well, but also talk about the things that are not going so well. We all make mistakes.

We Aussie farmers are pretty good at hiding those mistakes, but if you do share a few of them and then, all of a sudden, someone else shares something where they’ve done something wrong, you don’t feel so isolated and so alone at times. I think that’s one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about the beef group. When you have a look around, you think that everyone else is kicking goals and you are dragging your heels.

I think, ‘What am I doing here,’ some days, and then when you sit around the table, and you talk to a few others, and you’re starting to hear a few of the similar stories, makes you feel a little bit less vulnerable out there, that there’s more people sharing the same issues and same problems that you are on your own.

As a collective you can not necessarily solve the problems, but you can share the burden a little bit. I find that, just for me, personally, has been quite a relief. Rather than doing that isolated thing, put your head in the sand, and, ‘This is what I did, this is what dad did, this is what grandpa did,’ maybe have a look around and have a listen to some of the others. All of a sudden, it puts a bit of a spring in your step when you think, ‘Geez, I'm not going so bad after all.’

Drew Radford:

That’s a really interesting and honest insight there, Simon. Please don’t view this as trite, but it almost sounds a little bit, in some regards, one of the benefits from the group is a problem shared is a problem halved.

Simon Lawler:

Oh, I think you’re right there, because, look, we’ve got a wonderful facilitator that’s got an uncanny ability to get really interesting conversations started. Chris has this little method he likes to do when you’ve been somewhere, done something, or if you’re just meeting for the first time. He calls it the horrid ORID. It’s just a bit of a session on virtually a little bit like the start of this, who you are, what you do, and what’s happening, and what’s affecting you, what decisions you’re making. He has this wonderful way about him of giving you a little bit of comfort of actually opening up sometimes and talking about some of the things that actually aren’t going so well.

That’ll prompt someone on the other side of the room to say, ‘I’m suffering something similar,’ and then someone go, ‘Yeah, well I did that. That happened to me last year. We had similar problems. The worm burdens got up in the sheep,’ or whatever it may be, ‘and we did this and it really helped,’ or, ‘We got a bit of advice here.’

And all of a sudden, someone that you’re not necessarily, mixes in your circle of friends has given you some advice that you’ve taken away and it’s helped you, and then you’ve made good contact there. You have good, comfortable conversation. It’s quite comforting to know that there’s others out there that can help solve some of your problems and you might help some of their problems. That’s not necessarily what it’s all about, but that's part of it.

Drew Radford:

It sounds like a substantial part, but I’m guessing really at the centre of it too is you’re running a business and you’re trying to improve the way you run your business, so how’s being in the group help you improve the way you farm, do you think?

Simon Lawler:

Well, it went right back to that: you don’t know what you don’t know.

Look, we really thought we were not bad at this job. We were producing a reasonably good article, but going to the group and then going on various tours and trips all over the place, you’re seeing operations, people, family farms, that were run in a similar fashion to what we were but had done a few changes over the years, and all of a sudden they were starting to reap the benefits of those decisions that they’d made.

Just for argument’s sake, one of the decisions, we were in a set stocking regime and so we’d gone from that onto a full rotational operation. We’re weaning earlier, we’ve got to meet people that are doing some of the things really, really well, and we've also met some of the people that are not doing really, really well out of it.

It’s really helped our ability to grow and manage feed, as well as what are primary objective is, is to grow and manage livestock. That’s our end game, but I think it taught us a lot more about the growing cycles and understanding that and understanding a little bit more about the science of farming in areas that I probably wouldn’t have gone into.

Drew Radford:

Simon, do you think it’s contributed to how you manage your farm and prepare for challenges? You talked earlier about the varying climate that you’ve experienced or drought.

Simon Lawler:

Yeah, I think it has. One of the biggest changes that we’ve made to our business is, now that we know that there’s a lot that we don’t really know, we’re starting to seek out advice. We’ve got a better relationship with an agronomist. She’s essentially transformed some of our thinking and some of our methods just by bringing other experiences on board, and it’s also led to us seeking a lot more financial advice.

I remember one of the visits we went to was at Landfall Angus in Tasmania and listening to Frank Archer talk. He spoke about the relationships you need to run a successful business. The first one was you need to have a good relationship with your wife, and the second one was you need to have a good agronomist and a good bank manager.

We took that away and started to put some of that into practice, and it’s really helped us enormously by getting some of those skills. We probably would never have gone down that pathway if it wasn’t for the beef group and hearing other people inside the group that are doing similar things, using similar people; if not similar, the same people. But the thinking and the rationale around it was virtually the same, was if you don’t know something and you’re not expected to know everything, get some advice that’s good advice.

Drew Radford:

It sounds like quite the journey in terms of letting go preconceptions. I mean, farmers are often painted as very stoic, self-reliant individuals, and I think that’s true, but what you describe also requires letting go of some of that. I could imagine some people not being willing to stick up their hand and go, ‘Yeah, you know what? I don't know that. I’m supposed to know that.’

Simon Lawler:

That’s a really good point, because I come from a background of like that. The uncle I spoke about, he was a really good farmer in his own right, but he was a real traditionalist. Even though I had country of my own, I was still working with him, but he would fight a lot of the things that I wanted to try and change. He was quite scared of change because he was more worried about failing than succeeding through change and he’d seen that his traditional methods were serving him quite well.

Sometimes it takes a generational change to effect a bit of change and the pressures that are applied to young people. I only say this because we went through that, and I hope that we don’t do it to the next generation, is giving them a little bit of an opportunity to make a few mistakes, because that’s basically how we all learn, but to try a few new things, something that’s a little different, and thinking outside the box rather than just making everything on calendar-based decisions.

Outside of that, they’re all emotional decisions, and therefore, if they’re emotional decisions, they’re bad decisions. It’s a little bit like training a young dog. You’ve got to let him have a bit of a run around sometimes. I think, as the farming community, we’re so scared of failing because it’s so challenging and so hard to survive that we’re reluctant to try something completely different for fear of failure.

The fear of failure is usually financial failure, and therefore then you find yourself in all sorts of bother and then you end up in that lonely place. I think that’s one of the big reasons that the farming community are really reluctant to change, because it’s that fear of failure that creates this barrier that you don’t want to cross.

Drew Radford:

One of the things that I’m getting the impression from, Simon, is that the makeup of the group is quite influential on you in terms of how you approach problems. How’s it been different? Because traditionally, it’s a bunch of blokes sitting around a table.

Simon Lawler:

Well, it is a bunch of blokes sitting around the table and they all like to flex their muscles. They all like to say, ‘When we've got plenty on, we like to set the alarm clock, get out of bed, and go to work. Don’t come home until it’s done. But when it gets a little bit more onerous, we just wind the clock back a little bit earlier and we go to bed a little bit later, and we find that’s the best way to do it.’ But in our group, we’ve got a great cross-section of women in the group.

We’ve got some older mature women and some younger mature women, and their problem-solving, an ability to think outside the square, has really changed a lot of rationale, and thinking, and creating different discussion at the group level.

For us, I think, especially for me in particular who likes to pick up that big hammer and break the big rock, that you don’t necessarily have to do backbreaking work to get somewhere. You can think your way around things a little bit. It’s not all left up to you, that other people can help you. For me, that has been enormous.

Drew Radford:

Lastly, Simon, what would your take away, top points for anyone listening to this is why they should think about getting involved with a farmer group?

Simon Lawler:

Because your problems are not necessarily always your own. There’s a lot of great people out there in your community that you’ve never really mixed with that are very similar, and you can learn a lot from them.

The social interaction and the social capital we have in our group is phenomenal, and it’s a real joy to be a part of. You’re talking with like-minded people with like-minded problems, and you might actually learn something. If you don’t, well, at least you’ve had a good day out and yet you feel pretty good about yourself at the end of it.

Drew Radford:

Simon Lawler has significantly benefited from being part of his local farming group. The person who got him involved was farm management consultant Chris Mirams, who coordinates a number of groups across Victoria.

Chris Mirams:

I’ve got a group in the Upper Murray, I’ve got a group in Mudgegonga, I’ve got a group in Omeo. I’ve got a group in the Kiewa Valley and the King Valley, and I’ve got one at Boorhaman. They’re all beef or sheep groups of about 15 people in the north-east of Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Chris, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a lot of farmers over the years and getting them to speak in groups is not always the easiest thing to do. I’d argue that for Australian blokes in general really, but how do you get them to talk?

Chris Mirams:

The groups are about 15 people so that there’s no excuse to not contribute. I guess we create the culture of everybody wanting to share, and turn up, and be part of the conversation.

We do a bit of theory stuff, which the theoretical people really like. We do lots of practical things, so the practical people really like that. We do social things, so the social people really like that. We blend the components of those things together so that everybody feels comfortable at some point and everybody will get to take the lead at some point.

It’s just a matter of including everybody and celebrating everybody’s contribution and as a coordinator, making sure that you close down the extroverts from time to time and include the introverts from time to time.

Drew Radford:

I hear you have a bit of an icebreaker exercise, something called the horrid ORID.

Chris Mirams:

Yeah, you’ve been talking to Simon.

We go on tour a lot and I’ve got this saying that all meaning is contextual, and so when we go on tours, we visit top operators on whatever topic it is that the farming group wants to explore. We can spend a couple of hours with quite intense work with farmers, and then we do what’s called an ORID.

It’s a process of asking everybody in the group an observational question, ‘What did you see and what did you think about?’, and then we move into, ‘What do you think about that? What does that mean for you? Do you think you could have done it better? Do you think she might’ve done more or less of it? What were the challenges?’

The final part is the decisional one, is as to, ‘What does that mean for you and is there anything different you might do on your farm having seen that or been part of that experience?’

It’s a hard one to manage. The farmers get used to it. They look forward to the horrid ORID because that’s when they all get around, sitting around the pub, and then they can make sense of what they’ve seen collectively together. It’s really good because different people see different things, and it brings it to life.

Drew Radford:

It sounds so much more valuable than just walking around a property and seeing stuff. You’re going back and pulling it apart afterwards.

Chris Mirams:

Well, they’re pulling it apart themselves. I’m just sort of directing the traffic and asking the questions, and then they’ll have great discussions, even arguments, about, ‘I think this was good.’ ‘No, that was terrible. You should have done it this way, not that way.’

It helps them make sense. There’s the sensing, what is it, then making sense of it collectively, and then what are we going to do with that later. They’re the 3 levels that we talk through and it makes it real for them. It’s terrific.

Drew Radford:

It also sounds to me, Chris, like you are challenging the way they’re thinking or they’re challenging it themselves.

Chris Mirams:

The whole purpose of the exercise is for continual improvement, prosperity for the farmers, prosperity for their families, prosperity for the regions that we live in.

To maintain prosperity, we find in the capitalist business world that you need to be making more with less or improving productivity, adopting new technologies, new practices constantly, and so we like to foster a culture of curiosity and also a culture of challenging the norm and the status quo, thinking that, every day, we like to wake up and think, ‘What can we do differently and what can we do better than yesterday, today?’

If we can foster that culture of behaviour and thinking, and that mindset, that takes us a long way, but part of that can be really challenging their identity. If they’re really farming and set in their ways, to have them evoke change on their farm can be quite an interesting journey that we take them on. That’s where it goes from more than just giving them technical advice to actually taking them on a journey of increasing their adaptive capacity.

Drew Radford:

That’s a very interesting space to be in and I imagine requires quite a unique skillset to help producers along that path.

Chris Mirams:

I’ve been a consultant, for want of the better term, for maybe a decade or so after a 30-year career in farm management. Farm managers, they get to see fires, floods, droughts, commodity crashes, good times, bad times. You name it, we deal with it, so I think it gives you good grounding for thinking and adapting.

But what I found as a consultant, and I talked to some farmers, and deliver some new technology, and then think, ‘Well, I’ve solved the problem for them,’ and come back a few months later and find that that had been adopted by some but not all and probably not the majority. I think, ‘Gee, what happened there?’

I learned very quickly that just giving them the answer to the question is not solving the problem for them. If it’s a complex problem, it’s actually working through and walking alongside the farmers over a period of time to evoke the change rather than just give them the answer, and move off, and think, ‘Well, the job’s done,’ because about 5% of farmers will be done, but for the rest, it probably won’t be, and some of these changes can be quite confronting. It’s a change in mindset, not just a change in practice quite often.

Drew Radford:

Which is a big thing, and that’s a bit of an understatement there. I’ve heard anecdotally someone reference one of the groups as saying, ‘I thought I was joining a farming group, not a leadership group.’

Chris Mirams:

I think I was lucky enough to do the Australian Rural Leadership Program many years ago. It’s a life-changing program and it taught me a few things. One of these is the desire to give back to the community, and the other is that every day is an opportunity for leadership, leading yourself, leading yours, I guess, which is leading the people that you are on the same team with the same goals, but also leading others. That’s leading people who’ve got no idea what you’re talking about or disagree with everything you say.

I came with that context and learned very quickly that if I just give them the technical information then they head off, then, probably, the job’s not done, and that it is a leadership journey that they’re on when they join one of my groups. Sometimes it can be an identity shift for some of those people, which is quite a challenge and an interesting space.

It works both ways, I reckon, because it makes it much more interesting for me than just giving them technical stuff. I think we’re making substantial changes to the lives of the people that join in the group or those that are up for it.

Drew Radford:

Chris, what do you hear that farmers enjoy about being involved in the network groups?

Chris Mirams:

I think there are 3 things, maybe.

One is they love the social stuff. You get them together, and they’re sharing problems, and chatting about things. Every meeting, we always start with a round table, ‘What's going on at your place?’ We include everybody so everybody’s obliged to speak and they share what their successes are, and what their challenges are, and what’s keeping them up awake at night, and brag about the prices that they’ve received or their cost of production figures, whatever that is. They love the social part. I hope I’m right in saying they become a lot more curious as we go through the journey and they love seeing new things.

For mature groups that already adopted what we might call best practice, and I’d say best practice is always old practice now because it’s cemented in as being best practice, I like my farming guys to be on next practice. What’s the next best thing? Let’s start thinking about that rather than best practice.

It has them curious. They really love going to other people’s places and seeing how the principles of profitability are executed in different regions, gives them a really good understanding of those principles, and to see how other people are doing it.

I think they also enjoy the motivation, because there’s some peer group pressure in, ‘Oh, well, what do the best guys do when they soil test their paddocks? Every paddock, every year with a cheap soil test to understand what their phosphorus level is.’ You come to the next meeting and people go, ‘Give us a look at your results,’ so they can’t not do it.

I remember one meeting, one guy came up with his new scanning results and they said, ‘Oh, you scanned?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I was bullied by the group into scanning and now it’s fantastic. I’ve got all this data.’ They go, ‘Yeah, that’s peer group pressure.’ The motivation and the peer group pressure of holding each other to account, I think they enjoy that as well.

Drew Radford:

Well, it is a big shift, isn’t it? That accountability, because otherwise you can be sitting safely within the confines of your own operation and thoughts of, ‘I’ll eventually get to that,’ or, ‘I don’t want to try that because I might fail.’

Chris Mirams:

I think that’s right. To really simplify it, to evoke change on farm... Of course, there’s no such thing as staying still on the farm, you’re either going forwards or backwards. If you think you’re just standing still, you’re actually going backwards.

To evoke change, there are 3 components of it in its simplest form, I reckon. You’ve got to be able to, you’ve got to know how to, and you’ve got to want to.

When we are looking at adapting new technologies, I look at each of the farmers and get to understand their mindset and them as individuals, as well as the group collectively, and then think which components of that ‘able to, how to, want to’ are we missing or do we need to build or foster to see that change happen? That’s really exciting and interesting and keeps it simple as well.

Drew Radford:

Chris, how do you think being a network group member helps farmers manage their farm and, in particular, prepare for challenges like climate variations?

Chris Mirams:

I think, firstly, by getting together and sharing ideas, solutions can be found within the collective often. They’re sharing challenges, they’re sharing challenges that they probably didn’t even know that they had, but the neighbour’s got them. Forewarned is forearmed.

I think we also take them on journeys. We take them on 3-day tours and 2-day tours, or even just one-day tours, around to other people’s places and they see new technologies, new ideas or new to them. I think that’s really good.

When there are specific problems and we talk about droughts, or failed springs, or crashes in commodity prices, the group will say, ‘We are really wrestling with this, Chris. We can see that we haven’t had as much rain as we might’ve,’ or twice as much or whatever. We can bring the experts in and do a really deep dive collectively with the group as to how we solve it. Simple things like, ‘Well, if it doesn’t rain until June, how much hay do we need?’

We work through the process of, ‘How many livestock, how many megajoules of energy each one has? What’s the feed test result of your hay? Which ones are you going to keep, which ones are you going to sell? How much do I need in reserve and do I need to start buying some?’ All those sorts of things and create a hierarchy of activities. That sort of thing is really good too, the deep dive and get some strategy.

I think, in crisis, often, the decision-making is the most important part, and so collective decision-making or even framing the decision, helping farmers make decisions. We say, ‘Well, this is how we might make this decision or here’s a decision support tool that you can use and plug your data in and help you make the decision.’ I think that really helps in making the decision, which, hopefully, lead to a better outcome, but it helps with the mental health and the stress side of it as well to go through a formal decision-making process and collectively within the community. I think that goes a long way.

Drew Radford:

Chris, is part of your job challenging mindsets from, ‘I’m running a farm,’ to maybe running a business?

Chris Mirams:

When I come onto these groups and ask them, ‘What's your job?’, whether they own it, or manage it, or manage it for their family, or manage for a corporation, or just manage it for themselves, I say, ‘What do you reckon your job is?’, most of them say, ‘Well, I run the day-to-day operations of the farm, that’s my job.’ I go, ‘I tell you what I think your job is,’ and say, ‘Your primary job is allocating capital, your second is managing risk, your third one is making decisions, and your fourth one is managing the day-to-day operations, in that order of importance, so let’s reframe. What do you think your job is now and how do we manage that?’

We start talking about, ‘What is allocating capital? How do you make those strategic decisions? How do you manage risk? What are the tactical responses that you might do within season? How do you make decisions, small decisions compared to transformational decisions, and then what sort of technical information do you need to do a really good job at running the day-to-day operations?’

It really reframes it. So many farmers are really busy at the coal face that they are dragged, kicking and screaming, to those big decisions, the strategic decisions. There’s a saying, I reckon, that the battles on farm are won and lost in the paddock, but the war is won and lost in the office. Those big strategic decisions that are the important ones at the end of the day.

Drew Radford:

Chris, what would be your quick pitch to a farmer who’s never been part of a farming group? Why should they give it a go?

Chris Mirams:

I’d say you've got nothing to lose because it doesn’t cost much really, and a bit of time and effort, there’s so much to gain.

Turn up and contribute. Turn up and be curious about what’s going on in the big wide world and turn up and be open to new ideas. If we can find a farming group with contemporaries, like-minded people, there’s absolutely nothing to lose but there’s a huge amount to gain, and they’re great farmers as well.

Drew Radford:

It must be a very satisfying role, seeing people and communities progress and change.

Chris Mirams:

It’s deeply satisfying, particularly from my perspective with a real interest in leadership and evoking change, to enable prosperity so people have got life choices. To get people to be working smarter rather than harder is the challenge.

I get a great deal of satisfaction when I go onto someone’s farm and they come up to me and they say, ‘We moved our calving date and we’ve increased our stocking rate, and now I’ve got rid of my off-farm job because now it’s paying its own way. Now it’s big enough that one of my kids is coming back to help me. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we hadn’t done these things that we’ve learnt through being part of that group.’

That's when the deep satisfaction comes in, because we really can change lives for the better, intergenerationally, that you need to get those succession plans going and get the gross profit that enables choices so that... Yeah, that’s deeply satisfying, when we can have some big wins like that.

Drew Radford:

Chris, it certainly does sound like you’re helping deliver those big wins in an enormously satisfying and beneficial way. For now though, farm management consultant Chris Mirams, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Chris Mirams:

It’s been my pleasure, Drew.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk.

To access Farm Business Resilience Programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast. The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian government's Future Drought fund and the Victorian government's Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria or your consultant before making any changes on farm. For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk.

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

There’s the old adage of adversity often brings out the best in people. However, for farmer Matt Zagami, he thinks it’s a little more basic than that. It’s about identifying problems and working out their solutions.

G’day, I’m Drew Radford, and that might sound obvious and pragmatic, but it takes on a different hue when you learn that Matt lost his entire farm, including sheds, equipment and home, to a fire in 2020. To many, that would be the sort of adversity that would see them leaving the land.

For Matt, he thinks that dealing with what the climate throws at you is just part of being a farmer in Australia. Today he is back on the land, running his business, Avagrow Farms, where he’s diversified so that he’s in the best position to handle whatever he is dealt.

To discuss that he joins me for this AgVic Talk Podcast. Hello, Matt.

Matt Zagami:

Hi Drew, how you going?

Drew Radford:

I’m excellent, thank you Matt.

Matt, firstly I want to say congratulations on your Community Stewardship Award for AUSVEG 2025.

Matt Zagami:

Yeah, no, it was a nice little bit of recognition for the community work that we probably get involved in. We live in a small community. Look, you can always put your hand up and be a part of things and I think myself and my wife have always kind of done those sorts of things around the community and been involved in the agricultural industry. So yeah, it was nice.

Drew Radford:

Now I think you’re being a little understated, mate. I’ve been having a look through your CV and I would list off a few things.

President of the Local Land Care Committee, advisory group member for VEGNET in your region, advisory committee for Southern Rural Water, also on the advisory committee for East Gippsland Shire Agriculture and also junior president of the local football club and a long list of other things as well.

I don't know where you fit the time in.

Matt Zagami:

Oh look, when you’ve got a business to run in a small community and you’ve got 4 children involved in sporting activities and local groups, it’s not hard to get involved in things. We enjoy doing it and I enjoy doing it and I suppose being lucky in the early part of 2020, 2021, we actually had a little bit of a break from vegetable farming for a couple of years there and I probably put my hand up to help out in a few more community activities and agricultural groups, which has been quite enjoyable.

Now I'm spreading myself pretty thin because our agricultural, our horticultural business has kind of fired up again and I’m not getting much time now to really do much else, but it was good that I got the opportunity. I think especially I suppose I rate myself as being still a little bit young to be a farmer.

Drew Radford:

I want to get to the reason for that break in a minute, but first of all, let’s talk about your farm. Where is it and what do you farm? And I understand this has been an enterprise with your dad as well. previously.

Matt Zagami:

We did, started out with my father back in early 2000, finished an ag degree up at Dookie College and moved back to the family farm, which was in Waiwera, which is a small farming district, probably about 5 minutes out of Nowa Nowa, kind of smack bang in the middle of Lakes Entrance and Orbost. It’s a beautiful little place. You can’t see it from the highway but you take a little road called Waiwera up into the valley and it breaks out into a valley of flat country and hilly country surrounded by bushland, which is ... When people come in they often say, ‘Look, we didn't even know this little place was here.’

So we kind of like it like that too. It's a really wonderful escape to be a part of.

Drew Radford:

Well, as part of that escape, what are you growing on that property? It’s about 200 hectares isn't it?

Matt Zagami:

Yeah, so 2006, we purchased this property and Katie and I went out on our own. So we separated from mum and dad who had the original farm block, purchased another one and we continued to grow the vegetable operation that we were working with mum and dad with.

So we grow mainly snow peas, green beans, baby broccoli or shooting broccoli. And we also now, we run a couple of hundred head of cattle, we do some fodder cropping and then we also grow a little bit of seed production corn.

Drew Radford:

That’s quite a broad spectrum of agricultural produce, to say the least. And I do wonder if some of that’s spreading your bets in terms of variable climate. I can hear at the moment rain pouring down on your roof, but it’s not always like that, though, is it?

Matt Zagami:

It’s not.

It’s a funny little area of the state. Our rainfall is unreal. We're an average rainfall of around 850 mm, so on an average year that’s pretty adequate for what we do. We grow a variety of crops on hill country without irrigation and then during the summer months we’ll grow intensively on our flat country under irrigation. And with the 850 mm rainfall it’s quite good, because we get a bit of a top-up. I wouldn’t say we’re full-time irrigators because we do get Mother Nature to help us out every now and then.

Probably the last 4 or 5 years we’ve had rainfall in excess of 1,000 mm a year, so we’ve had a couple of really wet years up over 1,100 mm and then they were quite challenging, especially during the summer when we’re trying to grow vegetable production crops and we’re getting rain events 50 to 100 mm at a time coming through the summer months, which is a little bit unpredictable.

We don’t ever know it’s going to happen and we try and mitigate against it. But you kind of like having the rainfall as well, because we go back, further back into 2018, 2019, we probably went through 3 or 4 of the driest years on record and they were dry. But in terms of other areas of the state, I think we still received around 400 mm. But to us, that was a really dry year and it made it quite difficult for us to keep our production going.

Drew Radford:

Well it did make it quite difficult for you to keep your production going because at the end of that, around 2020, a very significant event happened to you and I suspect the dry led to that.

Matt Zagami:

Yeah, and I don’t know how we explain it, but it was kind of the drought-breaking fire that went through our area, because we had fires come through or started in November of 2019 and we sat there and we went, ‘Well, if there’s fires already started now, we’re going to be in the thick of it come the summer months,’ and it took until the last day of the year more or less for it to come through and it burnt out our whole property, our whole farming operation. It took the house as well and shedding and machinery and everything with it, but I think within a couple of weeks, it rained and the climate changed here in East Gippsland and we’ve kind of had rainfall ever since.

So we had a couple of years where we deliberated on what we were going to do. Lucky enough to be insured and we could take a little bit of time to look at what we wanted to do, but at the end of the day, I think I grew some lucerne and I grew some fodder crops and kind of dabbled a little bit in that game. I hadn't bought any cattle yet. I was going to go into cattle, but in the end I wanted to still grow vegetables. So that’s what we've got back into on top of all the other things that we do.

Drew Radford:

That’s a big thing to go back into that too, Matt. I’ve seen the photographs of your property post the fire and they are the archetypal devastation photos. I don’t think anyone would’ve begrudged you saying I’ve had enough and left.

Matt Zagami:

It did cross our mind.

Probably our family and our kids and our community probably kept us here as well. We moved into Lakes Entrance for probably about 6 months, which was fun. The kids kind of thought that was a fantastic place to be close to their friends, something that they had never done before, lived in town.

And then the unfortunate COVID come through and locked all our kids down for a little period there and it was quite funny, the first thing that they turned around and said, ‘Well, we want to be back out on the farm.’

And Katie and I were really happy about that because we didn’t like living in town. We liked being on our farm property and to have the 4 kids turn around and tell us that, we knew that that’s where we had to be and it took another 6 months and we got our act together and got ourselves living in a shed on the farm for starters.

And then we were lucky enough to get the short-term modulars that we lived in for about a year and a half as well. From there, we’ve now purchased our next door neighbour’s farm with a house on it, so that was pretty lucky for us as well.

You never know. You try and make all these decisions and work out your plan, but it’s amazing how doors open for you along the way if you’re open for them.

Drew Radford:

I think that’s a remarkable perspective and a very positive take from a very difficult period, to say the least.

Looking back then over really those 10 years, that’s a remarkable amount of variation in climate and a disaster in the middle, to say the least. How have these challenges changed the way you farm? You’ve kind of alluded to it a bit, but I want to get a better understanding.

Matt Zagami:

It’s funny, I think we have changed a little bit, but we are still continuing to do what we’ve done for many years. I like the fact that East Gippsland, or where we are, especially, it always gives us a chance. We’re always either looking for a bit of rainfall or maybe we’ve got a little bit too much, but there’s always something we can be doing to turn a dollar over and try and get ourselves either progressing a bit further into our farming operation or getting us maybe out of trouble because it’s been too wet or it’s been too dry.

So I like the fact that our little area has the ability to probably adapt to many different things. Hence now we’re running cows, which is a fairly reasonable herd for the area. The fodder cropping kind of come along the lines from when we didn’t have vegetables, but we’ve continued that operation on and then we’ve added the baby broccoli to the vegetables that we grow, so that we have some more income during the winter.

So that’s probably one of the products that we’ve grown on now that we didn’t have before the fires, so that’s given us a little bit more scope with our vegetable operation, but it’s still all challenging. I think there’s no one here in Australia that would say that being a farmer or being in agriculture is always easy and I think we’ve got challenges along the way. But I think that’s what makes us all farmers here in Australia because we enjoy those challenges and that’s what makes us do what we do.

Drew Radford:

Well you’re certainly living proof of dealing with those challenges. But what you’re describing there sounds to me in simple terms of spreading your risk. You’ve got a range of things going on to be able to cover you depending on the rainfall and the weather you receive.

Matt Zagami:

For sure. All these things that we do, especially the vegetable operation, that probably gets hurt the most when we get the rainfall events.

We are lucky enough to have a lot of hill country that we crop as well, so we’ve been able to diversify where we grow our crops. It was a few years ago, we were planting baby broccoli, middle of summer up on the hill country because our flat country was too wet, but we had the ability to go up there and plant, which was fantastic for us.

Now we’ve been working over the last couple of years to try and secure more water for our area, because we know that in the next few years or in the next 10 years, we don’t actually really know, but it will get dry here again and when it’s dry here, the benefits that we get is that generally we grow really good vegetable crops and we can actually make probably better money when it’s drier.

When we have the wetter years, we have more fungal problems, we have crop losses in the low-lying country, so we’re always thinking about what we can do and can’t do and always trying to predict what may happen, but also trying to be positive about what we’re doing, as well, to hope that it does work.

This year we had 200 mm fall in the first week of February and I couldn’t believe it. We had probably the most crop in the ground at that time and to have that much rainfall to deal with was a difficult one.

But we’re still here now, 5 months on and we’re still farming, so it doesn’t ruin your operation, but it just throws little things in there that makes you think a little bit harder about what you’re doing.

Drew Radford:

Well you are thinking about what you’re doing because I understand you’ve also recently completed the Farm Business Resilience Program. What’d you get out of that?

Matt Zagami:

Look, we got out of a lot of things. I think what we get out of going to these kind of educational processes is that what we’ve been doing for a number of years is quite good. It gives you reassurance that some of the things you think about and put in place on your farm, you are actually doing a pretty good job of it. I don’t think anyone that is in agriculture doesn’t continually think about their business and think about ways to make it better or mitigate the environment.

So going to these courses makes you sit back and think about, hey, well actually we are doing a pretty good job. Yep.

There’s a couple other tools that we may use to make life maybe a little bit easier, but I kind of think sometimes it’s more of a reassurance for what we’re already doing that we are on top of things. And sometimes you need a little bit of help too, and it might point you in a different direction and make you think about things a little bit differently.

But at the end of the day, I think as farmers in Australia and Victoria, we’re all kind of really on the ball most of the time with the challenges that we’ve got.

Drew Radford:

You mentioned, probably picked up a couple of tools and a bit of refocus. Does anything come to mind that you can share?

Matt Zagami:

I think identifying resources in your family and business were probably things that we got out of the information days. Funny, my kids now, we haven’t properly implemented them yet, but we definitely identified our kids are now, the oldest is 21 this year and the youngest is 15 and probably didn’t use them in the farm very much as they were growing up. They’d done whatever they wanted to do sort of thing and we’re happy for them to do that.

But going forward, we’re seeing how their interests in farming and in agriculture are there and now we kind of have to sit there and think about it as a business and a family succession, where their interests may lie and how we can incorporate their values into our farming business.

So it’s made us kind of think of probably the next 5 or 10 years and where they all fit into it. And then identifying our own values in the business as well, myself and Katie, my wife, and then our employees and seeing how they can grow and develop in our farming business as well over the course of the next 5 or 10 years too.

Drew Radford:

You mentioned there, the course also helps you focus on resources and you mentioned some of those. I don’t view your kids as resources, but there there’s a whole range of resources obviously, and I read on your website, ‘We are also streamlining our farming practices to help reduce our carbon footprint, thus ensuring the production of environmentally-conscious produce.’ That’s a good statement for a whole range of reasons, regardless whether it’s consumers or marketing or whatever it may be, but that’s also talking about dealing with the hand that you’ve been dealt and trying to maximise the resources you have, isn’t it?

Matt Zagami:

The biggest thing I look at is the fact that we are lucky enough to receive 850 mil rainfall.

We can grow so much produce in far East Gippsland on natural rainfall that falls. There’s no need to be taking too much water out of the environment to do what we do. Sometimes we do need some help. Sometimes it is drier and we do need to irrigate and we do need to put in infrastructure that helps us with our irrigation, but we are in a natural little area that can grow food for our nation in I think a fairly conservative managed way.

We also do a lot of no-till work with some of our cropping as well, so we’re not working the ground as much as what we’re used to. So we’re providing more of a benefit to our cropping program by doing this.

Drew Radford:

Matt, in wrapping up, have you got any top tip or advice for other farmers wanting to better prepare for climatic or seasonal challenges?

Matt Zagami:

My one tip would be to trust your instincts and to use your local knowledge and your people around you to help you mitigate risk and move forward. I think that’s how I kind of put it, but I don't think anyone’s got the answer to those sorts of questions. It’s about us as a farming area, or farming groups, that we identify the challenges and we find solutions as we go.

I think in agriculture in Australia, we’re always going to have challenges and always going to be managing a changing climate, is the way I’d like to think about it, because our climate changes so dramatically, so regularly that we are always managing those risks and trying to identify ways to make our farming operations better.

Drew Radford:

Well, Matt, I think you’re a remarkable example of trying to make your farming operations better and also dealing with more than significant challenges, more than most people will ever deal with in their life, and coming out the other side with a really positive attitude.

For now, though, Matthew Zagami, owner of Avagrow Farms, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me for this AgVic Talk Podcast.

Matt Zagami:

Thanks, Drew.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk.

To access Farm Business Resilience programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast. The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian government’s Future Drought Fund and the Victorian government’s Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria or your consultant before making any changes on farm. For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk.

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

It was only a couple of generations ago that farmers often viewed trees in paddocks as a limit on their stock-carrying potential. That, though, is no longer the case.

G’day, I'm Drew Radford, and these days shade and shelter from vegetation is important for having a productive farm, even more so in a varying climate.

John-Paul Murphy is a beef farmer. For the last 30 years, he and his family have been revegetating their Winton property to improve its productivity, and he joins me for this AgVic talk podcast to discuss what that has involved. John-Paul, thanks for your time.

John-Paul Murphy:

You’re welcome, Drew. It’s good to be here.

Drew Radford:

John-Paul, before we do a deep dive on how you vegetate your property for shade and shelter, can you firstly tell me where is the property and what is it you farm?

John-Paul Murphy:

We’re located in north-east Victoria, just outside the town of Benalla, and we're just a pure beef business. We breed our own cattle and we fatten them up to a grass-fed market.

Drew Radford:

So how big is the property and how many cattle are you running on it?

John-Paul Murphy:

The property is just a tad under 1,500 acres and we run about 250 breeders, of which we fatten the heifers and the steers and we keep some of the heifers for rejoining. So I think at the moment we might have about 640 head, which hopefully we’ll get rid of some soon because it’s been a pretty dry season.

Drew Radford:

I wanted to chat to you about some of the vegetation work that you’ve been doing on your property, and I do wonder if there’s a bit of an overlap for you there, because for about 10 years you were an outdoor educator, so you’re in the environment in more ways than one, if that makes sense.

John-Paul Murphy:

Yeah, I was lucky to have a background in the outdoors and I spent a lot of that time facilitating young people’s journey and connection with nature and in nature, and it’s certainly something that we’re passionate about here at the farm.

I think my mum and dad certainly instilled that in me as well. They actually arrived at the farm in 85, and there’d been 12 months of drought, like a really bad drought for the area. So that’s what they were greeted with. And on top of that, there’d been years and years and years of tree clearing in the north-east, and I think people’s understanding about the impacts of that was starting to shift and groups were starting to come back in and actually go, ‘You know what? We need to get trees back in the ground.’

Drew Radford:

And so that’s what your mum and dad started doing?

John-Paul Murphy:

Yeah, so mum and dad worked with a local group called The Regent Honeyeater Project. They were getting funding to put in plantings to protect. Originally to create an environment for the regent honeyeater, which is an endangered bird in the north-east here.

And so that meant that they had the resources and the expertise to be able to come in and do the plantings and do it in a way that was the most effective. And mum and dad, they gave up the land and paid for, I think, half the fencing, is how that worked.

Drew Radford:

What did that actually look like? Did that look like little blocks of revegetation or corridors?

John-Paul Murphy:

Yeah, corridors were really important, particularly if there was remnant bush existing in different areas. So if you went from a roadside through your property to another roadside, a lot of the times the roadsides would link up with other bush blocks. So that was important.

Waterways were important, obviously, to fence off, not just for the habitat for the flora and fauna, but also to protect the waterways. I’m actually looking out the window at the moment and I can see a bunch of corridors that run across the property. Boundaries with neighbours where we both give up a bit of land but then have that barrier between, which is really good for biosecurity for your business as well. And I can see the creek. The trees on the creek now would be 33 years old, I think.

Drew Radford:

It must look vastly different from when you turned up as a young lad.

John-Paul Murphy:

It does, and the way that I try to picture it is, if you just look around the farm and you try and spot all the old-growth trees – and there are plenty of them, but not as many because quite a few have died – but that’s when it really hits home. When you look around, you see all these trees that are under 30 years old and you can picture what the landscape would’ve looked like.

Drew Radford:

Originally it was related to a bird and a bit of a change in attitude. But then did the focus shift beyond that?

John-Paul Murphy:

It has in recent years, in part because the project itself has some limitations, like it has to be a certain size in order to be able to get the funding, and we certainly felt there was scope to do more within the business.

If I take it back a second and look at our long-term goal, well our long-term goal is to have every fence line on the property as a shelter belt. And that’s the goal. To get there, we can’t give up 40 metres everywhere because that would be a considerable amount of the property, but we can give up 3 metres, and we feel that that’s going to increase the biodiversity as well as the co-benefits to the property.

Drew Radford:

It’s an interesting balance, because you point out what used to be the argument in the old days of, well, you leave a tree there, that’s one less sheep I can have. So you’re trying to find that fine balance between protecting your production and biodiversity.

John-Paul Murphy:

Exactly. I think that’s the important part. I’ve got some paddocks where unfortunately the old-growth trees, if they haven’t died, they’re looking pretty sick. So once one of those old-growth trees disappears, well then you’ve lost the only shade in the paddock. And with the summers that we get here, that really limits how you can use that paddock. So there’s a real immediacy around what we’re trying to do, which is challenging because you can only do so much each year.

Drew Radford:

Well, that does prompt the question: do you have a plan about this revegetation process? Sounds like you’ve done a lot, but sounds like you want to do a lot more.

John-Paul Murphy:

Yeah, I do have a plan. We’ve got a whole farm plan. It seems to be pretty organic and changes quite a bit, depending on the season and just what we’re up to and how we’ve managed our time.

But certainly I think, for example, those paddocks that have the least amount of shade are the priority moving forward, because that’s the biggest limiting factor on how we can use those paddocks. Because to have cattle in there on a 40-degree day just wouldn’t work.

Drew Radford:

What about actually pasture on those paddocks as well, compared to the other ones that you have vegetated around? Do you see much difference in terms of productivity in terms of pasture growth?

John-Paul Murphy:

The argument would be that the wind’s drying off the pastures quicker in the areas where they’re not getting protection from that wind. And there is manuals out there that demonstrate the best way to make a shelter belt that encourages not just shade and the revegetation, but also how it impacts the wind.

So a good shelter belt’s going to have the right width and the right makeup of bushes and trees so that the wind will actually pass through, but it slows it down, and in doing so, that’s going to limit the impacts that it has on drying out the pastures.

Drew Radford:

That’s quite an involved process, isn’t it? And a long process. Because if you wanted a tree, you needed to plant it 30 years ago.

John-Paul Murphy:

That’s right. And we’re trying to combine agroforestry into it now as well. Just another opportunity, I think, for the farm in the future, and it may not be me that actually accesses that, but certainly future generations may have access to materials through agroforestry, which just gives us another bow in the quiver.

Drew Radford:

The agroforestry part, that’s a future revenue for you, but a long way off. In the meantime, you’ve got to pay for all this. How do you do that? How do you account for it?

John-Paul Murphy:

So far we’ve been able to get some grants, which have helped with that, and while grants aren’t always available, there has been, over the last few years, there’s certainly been opportunities there. So we’re always looking out to see what’s available and how we can make it work within the business.

As far as how you pay for it yourself, that is the hardest thing. That is one of the most challenging things, like just the economics of farming. It has to be profitable in order to have the money to put back into these kinds of things.

Drew Radford:

You mentioned there that there’s manuals and other resources. Where do you go to get information to design these corridors so that they’re effective for sheltering your paddocks?

John-Paul Murphy:

For me, being new to farming, really 7, 8 years now, one of my biggest resources has been mentors.

You chat to other farmers, you see things that they’re doing and you think, ‘Geez, that looks good. That may be something I can use.’ And you go have a chat with people, and people are always so willing to let you know how things have gone for them and whether it works or doesn’t work.

There’s lots of information out there. I think it’s just a matter of being willing to look for it.

Drew Radford:

When we started talking, you mentioned the real catalyst was the regent honeyeater. Has it come back? Are you seeing it in numbers now?

John-Paul Murphy:

That’s the running joke, actually. I’ve never seen one.

They have been sighted, and they’ve been seen up around Chiltern. So yeah, it’s a hard one. We haven’t seen it on the farm, but we have seen an increase in just general biodiversity, and I think the project’s gone beyond just creating habitat for that bird to where it’s now created habitat for a bunch of different birds and wildlife in general.

There's a group called BirdLife Victoria, they come up and they do surveys every year, checking on the numbers of certain species. It also helps them to know how the plantings are going, whether it’s having a positive or a negative impact.

Drew Radford:

You described looking out your window there. I imagine it’s made it a far more enjoyable place to work.

John-Paul Murphy:

Yeah, I think so. It’s certainly more beautiful when you’ve got native trees to look at and not just green pastures – or browning pastures as the case is at the moment.

I think it’s really nice to look back and just see the progress. We put some trees in last year and all of a sudden I drive past and actually notice them. They’re above the guards and some trees we put in 3 years ago are now above the fence. I don’t notice them all the time, but every now and again I go, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’

Some time down the future I’ll probably look over and notice that they’re casting a big shadow across the paddock and that’s when it starts to get interesting because we’re getting that benefit.

Drew Radford:

John-Paul, what advice would you give to others who are thinking about creating shade and shelter on their farms?

John-Paul Murphy:

I think about how quickly you need it, and this is just my opinion. I think there’s sometimes an advantage in putting in some quicker-growing trees that may not be native but you’ll get shade much quicker than you probably will from a lot of native trees, which take a lot longer to establish. That’s important.

But certainly do your research and work out what is it you want. If it’s just shade, do you want natives? I recommend natives because they’re going to have the biggest impact for your local ecology, but there’s certainly benefits to introduced trees as well.

Drew Radford:

John-Paul, there’s so many different trees and shrubs you could choose from. Are there are a couple of go-tos for you?

John-Paul Murphy:

There’s an Australian species of tree called the prickly paperbark, and while it’s not native to the north-east, we find it’s actually the most popular tree for the cattle to sit amongst. So we use quite a lot of them, and particularly in the wider shelter belts, we have them right alongside the fence and we find that they just create this beautiful canopy. They’ve got really fine, thick leaves, and if you go sit under one, generally on a hot day, it’s noticeable how much cooler it is, and the cattle absolutely love them. So that’s a tree that we just feel is such a benefit and we'll keep using that.

Drew Radford:

Any tips you’d give to farmers for successfully establishing trees on farms?

John-Paul Murphy:

Timing’s really important. Preparation. I think all farmers know this, we need to plan for things well in advance. So if you’re thinking about doing some planting, you need to be thinking about it a year in advance.

You want to make sure that you have a plan for how you control the grasses or the weeds to give the seedlings the best opportunity for success. Think about your spacings and obviously plant at the time of year that’s most successful for where you live. Like around here, we need to really plant from late autumn, early winter through till August, I think. Once you get into September, you’re going to be watering quite a bit. That’s okay, too. But watering is a big job if you need to do it and if you have a dry summer.

I’d also think about how many you put in each year, too, because you want to be able to manage what you do.

Drew Radford:

John-Paul Murphy now has a vastly different and more productive property, thanks to 30 years of revegetation. Kylie Macreadie is an Agriculture Victoria land management extension officer. She’s been helping farmers with revegetation projects for much of her career. She says the change in attitude towards vegetation is based on science.

Kylie Macreadie:

We’ve had a chance to do lots of research, quite specific research projects over time with lots of different organisations, and really show that there’s actually direct production benefits. So we can see now that we can actually increase our pastures and our crops by buffering them from some of those winds that we might get.

We can see improvements in live weight gain and lamb survival, so we get lots of benefits in animal production. We can also buffer our dams and stop some of that evaporation from occurring.

So lots of direct production benefits but also, of course, there’s all those environmental benefits that we can see now. So reducing dryland salinity, protecting our waterways, those types of things.

Also, we’ve appreciated those areas as also having a social and wellbeing area. So they’re often the area of a farm that we might like to enjoy as a family.

So we have lots of research on production, but we also see those other benefits that we get from enjoying those spaces.

Drew Radford:

So many and varied benefits, and I highlighted trees there, but what does shade and also shelter look like on a farm?

Kylie Macreadie:

So we often also think of shade and shelter being long corridors across a farm, and it doesn’t actually need to be these long corridors. It really needs to reflect what a landholder wants. Is it shade or is it shelter? And we can create areas that have benefits for both, but sometimes we just need to have shade. So it’s providing that protection from the direct sunlight, or just to protect those buffering winds.

So we can break it down. And if we’re just looking at shade, we might need small clumps of paddock trees. We might even benefit from isolated paddock trees.

Whereas if we’re looking at shelter, it might actually be from shrubs and smaller grasses and plants. So we can actually look at different forms in the landscape to have those benefits.

Drew Radford:

You mentioned there looking at different areas of the landscape. So where should I put shade and shelter, then?

Kylie Macreadie:

It’s really about putting it in the place that matches your production. So it can be expensive and it can take time, so the best place to start is looking at where it is that you’ll get the greatest benefits for your production.

So if you have lambing paddocks, it might be looking at those. It might also be avoiding other areas, like if you’ve got areas that become quite wet and boggy, they might not be suitable at times of the year, so you might avoid those areas.

So it’s looking at what your productivity is and where your stock might be and actually matching that up. So we often like to put shade and shelter along our boundaries to buffer out our neighbours, but it’s important to look at which paddock is getting the greatest benefit from those areas that are planted.

Drew Radford:

Do landholders also have a responsibility, a requirement, to provide shade and shelter for their livestock?

Kylie Macreadie:

There’s certainly an increasing expectation from consumers and industry groups to not just be providing food and water for livestock, but also looking at the environment which stock are living in.

So we’re actually finding that there’s increasing industry standards or even cases where production standards encourage landholders to actually provide environments that have shade and shelter.

And at times they also provide a competitive advantage or even a financial benefit. So it’s really worth looking into those types of things now.

Drew Radford:

What about dry conditions? How do you benefit from shade and shelter during dry seasonal conditions?

Kylie Macreadie:

Especially in dry times, we look at quite extreme conditions. So having adequate shade and shelter is really important. So we don’t want to have areas where there’s limited shade, where stock are really being forced to camp together and not getting a lot of space for air movement. So we want to avoid those type of situations.

It’s also about providing stock that might be sick or stressed in those conditions, to have lower temperatures and more ideal environment. And it’s also a great aspect to have adequate shade and shelter around stock containment areas, which landholders might be using in those dry times.

And there’s also some of those other multiple benefits. So where we’re buffering dams with trees, we actually are seeing reduced evaporation, so we might be able to have water for a bit longer for our stock.

Drew Radford:

Kylie, money is always a question, and if you want to establish shade and shelter, that’s going to come into it. If a landholder’s starting out, what are some of the best options?

Kylie Macreadie:

There’s always some grants that might be available to landholders. The key there is to really think about what your priorities are and match those priorities to what you want that area of vegetation to look like.

There’s also some other things that people can do. So one of the first things to do is actually protect the vegetation that we have now so we don’t see any further decline in that vegetation. So that might be your large mature trees or areas of remnants. If you fence those out and use them as critical needs, then it’s not as expensive. So it might just be some fencing and management.

We might move on then to looking at areas that just need a bit of enhancement. So maybe you’ve got some isolated trees that could be linked up and some extra vegetation and fencing added between those.

And then as a last resort, it might actually be looking at those big new areas of plantings, which are quite expensive. So if you look at what you have and what you can do to enhance what you have, then you might be able to save some of those dollars.

Drew Radford:

When entering into this, I imagine there’ll be a lot of weighing up in terms of what species of trees should I plant? And that’s going to vary, obviously, depending on where you are as well.

Kylie Macreadie:

Absolutely. And it’s really important to concentrate on the overall structure and design of what you’re looking for. So whether it’s shade or whether it’s shelter and matching those species.

So one of the ways is actually to plant based on ecological vegetation class, and that’s really important for biodiversity. And it also increases your chances of successfully planting species that would grow naturally in that area. So that’s how ecological vegetation class helps us, looking at what was growing and should continue to successfully grow. But that doesn’t always provide the best structure and design.

So sometimes you need to really look at what are the trees that you might be using, what are the shrubs that are actually going to meet those needs? And sometimes it might be just looking over the hill or across catchments and really looking at the structure.

So it’s about looking at things, not only just the species, but also the structure and height and how many rows that you might like to add, how repetitive you might be able to put species, and also if you want those multiple benefits. So if you are looking at firewood or biodiversity benefits, that you do that early in your decision-making.

Drew Radford:

Kylie, we've covered looking at where you might want to put them and species, but I’m guessing there’s more to consider, especially once they’re in the ground. They don’t always look after themselves.

Kylie Macreadie:

They don’t. So it’s all about preparation and also being aware that planting an area of trees and vegetation could be just like managing a pasture or a crop. It needs to be managed, but there is some tips.

So it’s grabbing the species from a native tree supplier, not necessarily your local plant supplier. They’ll be able to give you the bulk of the species that you need and make sure they’re grown properly for planting out on farms.

Then we can look at other things, like really looking at good soil preparation, good weed control and whether you need to guard or not. Guarding can be quite expensive, but if you’ve got pest animals that could provide a threat, then guarding them would be better. And weed control in that first year is really, really important for their success. And also making sure that you include a gate and spacings that allow you to move through an area and manage it.

Drew Radford:

Kylie, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Where can landholders go to get more information?

Kylie Macreadie:

Sure, so Agriculture Victoria’s website has information on design and management of shade and shelter. Greening Australia has a really comprehensive guide on revegetation techniques in Victoria. It covers all sorts of topics, but also local Landcare groups, catchment authorities, are really key to having some of those species lists and techniques that are quite specific to areas.

Drew Radford:

Kylie, you’ve given us some great insights on how to successfully establish shade and shelter on a property. For now, though, Kylie Macreadie, Agriculture Victoria land management extension officer, thanks for joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Kylie Macreadie:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk.

To access Farm Business Resilience programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast. The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and the Victorian Government’s Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria or your consultant before making any changes on farm. For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Not that long ago in the Victorian Mallee, the adoption of no-till farming made a dramatic difference. Erosion was greatly reduced, and productivity increased significantly. It was a huge gain for farming and it begs the question, is there another no-till leap forward to be discovered.

G'day, I'm Drew Radford and this was recently explored with five demonstration sites across the region. These saw a range of products and practices applied, with the aim of protecting and improving the productivity of Mallee soils. Darryl Pearl is Agriculture Victoria Land Management Extension Officer and he was central to it all, and he joins me in the AgVic Talk studio. Thanks for your time.

Darryl Pearl:

Happy to be here, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Darryl, you've been in this game for a while, haven't you? We've spoken before.

Darryl Pearl:

Yeah, everything goes around all the time, Drew. Yes, I've been with the department for over 40 years, so back in the good old days, right up till the modern technology that we've got now.

Drew Radford:

And you're pretty familiar with the Mallee too, I'd argue?

Darryl Pearl:

Yeah, I've been working with the Mallee farmers since early 2000, seen a lot of changes from total cultivation, now to direct drill-guiding systems, variable rate chemicals and fertiliser. It's really moved in, what…20-odd years. The amount of technology and resources that farmers now have is incredible.

Drew Radford:

I would argue that's particularly important in that part of the world too, Darryl, because the soils, to put it lightly, are a bit fragile. What's different about Mallee soils?

Darryl Pearl:

Mallee soils are made up mainly of, what they call, dune and swales. Now, the dunes are all sand, varying amount of clay in them that can hold moisture and nutrients down to sand that won't hold any. And then you've got a heavier, clay-ier soil at the flats. So, they're working in at least two different types of zones in the same paddock. So, the sandier soils are easily moved, they will move with the wind, and if you don't have any sort of crop cover on it, they start to blow and we end up with dust storms, and soil moving over fences, and everything else. So, it is always been where we really want to control our soil movement, is on those dunes.

Drew Radford:

So that's what this project's about, isn't it?

Darryl Pearl:

Certainly is. Its full title is Building Drought Resilience of Vulnerable Soils in Low Rainfall Cropping and Grazing Zones.

Drew Radford:

It's a bit of a mouthful, to say the least, but I think the title describes it.

Darryl Pearl:

It certainly does. We put it down to they're protecting and improving the production of Mallee soils. It's a lot easier to say, and it gets to the point that what we're trying to do is not only protect those soils but ensure that the farmers can make a profit off that soil. There's no point in being a farmer and trying to crop country if you're not going to make a return on that.

Drew Radford:

How did this project work? What was it focused on?

Darryl Pearl:

These are demonstrations, not replicated trials and we looked at what where some of the options that you could use to improve that production on those sandy dunes or protect those dunes when they did come to the point of having no ground cover.

Drew Radford:

This was done through applying products. What were the products you focused on?

Darryl Pearl:

One of the products we used was bentonite, which is a clay, which will swell and contract as it absorbs moisture. Now, bentonite is used in the mining industry and in dam production to seal and prevent moisture moving through it. We were putting it at a treatment level that will allow it to absorb the moisture but hopefully it will let the plant get that back. We also were using a compost product which was, also had a little bit of bentonite in it but was made up of organic matter, and humus and a few other things, made into a pallet. We also had another site where we were using straw, which was spread out over that sand dune after it lost all of its ground cover. And we also looked at what we had done in 2014 on a site with biosolids. So, the biosolids, we were looking to see if we could find any effect, 9 years on from when we first put it on the site.

Drew Radford:

So, you've got a few things going on there, in terms of products that you’re using. I imagine you would've applied these in different locations in different ways. I understand there were 5 demonstration sites.

Darryl Pearl:

Yeah, there were 5 demonstration sites, which we've got to thank the farmers for letting us come on and do that work on their sites. Site number one, at Murrayville, we were putting this bentonite down through the air seeder, at sowing time, at various rates, and at the same site we were using this compost mix which was going down under the seed as well, at varying rates to see whether we could see an effect on improving crop production and cover.

Then we had the other bentonite site. He wanted to put it out ahead of sowing, so we put out a 5-tonne treatment and a 10-tonne treatment and then you just incorporate it at sowing time.

The straw site, the paddock had been harvested and the ground cover got lost. Rather than let that go through till sowing time, he decided he wanted to cover this site with something. He has a machine that would throw straw out and that straw was being applied at a few tonnes over the surface.

One of the other sites is where we had biosolids down at 3 and 6-tonne treatments that we did in 2014, and we were looking again at whether that still had a residual effect.

The fifth site was a site where the farmer had sown traditionally across his dunes, and he turned and went over the dunes to try and get better establishment. And with that site, it was aimed at trying to improve growth on that sand dune by driving over, which you can now do.

Drew Radford:

What were the results?

Darryl Pearl:

On the site where we applied bentonite and compost at sowing time, we did see an increase in biomass under some of the varying rates. And in the end, at harvest time, bentonite at about 50 kilograms under the seeder, showed an improved yield as did a couple of the others. But we also found, during the year, because these things were absorbing moisture, they actually did slow down the crop growth a bit because they were competing against the plant for the water, but that evened out when you get through to the harvest time.

So, we did see an effect from that and it was economical. We've done some cash figures on it and it would stack up under a normal season if you get production yield as well as a bit more biomass. The bentonite spread on the surface. We showed that the 5 tonne did improve yield and the 5 tonne did have a bit more biomass. But at 5 tonne at the surface, it would take you 5 years of improved production to make sure you got a return on investment.

The biosolids product, we saw responses in 2014 and 2015, but when we went back this year and tested the site again, there is no difference between that and the control, which could be effect of general sowing through there. It's moved the biosolids away from the site or it could be that we just consumed all our biosolids and we no longer got any benefit from it.

The straw, we found that we protected that soil from losses, which related to about 500 tonnes of soil. And if you calculate out the cost of nutrients, it could well be over a $1,000 worth of nutrients that you're losing out of that sand as well. We did see a little bit of movement in the covered straw as well, but it was half a centimetre’s worth of soil we lost, but we lost over four centimetres on the uncovered area, and visually you could tell the difference.

In that same site, we put a hand core down under the straw site and it was moist all the way down. The soil had moisture through it. We stepped out onto that uncovered area and it was dry as a bone down to a metre. So, the shading effect that results from the straw has an impact on moisture as well. So that was quite useful. And on the seeding direction site, we did see better establishment, a more controlled setting of depth, and allowed that crop to grow a bit better. And yield-wise, it was still below the swale but we were starting to see a bit of improvement.

Drew Radford:

What do the results tell us? Can you sum that up?

Darryl Pearl:

I think the straw one sums it up best of all, Drew, in the fact that clearly, ground cover is really important in these fragile soils. So, if you can keep the ground cover you've got, you're already starting to improve. If you can increase that ground cover, at the same time increasing your yield, you are going to have more protection from a severe year that may be dry because you've got a bit more stubble cover. We might come through these without causing damage to the dunes, without causing long-term effects where you lose nutrients and all the rest. So, I think it actually dovetails quite nicely between that straw covered effect. We know we can protect it, but we clearly can see that we are better off trying to maintain and increase our stubble cover on dunes because it protects them, and we hopefully should be able to cycle a bit more nutrients and all the rest, and therefore get a better yield performance.

Drew Radford:

Darryl, anything else you want to elaborate from those results?

Darryl Pearl:

We weren't certain, when we started, whether putting these products through an air seeder would work or whether they'd be bulking up, and blocking, and all the rest, and we proved that, A, it can be done through an air seeder. We also saw that it was a lot cheaper to do this through an air seeder than doing it by spreading. And you could actually get a return using the air seeder, whereas in broadcasting, we're looking at maybe five years if you can continue to get some response, that you'll get some return on that expense. So that was significant from that point of view.

One of the other things that we learned, only by the end of the demonstration, was these sites, what we think is actually the cause of it, may not be the real, complete issue. We dug soil pits after harvest. We found that on one of the sandy soils, there was an issue of a pH change.

The biosolids, what we learnt when we went back, we were also looking at potentially doing biosolids on a new site. The process is fairly long, so if you are looking to, say, to put biosolids out before sowing, you're probably going to have to start just after last year's harvest, because by the time you go through sourcing it, getting approval through the authorities and then managing it, it's probably a 2 or 3 months process to get to that point. So that's something that we learnt because we looked at possibly doing that and it just took too long.

Drew Radford:

You've learnt a lot of valuable things from these demonstration sites. Lastly, Darryl, what would your top 3 tips for farmers be regarding poor performing soil?

Darryl Pearl:

That message about knowing what it is that's actually causing that poor crop performance. We looked at the surface and we saw, yes, that these sandy soils, of course they're not holding water, it's going to go through, but that wasn't the total issue for why there was poor performance on that soil. So, know what's causing it, know that whatever you're going to use is actually going to remedy that, rather than be just another costly exercise that gets you nowhere. So do a thorough investigation before you do that.

The bentonite and the compost also showed us that you don't have to put the highest levels out to get a result. Under the seeder, we found that probably 50 kgs is as good, if not better, and it was better than some of the higher rates at 200 and 100 kgs.

The third point, which every farmer knows that maintaining ground cover protects your lighter soils, which is important because it also protects the organic matter and nutrients that are in that soil, which you've put in there by farming it and you want to keep it where you can actually get some return from it.

Drew Radford:

One of the farmers that Darryl Pearl has been working closely with is Richard McKee. His family have been farming near Murrayville for 4 generations.

Richard McKee:

So, it's majority dune, swale country. We're in the low rainfall zone and we get on average 325mm of rain each year, which has probably dropped slightly, I'd say, in the last 20 years.

Drew Radford:

I'd imagine, though, that being dune, swale, the way the water reacts on that and what grows on that, is quite variable.

Richard McKee:

Yeah, that's it. We have a mixed cropping business, where we have lupins, we've dipped into some lentils, vetch, and then, yeah, wheat barley, and then we grow a bit of canola as well.

Drew Radford:

That depends obviously on dune versus swale, where what is planted.

Richard McKee:

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, we try and get our rotations right for getting a grass break and, yeah, those different soil types only grow certain seeds in certain places, so we've got to get them in the right spots.

Drew Radford:

Now, in your lifetime, you've seen dramatic changes. You already alluded to one in terms of direct drill, that would've had a remarkable impact on the landscape, wouldn't it?

Richard McKee:

Yeah, that's it. Yeah. It was just too often that we were seeing the topsoil and the good part of your farm just blow down the highway, or blow across to Sydney pretty much, and it just got to a point where you had to make a change and we just jumped in and didn't hold back, really. We just went straight in for it, got rid of stock and went no-till farming.

Drew Radford:

The other important part, I would imagine in your change of practice, would be maintaining ground cover as much as possible.

Richard McKee:

Yeah, on our lighter country especially, we've got some pretty fragile dune-y soils that we definitely have to maintain and not have too much go into them, because they're a hard one to deal with, because they're unproductive and you don't want to spend too much money on them. But then you are also trying to make them productive in the same sentence, because they're in the middle of a paddock or on the edge, and they do take up a percentage, and sort trying to make money off of everything, really.

Drew Radford:

In that vein, you had the opportunity to be involved in these demonstration projects, so what are some of the solutions for improving ground cover for you?

Richard McKee:

Well, in the past, we've tried to maintain our stubble. We've done a bit of deep ripping just to see how that responds. And we've gone into this trial with AgVic, trying to put a product down the tube to create a micro-ecology just around the seed and try and stop that water running past, because our biggest problem is, when we get rain over summer, because we're not maintaining any weeds or anything on the hills, it's running through our hill. It's coming out at the bottom and we're getting seeps or soaks at the bottom of our hills, and just in where we are, they are saline, they're not fresh, and then that land is then becoming unproductive and we can't grow anything on it.

Drew Radford:

So, in regards to the product that you included at seeding, what was it?

Richard McKee:

So, we did a bentonite, which is a type of clay, and then we did an organic pellet that had a few different products in it.

Drew Radford:

Now being able to put that in at seeding would've been quite a saving, wouldn't it, in terms of not having to go back and spread it or do a separate operation?

Richard McKee:

Yeah. Yep, we were able to really lower the rates that we were able to put down the tube, compared to, say, broadcasting it out before sowing and then incorporating it. We did put some rates of 30 kilos down, because it was more just about trying to get it sitting next to that seed, so that when we got the rain coming down, instead of it just running straight past the seed, we were trying to get that other product to soak up a bit of moisture, and then hopefully it's sitting next to the seed or somewhere near it, and create that bit of a micro-ecology there.

Drew Radford:

And what did you find?

Richard McKee:

It's probably a trial that we need to repeat, I would say, to make sure the results are saying what they think they're saying. They were probably a little bit mixed where you would've thought the higher rates should have done better, but it was, yeah, we did find that the 50 kilos of bentonite down the tube seemed to be the most effective.

Drew Radford:

Why do you say you need to repeat the process again to get a better insight to it?

Richard McKee:

Because of the season it was, we had pretty good start-of-the-season rain, and then it was just a good season overall. It stayed wet all year. So, we're not sure if the dune produced more due to the season or whether it produced more due to the product being in the soil.

Drew Radford:

The bentonite and also the compost product, I'm assuming you did those in separate areas.

Richard McKee:

Yep, that's correct.

Drew Radford:

And did you find differences between the two?

Richard McKee:

There was a bit of a difference. I believe that the bentonite did a little bit better than what the compost pellet did.

Drew Radford:

So, in terms of those quantities, it all comes down to cost. In the scheme of it all, do you feel the treatment was cost-effective?

Richard McKee:

Yeah, well, I would say it was pretty cost-effective if what the results are saying is probably correct.

Drew Radford:

What are your top tips for other farmers trying to manage poor ground cover on dunes?

Richard McKee:

Yeah, well, it's about not bearing off your hills trying to maintain cover, and then investigate why that area isn't producing. Is it a compaction problem or is it a soil-related problem? Try and do a few different trials yourself into what could possibly change that composition.

And my final tip would be where variable rate over most of our farm with seed and fertiliser, and we can put more seed down the tube in those areas that are a bit more volatile, so we can get a few more plants per square metre, allowing to get better ground cover.

Drew Radford:

Well, Richard, getting better ground cover has been central to these demonstrations. Thanks for the insights to the ones that you ran on your property. For now, though, Richard McKee from McKee Agri near Murrayville, thanks so much for joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Richard McKee:

No worries, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk.

To access Farm Business Resilience Programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast. The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and the Victorian Government's Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria or your consultant before making any changes on farm.

For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Plan for the unexpected, and then, if you’re unsure, factor in an extra buffer. G’day, I’m Drew Radford, and that’s the perspective of a third-generation apiarist whose family business has been dealing with climate variability for a number of years. Richard Collins joins me in the AgVic Talk studio to talk about how his family had been doing this. Thanks for your time.

Richard Collins:

No worries, mate. Thanks for having me.

Drew Radford:

Richard, you’re a third-generation beekeeper. There's a great story about, is it your grandfather getting into it?

Richard Collins:

Yeah, yeah. My dad and Pop got into it. And the story that I always remember, is dad was riding home from school one day and seen a swarm of bees on a tree limb. And thought, ‘Hey, I'm going to snap this off and take it home’. So in a hessian bag it went, and that pretty much is what started Dad and Pop into the bee industry, I guess. And then he was a self-taught beekeeper and expanded from there.

Drew Radford:

Well, you have expanded because you’re third generation now, but you’ve got a couple of brothers as well. Not all in the game, but all having hives. How many hives between you all?

Richard Collins:

We’re probably sitting on around 3,500 I’d say, give or take.

Drew Radford:

That's a lot of beehives.

Richard Collins:

It is, it’s a fair bit of work. It’s always a full-time job, but you got to do what you love, and as Dad always says is go big or go home.

Drew Radford:

Well, you did go home. Because you’re actually a chef by trade, aren’t you?

Richard Collins:

Yeah, yeah, I am. Which has helped with the packing side of the honey world, I guess, is having a cheffing background and creating new and I guess exciting ways to do something with honey. Like we launched a creamed honey chocolate, and that was the first in Australia and we’ve just done an all-natural honey ice cream, honey honeycomb, a chocolate-coated honey honeycomb, collaborating with local producers in Bendigo. And I’ve just done a vanilla bean creamed honey.

Drew Radford:

So really diversifying what you produce. Just taking one step back, 3,500 hives spread over what sort of area, and how much honey does that many hives produce each year?

Richard Collins:

It all depends on the seasons. Weather, rain, summer, what trees are going to be yielding. It’s very variable of how much honey you'll get. You could get 100 pelotons or you could get 10 pelotons.

Drew Radford:

What’s a peloton?

Richard Collins:

An IBC [intermediate bulk container], so it’s roughly about 1,500 kilos of honey.

Drew Radford:

Wow.

Richard Collins:

Yeah, that’s a lot of honey.

Drew Radford:

Richard, what sort of area are those hives spread over?

Richard Collins:

Pretty much throughout Victoria. Sort of down south to Gippsland and north usually into ... Or we used to go into New South Wales pre-varroa, and then the Mallee area and then throughout Bendigo as well.

Drew Radford:

A moment ago you talked about their output, that it depends upon the season, which is what we want to drill down into further. But firstly, are bees particularly sensitive to weather and climate?

Richard Collins:

Yeah, they are. Weather is everything. It’s farming, same as every other farmer is, we depend on the weather for everything, really.

Drew Radford:

Do they give you signals that there’s changes coming ahead?

Richard Collins:

Yes and no. Usually if you’re trying to work them and they know rain’s coming and we know rain’s coming, they’ll get pretty grumpy and whatnot. But yeah, that’s probably the only signal you get is you get a few more stings because they know that the weather’s going to turn bad.

Drew Radford:

Southeastern Australia, the weather’s quite variable.

Richard Collins:

Yeah.

Drew Radford:

What are some of those variabilities and how have you dealt with them in your business?

Richard Collins:

You check the weather and try and come up with a game plan for the week, but the weather’s always changing. The downpours of rain. We’ve had bees flooded 2 years in a row now, unfortunately, due to extensive rain that wasn’t really forecast to hit.

But yeah, it’s I guess trying to have your game plan set for where you’re going to go and ensuring in summer the bees have got enough water, and you’re up there every week checking on them and giving them a fresh supply of water. Especially in the Mallee district where it’s dry sand and 40-plus degree days.

Drew Radford:

Richard, over your family’s history in the game, has your dad seen differences in terms of the climate?

Richard Collins:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. He talks back 12, 14 years ago when that big drought went through, is that he believes that’s when the trees definitely took a toll. And back in his day you’d go to any sort of nectar flow and you get heaps and heaps of honey, you’d get boxes and boxes. And now we’re chasing our tail to try and get enough to keep the bees happy and occasionally you’ll get a box off to be able to keep yourself happy too.

So the trees just don’t yield or last as long as what they used to in his eyes. And the climate is much more different now too, with the unknown of monstrous downpours, is it was very uncommon back 10, 15 years ago.

Drew Radford:

That’s really interesting. So you’re talking about those monstrous downpours, which a lot of them have been almost around summer, northwesterly patterns.

Richard Collins:

Yeah, yes. Definitely took us off guard last year and the year before. We lost hives both times in floods, but if you're expecting 10 mm then you get 100 mm, which is way off.

Drew Radford:

That adds a lot of variability into your planning, doesn’t it?

Richard Collins:

Yeah, it definitely throws the spanner in the works. That makes you question your backup plan or your plan to begin with, but unfortunately you just can’t control the weather and so you just got to do your best and hope for the best

Drew Radford:

I get the impression you’re always looking for ways to improve your business, and as part of that, you recently completed the Apiary Farm Business Resilience Program. What did you learn from that?

Richard Collins:

Probably the biggest thing we learned was the costings and feasibility of how much it’s going to cost to move that load of bees. And I guess what the return on the investment is going to be of moving the bees is usually you just get up and go and do it and not really think about the consequences or how much it's going to cost you, it's just something that has to be done.

But that was more of an eye-opener of working out if we move them from here to here, what’s the chance that the trees are going to yield and how much is it going to cost us? What’s the benefit going to be? Which is all still variable, given that they’re livestock, but knowing your numbers a lot more than what we did has probably been key to expanding.

Drew Radford:

It’s really interesting for you to say that because you’ve got so many hives in the family business and you’ve got even a dedicated truck. I mean, we’re not talking a small truck. This is a pantech that you’ve got for moving things around.

Richard Collins:

Yeah, yeah, we just actually got a new hive hauler truck, being a curtain slider, so hopefully a bit more safety while transporting bees. And we can do pit stops and whatnot along the way so bees can’t actually escape the truck when we’re moving them now, which is I think going to be the future moving forward.

Drew Radford:

Totally understandable. But I guess what I’m getting at is you’re very focused on the costs of running your business, and yet you’ve gone and done a course like this and you’ve actually gone, ‘Yeah, there’s more we can think about’.

Richard Collins:

Yeah. Well, being a chef by trade, I’ve got a fair idea of understanding costs, but they opened it up to a lot more costings that you weren’t really considering or thinking about, I think. And putting it all into the equation rather than just a few things.

Drew Radford:

So how have you implemented this in regards to your business?

Richard Collins:

So that’s probably key as well, is having a really good accountant that understands your business and your planning, your 5-year goals with your accountant on the expansion of what you want to do, where you want to go. That’s been helpful. And besides hard work is running numbers and trying to plan for the unknown, having a plan for the future.

Drew Radford:

It’s interesting you say that because you’ve already mentioned planning for the unknown in terms of floods and unfortunately you’ve suffered hive losses from those. There’s other unexpecteds that you’re facing, such as varroa mite. So how are you planning for those sorts of unexpected things, such as the possibility of that?

Richard Collins:

I guess probably research and trying to come up with a game plan for when and if it does come. I guess probably more when it does come into Victoria, is trying to have a game plan in place of what we’re going to be doing, how it’s going to be done. And adding that all into our costings now so that when it does come, the business is already set up and ready to go and we've got a fair idea of what’s going to happen.

Drew Radford:

It’s a lot of planning on top of planning, isn’t it? Because you don’t know what one season is going to be from the next. Then there’s curveballs such as floods, fires, and in this case a biosecurity risk.

Richard Collins:

Yeah, that’s probably the biggest thing, is livestock and just farming in general is trying to plan for the unplanned and always, I guess, the key is having a safety net, always having a buffer, and if you’re unsure, add an extra to your buffer. And that way, when it goes south, you’ve got a backup plan.

Drew Radford:

Well, it’s obviously worked well for you and your family because you are now third generation, but I imagine there’s been difficult decisions over the years to make sure that your business has stayed on track. Have there been, can you share some of those?

Richard Collins:

Yes and no. I've moved into the packing world instead of just wholesaling, which has probably been key for us to continue on, and that way we can choose how much we sell the honey at. And the only thing is you have to be able to sell to customers, so therefore you’re doing markets on weekends and you lose your weekends, so it’s sacrificing of spare time for more work time.

Drew Radford:

It sounds like they’re personal decisions as well because that eats into your family time.

Richard Collins:

It does, so having a supportive partner is probably key as well, is you are both in the game together and they may not have chosen the lifestyle of a beekeeper, but they’re definitely there to support you, which has been amazing for us.

Drew Radford:

Are there beekeeping networks that you are connected to that you get information and knowledge from?

Richard Collins:

Yeah, the VAA Inc. [Victorian Apiarists Association] is great resources, and then the field days that they host as well is very helpful. And then online, there’s so much online and I guess especially with varroa you’re Googling for New Zealand and other countries that have already got it and how they’re dealing with it and what they’re using. And chatting to other beekeepers to try and get tips and tricks of how to plan for the unknown, I guess for Australia, given that it’s different climate, different trees, different nectar.

Drew Radford:

That’s a really interesting insight, actually. I hadn’t thought that obviously the different trees and what they’re pollinating, flying around, could have some positive impact for you I guess in that front.

Richard Collins:

Yeah, I guess having a brood break in the bees to reduce mite numbers is something that we’ll have to work on. New Zealand, they get their varieties and then they can have a period of break, whereas Victoria can chase it to keep the flow coming in sort of thing, or keep the bees active.

Drew Radford:

Lastly, Richard, you mentioned you’re constantly looking out for tips and tricks. What would a couple of your top tips be for other beekeepers in terms of managing extreme climate events?

Richard Collins:

Always do risk assessments. I think they’re probably key of whether or not it’s worthwhile moving and taking the risk on moving them there. And trying to stay up to date with the weather is crucial. I think especially with the flooding over the past couple of years, is be mindful of if rain’s due, how much they’re anticipating. And if you’re in a low-lying creek or river area.

And a backup plan, trying to always plan for the unknown or prepare for the unknown is backup plans and trying to build a resilient beekeeping operation, I guess.

Drew Radford:

Richard, it sounds like you and your family have done a remarkable job over 3 generations for dealing with the unexpected. For now though, Richard Collins from Collins Honey, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Richard Collins:

No worries. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk. To access Farm Business Resilience Programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast.

The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian government's Future Drought Fund and the Victorian government's Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria or your consultant before making any changes on farm.

For more AgVic talk, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

The day-to-day operations on farm often seen never-ending. Be it sowing, harvesting, drafting stock, fixing fences, or even just spraying weeds. The list is endless and usually finding time to plan for big decisions is at the bottom of that list.

G'day, I'm Drew Radford, but as the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. Peter Brown knows this first-hand from years of working in the corporate sector. It's that insight to planning that's now fundamental to him running his family's beef farm in East Gippsland. Peter joins me in the AgVic Talk studio to delve into this further. Thanks for your time.

Peter Brown:

Thanks, Drew. Good to be here.

Drew Radford:

Peter, the property, whereabouts is it and what sort of size are we talking?

Peter Brown:

It's 10 kilometres north-west of Bairnsdale at Mount Taylor and it's 1300 hectares roughly.

Drew Radford:

Now, usually in that part of the world, Peter, it's good cattle country, is that what you're running?

Peter Brown:

Yes, we are running Herefords and transitioning sort of to Poll Hereford, so that's been an ongoing process for the last sort of five, six years. I like the temperament of the Herefords.

Drew Radford:

And how many of those are you running?

Peter Brown:

We've got 1500 Herefords.

Drew Radford:

And what's the country like there?

Peter Brown:

It's very undulating. We get about 680 mil, well average long-term average, we don't really ever get an average year. It's fair to say where we are it's a bit rocky and has lots of components, but there's a good range of pasture and trees as well. So good shelter for the cattle. And we sort of back onto state forests, which is good.

Drew Radford:

You said there nearly 700 mils in an average year. What have recent years been like for you Peter?

Peter Brown:

We've had some pretty good years since 2020, above average, but then we'd had three years before that where we were getting under 300 mil. We sort of needed this to top up again and I think this'll be an average year in '24 based on where we are at the moment.

Drew Radford:

300 mil is a dramatic cut in that part of the world.

Peter Brown:

It was. It was tough and especially when you get it three years in a row. So, I came back to the farm in 2019. We were de-stocked down to about a 1000 at that stage and everyone was doing it tough.

Drew Radford:

So, at that particular point, did you start thinking about doing things differently or what you can do to make your property more resilient?

Peter Brown:

Look, I think at that stage it was a bit of survival mode for everyone, but I think once the rain started is when we started to have the head space to do some of that. I also was getting my feet on the ground in that first year, so learning a hell of a lot.

Drew Radford:

Is that what prompted you to do the Farm Business Resilience Program?

Peter Brown:

Definitely. It was a combination of that and also, I'd come from a corporate environment where I was used to probably a bit more structure around business planning and we didn't have anything like that, and I couldn't see how what I had learned in the past could exactly be applied for the farm environment. So that's why it sort of looked attractive to me.

Drew Radford:

Peter, what have the benefits been for you in participating in the Farm Business Resilience Program?

Peter Brown:

What it gave me is the framework that I could discuss with my parents and also the other person who I work with on the farm, and it helped us look at the business at a higher level. So, it helped pull us out of the day-to-day running, which is really what we were stuck in I think and made us look at the bigger picture. So, some of the areas that we looked at were what the enterprise was, what the people were. The other one was climate change and then there's soil and water. And when you look at the sort of strengths and weaknesses of each of those, what do you want to change or are there opportunities for change in any of those?

So, on the enterprise side of things, we realised there was a market that we weren't compliant with that we could access with just a little change in our handling requirements. So, we've done that and that's helped give us a premium at the market ever since. So, it was things like that.

And on the people side of things, because moved home and it was a family business, we hadn't really made our roles and responsibilities clear and that was causing friction in the business. So, we addressed that.

And then around soil and water, one of our weaknesses around here, we do have quite a good rainfall, but it's meant our soils are fairly acidic as well. So now we've changed our fertiliser program and over time we're hoping we can reduce the acidity.

Drew Radford:

It sounded like you were very much looking for structure and plans considering you'd come from a corporate background, but it's also I guess about planning for uncertainty, isn't it?

Peter Brown:

Definitely. Because you do look at that bigger picture, it gives you a framework for when things like drought are coming up how you want to address it earlier and you can start to think about those things beforehand rather than when you're in them quite so much.

This happened to us last winter because it went dry for last autumn, winter and early start of spring and El Nino was forecast over summer, so we sat down last winter and went through our forecast numbers and just decided that it was probably an opportunity to reduce a bit just to give us a bit of flexibility with the likelihood of things being dry. Now as it turned out we had a good summer so it wouldn't have been such a problem, but now we've had a bit of a dry spell recently and it means we are actually sitting in a pretty good place at the moment.

Drew Radford:

It sounds like you have very clear decision-making points, and you stick with those decisions and also, you're not looking back at it through the rearview mirror regretting it.

Peter Brown:

That's right, and I think to add to that I'd say is it allows everyone in the business to contribute because it gives you the ability to have those discussions rather than one person feeling like they have to make all the decisions, which in those tough uncertain times it is a big responsibility for that one person and also it doesn't necessarily allow for buy-in and you need everyone to have bought in when you're going through those tough times I think.

Drew Radford:

I reckon that's quite an important insight and point to get to because yeah, you're shouldering the responsibility, everyone's made the decision and no one person's, to blame.

Peter Brown:

That's right.

Drew Radford:

Peter, I'm wondering if you've got a couple of top tips for other farmers wanting to prepare better for future challenges

Peter Brown:

While everyone's going to have a different approach to how they tackle things. This framework, you can adapt it for whatever your system is and apply the assumptions you have around threats and opportunities. And by capturing these in the planning tool, it sort of helps you to test your thinking with other stakeholders both within the business and also potentially outside, like with your agent or your agronomist, about how you're planning on tackling things and that helps get that alignment.

The other thing I think is you've got to embrace that there aren't certainties in this environment. Climate's always going to be a massive risk. There will always be unknowable areas, so best to make the best decision you can with the information you've got available at the time and move forward and then you adjust and learn as you're going. I think that's been a big thing for us. It takes out a lot of being overwhelmed if you feel like you're moving forward, even if it's not the perfect solution in the end, it's better to be moving forward on it.

Drew Radford:

Peter Brown is moving forward and that's thanks in part to Paul Blackshaw whom he met when undertaking the Farm Business Resilience Program where Paul was leading the course. Paul's a farm management consultant with Meridian Agriculture. He knows firsthand that for farmers to be successful, they have to look at farming not just as a way of life, but first and foremost as a business.

Paul Blackshaw:

Oh, absolutely. And I think people who do view it as a business do bring a different approach to farming and generally with the farmers that I work with and come across, those people who do view it as a business tend to be more successful and profitable. Not that success is always measured in profit, but they tend to be more successful about achieving what they would like to achieve because they're often a lot clearer about what they want to achieve.

Drew Radford:

I think that's an important clarification because I would imagine that's separating sentimentality out of making business decisions.

Paul Blackshaw:

It is. And one of the things that I see a lot, I do a reasonable amount of succession planning as well, and one of the difficulties in a multi-generational business is that lack of understanding about where the actual business is going and then what are often conflicting aims or desires about what people would like to get out of life and what they'd like to get out of the business. So that's where this planning role is really extremely important when there's a couple of generations who perhaps don't necessarily agree on what the business might look like in the future.

Drew Radford:

Paul, we're going to drill down into the farm business planning in a moment, and you mentioned that you've worked in the succession planning space. You seem to be a perfect person to be having this broader business planning discussion with because from what I can work out, you've had a career that's focused on the business of running farms.

Paul Blackshaw:

It's probably over 20 years now, but I like to say that for about the last 20 years I've spent a lot of times sitting around the farm kitchen table where most of these conversations happen talking about farm finance, which is often the entree into that kitchen, but it often drifts or it should drift into farm philosophy as well because there's always a story behind any set of numbers. So, to be able to actually acknowledge that ultimate profit from a financial perspective is important, but also to start to drill down with people about what are the other things that are really important to them, which might be lifestyle, it might be something around sustainability, it might be being there for kids that are young. All those sorts of things are actually really, really important and you find that farmers or people tend to make decisions that are based around emotion or passion. It's a stronger influence on decision-making than those that they might make with the head.

Drew Radford:

You've also got a bit of dust on your boots though as well. You do a bit of share farming.

Paul Blackshaw:

Little bit. I live in a great part of the world in north-east Victoria, and we've got a little bit of land here that we do share farm with a neighbour. Luckily, we don't have to rely on it totally for our income, but certainly you live those seasons with the people that you're working with. Having said that, there's a lot of farmers that I've worked with over the years as well that rely on some degree of off-farm income and it's surprising the proportion of farms that are out there that do need some level of off-farm income. And there's absolutely no judgement around that, that's just reality for some people.

Drew Radford:

You've talked about a range of things. Distilling it down, what is business planning and why do you think it's so important for farm business?

Paul Blackshaw:

To me there's three main areas of planning. There's the strategic, tactical and operational. So, the strategic is about the bigger picture, the 5, 10, 20-year plan, where you're wanting to go, where you're headed, and that often morphs into a formal written business plan.

The tactical, which is more the yearly plan, the yearly activity, that's going to let us run the business and achieve our strategic aims.

And then the operational, which is more your sort of, day-to-day week-to-week, things that are required.

They're the sort of the three areas of planning and each of them are important and need to build on the other. So, you can't have an operational plan that is in conflict with your strategic plan, for instance. So, by doing that thinking, and I think you do it in some order, so you need to have thought about the strategic direction of your business before you worry about the others because the day-to-day things will be influenced by whatever your strategic direction is.

And this is again, one of these issues around these multi-generational businesses is that strategic planning, where we want to be in 10 years or 20 years-time, you would expect it to be different from somebody who's in their seventies or eighties, for instance, who might be looking towards retirement. You would expect their 10 and 20-year plan to be different from somebody who is perhaps 30 or 40 and coming back with passion and new ideas and wanting to take the business in a different direction. But this is one of the real challenges with strategic planning is that the actual plan for the business needs to incorporate each of those individual desires, and that can be really difficult.

Drew Radford:

There's a lot there going on in terms of making you a good business plan. What else do you think you need to consider? I imagine it's a dynamic thing as well.

Paul Blackshaw:

Absolutely, it's dynamic. I think some of the things to think about when you are doing that strategic planning is the actual role of documenting it is seen as just the tack-on at the end. But actually I find with farmers who are often not particularly good communicators, the actual process of thinking through where they would like to be in 10 or 20 years, and we've got some little tools that we might use to help them think that far out, and then actually write some stuff down and then show it to other people in the business or other people in their family, it's amazing how many surprises pop up from that little exercise.

And I've got a classic example from years ago where the conversation started with Dad who said, and this was during the millennium drought, and he said, "I actually don't really want to be farming. I really don't enjoy it." And these were conversations I was having individually, "I don't enjoy, it's pressure, it's stress, I'd rather be doing something else. I'm only doing it because my son loves it and I'm wanting to support him."

And then I individually have the conversation with the son who says, "I'm not enjoying farming, it's too much stress, pressure. I'd love to be doing something else. I'm only doing it because Dad wants to do it and I want to support him." And so, there's a great example of two people who are running a business together but had never stopped to talk to each other about what they would like to do in life, which then translates to what they'd like to do in the business.

Drew Radford:

That's quite an eye-opening example to say the least. And documenting that forces you to have those conversations, I guess.

Paul Blackshaw:

Absolutely. And farmers often are not very good verbal communicators, so being able to write something, go back, rewrite it, not have to have some pressure to come up with the right words at the right time, is really important. But once you actually do start to build this strategic plan, it's like a reference point for the business. So, when you're at a difficult crossroad, you can go back to the work that you might've done and say, "That's right, we agreed that we were going to follow this pathway."

It's almost like having a position description for a business. It gives you the guidance about where you're headed. But the other thing is don't just leave it sitting in the drawer. So, the important aspect of being able to pull it out of the drawer every year or two and say "What's changed?" Because things will change. "Is it still relevant? What do we need to update?" But it's also a great exercise to look back and say, "Actually we've really achieved a lot." Because as farmers they're busy working, sometimes you don't look back and reflect and celebrate the fact that you actually have come a long way in a couple of years.

Drew Radford:

You've talked about the future direction there. I imagine farm business planning can help farmers before, during, and after a drought. How does it work in that regard?

Paul Blackshaw:

A reasonably simple example is thinking about the actual stock that are on your farm. So, if your strategic direction is that you want to be a well-respected or acknowledged breeder of commercial or stud bulls for instance, then the decisions that you make when you're looking to do some restocking will be very different if you're just running a commercial fattening or veal herd or whatever it happens to be.

And so little things like that, once you realise what the future direction of the business is, and those drought-based decisions we call tactical planning, so it lets you make a tactical decision about de-stocking that's in support of what your strategic plan is. So, if your strategic plan is that we're just going to be trading cattle, we'll buy them cheap, fatten them and sell them expensive, hopefully, most cattle farmers have been the other way around in the last couple of years, but if that's your plan, then you don't need to keep breeding stock because that's not part of your strategic direction.

Drew Radford:

So, when it comes to developing a plan for drought and other business risks, what are some of the common mistakes that farmers make?

Paul Blackshaw:

We know these things are very difficult to plan for, but perhaps to not really have just even considered that this is going to perhaps go a little bit pear-shaped at some stage. So up until probably 18 months ago for most of the businesses that I work with, it was a pretty good four- or five-year run. Commodity prices were strong, we had good seasonal conditions, and the risk is that you forget that there's another drought coming or there might be another flood or bushfire or whatever it happens to be coming. So, you tend to get a little bit sucked into just thinking this is how it's going to be forever.

Whereas if you've thought about into the future, this is one of the risks to our business. I suggest that part of your business planning should be about thinking about risks. What are the threats or risks of our business? Then to actually have identified some of those helps you start thinking about planning for them. You mightn't actually pull the trigger on things until that day arrives, but at least you've got to clear a picture of something that you might need to do. And we actually find that the process of doing a SWOT analysis so that thinking about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the business is really a powerful part of pulling out what those threats might be. And you mightn't have the exact answers to what happens, but at least you've started thinking about them.

The other part of that is that there's a risk that people don't make any decision, and we use the term decision paralysis, and that will often happen when an event is occurring around you, and you haven't thought about it, so you don't know which way to turn. At least if you've thought about an event, you've at least got some idea of what you would do. So, when you're in the heat of it, when it's drought, whether it's fire or flood, then you actually don’t have to do that much thinking because you've actually done the thinking already. So that's a way of getting around decision paralysis.

Drew Radford:

Paul, what are some of the common challenges farm businesses face when it comes to building their business resilience?

Paul Blackshaw:

One of the challenges is lack of profitability. Any business that has the financial capacity to be able to ride through an event obviously is going to be much better placed. And it's amazing how many risks will really dissipate when you've got a financially stable business. So almost thinking about the financial performance of the business is a good place to start because if you've got a business that really is financially risky, then some of the decisions you make in an event are going to be very different from if you've got a really strong financial business. So, there's some aspect to this about thinking about the financial sustainability of your business.

Obviously, people who are financially stable, sleep well at night, they're less stressed, they make better decisions, I mean, that's just human nature, but we can't automatically just pull a financially strong business out of the air either. I mean, some businesses are financially strong, and some aren't, and that will be partly due to the role of the operator, but that some of them are inherently too small in scale or those sorts of things. So that's why I was saying earlier about a number of businesses who rely on some level of off-farm income is fine because that actually gives them a little buffer too.  Every business is very different around that, but just being able to have that level of financial sustainability is really, really critical.

And probably the other bit is don't be scared to ask for help and support. And probably that goes back to my days as a Rural Financial Counsellor was to say, you're not in this alone. And often the problems seem overwhelming, so don't be scared to talk to people, whether it's a rural counsellor or whether it's an agronomist or whether it's a trusted friend or a neighbour or whatever. The idea of being able to bounce ideas off somebody usually will increase the actual value of a decision and it makes it a better decision in the long run.

Drew Radford:

A moment ago you mentioned a SWOT analysis. Lastly, what do you reckon a couple of other key tools or practices are that you'd recommend to farmers to help them develop a successful farm business plan?

Paul Blackshaw:

We use the term think outside the square or think outside the box. We use a little tool which we call the futures cone. So, what it says is, out 10 years, here's your likely future. That doesn't have to be your future. So, you can expand that futures cone to think, well, what is possible? And businesses that, particularly entrepreneurial businesses or those who are trying new techniques or technology or growing new crops or whatever, will generally have that mindset to say, well, if we keep doing the same thing, this is where we'll end up. But don't be too scared to open-up the mind to new things.

But going back to some of the tools, actually being willing to, if you like, pay somebody or be part of a group exercise where you do some work on this is also pretty valuable as well because an independent set of eyes on a business or on your plan is gold. Just somebody who tests your assumptions and says, "Well, what about this? What about that?" It doesn't have to be on a regular basis, but particularly I think when you're starting from scratch with a strategic plan, having somebody to help you is pretty important, I think.

Drew Radford:

Paul Blackshaw, Farm Business Advisor with Meridian Agriculture, thank you so much for joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Paul Blackshaw:

Thanks, Drew. Pleasure to talk about it.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk. To Access Farm Business Resilience Programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast.

The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and the Victorian Government's Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria, or your consultant before making any changes on farm.

For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:
Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:
G'day. I'm Drew Radford and welcome to season nine of AgVic Talk. This season's all about planning for the dry and to better equip you to manage the impacts of drought and our changing climate. This season will provide you with resources and a range of practices and tools that are available to help you improve your farm business. Farming's rewarding, but it can also be challenging, and no 2 stories or businesses are the same. We can all learn from each other and set a plan for success. Today's episode is a sneak peek of what's to come.

Australia has some of the oldest soils in the world. For farmers that can make it difficult to capture subsoil moisture so that they can deal better with dry times. However, one way of resolving this is through subsoil amelioration, or more commonly referred to as subsoiling.

Chris Smith runs a mixed farming enterprise at Grass Flat, around about 30 kilometres west of Horsham. He's been on a quest to improve the soils on his property. So when the opportunity came up to run a subsoiling demonstration, he keenly offered up a piece of his land for the exercise. To discuss the process, and more importantly, the results, Chris joins us in the AgVic Talk studio. Hello, Chris.

Chris Smith:
Good day, Drew. Good to catch up with you.

Drew Radford:
Chris, whereabouts do you farm? And I understand your family's been in the region for well over a hundred years.

Chris Smith:
Yeah, we farm in an area called Grass Flat, and I farm here with my wife Annette. This area is 30 kms west of Horsham, just near Mount Arapiles and getting near the edge of the Little Desert.

Drew Radford:
Right. So that would be a reasonably varied country out there then, wouldn't it, Chris, if you're between those two spots?

Chris Smith:
Yeah it is, Drew. It's a pretty spot. We get a good view of Mount Arapiles and the undulating country. So you end up with sand rises and there's an interesting run of salt lakes that run probably in a northerly direction from Mount Arapiles and we've got a number of them on our place, two of them. And on the eastern side of those salt lakes, what they have, is what they call lunettes. So they're like sand rises, and then you can end up with heavy flats. So we end up with a whole range of soil types here on our place, but it adds to the interest of trying to farm.

Drew Radford:
I think you're being fairly generous there with your description. Cropping across that landscape must be...I don't know whether challenge is the right word, but it sounds like you've got at least four different soil types. What's going on there?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, so within paddocks they do pick up different soil types. You can have limestone ridges running across your paddocks to heavy flats to sand rises, to really gutless sand. We've tried to patch out different areas at times to lift the productivity of those poorer areas. Maybe using a bit of sulphate of ammonia, gypsum and that sort of thing. But you end up with quite a colourful yield map at the end of the harvest because you can see just your different soil types dropping in and out, depending on the season.

Drew Radford:
Chris, that sounds like a fairly top-down approach for want of a better description. I understand though you've started to have a look at a slightly different approach, subsoil amelioration or otherwise known as subsoiling. For those that don't know what that is, can you describe it?

Chris Smith:
Well, subsoiling, people are probably very familiar with deep ripping and even clay delving. Deep ripping can be used to bring clay up onto your sand rises, which is not that new. People have been doing it for a long time, but subsoiling or subsoil amelioration is dropping some sort of product to improve the soil fertility, health, biological activity in the soil behind the tyne as you rip. So you're dropping it at depth so at the same time you're breaking up, maybe a compaction layer, you could be bringing clay to the top of the profile, depending what your approach is, or you could just be getting a mix of that clay and the topsoil and dropping some sort of product behind the tyne.

Drew Radford:
So it sounds like there's a bit going on there. You're not just deep ripping, you're adding something to essentially the rip, the trench, that you've dug. What's that achieve?

Chris Smith:
The idea behind subsoiling is to improve the health of the soil in a number of ways. One way is to aerate your soil. You're breaking up a compaction layer that's preventing air getting in, and without air there's not much biological activity in your soil and the roots won't be penetrating, and the water doesn't get in. So there's that side of things, and then by dropping a product in behind it, which is high in organic matter, then you're going to add all those goodies into your soil that the microbes and the bugs and the earthworms will hopefully add to the overall health of your soil.

Drew Radford:
Let's start talking about what's involved, and I understand, you offered to do a subsoiling demonstration on your property. What did you do?

Chris Smith:
It was in conjunction with Agriculture Victoria and Birchip Cropping Group and they provided the hardware, the equipment to do the job. So we allocated an area in a paddock that was going to a cereal in that rotation, and we picked a transect across the paddock that picked up a sand rise and then a gilgai heavy flat and then up onto a problem area where we get water logging. So we had all three soil types, all three areas in the one transect, which ran for about 400 metres, 350 metres, and there was a number of subsoiling products that we were dropping down the tube or just on top of the soil or just left the control. That was just to assess what is best for the soil types that we've got here and the conditions.

Drew Radford:
There's a bit going on there in terms of you're doing different soil types and you're also doing different additives for want of a better description. Did the results vary?

Chris Smith:
Yes. It was quite interesting, really. We had a pretty good winter here, so the product that we had access to was some compost pig manure, and then we had our own compost, which I made myself, made out of duck manure and straw and a few other goodies, and that was what we called our ‘home brew’, and then we had gypsum as well.

So there was a whole series of combinations of mixing, say, putting the pig manure, compost at depth, and then my home brew at depth, and then mixing gypsum with those products and also putting them at depth and then a few controls and then just dropping the product on the top. And then we went about speed tilling that in. So we let that run through the season. We just pretty much sowed it as part of our normal rotation and that's pretty much all I did.

I just let the trial run its course. And so as the time went by in the demonstration trial that we were running, it was plain to see that where the product was drilled in, there was a yield response and where the control, the crop wasn't as good. Between the control and the compost at depth, that ranged from about 0.6 of a tonne per hectare benefit of the pig manure, which was close to 1.3 or four tonnes higher. So there was some interesting results there, and we got to dig a soil pit. And you could see this product you dropped in at depth, it was like a big sausage ripped in behind the tyne, and it was really fascinating to see actual worms in those subsoiling lines where we dropped the compost, whereas I didn't find any other worms anywhere, but they were in the subsoiling product, which was good.

Drew Radford:
Those yield results, you'd be pretty happy with that, wouldn't you?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, it was good to see that you can get a response and you get some benefit from going to the trouble of the expense, I suppose. And it'll be interesting to see how the paddock performs this year and just how it responds. We drop back to a legume this year, a pea, so it'll be interesting just to see how that establishes and whether there's improved nodulation on those areas where we did deep rip the compost in.

Drew Radford:
Chris, you raised the word there, expense. Running a tyne through a paddock and then providing the home brew or the pig manure in behind it is a bit involved?

Chris Smith:
Yes, there is, Drew and they were putting the pig manure at 20 tonnes per hectare, which you need a fair bit. And the home brew went in at about 12 tonne and the equipment was pretty substantial, unique sort of equipment. I guess people have to weigh up what are their objectives. If you are going to deep rip it or do clay delving, is there an opportunity to drop something down the tube if you're going into the paddock anyway, so those sorts of things you have to weigh up.

Drew Radford:
Well, in terms of weighing it up, what have you taken away from it for your own property?

Chris Smith:
I'm very interested in trying to improve our soils. I'm very keen to look at doing subsoiling, particularly on poorer performing areas of our paddocks on the sand rises and just targeting those and trying to lift the overall soil health and performance and hopefully yield.

Drew Radford:
They're crucial things. Do you think it'll put you in better stead for dry seasons as well, trapping subsoil moisture?

Chris Smith:
Well, yeah, I'd hope to hold on to the moisture. If you're lifting the organic matter, in particularly those sand rises, hopefully the soil can hold on to some of the moisture more readily, rather than just draining straight through or running off, because some of our sands are non-wetting, which can be a little frustrating when it comes to germination, and trapping moisture as well as not losing nutrients through the profile as well. If we can lift the soil productivity and that can hang on to the nitrogen and the different minerals that we need to grow a healthy crop, then we're going to have a win-win, I believe.

Drew Radford:
Chris, what have you taken away from it in terms of challenges and lessons learned? I understand you're a bit surprised about the quantities involved, but I can't imagine it's a quick process running a ripper through even to start with.

Chris Smith:
It is time-consuming, and I suppose that's something to consider, but for me it was a real eye-opener to see just how the soil responds and just seeing at depth what problems that we have to deal with in this area of grassland and what benefits could be achieved using deep ripping and dropping ameliorate in. So I'm interested to pursue it further and target those areas where I believe that we could lift our soil health.

Drew Radford:
Lastly, Chris, for other farmers listening to this, have you got a couple of takeaway tips that you'd suggest to them to consider if they're thinking about subsoiling?

Chris Smith:
Yeah, I'd probably evaluate what your objectives are, like what are you trying to achieve by subsoiling and what products are readily available and at what expense and availability of the equipment, and if you are going to clay delve anyway, maybe there's an opportunity to value add that procedure by incorporating some sort of ameliorant or subsoil product into the soil profile while you're doing that process. I think that you have to evaluate each of the steps. Can you do target areas when it's so expensive and try to lift the performance of those areas and leave the better performing areas just to conventional farming or maybe using other additives to improve soil health without actually going in and ripping the soil. But I guess you have to evaluate what the problems are, whether you have a drainage issue, water penetration, compaction. So I guess you have to weigh up your limitations of your soil and saying what it's going to deliver for me and the cost associated with that.

Drew Radford:
Well, Chris, it sounds like you've had a fascinating ringside seat, literally, for this demonstration that you've run on your property and gained some huge insights about potential ways of improving your soil, because that sounds very central to your future farming. I'll be fascinated to see where you get to with this over the years. For now though, Chris Smith, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Chris Smith:
Thank you, Drew.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to this episode of AgVic Talk. To access Farm Business Resilience Programs and information from Agriculture Victoria, check out the show notes from this podcast. The Farm Business Resilience Program is jointly funded through the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and the Victorian Government's Future Agriculture Skills Capacity Fund.

Contact Agriculture Victoria, or your consultant before making any changes on farm. For more AgVic Talk podcasts, visit agriculture.vic.gov.au/agvictalk. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Further information

Fact sheet: Decision support for grain growers

Case study: A first experience of subsoil amelioration on Chris Smith’s farm in western Victoria

Video: Subsoil amelioration