Ep 010 - Scott Brennan Chats About Regenerative Agriculture

In this episode Averill & Bernadette interview the accomplished Scott Brennan.  Scott is an Australian Olympic gold medallist, a medical doctor and a keen practitioner of regenerative agriculture.  Scott's informative and down-to-earth approach to working with nature is refreshing and inspiring. 

In this podcast Scott references the following books:
The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown

Transcript

Before we start today, Seedy Chats would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Ngunnawal and Ngamburi country, recognising their continued connection to this land. Traditional custodians of all our lands, from the water running through our creeks, the air we breathe in the mountains and the stars that shine brightly in the sky, we pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging. Hello and welcome back. Welcome to Seedy Chats, the podcast where imperfect gardeners, Avrill, that's me, and Bernadette, Hi, that's me. chat about our favourite topics, gardening and life. So whether you're new to gardening, a seasoned pro or somewhere in between, join us on our journey to be mindful in gardening and life in general. So Avril, today, a very exciting guest on the show. Someone who's a little bit intimidating, not only an Olympic gold medalist. I know, complete overachiever. Also a qualified doctor. Yep. And now a regenerative. Agriculture. Agriculture practicer. Also, can I say, is it too early? A friend. A friend, yeah. A friend of Seedy Chats. So today we're interviewing Dr. Scott Brennan. He is an Australian Olympic gold medalist representing Australia at three Olympic Games, our champion rower from Hobart, Tasmania. After a back injury, he then casually stepped across into medicine becoming a doctor and now he's practicing soil regeneration on his properties. So yeah, very exciting to have him on board and I hope all of our seedy chums enjoyed this as much as we did and Avril and I are actually hoping to take this chat a step further aren't we? We are, we're going to collaborate with Dr. Scott Brennan which is very exciting. and do some real life gardening and you can follow along that journey and watch as we regenerate a patch of some pretty lifeless dirt into a pretty productive little crop. Yeah we're going to regenerate it, we're going to document it and yeah I'm pretty excited about this actually because we get to do something different and share our experience. So Scott had shared some photographs of before and after with his properties. Amazing isn't it? And I was totally blown away. And even... If you didn't have the house in the background, you wouldn't believe it was the same patch of land. No, you wouldn't. The life that he's brought into it. And I actually felt quite drained and hot looking at the first photograph. And then the next one, I was like, so much more cooler. Do you like peanut coladas? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just felt a little bit more relaxed. It just seemed right. The first one was so barren, your favorite word at the moment, Bernardin. But yeah, let's get to it, let's get challenging. So I've done your little intro. Yeah. I've put in it, am I correct? I want to fact check this. Am I correct that you finished your medical studies in 2007? Yeah. And then won Olympic gold in 2008. That's right. So you were rowing and studying at the same time. Yeah, yeah. My first Olympics in 2004, took the year off for that year. And then 2008, and then the hard one was intern and resident years. And then 2012 Olympics, that was a tough one because working night shifts and stuff. But yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, it's so normal to do that. I was saying to April, I said, look, because we're saying we're a bit nervous today. And I said, I'm nervous. He's just like us. And then I'm going through. And I was like, Bernadette, you're so like us. Well, I love nature and gardening. So I am exactly like you guys. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, it's a. I just did some sport in the past. And a bit of a bit of a cat that's lived nine lives. in a way, you were doing the Olympic rowing. Yep. And then onto medicine, what kind of medicine? So mostly critical care, which is kind of that umbrella of like emergency ICU and anesthetics, and then sedol and aesthetics, because my wife... she works for Ernst & Young, you know, like one of the big four kind of accounting firms in their consulting wing. And so she was on the like the path to partnership really quickly. And then we just kind of found that... Power couple. Yeah, well, she's powerful. I'm no longer the powerful member of that couple, but she makes up for all the power. But... So we just kind of realised we had to make a choice. Do we want other people to raise our kids or do we want to do it ourselves? And family is really important to us. Yeah. And we just sat down and said, whose job is better? And being a doctor is so rubbish that I didn't even have a chance. Right. So she's like, you're a stay at home dad now. So that was that. And and that's kind of what's harder. This is the biggest job of your life, right? Yeah, well, certainly. Well, the difference is right. Like what I love is they're both really hard. And I've got massive respect for anyone who. has done kind of full-time parenting. Like I just think it's like, when we had that little lockdown period in camera and I had the two of them at home, six months and three, I was like, I'm losing my mind. Right, like five, like just no break. And- No break, no weekend, everyday's groundhog day. And I just like- I just kind of blurred into this thing and I was trying to do some work at the time. Like I was doing some consulting work through sport and I was doing it between the hours of like midnight and 4am. Like when the kids were not waking up and I was kind of stuck and it was just like, I am actually losing my mind doing this and I can feel my health really deteriorating. All these things. Sleep. Sleep. It's a form of torture. That's why it's pretty bad. Absolutely. And so anyway, once. And then kind of like I just got better at being a dad after that and you just figured it out took me a long time Plus when you get to a little bit of economy at scale Yeah exactly Where eventually one will start entertaining the other Yeah exactly But anyway so I ended up kind of really enjoying that role after struggling a bit at first with the parenting thing. And then it also gave me that space to move more away from giving the best of myself to strangers really, um, as much as I love that, like I loved like that kind of patient doctor interaction, like that real humanity point where you're helping someone in that their worst time. That is magic. Yeah. And yeah, yeah. When they're the most vulnerable and absolutely that is, that is, I was just saying I had some surgery on Monday and I was just saying that is the beautiful part. In that room there would have been hundreds of years of study between all those people just to help you in that moment Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, and even just a small one It's like so there's the actual survey, but even just the thing of can you just settle someone's fear? That's right The answer is yes. Cause I'm here. Yeah, here's some drugs. So I was sitting there, I wanted to give you a quick little look. Right? So I'm sitting there and I was having a bit of a joke with him. I said, you know, you're going to give me the happy stuff and the sleepy stuff. Doctor, just give me the happy stuff first. And then he came back in and he said, actually the equipment that we need for your surgery isn't ready yet. It's going to be 30 minutes. So I'm going to have to get you to sit here and wait. And I said, what in this room? There's nothing to do. And he goes, don't worry. Let's have a party. Oh, I'm sorry. He keeps giving me these little injections. Wee. I was down the K-hole. I don't know what it was. But I just sat there. The walls were moving. I was having... That sounds like it. I mean, yeah. Everything was going well. Sort of, yeah, it sunked out. Then I came to it. But it was actually, there was a point there in terms of with that, what I was just saying, in terms of the... As beautiful as that moment is where you can ease someone's fear. The cost it extracts from you to have that privilege is huge. You know, to be working in the middle of the night and to do all this study and to do the hours that you have to do. And we, and our family simply didn't have the capacity and the buffer. We're here. We don't have any extended family in Canberra. And so, yeah, so I know you guys the same. And so there was just like, right. something's got to give and I don't want to be my relationship with my children. Yeah. So that means my job. Brave choice. Scary, really scary, but also awesome. I can see though, you've got a very calm presence as soon as you walked in. So I can understand, like you would have been on the front line with critical care that would make someone. Well, you can't be a nervous nearly. Well, it would be a very unpleasant job. If you don't know what's going to happen. So then you decided to take this. a leading hand with the kids and then also moved out to a 40 acre property in 2019, which is where you've focused on raising the children and a new chapter of regenerative agriculture. And you recommended for me to actually read a book called From Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown, which I loved. And he basically has this 20 year journey of where he enhances the life biology of his soil through necessity at the beginning and study. So I thought it was really interesting because Avel's on a property as well. talking about bringing in all these inputs, but I'd love to talk about your journey on the property and how you've improved where you started where you are now. Yeah, so when we moved when we moved out there it was just approaching that really awful drought that we had. And so we had 2019, you know, it barely rained at all. And then just that summer of fire in, at the end of 2019 and start of 2020. Just around COVID, great time to be alive. I wasn't, it's just beautiful. We're still waiting for the locust. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. And, um, well, if it rained frogs, I probably wouldn't mind that. That must be pretty cool. I think so. Yeah. Anything, rain something please. But, um. Yeah. And so I kind of just remember having this period of, um, you know, stepping outside and there was that red haze and just something about that light that was just quite distressing in itself and the smell of smoke and you couldn't get away from it. So my wife came in and took my boy, um, down to Melbourne to get away from it, stay with some family there and I stayed with the dog to look after the farm. And I just kind of had this feeling of, look, it's got to rain again sometime. Right. And, but it's just like when it does like, we got a lot of work to do, you know, in terms of trying to build up some resilience to be able to survive this better than what we did, because everywhere I looked, it was just bare ground. You know, and so barely a thing growing. The trees somehow managed to survive, except one beautiful chestnut tree. The only tree I watered and it died. I think it was just too much for it. But, you know, for everyone listening at home, barren, lifeless soil, even when it does rain. can't just run it off. It just runs off. Even when the rain comes, it's about having the soil in a position to be able to Absorb. Absolutely. And so that comes to that concept of effective rain format. So you can have a thousand millimetres of rain But if that rain falls on a concrete, it's not getting to the ground underneath there And so effectively like when it did start to rain we were getting zero millimetres again because it's just sheeting straight off the top Yeah, and that was always going to happen because it would be baked hard. You know, there was nothing there. So I just started with one, we have a small kind of orchard out the front of our house, had some surviving trees there and we just started with that and all I did was I just kind of shopped around and it was really quite difficult but I got all sorts of different cover crop. So one of the concepts in Gay Brown's book, and these are widespread concepts now, why don't like the five things really, I want to just list the five things, they're really helpful. There's like five concepts to soil management. The first one is limit any disturbance, so don't dig up the soil, don't plough it, don't break the house of soil because there's complex fungal networks and everything that grows there. No dig, no till. Yeah absolutely, no dig, no till. And the second one is wind and heavy rain so bare soil get washed away blown away and also not getting backed by the Sun because once you get to about 50 degrees at soil temperature which you can do in summer quite easily effectively all your soil soil life will die off. As you say, avril mulching, blanket, the blanket. Yeah absolutely and so then greatest diversity possible is the next one and so basically because monocultures aren't natural and they don't exist anywhere except where humans are. Yeah. And because different roots all reach different depths and they'll do different tasks as well, they'll cycle nutrients differently. I saw a great image recently and it was showing some perennial grasses versus some monocrops that were growing and the root system on those perennial grasses, I mean it was over a meter deep and wide. Did you see that this morning? Ah, I saw it recently. Was it this photograph? I saved it. We'll share it on our social media. this morning we were looking at the same thing at the same time. That's it. I even saved the photograph because there are different vitamins and nutrients and things available at different depths as well so obviously that's going to be yeah that's a great image to share to explain that. Yeah and then that's three isn't it and then the fourth one is roots in the ground at all times of year if you can. Never have bare soil. Yeah but also always try and have like solar panels to the Sun so leaves and things to the Sun. because then those plants will send the sugars down to their roots, which effectively forms the carbon that is what we want to sequester from the atmosphere from a climate change perspective, but also more importantly for soil, forms that organic matter in your soil. Which is side note, that's why there's issues with peat moss, right? Because all of that peat moss has contained all of that carbon. And when they mine all that peat moss, it releases all of that carbon into the atmosphere. And then, sorry, point number five? Is incorporate animals into a landscape. Yes. Because nature doesn't exist separate to animals. And that's the tricky one though. So that one requires quite intensive management, a skilled eye and that kind of thing. Time. Yeah, and time, right? Do you have animals on your land? No, not yet. I've got two small animals. That's how I take up all my time. And management. And so, yeah. And also kind of like, we're at that point in our lives where if we want to pick up and be able to just kind of go away on holiday, like we've just got back from, we want to be able to do that without like a lot of stress and things. So if you've got livestock and things, then you've got an obligation to look after them well and all that stuff. So we've got plans in the works to once the kids are at school for these things to start kicking off. But I'm... very like just managed to hold myself back because it's really exciting. I love to have lots of animals but I also realise that right now that's probably not going to work that well. And it's not where you want to learn with livestock is it? You know you sort of want to have worked out a few other kings. Exactly. You've read the book. You've got those five principles. Where did you start? All right. Yeah. So back, if we go back to kind of late February 2020, and that first lot of rain was coming in, if you remember that time, I was on placement down in Wagga at the time. And I saw this forecast of rains coming. And so I'd already. bought all these seeds and so lots of that principle of diversity. So for your cover crop? Cover crops, yeah. So I had all this bare soil in my orchard and the orchard was the one place that was still beautiful even through the drought, like the trees had survived. I was like, right, I want to make this the first place I'm going to work on. So when bought, I think about 15 different species of cover crop, mixed it all up myself. expensive annoying way to do it because all the old blokes who were the agronomists and stuff were looking at me like I was completely insane because I just kept searching searching searching and then I found someone in Victoria who effectively on a large scale does cover crop mixes. I was like thank god. Yeah right so why why did the Adelaids think you were crazy like? Well because they're just like so what crop are you growing and I'm like well I'm not really growing a crop I'm trying to build soil right and they're like no. No, always. Or they're so used to monocropping. It's all monocultures. Yeah, so it's what they're used to. Exactly. Yeah. A different generation and different understanding and it's like shifting. So anyway, I had all this cover crop there and then I'd had a friend of mine who I met at like the Murr and Bateman Field Day, like one of the local field days here, happens to run this massive agricultural business and he's like called me about two months before and he's like, oh, I've got this place shutting down. Do you want like a couple of hundred cubic meters of compost? And I was like, well, yes. Anyway, so I had this thing. So basically what I did was I, when I saw the rain coming, I arranged the day of leave, came home and I spread all the seeds by hand. And then by hand, right, all the shovel, I spread all the compost. Cause I was so desperate for this to happen. And I don't like, it's not the kind of space you could have machinery. And even if I did have it, cause I didn't have the machinery. So I was like, well. this is just what I have to do. Right. And so I did it. And then like we got hit with that first. Those rowing arms would have got to work out that day. Yeah, well they hadn't rowed in a long time. So it's what I ended up with basically Tim's elbow for a year and a half after that. But anyway, so then the rain hit and of course like half of it washed away. So I came back out and I did that other half again. And then another night of rain and then a third got washed away. So I came back and did that third. And then we had another night of rain like shortly afterwards and it stayed. And then it just exploded into green life and just changed. And what seed did you have in your first cover crop? Yeah, I didn't actually think to remember the 15 different types there. 15? Yeah, absolutely. So I shopped around, but essentially what it... The main principles I need to address were it was compacted. So it was concrete soil. So something like, so I had lots of radish in there. And there is a bred type of radish, it's dicon radish, but tillage radish, right? Is what they call it, because it tills the ground for you. Dave uses radish a lot. If you can imagine a radish growing in the soil, this bulbous little thing, it's gonna push compacted things apart. It just drills down, yeah, absolutely. And then once it's drilled down, it just... rots away in the ground at the end and there's compost in the soil where you want it, right? So you don't have to do any work because I was pretty sick of shoveling stuff around. So there was the compaction component and then there was a biomass component. So things like vetch. and winter oats and different things. They just put on heaps of biomass. So at the end when you cut it down, there's like, it came up to my, sorry, it came up to my forearm, like if I, so my elbow when I actually put my hand, when I cut it all back after it had grown, and then some nutrient cycling. And so there's like different types that will do that. And also flowering, because I wanted to attract insects and things. And a lot of those crossover, so it's not like each one does one purpose, but some do it better than others. And so generally I just kind of picked three or four from each class that I could find. and tuck them in. Whereas... And they say, I mean, the general idea is you can't be too diverse, right? Exactly, yeah. And one of the interesting things is if you read back over some of Charles Darwin's stuff, even he noted in his studies that if there was in a square metre or whatever measurement he took, it wasn't very big, but if there were six species present, they all grew better. than if there was less than six pieces. Yeah. And I don't know where the ceiling is for that and if there is one, you know, like maybe it caps out well before 15, right? But the other reality is if you're just throwing seed around like I am and you're just relying on nature for it to germinate, it doesn't germinate perfectly. Right? So some areas will just be all this radish there and then like not over here, but there'll be something else and some flowers popping up and all those things. So. It ends up being this quite a nice kind of varied pattern of cover crops that at one point, you know, it was like chest high by the end of the growing season stuff and, um, and just the breadth of like kind of relief and life and stuff that they brought to the property in that one small spot. Just amazing. Let's talk a little bit about how that's regenerating the soil. So you've got your crops on top, you've got the root systems which are now developing, which are pulling things up and pushing things down into the soil. But then your cut, did you cut that down and just leave it on top of the soil? Yeah, absolutely. So I just cut it back twice a year. So I just generally operate here in Canberra on like one warm season, one cool season. So I just have two plantings each year. And I just let it go wild it's about time to cut it down. When is that? It doesn't really matter. It's when you've got time. I've read that once your crop sets seed, that process converts the sugar to the seed in that sort of a process and that that's pulling that... out of the soil and that it's better to cut a cover crop before it goes to seed for that reason. Have you read anything? I mean, absolutely. No, that isn't. I mean, it isn't. It isn't like it's absolutely true, but it's also, then it comes down to like, what are you actually trying to do? You know, and that's, and that's really the question that you always have to ask anything, right? Sport or medicine, whatever. But it's that understanding what is your actual purpose? We do all this work. Why? And what I'm trying to set up is a self perpetuating system that goes in an upward cycle as opposed to a system that goes in a downward cycle where I have to do more and more work for more and more money for less result. You want less inputs. Absolutely. So yeah, absolutely. You're right. I am losing some of that sugar and nutrient that would be in the soil to the seeds, but then what am I gaining is next year's crop. And so for the first time this year, so last year now, I didn't touch that orchard and it's full of cover crop. And so that's if I cut that down then it's on me to then do it again Have you ever had to sow any of that seed again? Oh look I still proceed I do but it's very different So now like I just kind of oh because I'm working on a second orchard now I'd say this process just come expanding it out from our house outwards on the property and I just kind of I get the seed for the second one that I'm doing That's hard work at the moment. Um, but then all I do is I leave a bit there and I just kind of chuck it around in the other one and then I cut it all down and then it rains and stuff grows. Yeah. Right. So it's kind of a, a perennial cover crop in a way. Yeah, absolutely. And so, yeah, so they started with annuals and if you listen to, I mean, cause I started with gay Brown and I don't know how many books I've read now cause that's all I tend to do when I'm driving, just listen to various agriculture books, but, um, you know, kind of started with annuals and then what I'm doing now is They're kind of good for the first two to three years, generally, maybe two years of annuals. And then I've just started shifting gradually to more perennial based mixes. Now I can do that because the guy in Victoria, which is called Down Under Covers, lovely guy who runs that. All about supporting local business. Yeah, it's brilliant. And knowledge, like if you had to search them out and then you find them after a while. I could say someone with a lot of money and time by referring them to him. And so Down Under Covers have various like mixes that you can use for whatever purpose you want. And so there's a perennial mixer. So I just order that now for that orchard and I throw that around every year, every season, sorry. And... Then what I'm finding is gradually, I am seeing is just less, slightly less of the annuals. Cause as the soil improves, I lose their competitive advantage and the perennials is going to take a better hold and, and he gets that concept of succession, which nature does normally, which is they send nature sends in weeds, right? Yep. And to cover their soil. And then the weeds do their job and the soil improves a little bit and it makes a bit of mulch and then something can take a foothold that is a bit more delicate at the beginning, but it can last longer and you get perennial grasses and then you get shrubs and then trees. And then. Beautiful. And I think that... progression from annual to perennial that's a lot of my journey with gardening as well I think you sort of start in the annual Yeah, and then as you learn more and then you realize how much effort it is to see what some of the annual stuff you like So I'm gonna be good if I don't have to do this again Yeah, you talked about that with your and your daily bulbs this morning when we were out in the garden Yeah, I was like look at your daily is there fantastic Bernadette which is beautiful. I can vouch for that And I think I you know doing lots of work is viable until it's not. So if you want to do it, do it. And what you say, you need that energy for the next pot, the next area. Absolutely. And look, I kind of, you know, one of the concepts that I kind of use to reassure myself when I'm not there working my ass off is the idea of momentum. You know, so it's like nature in like, in my mind, it's like a huge boulder on the top of the hill. And it's just like actually getting that boulder moving takes a lot of force, you know, like you really, because there's been a lot of damage done tonight, so 200 years or so of poor management. And then here you go and you think you're going to turn around in like That's not gonna happen, right? So you gotta put in a huge amount of effort to kind of make up for everything that's gone before. But then once that bolder just starts to move, a little bit more effort and it'll gain some momentum. And then now what I'm seeing, saying that first tour, it's only been three years, right? That I don't sow any cover crops there anymore because they just do their thing. And then I've done some swales. Do you cut them down twice a year? Yeah, so that's it. And you just leave them where they fall? I just leave them right there. And then I just chuck seeds into that. Into all the kind of litter tell us about their fruit trees and over the cover crop Have you noticed and any change in the yeah? Yeah, well, so they kind of I mean like it's it's always gonna be hard to compare I because we came to the farm and it was really dry. Yeah, but My understanding those trees had been there for quite a while before we bought the place So the previous owner had passed away a number of years before and his wife wasn't really His wife really wasn't that involved in the gardening side, you know So he ran the property and and in a very traditional kind of I've set up and then she looked up the house and the, but photos we've got, like you don't really notice it, right, but the, when I compare photos from even from one year to the next, the growth rate of those trees. I was quite blown away. Yeah. It's just like, wow, look at that. And it's really changed. And so now, um, like the small blonde trees are now kind of like five, six meters tall and, and different things. And, um, you know, and like we've, we've had some, like one of our peach trees drowned this year of all things, you know? So like, it just was so wet in there. It was in, it was in, I know it was crazy. So I went, I went standing in like a foot of water for three weeks. you know, because it was just so saturated in there. Now, one of the things I did was I built swales for the orchard, right? Because- What's a swale? So a swale is essentially a contour trench, right? Where you just dig on contour. So basically if you poured, you know, a couple hundred liters of water into a swale. it should just settle out evenly across that soil. And what it does then is it gives it time to just settle into the soil as opposed to just shooting off down to our dam, which is at the lowest point. Yeah. And so that's great in a normal camera. Yeah. But when you get- Or grating drought. Grating drought? When you're trying to catch a grout. Absolutely, yeah. Cause then you just catch anything that falls there. But then, yeah, we just caught so much that we couldn't get rid of it. And you can't really undo a soil once it's there, right? So yeah, it's typical. We've gone from like, So I was too like, Jesus, that's why I'll kill my peace tree. But also, you know, we all are, all the water run off from our house all goes into that orchard and everything as well now too. So we've kind of really made it so that it's prepared for- For drought. It's prepared for drought. And so what I need to do now is actually have some preparation for these kinds of flood times because if climate is going to more extremes, one to the other, we'll probably see more of these super wet years. Yeah. And so then it's just like, I don't have some way of diverting this here. That La Nina was meant to last one season. I think this is the third season of it now. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A few of my neighbours, they have dug full trenches around their property. Yep. Just so the water. Distributes. Distributes and then it sits there and then we'll give back into the land. Absolutely. But yeah. But the fruit trees are now doing really well. Yeah. And I have a tendency to just prune less as well because you can make fruit trees a ton of work. You know, and so it's like. I was really aid. across the back fences. We've gone vertical. Yeah, true. And like you're living in, like it comes down to scale, doesn't it? Yeah. So like if you've got like me, like I've got room. Yes, and I don't have time right so I've got lots of trees, but I can't baby every single tree and and and like manicured Right, so it's like it's covered in your your your orchard. No, it's not so it's open to everything Yeah, and so kind of like I don't know if you guys have read much of Jackie French's a little bit Wonderful lady, right and they're like yeah. Yeah, actually she doesn't live too far from here. Yeah, um Her attitude and mentality of you grow a fruit tree big enough The birds will take even if that's like the top take with an end two thirds. You'll still have too much And so I'm like, that's what I like the idea of that. So I'm just letting them grow. I think once you decide that you're not gonna be using herbicides and things like that as well, you do get to a point where you have to accept some pest pressure. Exactly. Whatever you. Yeah, and then like the first question I always ask is, well, what is it firstly, when I see this thing I don't recognize, but then the next question is what eats it? And so then I say, let's bring that in. So whatever it is, I'll just bring that in. And so you get diversity as well as control of your pest pressure. And so you then kind of, spiral where you just give nature the work. She's got a lot of capacity and we don't. And so like as soon as you spray something, that's a viable thing, right? You can do it. I'm not here to judge anyone, but you just have to accept that when you spray that you've taken that job off, nature is now your job because nature is not replacing anything for you there. And you may have in that spraying. taken out something else, not just the insect, not yet. And that was doing a job as well. So then there might be 15 jobs that are now your job. Exactly, and what they tend to find is that when you spray and you kill all the beneficial insects, it actually gets worse, not better. And then the other thing is there's always a couple that survive, right? And so you breed resistance and then it's just, it gets harder. And it's that downward spiral as opposed to an upward one. You just need to embrace that and work with. Yeah, and it's frustrating, right? Like sometimes like, you know, cause I just planted some, maybe we got trees the other day and bloody kangaroos just came and ate one right down to the ground. I'm just like, and digging into that new orchards like Shaly Rock and stuff. And I do it all by hand, I dig a meter deep and I'm just like, are you bastard? You realize, I think we've said it before in the show with gardening, you are both in control and never in control at the same time. Oh, you're not in control, you are not in control. Sometimes you like to think you've really got something and then something else just gets thrown at you. There's a nice illusion of control. You can trick yourself with the times, but you quickly get out of control. Well, sometimes I'll walk in the greenhouse, I'm like, I am God, you know, you've got something. And then a rat's coming in each. Yeah. Your price tomato. You're like, damn it. Close the door, Bernadette. Close the door. I actually went out to my, I thought after yesterday, I might need to award her a little bit. Yeah. And when I went out, there was a massive kangaroo. Oh yeah, wow. He was huge. Yeah, impressive, aren't they? He was standing, because mine's all covered in, we built it during COVID. It's very rough and ready, but it's all PVC pipe because my husband's a plumber. And it's just covered in net. Yeah, that's a job, right? Yeah, it's what we had. We loved that. We actually loved doing it because it's what we had and we had to just make do with it. But he was the other side of the netting. And I literally, he didn't realise I was there and I got up so close to him. And then I went, boom. Did you really? Yeah. And then he booted you through the greenhouse. I took a little bit of video coverage. I didn't actually, I'll have to look before I share it. Look back and see it. I'm completely in it. But he was massive. But he would have been right in at my tomatoes. And it's where I had my potato patch. And there must have been some nice kind of grass growing around there. But the wildlife is, yeah, damage. It does a lot of damage and to be honest that's where the cover crop stuff becomes fantastic as well because there's a lot of palatable species in that cover crop that they love. They'll focus on instinct. Yeah and you grow like tons of it right it's everywhere and then you just have these little islands in that where your trees are and stuff and say like with my apricot tree now all the surrounding cover crop has kind of grown to a point where it's like gone beyond being nice to eat and I plant this nice new... like apricot, sapling in there and they're like, oh, yum. Yeah. I'm not eating this old food. I'm gonna eat the new fresh food. Because the cover crop there now is actually taller than me. Some of it, which is nearly two meters tall. And flowering, it's beautiful, right? So. And what's your end goal? Are you looking to have sort of a permaculture living off the land set up where you are? That'd be nice. I don't actually do end goals that much. So I have like kind of interim ones where it's just like, to do this much by then. And so each, I kind of have this thing where each growing season, cool and warm, I have, I mark out an area that I'm kind of, okay, that area is going to be better. And I've moved away from this is going to be this much better. It's just going to be better. I don't really know how yet or whatever. I don't know what time I'm going to have. It doesn't have to be like sick, not sick, happy, not happy, whatever. Um, but it's going to be better somehow. I might have five minutes. I might have five hours. Yeah. And so, and look, to be honest, that's, you know, I've got how many, like I'm trying to, like, I'm doing a lot of health things at the moment to make sure that I can still be farming when I'm 75. Yeah. So I went to a physiotherapist and I'm like, yep. So I've got a farm. wants you to just kind of make sure that everything's working well in my seventies. And she just looked at me and it's like, what? She's like, so what's wrong with you? I'm like, nothing. Exactly. I want to keep it there so that I can keep working. And she found that quite a difficult concept to grasp. But that's the kind of thing of like, you know, I have, if there's two growing seasons a year and I just turned 40 like two weeks ago, right. So let's say 75. Yeah. Well, it depends. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got roughly 70. in the next 35 years. Oh God, what a depressing way to look at it. Well, it can be depressing, but also galvanizing, right? Yeah, you can prepare, you know, you're trying to prepare for it. Exactly. So it's perfect. And so, but what that does is it brings into focus the fact that time is limited, but also if you then kind of just huck back to that little story I told about how quickly it did turn around when I did it. Yeah. You know, time is powerful, right? So you don't have a lot of it, but if you do use it, it's fantastic. And so what I'm... moving away from is like, well, I want X. Like I'm actually never gonna be happy, in inverted commas, with the farm. Unless I'm just constantly making something better every growing season, that'll keep me happy. Now we've talked about Gabe Brown's book and it is worth reading. I think all your listeners really should have a listen to that book or read it. But the philosophy of why you would do it. I think goes to Masanobu Fukuoka with his book, The Once Draw Revolution. And so if you get a chance to read that, it's just beautiful. So it's a Japanese scientist, he died in 2008, I think, but he grew up in the kind of reductive scientific system and was a researcher and things. And then just kind of, he got sick and just had almost like a bit of a mental break and then came out of it and just completely shifted his way of interacting with nature. essentially the way he sees it is you either work with nature or against it and you know the good money's on working with it right? Yeah, he wouldn't back anyone working against it but he you know and so he just contrasts so he then has this this property in Japan that he grew citrus orchards and rice and he basically had his own way of farming rice which didn't use the standing water that didn't use herbicides pesticides those types of things and he could usually match people's yield or outperforming, even in a good year, but in bad years. And this is the same as what Gabriel finds in the bad years. Regenerative agriculture of whatever form you want to use by dynamics or permaculture whatever But basically the type of radical agriculture where you're building up nature as opposed to mining it. Yeah in bad years Vastly outperforms. Yeah, let's remember that the purpose of this regenerative agriculture isn't to outperform the yield Most of the time it's just to make that I mean the fact that often gabes yields did outperform his neighbors and that was One of the turning points of him was when his neighbors were knocking on his door saying What are you doing? Because that looks really good. But his goal wasn't to outperform, it was just to have the same yield, or without having, but then in the bad years, having a more robust setup. Because he had some really bad years. We kind of have been working against, when you think of farming, like mining, we have been warfare. Like we have been working against it, because we're just taking, taking, taking, and not really, so now we're taking, but we want to give back. Exactly. Completely. Looking after. A lot of our listeners, You know have smaller setups. Absolutely. Would you use do you do any gun bits? They do your own bits and things like that. Do you have a crop on any of them? I do and So kind of like I mean for me gardening actually started in a really small setting right so before 2018 you know before we moved to the farm we bought like a tiny place in in Canberra and I just that was my first real gardening experience So I had this kind of like a nine square meter veggie bed I was like, huh? like went to just kind of- That's when you fell in love with it? Pretty much. And what I fell in love with was soil, not gardening. I actually really cared that much for the gardening at the beginning of it, but soil itself fascinated me because you know, you can't reclay, right? Yeah. And in this area, like they clearly, it was a corner block, they'd split into four townhouses. Soil is a very important part of the garden. It's a very important part of the garden. And they clearly just scraped off all the topsoil, who knows where that is now, it certainly wasn't there. And so then I just kind of like a couple of millimeters under the surface, I was like, oh wow, that's clay. And so then I tried to grow some stuff which clearly wasn't ever gonna grow there. And so then it was this thing of, okay, well, how? Like, how am I gonna do this without just... buying a ton of soil. Like is there a way? And that was kind of my first journey into cover cropping and stuff like that. And I did it in nine square meters. And now I just do it on 40 acres. Yeah, and there are a lot of really good books out there on kind of soil life as well. So like actually, you know, one of the things that I've kind of just found myself saying to people over time is like, look, everything above the ground is just an expression of the health below it. And so like, if you look at trees and flowers and all these things, If you've got really healthy soil, they are almost guaranteed. to be healthy in some way. Yeah. And so are you going to get pest attacks? You're going to get all these different things, right? That's life. But if you've got unhealthy soil, you can pretty much guarantee that your plants are really going to struggle unless you are then doing a job of supplying fertilizer molecules and all these different things, your nutrients and stuff. And the more you put in, the more, you know, you pretty quickly realize you don't want to keep doing that forever. No, it's expensive and hard work. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And also like, you know, that are formed between basically bacteria and small vertebrates and other things and fungi between plants that vastly extend what they believe was even possible just 10 years ago. And so kind of recent research around, say, trees and fungal hyphae, right, they reckon it basically extends the root zone. But say the conservative side of that is 10 times more than what the roots of a tree alone can do. That makes sense to me, like you were talking about that horrible was the one area that survived and I was thinking about that in my mind I had that picture of all those roots underground extending into this huge network that were still able to pull what it needed when everything else wasn't. Definitely and as soon as it rained mushrooms just popped up everywhere right so the fungal network is alive under there and it's very hard to kill unless you dig it up because it's like basically if you actually read about it and they they send out almost like roots from the from the fungal like the mushroom kind of component itself and then as those roots extend to the tip and the tip grows and grows and grows for ages. So that's getting oxygen into the soil as well. So then what the trees do is that there's a symbiotic relationship. So because fungi are kind of like us, they need glucose to live. And so they can't convert sunlight into energy and things. So they're dependent on trees. So what they do is they kind of like, I mean, in fact, sounds like a bad word, but like they kind of latch into the root network of the tree. And then the tree just releases chemical signals. I need this. And the fungus is like, I can get that. And so it goes out and get it. Relationships and then the tree goes. Thank you. Here's some sugar And they just switched that back on the force right But certainly the trees get a lot out of it and the fungi can't live without the trees and to a degree The trees can't really survive without the fungi either now There are kind of more commercialized products now where you can buy the fungi and stuff That to me is getting more complicated. It's getting more complicated and expensive. Yes. And all the kind of people in this space who I've spoken to, say, for example, that guy from Dindali Ag, who I mentioned before, who got me the compost. Like this is his fuel, right? And he's a big believer in that it's dormant in the soil. Like unless something severe has happened to that soil, it's been like irradiated doors. Yeah, it's just unlikely kind of things right so far. Sorry. Then there's enough dormant in there that if you just basically do those five steps. Even just like put some mulch down, right? That's probably enough. And they tend to feed off all the mulch stuff. You can get really complex around kind of bacteria to fungal ratios and all this different stuff, but you don't need to. You just provide the conditions and nature will do the rest. Do you hang out with any other farmers regenerative? Well, so there's like all the local guys around me. So like, I mean, we're the youngest by quite a lot on our street. And so, and they're really open to this stuff, even though a number of them. back in the day, they put heaps of super phosphate and stuff on, because that's just what was done, right? That was the done. I grew up in a garden store. I used to sell a lot of phosphate and, you know, stand there going, how you lick, you know, water it down and it was the best thing. And you can still eat stuff from that. And I think the important thing is not kind of like. you know, pilloring anyone for doing that. It's just, it's that thing of, okay, that's fine back then, but now we know this and now we know this and we just keep moving forwards. And I think that's, I just try and stay with that. In answer to your question around circles of friends, yes and no. Mostly like I have this weird thing. You can probably tell them a little bit left leaning, but Just a little bit but the I always make sure that I'm reading conservative kind of at least one or two articles a day and I do have some friends who are very conservative for the military and things and And I actually think that's really important because they're both viable things and they both want the same thing like everyone thinks that they're doing the Good work and they all want a better society and stuff and it's just different ways of looking at it and so what I've found is There's somewhere I felt like, oh, I could let this go. I could easily let this go, right? It's hard to listen to this. But what I've also found over time is that if you stick with it and you don't put them on the defensive, you can actually shift, right? My father's a really good example. God, he's coming around a long way. Gabe's father-in-law in the book is a really great example as well. It's a process. Absolutely. And I think like, you know, I can totally understand that for a generation, say my parents' generation It just wasn't known yet. So through the 70s when the green revolution, you know, green and very common was with synthetic fertilizer happened I thought it was genuinely a great thing for agriculture and good for the environment and all these things and then to feel like potentially they are responsible for Damage and for the climate change situation all these things is both partially right and partially wrong You know, so that's their father's all the stuff that came before them. It would feel quite attacking Absolutely. Now, I'm not saying it's easy to engage around that stuff because it can be really upsetting to see the kind of damage that's happening and then you know because you've got children so you want your kids to grow up in a good environment but also that's just part of it and you want like people of different viewpoints all working towards the same thing, which is a more livable world that we can actually make better by living in it instead of just destroying it. So we do have to consume to live like everything in nature. That is part of it, but we've got to do something different. And what you guys are doing is actually a brilliant first step for a lot of people. And when you get yourself involved in more of that process, like now that Averly Line do grow more of their own produce, you get so much more aware of that food chain, aware of waste, going aware of how much work is involved in making that produce so you don't want to waste any of it and so sometimes it's just that awareness of being more connected. I happen to put a picture of my potatoes I didn't do now as well as you Bernadette with your harvest and on my Facebook page. Call yourself Irish. Yeah and someone came up to me the other day when I saw your potatoes. Awesome. And I was like did you and she was like I did. They've just taken them. So I'd like to grow potatoes because they've just taken them off. Have you seen that at our local pub? They've taken chips off the menu. I warned everyone, episode three, I think. Potatoes are going up my throat. I said, you can take anything, but don't touch my wine and cups. You have just grown a commodity there. She goes, I want to do that. And I was like, this is awesome. Is there anything more rewarding than when you, like, you know, I love. My mom listens to the podcast and she does these little things or friends that had no interest in gardening whatsoever. I will be like, I've just planted some lettuce. No, that's right. You're right. It's the little steps. And our podcast is we it's, you know, it's just getting in, having a chat, making people aware. And whatever comes from that fantastic. If it means one person thinking about a cover crop. Yeah. And pollinators is a big thing as well. So because you'll find that, you know, especially like say like vetri. I grow that for biomass. flower on it. Bitch. Yeah. I know. I've never heard of bitch. And there'll be all these things that maybe you haven't, potentially you haven't heard of. that's um, and it's really fun, you know, because you start, you throw this in, you can start recognizing the seeds themselves and that's, I found that quite satisfying and then you start recognizing the seedlings like when they start popping out. It's really cool. I know, what are these true leaves? And you're like, that's, you're not my friend anymore. That's why we had to, that's part of the recipe started the Instagram because my friends were like, if you put one more gardening photo on your Instagram, I'm not going to follow you anymore. I'm like, okay, okay. question. What was your first memory of gardening? We ask this to all our guests. Do you have a first memory? I've kind of given you that first awakening moment. I think that's the first really interesting one. But my earliest gardening memories are those really mundane suburban ones, but still lovely. So it's just like the sound of lawn mowers on a summer evening. On the smell of the grass. Being outside with dad, sorting mozzies off you. Not so nice. And just kind of like, because neither of my parents... were super into their garden. They've got a lovely garden. But it's much more of their generation. It's neat, it's orderly, it's pleasant. Yeah, exactly. Semi-formal, I think now. And also, I have to give them a lot of credit now. They've really started to think differently about it over time. And we had a couple of chickens down the back and Dad would kind of turn that manure stuff into the veggie patches. Very progressive. Yeah, beautiful. But the funny thing about Dad is that he loves like... kind of making the veggie beds and doing stuff, but he never actually grows any veggies. He might plant them, he's like, oh yeah, they're going well, then he'll just do something else and they'll just be like weeds and some wild species like huge and rubbery. But they're kind of like just those times with mom and dad outside in the summer is the one that really sticks for me. And so kind of bringing that to now and how that relates now is that, you know, I want my kids to grow up with the same kind of passion for nature. Yes. Connection. Yeah, connection to him. And so part of what I do is I don't get them to do jobs. I do try and make it like, okay, I'm going to go plant trees. Do you want to come and see, let's plant a tree for you? This can be your tree, you know, and no one's that eat these apples. Unless you say so, you know, and you can just see my boy's eyes light up and stuff. And, um, and so now, you know, he comes out and he looks at his tree and he checks it and stuff, and then he asks questions, right? And he's always asking questions and he's about worms and soil and, and why are you doing that? Why are you doing this? And so instead of asking him to just help me pull weeds out, I kind of involve him in the process. is have that lovely memory of time with dad that I had with mine. And then, but also bring into that. just some lessons they don't even know they're learning. So that over time it's just like, oh, that's how you do it. And maybe we'll need to change things as we go along and we learn new things and that kind of stuff. But the principle is there. We are actually serving nature first. And the result of that is we get more than we'll ever need. And then it'll come full circle and they'll be teaching you things. Hopefully, yeah. I'm already learning some things from them. That's right. Well, they bring it to school with them as well. Yeah. Like, like. Ava would talk about worms or she'll see a snail on the ground and her little friends, they have snail races and yeah so. Charlotte goes outside with me and that's where she's demanding snacks, peas, berries, berries, you know that's where, you know she wouldn't eat anything green until she started picking the peas herself and now she like, peas is a third of her diet. I have to keep succession pointing them because I'm out of peas. Yeah exactly. She's the worst caterpillar in the world. Yeah, she is. The strawberries get these little pincer bites out of them when they're not ready. I'm like, Charlotte! bags on stuff not to protect from the pest. To protect from her. I saw that. I said, oh, look at your little bags on there to protect yourself from Charlotte. Yeah. That's very good. She doesn't quite understand, you know, things being ripe, really. Nah. She will. Yeah, I just want to thank you for all that. I mean, there's so much interesting food for thought there. And I think a lot of people, no matter what stage you're at in your gardening journey, will pick out pieces of what you've said there. We could cook a wine, we could do another. We could catch up with you again. Oh, I'd love it. We could do another pot. That'd be great. Because I don't really have many people who like to talk about this stuff. that much. There's some, you know, but it's like you guys are really into it. And so I'm just like, can I please come back? We've learned so much. And I did have just with the regenerative agriculture. Is there like a like, how do people? Do you get a stamp or a sticker or seal of approval? Like how do these farmers, is it like, I suppose, the word sustainable or eco? No, no, and this is what I like about it, right? So it's like, it's a guide, it's a guideline free of dogma. It's so nice. So you can say, it just comes back to those two things. Are you improving your soil? Yep. And are you increasing diversity? If the answer is yes to both of those things, you are a regenerative practitioner of small scale market gardening, 10,000 hectare farm. Doesn't matter. Yeah, right. Yeah. Love that. Yeah, it's great. Cause sometimes that will be sustainable. I'm regeneratively gardening two square meters. Yeah. See, like it's the same principle. Yeah. Amplified. There's no, there is zero difference between what you're doing there when I'm doing on 40 and what someone's doing on a farmer's house in Belgium. Yeah. It's great. I admire though that you're doing it on 40 acres cause to me that's just mind blowing. Like, and farmers do it on huge. Yeah. You know, a hundred plus acres, but well done. Thank you. Yeah. It's fun. Well done. So Avril. How amazing was Dr. Scott Brennan? I feel like, Scott, I feel like, because he's so casual, Scott, I feel like I'm smart, I just via osmosis being in the same room as him. But I'm soaking it all in like a sponge. That's it, I mean, there's so much knowledge there to learn. I learned so much. We are, he's so generous with his time, so we're gonna collaborate together. Yes, we're gonna do a project together. But not just learning. He's I learn all the time. I read all the time. I'm really searching all the time, but that's the kind of learning where I'm literally like, I can't wait to get outside and do and where you feel empowered to go and act on the knowledge. Part of me as well is because I'm, you know, I say, get out there and do it. Don't try and. Think about it too much in your own head or you'll never get to do it like the whole Mr. McGregor line. So he just confirms that for me as well that it's right to... ..that nature, you can't be perfect with nature. I'm still fighting nature all the time. I'm still in that part of that battle. I'm still wanting to control a lot of things and that's a really good... reminder for me to take stock. Yeah, there's probably ways that you can control it in a certain way. Like visually, you can, you know, put your your mulch on top and make it. But yeah, no, that that makes me really happy. He just said at the end, then when we were saying goodbye, he said the worst thing you can do is nothing. So just, you know, just go out there and do something. You'll learn from it. You'll. If it fails, it doesn't matter, you just do it a different way or... No failing and gardening, just experiment. Experimenting, that's it, exactly. Oh, Bernadette, awesome chat. Yes, thanks. I hope everyone got as much out of that as we did. And until next time... Salon lab. Go Monkah. Bernadette, I'm so proud of you! We just came out!