Voices of Resilience: Dr Will Bignell

Voices of Resilience shares real stories from farmers and community members across Tasmania’s Derwent Valley and Central Highlands who know drought firsthand.

The series explores the challenges of living and working through dry seasons, and the perseverance, innovation, and community connections that help people adapt and keep going.

These are stories of challenge, change and resilience.

In this episode of Voices of Resilience, we chat with Tasmanian farmer Dr Will Bignell about his experience with drought and how science and technology are helping farmers manage their properties more efficiently.

Will shares how new tools and better access to information can help farmers make informed decisions, adapt to changing conditions, and prepare for dry times.

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Show theme music: Easy Lemon by Kevin MacLeod.

Voices of Resilience was produced by the Derwent Catchment Project and jointly funded by the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and the Tasmanian Government.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:05

Welcome to Voices of Resilience. Real stories from people who know drought firsthand. My name's Jen Sanger, and I'm from the Dowent Catchment Project. Throughout this series, we'll hear from farmers and community members from across Tasmania's Dowent Valley and Central Highlands. These farmers have faced droughts and dry seasons that have pushed their land, their livelihoods, and their limits. But this isn't just stories about drought. It's stories about perseverance, innovation, community, and the people who keep going when the odds are stacked against them. These are stories of challenge, change, and resilience. In this episode of Voices of Resilience, I chat with Tasmanian farmer Dr. Will Bignall. Will talks about his experience with drought and how science and technology are helping farmers manage their properties more efficiently. We discuss the tools and information that can help farmers make better decisions and prepare for dry times. Here's our conversation with Will. Thanks for joining us today. Do you just want to introduce yourself and give us a bit of detail about what kind of farming you do?

SPEAKER_02 1:34

So we'll Bignel and we farm on Thorpe Farm, which is at Bothwell in the Central Highlands of Tassie. So we've been there a while, the family arrived 202 years ago, and the family's kind of stayed in the district ever since. So we've seen a lot of generations. You know, the farm's gone from 30,000 hectares down to well, we're running about 3,000 at the moment, just through marriages and succession. I suppose the farm's interesting the fact it's passed through daughters twice, uh, particularly in um you know the 1900s period. So that's a unique thing. Um, I suppose out of that, the key thing is not to gloat about dates or say, oh yeah, we've been here so long. Uh that just means we've got a lot of junk lying around, including sales. Yeah. But um basically just uh it it shows that as a family we've weathered all the storms of succession, uh climate, variability, seasonal changes, market collapses, the whole lot, uh, wars, everything, and kind of still there in the trade. And it's quite nice we do have family diaries that cover, you know, a century or so of the history of the farm. So I call that social the social capital of the business, I guess. So you know, everyone can talk about what great-grandfather did, and we know it, and it's written down, and you can open the diaries up and see what he's doing on this day 150 years ago, and you're like, Oh, geez, it's the same problem, you know.

SPEAKER_03 2:59

Yeah, that's so fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

The fencer hasn't turned up, someone's drunk, and someone else has hung over and same, same problems.

SPEAKER_03 3:06

Yeah, just that's so fascinating, and how wonderful to have such a long history, and um, yeah, that's that's really unique position in that regard.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Um, yeah, it kind of came out from from a a broad history of they went to look at indigo plantations in India, didn't like that at all. Um, yeah, back in Edinburgh and then came out to Tasmania. I mean, 16,000 odd years of heritage before us, of course, on the landscape, knowledge is there, and yeah, we just in this blip of you know two centuries of it of our journey, and um, you know, basically just trying to produce food and fibre and medicine. Fantastic. That's our whole goal.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

Fantastic. And so, what kind of um crops or livestock do you have?

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Yeah, so we were traditionally just a wool growing operation with a little bit of hay and fodder conservation. Uh, the business heavily diversified in the 80s and 90s in my father's generation. So Peter and John, Bignor were both very innovative. We started growing two million strawberry runners a year, uh, milking sheep and goats, making cheese. We had a deer farm, uh, abattoir on farm, killing, butchering, sales direct to restaurants, that was all in the 80s and 90s. Um, uh, horseradish, drugs tomato shows, all these boutique vegetables, a lot of vertical integration. And basically, it's like uh the old saying, how do you boil a frog? And pretty much you start with the cold pot and bring it up slowly. So I think I grew up in that space, it's very sexy and entertaining, and uh particularly in the 90s, ridiculous people like that were pushing to rural industry development council, were pushing diversification, and it was a big buzzword because it was the only way you could make a dollar. The nineties were a very physically hard time.

SPEAKER_03 4:44

I remember, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Um, and then the millennium drought came along, and a lot of farms sold, a lot of people just said stuffed this. They've been paying school fees flat out, driving a car that was 20 years old, you know, recycling staples. It was a brutal time. Um adding, you know, reserve market schemes and and all that kind of economic upheaval, it was a tough time, and then we had to come into that millennium drought. That's when my journey into farming started. Um, you know, I came home from school in 2000, the end of 2000 for that drought. Uh, then when I finished uni 06 into the 08 seasons, I was home for those. Um, and then yeah, 136 in my memory, 1819 was an intriguing one. So we're having those seasons, uh, and for me, watching the diversification of complexity, uh, and then in 2011 I lost my brother, uh, and I was doing my PhD at the time as well, trying to write up, get things done, and it was a challenging space to. I then started looking at the business, what the hell was I doing? What's life about ego or what do I want to be? And from that I kind of then restructured the business because I was working so hard, there was no money. There was bugger all for you know, of it. Something's worth 50 bucks a kilo. It's like yeah, but you can't sell it uh in bulk or you can't move it, and it it was complexity, you know, running lines of credit to 20 different stores and restaurants and and never know if you're gonna get paid and the complexity of your orders and stuff. So I looked for answers and directions and kind of went to um an old Italian philosopher, the 80-20 rule. So, you know, 20% of your customers are 80% of your output, or 20% of your effort drives, 80% of your output, that kind of um less is more, and I was in the precision ag space, and it very much rang true there as well. We just wanted to capture 80% production, you know, 80% goals, not the top.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

And um, so yeah, I started looking at the business and restructuring. So long-winded way to get there. What we do now is I looked basically to SWOT analysis, strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. Um, climate variability was a big threat, um, human resources were another threat, so the complexity. Uh, opportunities were water, you know, we had a long-standing water right in the Clyde, not the greatest sureties, but reasonably good.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Uh, and so that water was there, allowing us to you know do things, overhead irrigation, various markets were there, so transitioned into a lot more overhead irrigation, and then through benchmarking, uh, you know, the tail wagging the dog as such. Um, we were putting lambs under pivots, things look good, production looks sexy, grass is green, animals look fat, but it doesn't actually make any money. And so a big ethos shift there was to take water and drive it to grow the highest value dollar thing I could. And if it meant getting rid of sheep off pivot circles, that's what happened, which was a big ethos shift for a business that was flooded irrigating and growing sheep and all the rest. And so now we are uh shooting for 7,000 composite Us. Um I got rid of all the merinos this year, and yeah, shooting for 7,000 composite Us. I want a U that is what I call fit, fat fit. So I do a lot of um weighing. Um just got another OptiWay coming, so that'll be one tool. But basically trying to find a U that will give me twins. I don't want triplets, no way. Yeah, give me twins, drop them with a high lamb survival, you know, wean at 135% to use joined, not just what's there. Um and I want that U to lose lose condition, put it all on a lamb, but then I want to be able to take her off, put her on grain ration, and have her weight come back up. So weaning will get U weights with EID, which I've been doing for a long time. And I really actually just cull off a um U grid as such, U's that won't put weight back on.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

And when you look at them, you can then usually see why it's either genetic background, they're a milking sheep or um feet or you know, something the mouths aren't right. And so I'm trying to find the sheep that'll lose weight, put it back on, and then hold it. So now they're just treating water. All my users score three joining, they're treating water, and they don't need a hell of a lot of food, and we just want fetal survival now. So we're trying to get that 135% lambing. Um, we will sell store lambs, and that's a management tool for water availability and crop opportunity and lamb price. So we'll either sell stores and retain enough to fatten. And uh, this year I made that call to try and push for a 25 kilo, so add three kilos to the carcass weight, not fatten as many, sell more off the off the tit, and yeah, grow every high value crop I can under pivots. So I think about 450 hectares of irrigated ground now, uh, with a bit more expanding and farming effectively, effective grazing area, about 2,000 and something hectares, uh, and the rest of it, half the farm's remnant vegetation, so bush and native grasses.

SPEAKER_03 9:44

Great, that sounds wow. It sounds like you've you've done a lot and you've been really strategic with what you've been doing. It seems like you very much kind of are very in tune with what's going on and you're able to kind of make these really good decisions about how to move to you know get the best value out of your farm. So, for instance, if we were facing a really big drought, say next year or the year after, um, what would that change your strategy?

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Uh yes and no. So I think watching the millennium drought shaped a lot of me. I there's a cohort that's younger than me, you know, 30 something, haven't seen it, seen some pretty good seasons and some pretty good commodity prices. Uh, talking to you know, Andrew McShane, for example, someone who mentors me a lot, you know, big operation and and keeps it very simple. You know, I always watched that and admired it and modelled myself off that a bit. But I remember him saying, you know, you come home in the millennium drought and you just think, How the hell do you make money? How do we survive this? You know, there's no water. I was shoveling out water holes with a galvanised bucket into a 44-gallon drum on a tractor, dragging it out and dumping it, and then we were watching the farm blow away. We had two water points, we were breaking through silt stone to try and get salty subsurface water to come up. Um, and then you know, I think 90s economics, that drought, watching your farm blow away, everything you're doing was hard, we were just feeding. Um, that you know, that shaped me to think, God, we've got to do this better. And as an 18-year-old watching that happen, and you know, watching your father chew himself inside out, wondering how to cope. And and we shot stock, we had stock come back with boxes of bullets telling us how deep to bury them. They got to Oatland's and then they came back. Still remember that, and then yeah, you know, then seeing it happen again within six years, uh, and again, shooting sheep is a confronting thing. And I mean, yeah, three times I think we've done it now. Oh, that's very stressful, yeah. But it's yeah, it's I think the the bit people don't realise is the impact it will have on you. You can't do it on your own, but uh yeah, you have a yard full of life that all of a sudden stops, and you've got blood up to your knees, and you're just reloading guns flat out, and you know, I remember we're doing it with my uncle and everyone, and yeah, you just like Jesus, and then you've got to clean it up, yeah. Load tractor buckets with eight sheep at a time, and there's a few hundred there. And these these red meat collapse that that scarred me that inability to destock, um, which doesn't happen in Tassie, it's not in the mainland. You can't put them on a B double and basically you know cross Europe in in uh two days with a truckload of stock to somewhere where the climate's working and the season's there. So Tassie does get pinched, our kill space capacity does get pinched, and the Australian red meat market is primarily driven by rainfall. Uh it's highly volatile and it's all centred around rainfall. And so we can't level it out with feedlotting or or wet milling techniques like America and and Europe and things like that with housed animals. So all that put the wind up me as a young guy watching it going into the 06-07 season, into 08, again, destroying stock, unable to sell, poor stock. And so that that's what shaped my fat fit use, as I call them. Ones that could lose it, put it back on. Um, I then wanted to look at drought lotting and all that sort of stuff, but we just didn't have the capital, we didn't have the cash flow to do it. Uh, and between that, starting a PhD in 07, just because I thought it'd be a flexible way to have an income and still work on the farm. Um, yeah, trying to look at what uh the headlums were doing at Tunbridge with their droughtling. Like I went to a few drought lot field days, but yeah, dad was just completely averse to grain, terrified of blowing sheep up and stuff. And so I think that's a sticking point a lot of people don't talk about in drought management is you know, you might get two brothers, or you might get a father and a son, or a daughter and a brother, or whatever combo you can come up with, you get that tension and then finding a path forward. So, you know, I just had that total resistance to grain feeding. Yeah. Oh, you'll kill sheep, and it's because they had they killed sheep feeding grain, we had these shit feeders that I still use now, and I still kill sheep with them. Looking at two dead rams yesterday, thinking, you know, and then they the crows pecked their ass out, and what pops out's you know five kilos of barley, and then they go look at the grain feeder, and the damn things have just shifted across enough to leak. Yeah, well, while we'd refilled them, and so it's just like yeah, yeah, and and that you can see that's why they were scared of it, but the business had been supplementary feeding for a long time, making hay and and fodder conservation and flood irrigation was a big part of that, and so yeah, shifting that ethos away from hay was a big challenge. And so for me at uni, PhD, you know, in and out of the business, it's easy to look like the know-it-all rick that floats in and out. Yeah, but you know, I had a tax-free salary, uh, I was being respected and using my brain, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And yeah, but it's coming home and getting that rain and that change to manage it because I could see in the data, like I'm a data-driven guy, you can't change what you don't measure. And so for me, yeah, climate resilience has has been a core focus because if irrigation water runs out, I experienced that in 08, you know, zero 60% water right, then zero percent. And if you've got a lot of capital tied up in pivots and things and pumps and they don't spin for a whole season, you've still got that core debt, you've still got that interest, you've still got that depreciation. Um very only the variable costs, which are usually minimal in the whole system, it's the overheads that kill us, you know, is not earning any money, and then you lose that income stream, so it gets hard to tighten the ship down. Yeah, and if you're doing a shitload of things, it's impossible to do it. So benchmarking again, Sandy McEchran, you know, the guy will just give you confidence to buy farms or do whatever you want and stock the shit out of it, but and to feed, uh you know, bringing benchmarking to the business was a big focus in that regard, and then saying, you know, as Sandy says, droughts only last two years. Yeah, it's probably right. You might do two shit springs, or you know, in a in an absolute cork of summer, and you know, I've given up on autumn, they're unicorns.

SPEAKER_03 15:53

I know, yeah. I mean, look at this.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Autumn started today, it's sort of in June tomorrow, you know.

SPEAKER_03 15:57

Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Whereas this in March, you know, no East Coast lower. So so yeah, and climate data helps me with all of that. And so trying to stay focused, I guess, you know, is my conversation now. I'm I'm you know, I've got a uh spicy mind, I suppose, in the on the spectrum. And so for me, I I just like that data. I've got to control my emotions, and droughts are highly emotional times, uh, and then try and come forward and and find a business that could make money and be resilient to these events, these checks.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like um it sounds like you have a very level head, and you know, you obviously um with your PhD that that must have really helped in how you run the business. I hear that you're very um into technology and drones and using modern farming techniques as as well. Yeah, are you are you able to elaborate on that at all?

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Distractable child, I think the gadgets. Yeah, so I've always had a interest in tech and and and electronics and just making things. And so it kind of came about out of trauma actually with the loss of my brother. Uh my best mates in the army. Some of his mates do some interesting jobs up there in uh Canberra, wherever he was. So he came down with a radio controlled glider that we used to always fly them together as kids, uh, with a camera on it and a set of goggles. And then I had my first experience of first-person video, like the FPV. Wow. Um, so I got into drone racing through that. But I was kind of like this is giving me the relaxation I wanted. I had handed my pilot's licence in during the tragedy. I just my brain wasn't I was I was flying and the aircraft was in front of me, which doesn't end well. Yeah, and so I sort of let that lapse, money, time, kids, all that kind of failed. So this was my outlet, and that was fun, and that drone revolution was sort of starting at the time, and I was using auto steer, it was turning section control on and off, and that was about it. And so then I got interested in that precision ag space, um, drainage in particular, and we'd had dad done land planing with the flood irrigation. So I was kind of interested in in joining the dots for the tech to do it more than just turning spray rig on and off on section control and drive a straight line. So I kind of got into um approached the bloke I knew through the Aero Club, who had his operator's licence, said we'll get into ag, get rich quick kind of theory. You know, there's got to be lots of money in it, and basically became specialists in uh drainage and you know pivot positioning and mapping and uh working with ag logic, so fair, very firm believer in working collaboratively with people. Um, Hall Earthworks, they were always up for the challenge of doing things. Um Shaw also got into it because you know, back they still do it, they charge you to use GPS as a premium. But we were trying to cut drains to drain paddocks, and going around doing crop health mapping all around Tassie with the poppy crops would cover tens of thousands of hectares, and you just see so many basic problems that could be solved. And so I kind of got into that UAV space, precision ag, which as we say is drawing a very accurate line around a problem the farmer already knew he had.

SPEAKER_03 18:58

Yeah, well, yeah, that's true. I mean, yeah, tech technology, I guess, very much um, you know, farmers have a very close connection with the land, but that and and they do know what's going on. But yeah, as you probably know from your PhD, um, we can if we can get a more precise kind of understanding so it can kind of help that that knowledge that that farmers already have.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

They want a big red button. They don't want to, you don't want to fart about with maps and making a taking an NDVI map to make a variable rate map to upload it from your edge. No one wants to do it, they just want to hit a button. I don't need to do it, I'd I've farmed that job out. Yep. Um, you know, just no hate it. I'm just over it, you know. It's I've got too many other things to think. And farmers, as you say, are great observers, horrendous analysts.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

Horrendous. We all are as human beings, yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

People's have bracket and then they'll you know do a column or a row, and that's about as far as it gets. No regressions, no, you know, randomising trying to pull data apart, which is the benefits of PhD. I mean, it's it's an apprenticeship in thinking.

SPEAKER_03 20:00

Exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

Uh, and critical thinking, not being afraid to be wrong. I think that's probably where I differ to a lot of guys. They'll get pig headed and and charge down a path, whereas I will charge into it with conviction because I want to test a hypothesis uh that's been well researched before I start, uh, but then I'm open the whole way. And I think that's yeah, the worst blood sport on the planet is academic publication.

SPEAKER_03 20:24

Isn't it? Yeah, I have a PhD as well, so I know exactly what it's like. It's one of the most frustrating things I think too.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

I used to get a pencil and just see how many small pieces I could snap it into as I read the reviewer's comments.

SPEAKER_03 20:36

I know, yep.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

Yeah, bastards, and then you'd snap them in half, get the leather.

unknown 20:41

You don't get it.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

Maybe I don't get it.

SPEAKER_03 20:44

I know exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

It self-doubt's huge, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 20:47

It is, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

And farming's no different, and that's why you farming rewards conservatism. No denying that. That's why farmers come across these conservative dipshits a lot of the times, output public viewers, yet you start talking to them and they are clever. Absolutely. Most of them have got a spicy brain somewhere, but you can also come in, you know, with just a feeling of a landscape and nail it as well. So it's not it to say it's a data science or there's also an artisanal aspect to it that plenty of people without any of this tech nail it. And so I was looking at people like that, and you'd see it when you're doing the precision ag stuff, just consistently getting it right. And the common themes I found were they're doing things on time, doing the appropriate thing, and not trying to do too much. Yeah, so again, feeds back to that 80-20. And you know, they big and I think the big part is not doing too much allows you to then feel and sense your landscape. You know, that that original concept of being on country. I'm no different. I have to drive around the farm to feel it and understand it. Like today's rain, I want to go up and drive around and feel the landscape, if that makes sense. It's actually cheesy, but no, no, I want to drive around, see the puddle, see the water, see compaction. You know, I'm gonna I I get the funny feeling I'm gonna go see gateways. Where I haven't got reticulated water in yet. I've got gates open, you know, those gateways are just going to be a shitfight of compacted soil and slop and the radiating out from it because there's no water infiltration and no ground cover. And so I suppose, yeah, it's that concept of feeling what's happening. So the tech has come in to give me situational awareness. So probably the biggest step ideas, besides the drone stuff, which was all sexy and cool, it added a few dollars. It was one percenters, two percenters. Um, but time management was the big one. So I went into building a Wi-Fi mesh, my own private Wi-Fi mesh. My cousins are IT gurus and runs his brewery, T-bone brewing, runs it from bed, starts making his brewing bed, his you know, the whole SCADA system. It's not like I want that.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

They make good beer.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Yeah, so why are we driving to a pump shed to turn a bloody pump on?

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

Why are we trying to figure out what the hell's going on? And you usually do it after dinner with a few beers under the belt and a whiskey, and you tear ass about no seatbelt, you know, you're adding a personal risk to yourself.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

You know, you sound so wankery saying it, but is this how many times have we hit a most of the times we ding a huge or something on one of those runs in a hurry, trying to go to dinner or late for something or get away in the morning to sport? And so I wanted to remote sense it, and then the way the farm's set up with sort of 12k's between each end, I can be at one end with my head down and crash an irrigator at the other end, had no idea it's happened, or it's turned off. Dad's technique was to put a you know, the plum, the pump pivoted pumps into the stock and domestic water. So when he went to the toilet, if the toilet didn't refill after he flushed it in the middle of the night when he got to the toilet, he would know that the pump was out.

SPEAKER_03 23:35

Oh, what a great.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

And then we'd deal with it in the morning.

SPEAKER_03 23:36

What a great plan, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

When he wanted his afternoon naps, you get the sprinkler and just pull the hose towards the door so the sprinkler would just hit the window bit, which I think drove my mother insane. Stanging didn't ever clean a window in his life. Yeah, and so he'd be lying on the couch and hear the sprinklers and I can't hear the sprinkler on the glass, it pivots out or it's hit its stopper. Yep. So I I I didn't have that luxury, I didn't live on farm, and so yeah, I just then started building out. So when the drone business was quiet with weather, which was quite often in Tassie, uh my business partner and I would then build on farm Wi-Fi mesh projects, and so yeah, we started building out, program them in town, take them, install them, build our own systems, work within the radio frequencies we're allowed to use and this appropriate power band. Yep, that's a bit of a caveat, um, and then yeah, starting to build connectivity across the farm, so modern-day UHF. And generally, where we want people, there was 240 volts or solar, so relays on top of hills, and then pumps, pivots, um, gateways, that sort of stuff. So when we build our cameras initially, so I could just look at the pump shed when I hit the relay button and see the red lights flick, and then I'd put a giant steam gauge off an old train that I got in the pump shed, which would then show the pressure gauge coming up on the needle, and that was just brilliant. The starting pumps. Then I started putting cameras on the irrigators, and you could see them, and then one day I just happened to watch it and it's going off track and crashing. It's like shit, how do I fix this? And so then again, just I had no money to do any of this, it was all fiddling, and so yeah, just buying a $450 Wi-Fi relay control card, putting the antenna on, and then saying to the electrician, you know, this is a two 24-volt switching circuit, why can't I just jump these, run some cables to this box? He's like, Yeah, you can. And so for 500 bucks, you know, with you know, a half an hour of an electrician checking what I did, saying it's safe, you know, ticking it off. We then had control. So when we could then look on the camera, see the irrigator crashing, hit stop. Or I could change direction or stop it, or I could see if it hit the stopper, um, see if it was still on track, because these were lateral moves that follow a drain and steer and crash often and are a nightmare. So you might be at the other end of the farm and crash it, never know. So the cameras added to that, the Wi-Fi added to that, then adding switching built things up. Um, I built a community rain gauge, so now you'll see the wild eye system with AgLogic. So I suppose I was one of the early guys in that where I bought the rain gauge, you know, four or five grand, got a bombing over by it by the old man, asked everyone to chuck in three or four hundred bucks for kitty, the data kitty. And I know we don't use it, we don't use it. I'm like, well, I can see your MAC addresses logging in, you know. The two guys paid straight up, they knew the value, but it's funny because they'd all and where they'd log in, it was always in Hobart when they're away. So again, they're creating that situational awareness. And so the weather stations are a powerful tool, and um moisture probes are a powerful tool, so worked a lot with Marik. We were PhD guys together. Um, you know, got Marrick and I get on well, and and Ruben with our drainage and everything, and so it's just talking through that, and then 2019 fires. You know, we used the weather stations to show guys real-time um relative humidity switch and when the fires were kicking off. And so I ran a weather station up with me in the fire truck and and set it up there at my ENA. And then now that's you know, it's a standard policy for TFS is to put these mobile weather stations all around the place.

SPEAKER_03 26:48

Great, great.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

And so things like that. I'm not claiming I caused it to happen, but just showing officers and guys up the tree. You know, we were using that tool, and Will Bowden was also there, and he had his, and we were using those tools for ourselves for our own safety, and you know, you know the show's up once the humidity goes to eight percent. Yes, exactly. Or you know, you just sit back and you're a passenger until it gets doughy when we can watch the weather, you know, and then you can watch relative humidity again. And so now we have the fire danger indexes, and it's a statewide thing funded out of drought resilience, uh, and it's bloody great. Great, and we've got the moisture probes in. So I suppose to sharpen the pencil back to drought and my journey with it, uh, those personal experiences were challenging. Um, relationships about how to manage it was challenging, you know. One loved hay, making hay, and we basically had a lot of hay because we had really poor growth rates in our livestock. So you can't change what you don't measure. And so I wanted to take sheep that were averaging 60 grams a day. You know, the genetics were geared towards uh milking with South Downs and East Frisian Cross, homebred ram. I had a PhD in molecular genetics, sheep genetics, and we were using homebred rams, it drove me insane. Both let it slide. Um, so we had slow-growing sheep. You know, for me to get the same 20 kilo carcass as my neighbour, I had to feed them four times as much. They were getting 200 plus grams a day, shooting towards 300. Irrigation systems not keeping up, growing fodder, systems not in place, people getting chewed up and spat out by linear irrigators, you know, weekend roster, even with the cameras and stuff, and switching and alerts and things, it sucked. And so trying to handle the drought better and this climate variability stuff better, uh, human resources was a big part of it. Creating workflow, clear defined roles, good record keeping. And so it's again, it's it's like boiling that frog. You you've got to start focused, and when and often when you're in this position, probably the people that are gonna listen to this style of podcasts, the ones that are probably looking or wanting or trying to figure out how to start drought resilience, not so much those that got it right. Once you get it right, you're okay. But um cash is never there, and wherever you put it, you're not gonna see a big hit. Yeah, there's no silver bullet in this one, it's a systems-based approach. Um, but you know, the first start is creating grain storage, getting an auger, getting a feed bin, putting it over some scales off the wool press, filling it every hundred kilos, mark the inside of the damn thing so you know exactly what you're feeding out, and getting in a ration. And so for me it was, you know, what does the grain bin hold? I borrowed the grain bin, still haven't given it back. Sorry, John. Paid for it. You've had it for a decade. Yeah, it's usually a couple of shit silos on the farm and borrowing auger and all that. Yeah, you know, buying an auger, getting grain out saying to feed grain, and getting that whole you're gonna kill the sheep. So a big part of that was weighing and knowing how many sheep were there, just giving them 50 grams and rationing up with the hay and drought lotting, I could see as the only way to survive these. Instead of op we used to open the whole farm up and huge compaction around gateways to just two water points.

SPEAKER_03 29:58

Yeah, I can imagine.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

And everything went salty, and you know, you'd have a thousand sheep spread over one and a half thousand hectares, and you know, you're trying to irrigate and grow fodder for them and then grow them, and the sheep were burning a lot of energy walking to water and stuff, and I suppose it just yeah, trying to change that system around was hard. And so the animals were part of it. Setting up an animal that I believe could handle the drought, the getting a you in that space is a big part of it, and getting stock you want to manage. I didn't want to manage merinos, I just I am done with them. I love the wool, but I didn't want to manage merinos and composites, and so again, benchmarking, just become a specialist. And becoming a specialist is a big tool to weather drought. Watching the guys that got it right were all just cropping and merinos or composites, and a big resilient system can cream it like now when the commodities are up, and you've had a high lambing, sensational growth rates, sensational market. I can put money into things right now and strategically offset it before Alvo gets his slice into drought mitigation tools. And so setting that whole system up has been hard to really get it to work, and so getting the use right and then creating a system where we're punching above 200 grams a day is a big change. Yeah, it's five, six years to get anywhere because you've got to breed out that that poor stock, and so they're gonna hurt you every time the climate goes pear-shaped, they're gonna be bags of shit by the road, dying in water holes, causing you all the hell. Uh, and so that strategy is a big part of it, and you're earlier you start that the better off you are, and having clearly defined breeding goals really helps. Writing down what you want to do and why you want to do it, so you've got something to come back to.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

All sounds so wanky, but yeah, writing a mission statement for the farm is a wonderful tool.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Great.

SPEAKER_02 31:51

Writing some breeding objectives on a one page of where you want to go with your stock, what numbers do you want to hit? It just sounds so wanky and so corporate and jargon with shit. But um it does help.

SPEAKER_03 32:04

These systems exist for a reason.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

Because when you're overwhelmed, you just go to that, you can go to that manual and just flick through it, and it's there, and that's that human resource capacity, building that capacity to weather a drought. Um, the resilient farmer, you know, his book's great about that, and he said the worst thing he did was go into his office, play computer games, and get rid of everyone.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Whereas he said you need to bring people in and just just get the fundamentals done quick and fast and say, he have a six-hour day or whatever, or we'll come up with a strategy, you know, keep them on the payroll, try and keep them there, because when it comes right, you can then run out of it. And coming back to that two-year concept, you know, yeah, they can be bad, but the worst one, there's only one of them.

unknown 32:41

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

Then either side's a shoulder, day close it a rain. Yeah, you feel like slapping someone say that one. You can't. Yeah, yeah. But it is bloody true, that's the frustrating part. Yeah, and and so that's keeping that emotion in check. But so then, hardware-wise, for me, that's the hard part was building a system up with no money. That's you don't have it. You come out of the droughts with your ass scraping the ground, overdraft, bank manager down your throat, you know, uh, they want to back you, and you're you don't know what's gonna happen, and you you're gun shy. And so coming out of it, you're always edgy, and I think that's when you've got to strike, and I think that's when things like these the tech investment one came out 50-50 that was absorbed straight away. You know, people started wising up to where tech can fit in to give you bang for your buck. And I've been very diligent on only spending on things that'll give me return, not just things that it'll be cool to have that, yeah. But I say no. It's very strategic, and you just never had the cash to do it. Yeah, never had the cash to do it. Everything's big, borrow, steal, or goodwill and generosity or credit, you know. Just explaining to people I really need this now. At this time point, I can't pay you for 90 days. Are you happy to do that, or what do you need? Do you need 45, 60, something, or can I install it? Sometimes doing that does help, particularly with you know larger suppliers with a bit of buffer that want to back you to the future. I found a lot of those businesses very supportive to help the cash flow because ultimately overdrafts are just you know brutal interest rates.

SPEAKER_03 34:14

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Uh, and so the more you can work in that space and communicate what you're doing and have a clear strategy, the easier it is to find those avenues and and gear. Like you know, I had guys reach out on Facebook and say, Oh, we've got all this um got all this um shed trussing that's that's stained and salt oxidised. Do you want it to make a drought lot? And so you know, bought that for cents per metre, not dollars per metre. Wow. I couldn't afford the rubber out of Gladstone that everyone was using in drought lots, and so yeah, finding cheap, simple systems and and going around other farmers and seeing what they were doing, which um you know, doing what catchment and people are doing, which has been great, and just talking about it. And so hardware-wise, you know, I couldn't buy much. The biggest thing was being able to handle grain, I think was important.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

Um, so again, an auger, no matter how shit it is, have your own auger on farm, the grain bin, a way to weigh what you're putting out, you know, right down on the door of the silo, how many tons it took or how many truckloads it takes to fill it, just having those basic numbers there to refer back to helps. Uh, and then for me, drought lotting was the big one. Um, and it took me years to get to it. So initially it was feeding in the paddock on the dirt with you know wasting 30-35% of it. Still do that now. Uh, you know, with the borrowed grain bin uh and bringing that feed ration in, killing a few sheep, learning a few hard lessons, you know, don't go feeding them at night. Uh, you have to get them done in the mornings or afternoon when there's daylight, so you know every sheep came to the trailer. Having big open paddocks really knocked around the animals, um, and that was a big impact. So closing them down, but then that requires water. And so basically, I kind of have gone from paddock feeding down to drought uh paddock drought lots. So bringing water in, um, I still haven't built decent water troughs, like a lot of guys built fancy trickling troughs. I've generally just used more larger volume ones, uh, not as diligent on cleaning them as I probably should be, but I don't seem to lose the animal performance. Putting them into smaller mobs, like they were a thousand to eight hundred each time. I pulled them down to um much smaller numbers, condition classing them regularly, so yards set up that weren't a headache to put a dog on and put sheep around, and classing getting shy feeders out. Probably the biggest mistake I made was kind of taking fat sheep and putting them out to drift around the farm, like letting them blow around in the wind, as I call it. Instead, I should have taken the really poor ones. Okay. Because they get knocked about in the drought lots and the feedlots, tighten the ration down on the fat things, amp the ration up on the mediums, and then the poor ones either give them irrigated fodder or just let them blow around with a couple of lick feeders and just not have the bullying and the animal behavioural components. So that was a big mistake putting fat sheep out and trying to, you know, give the good stuff to all the skinnies because they don't love it, you know, feed lots. But right now, my skinny girls are sitting on clover, um, happily just chugging away on that.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

And they're getting good, and then the mediums are on the intensive lockdown grain lot, and then the fat girls are all out just roaming bushblocks. Yeah. Trying to find a nibble. Um and so and and getting the grain cut every day.

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

So we kind of, yeah, it's been that challenging journey. Um and they're not going to go away. I just can't I can't come at the fancy drought lots. Um, I just I just can't. I could spend $30,000 elsewhere. So right now my drought lots that are intensified are the 270 mil um shed purlins trusses laid on the ground and a Jackie bin on the tractor with a Bluetooth remote. And so we I've now built yards so it's a central feeding trough, a bit like the Headland boys do. So one feeding trough in a central yard and in and out to the silo, fill the trough with whatever ration they need for each mob, try and get the mob sizes all the same. Open the gate, let them feed. When I come back from the silo, dog and dog will put them away, I guess they'll they'll eat it pretty damn quick, put them in the pen and just put do the four or five like that. Um, and that's been a good system. Um simple, cheap. They do get run over when it rains. Yeah, well, they hurt when you hit them on a motorbike.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Yeah, imagine. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

Tear ass into that damn thing, you know about it. Um but yeah, that was a very cheap drought lot. Uh used so with the drought hub funding. Um, you know, we got access to nutritionists, access to design things. We did design up a big system, but you need such a big footprint to put everything into a drought lot. Um so yeah, just kind of gone in down that path of drought lotting. And the biggest thing is once you is holding hands. And I have been very vocal in every drought hub meeting, and and where do we need funding? I said it's holding hands, as cheesy as it sounds. When you lock down half a million dollars worth of sheep into a drought lot, you can kill them pretty damn quick. And they're horror stories. That's all you ever hear, the horror stories. You never hear the good news stories.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 39:15

And so having someone help you with your ration structure, help you with lime and salt, how often you change it, why are you doing it, having talks, like you can go and eat every field day you want, but until you do it yourself. And that's when being able to just call you know, having a nutritionist in South Australia, still remember, we sort of fed out some kibble grain and flour and tried to blend it with barley and all the rest, and then we're having a panic attack because Dad had raised questions, and we've been doing it for a couple of days, and you know, she's in the supermarket and can just give me a rundown on we were safe, we could do this, this, and this to help calm it down, and it was fine. So we basically just used the dog and let them on for 10 minutes, back off and did that until we had the trough empty and then just reshuffled how we mixed it. Um and again we survived with that. So the idea is to try and keep to know how much we can spend on them, hold the use, keep the breeding stock for that two-year period and come out the other end of it with a high number of sheep when it rains.

SPEAKER_03 40:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

So it's a it's a hunger games ethos.

SPEAKER_03 40:15

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's so interesting. Um I grew up on a a dairy farm, but um my grandparents sold it uh when I was quite young, and so um I it's really interesting talking to you. Um I do have know a very small amount of farming, but yeah, just listening to you talk about all of this stuff. It's really fascinating about how much complexity there is. And I really um I really admire how you've kind of really used technology to kind of figure out the solutions to these problems, which is really fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 40:46

Taking the anxiety out, I think, is a big one. Yeah, that's a big one. Like there's a lot of data out there for us now, big data. And I think the classic right now is the Super El Nino story.

SPEAKER_03 40:56

Yes, it's is that going to impact Tassie much?

SPEAKER_02 40:58

Well, we don't know. This is the whole thing. Like you've done you've done stats.

SPEAKER_03 41:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:02

I think that our value right now, like I did a regression analysis against predictions versus what's happened with the climate data back to I think 78, it's the last clean data set. 0.27, like you know. Wow. It's an educated guess. Yeah. You wouldn't use a parachute on those odds.

SPEAKER_03 41:17

No, absolutely not.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

You wouldn't pump you wouldn't use a car tire on those odds. Like, you know, you wouldn't go on a long drive with a tire 27% chance of making it. And so right now we've got media hyping it up, you know, nine and everyone love the Barry Battler stories, and ABC has a very deep climate narrative. Yes. Plus, you'll get the the weather channels on Facebook and stuff, um, who, you know, let's face it, they make the money out of ads and us consume it at the trough. So I haven't kicked I I got kicked from one and then I got re-invited back in by the admins because I called bullshit a month ago on it. I said, stop saying this, like you guys, in 23-24, it's ingrained in my memory. I lost three quarters of a million dollars due to the red meat market collapse. And it was I was on Saurak, Southern Australian Livestock Research Council, Taz Gipslang. So we're travelling between the two sites regularly, and we're just watching people dump stock because 2019 was so vividly burnt in their head. And um Kerry on landline did a great graph when the bombs um bombs and announcement of El Nino market collapses and then stabilises a little bit. The next announcement every 90 days, and they drove that red meat market down to there's a picture in the hallway where you sat your bag, my son drew of me with my head down holding a dollar. And I was I just went to Kohl's and I said, you know, it's six dollars something to grow lambs if you're the top 20%. Yeah, and they said, you know, to their credit, we're in this Coles Grays grass-fed branding program, and they work with us. And they said, Where do we need to be? And I said, You just need to be as close to that as we can. And the market was in the high threes, low fours, and they were still giving us five and still ringing and checking on us, and you know, you just communicate when you need stock off. They knew the importance was de stocking, and other abattoirs were doing the same with reliable, you know, that's why relationships are important. They were helping us unload and destock. But you know, as I had to grow the sheep as fat and as heavy as I could to minimize my losses, and a lot of us did that, and I got really caught because of slow-growing sheep. Yeah, I got caned. Merinos with shit rams with poor growth rates and composite sheep with too much milking genetics in them, and they weren't growing. And it didn't bloody grow till the next spring. And it came, oh god, it killed me. Three quarters of a million was the losses in that 24 year to then claw back and absorb.

SPEAKER_03 43:33

Um, that's huge.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Yeah, and people don't realise that about ag. You know, I kind of came into a small business that wasn't turning over much with no debt, and then I've added debt built strategies, and you know, we're turning over a couple of million now through very focused investment and some nasty seasons. Like, this is the argument I have with my old man is I said, you know, I've seen more climate variability in my short farming career than you saw. In your whole career, like you know, 60s, 70s, and 80s were moderately stable. They had some nasty hits, no denying it. But the rate we're seeing the variabilities is astronomical, and I mean there's only one thing to blame for with the amount of energy we burn and consume for nothing.

SPEAKER_03 44:14

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

You know, with you can't deny it.

SPEAKER_03 44:17

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

Um I just hate the doom doom scrolling on it like this super El Nino shit. We can't call that until August.

SPEAKER_03 44:25

Exactly. So what's the And right now we're in a data set.

SPEAKER_02 44:27

We were so far out of the bell curve right now, 3.1 degrees or two. We're so far out of the data set. Now they just announced yesterday, well, we can have a collapse into La Nina. And it's like you don't, we just don't have the data to say what happens when the dots out here, 1877 was the last one.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 44:43

How much energy have we put into the atmosphere since then?

SPEAKER_03 44:46

Yes. It's irrelevant. There's so many unknowns to do as well, and so trying to kind of you know predict that and yeah, it gets really, really hard. I remember last El Nino, I think, um, there was like flooding up in New South Wales.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

Which is just Yeah, and the trade winds can do things. The dipole, like all those, it's there's three big variables, and if the trade winds blow and knock the temp off the surface, you know, was it the trade winds or yeah, and the beautiful thing about being at CSIRO for so long with like my oil and lipid chemistry where it was down there on the waterfront, CIMAR, you know, these boys are instrument. I'm sharing labs with guys that are measuring ice core samples and and whale shark fat through to people that are dropping sensors over the side of oil tankers to get ocean data and you know, defence spending's huge on for submarine warfare to understand the ocean. So these guys, I'm having lunch with them. Wow, and you know, they've got this the farmer that can articulate what he's growing, and and there was a little lunch group we used to have, you know, what's your plan for spring, what's your look? And we didn't do it till June, July, after the equinox. And these guys, you know, Mike Pooke, the classic weatherman, I grew up watching her, he was there, Pookie would always chat, and they would talk about their 90, 120-day, 150-day forecasts, what they felt for what they couldn't publish, and and running off what those guys told me and looking at the models they trained me onto and where they looked and how they thought, was a very powerful tool for me and and helped me calm down a bit. Yes, and and and think it through. Like it's so easy to be a doomsdayer with all this shit. Super El Nino, we're all gonna go.

SPEAKER_03 46:20

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 46:20

And I think 23 was a good year when we invested in um the climate, you know, climate modelling, that app that came out, that was a very good tool just to see where we track. Then, you know, uni doing Grassgrover, Matt Dumbavan. I was a I think I was a little shit during that. I just didn't get it, couldn't, couldn't relate it and put it together, and it was a clumsy bit of software. My moisture probes and weather station, community weather station, you know, all that data to reflect upon was powerful. But then um, you know, the farming forecaster kind of came together, which uh was the ultimate what I wanted. You know, we were using moisture probes in crops and a dry land one that I had, creating crop coefficients and trying to forward predict off it. And Bosch were interested in that with the yield project and profit, um, all that uh profit software. So I was involved in it in that tech space in the background, but um yeah, just seeing that farming forecaster come together, which took the grass grow data, took a weather station near you, and took a soil probe. Like three of the most fundamental things to put together, and then took the farmers' interpretations out of it. Uh, and yeah, I I was at an NRE or doing a catchment thing with Eve and um the New South Wales chap who was articulating it all, and we were there in the middle of winter and everyone's having a panic attack. And I'm like, just look at the data, like, put it up, let's look at it. That the lines are all together in winter, we can't change shit. Yeah, it all changes in springtime, and then we need to track. I said, we have this beautiful tool, you've got a probe on your own farm that's going to show us where we track. I said, and then we can react. And for me, out of that data, I have got October 28 is my tipping date, and that's pulled purely out of the grass grow data.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 48:01

Uh, and so for me, I have a fence line photo that I always take on that date, um, looking down a fence line, and it is a great way to show the variation we face. And so for me, you have to farm as though springs are gonna happen. If you're farming like springs not gonna happen, you shouldn't be in the game, it's gonna eat you up and spit you out. Uh, and again, there's a Sandy McEchran saying, we're relying on him a lot here. Yeah, the old uh the the prophet, prophet Sandy. Um, but it it is great to you know have someone just say that to you. You have to farm because my old man's a he's a glass half empty doomsday warrior, um, and fair enough, the seasons have done it to him. And for me, it's like okay, we just have to chill, you know, wait. Spring's gonna happen, we have to get our ewes in the best condition they can be, set the pastures up, have the fences, the water, everything in place, so we can lamb these ewes. We'd measure what grass we have the day we, you know, the week prior to lambing, do the feed budget on that, set the paddocks appropriately, and have a plan for my buffer. So I have a spreadsheet, and so then I lamb into a failed spring, feeling reasonably confident I can get the lambs out. Narrow joining, earlies, lates, so split it out, and then on my spreadsheet, I have a predicted value of what the paddock should hold, my gut instinct value, then an actual, and three weeks in I then go around the paddocks with the plate meter, plate meter every paddock, write remarks, comment on the deaths, uh, and then that paddock then gets its landmarking data put against it as well. And that paddock, the lamb's paddock where it was born is also recorded against it in the e-tag. So quite a bit of data for the sake of data, but I actually use that to rank my paddocks for lamb survival and pasture quality and hold off and animal performance on them. And so just doing that at three weeks and then at five weeks at the end of lambing when I we kind of get it done, and then at lamb marking when I have the spreadsheet, I'll go around and if I see anything that is an outlier and what what my trend sort of says on the paddock, I'll put a red dot against it. And that's a clipboard paper job, no digital sheets, I'm visual, have to see it. Um and so out of that, it's interesting. So I've changed some paddocks where I thought I had good twin survival to singles only on hills and things, which we think were twinning country. Swapped a lot of things around and kind of gone from 112% to that 135 that I shoot for, um, which was a core focus. And out of that, you know, that's help helping me farm. So in October 28, I know I'm weaning in two weeks' time. If I'm screwed, I know I've got healthy lambs, I've got ewes that are gonna lose all that condition, put make milk fat onto that lamb, that lamb can go into irrigation or into a store market, and the ew can go into a drought lot, and it just all it's dictating is it's a pre-Christmas weaning or a start of December weaning. Like that's that's what that date tells me. Yeah, um, which then allows me to plan, find markets, figure out what I'm gonna do. But I would have already been trying to work that. And using that climate data in winter, looking at these long-term analyses in August, a lamb operation and an eight to ten ton barley crop is about the same money. And so for me, my trigger to financial survival is swap the two. If lambs have gone to shit, the market doesn't look great, the season looks challenging. Maybe I'll just put more barley. I'll go so 100 hectares of barley and not put rape in, or vice versa, knock the barley off. So this year, you know, we'll knock the barley back, we'll put some more sheep tucker in, retain a few more, and just keep doing that well and focused, but still offload enough. But it's crystal ball gazing, but again, working with clear conviction and and choice. Um Charlie at Berigery Farming, um, he he talks in his podcast, he's chatting about performance coaching for himself, and in particular this volatile time now, he's actually making a decision with conviction and knowing why he made it and sticking to it. And so trying to, you know, mimic those guys, I guess, is is helpful. But yeah, that's that's my lambing drought plan. And so last year, last spring was shit. Uh I carted water to every lambing paddock. So I went around a week prior. Our oh shit, water holes are empty, and and I've been fencing very aggressively to create smaller lambing paddocks and pasture management and and set paddocks up well. And so I'd used human biosolids, so I was getting free P and N, so had beautiful with hole, you know, lockups for 30 days at least, and and all the rest. So huge amount of feed on offer, no bloody water in the paddocks.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 52:28

Set up for great land and no water. And so then we had to go buy IBCs off marketplace, go to Bunnings and buy the damn expensive Schultz adapters, and then I had a heap of pivot irrigator drop hoses, which I then used to lay to the um trough, and then you had to go and buy five gram worth of troughs and lay them out in the paddocks, and then we I gee, I wasted some money, but carting water to use and put them by the laneway, so built a bit of a laneway to help make things easier, and that that was shit. And so then I've now time to up. I went and bought $25,000 worth of pipe, you know, got proper water designs, there's some tools out there to help us do it. But again, I think this is something where the government should be co-investing with us in those good times, is saying, you know, reticulated water, get stock off dams, dams just kill stock, algae. I see um Vic have just released a thing about do we empty a dam out of sediment or not. I don't think animals get great performance out of dams. Okay, and there is evidence supporting that, but the capex and the complexity of putting heaps of troughs in is hard, but then it opens up being able to graze tricky areas, fence to landscapes and soils and animal behaviour a lot more. So we're laying a four and a half kilometre PN8 metric 65 uh 65mm poly. So I bought a ripper to put it in, and it wouldn't go in the bloody ground. So we're trying to rip it now for the last month or two. Wow, I don't want to create a problem. So now I've had some rain, but drilling postiles yesterday, even after 50 mils of rain, it's bone dry. Wow. So I want to lay that we're gonna lay that in, tee off to every paddock and run stock water to all these paddocks, and then there's that much tech. So farm bot was a great piece of tech. I bought one of the best things I've ever bought was Farmbot. Sat it up on the tank, it's on the phone, feeds into AgriWeb, and then I put scarter control, so uh automation control, like mechanical control stuff into my pump shed. So, like last night I get a text, hey, your tank's at 27%. I go to my scarter on my farm dashboard, open the pump up, longer pump, turn it on 15 minutes. Uh it's a 15-hour run to fill it, watch on farm bot half an hour later, tank's going up, pump's prime, it's on a timer, turned off sometime this morning. I haven't thought about it again. And I'll get a text. Um, and so that's a great tool. There's little Internet of Things, there's a whole heap of stuff. So you've got the basically like a bomb switch, um, the tilt switches. And so when you move stock, go to the trough. Um, grab the tilt and chuck that into the next trough when you move the stock in there. So if it does run out, yeah, the tank server is full, uh, it'll alert you and say, hey, if there's no water, this this float has fallen over. Go check your water. And um, yeah, water has been a big threat for me often, especially living in Hobart, not being on farm all the time. So, again, this remote sensing's powerful. A couple of pressure nodes, so I can see if a pressure drops, that means high flow, so we can find a leak and the tank will fall. Um, all those you know, farm bots are ubiquitous now. You'd be mad not to have them. And then, yeah, pump control, like why not? Why go to bloody pump to press a switch? What's the point?

SPEAKER_03 55:34

Exactly. Yeah, well, I guess there's a space where technology can really kind of help with this. Um, just one thing before before we wrap up. Um, it's it sounds like that you do um a lot of time talking publicly about your farm and um community engagement. Um why is that important for you? And do you think that there's value in farmers telling their story?

SPEAKER_02 55:53

Yeah, yeah. You know, you get a it's a two-way street. I guess I've got the gift of the gab in that regard, and I've always been able to communicate uh thoughts and things like that. And science teaches you to communicate as well. Absolutely. Um and I suppose for me, living in Hobart, commuting back and forth, I started doing Instagram stories mostly and things just because I didn't I'm not a good person at coming home and articulating how the day went or whatever. And so it let my parents and other people see what was happening. Quite a few people, you know, a few thousand people follow along with that now, which is a great way to communicate, but I mean a very firm believer in building community. So the loss of my brother was a part of it. But during Ag Science, you know, the Ag Science Societies, uni societies, um, community is always important. You can see the strength in resilient communities weathering anything from whatever it is a club folding to you know getting it back on its feet through to a farming community. So I've always supported community events, um, you know, grounded festival, Matt Evans, uh you know, a good friend from the old days of the complex farm system, and and that you know, a good friend with dad you know came to me and said, you know, I want to start this grounded festival and bring people together, not about scale or whatever. Um, and so yeah, I was happy to support that for the last couple of years. Unfortunately, I missed it this year, but you know, seeing that grow into a beautiful beautiful event of a cohort of people that I'm not normally in either, um, with a regen bent, even though he doesn't want to market it as that, you know, it's the there's an ethos of farming there that's now getting represented and getting people together and sharing ideas through to you know, we do our shortest day, longest lunch. Yeah, so that's the 19th, shortest day of the year. Hundred odd farmers get together from the south, have a few beverages, some food, and we all just talk shit. Great. For the you know, and it's a long, long lunch. Yes. Uh through to our sheep station cup, you know, raising money for a charity, we put 60 grand back into the community this year. Um, all those things help. And so, yeah, I'm I'm happy to speak, use those tools, and I suppose I've been in that innovative space for a long time that people are curious what I'm doing, uh, and I'm happy to I want to see people prosper and get up because a lot of people have mentored me behind the scenes that are quite private people, uh, and uh some people haven't known the impact they've had, and I think that's something else we don't do in agate a lot. We we don't like tall poppies, and so I've had my head I've had my head cut down a fair few times, and you know, there's there's the haters out there, that means you're doing something. But um I got taught by a high up in the courts now, um, a gentleman there that you know just I I value their position and level-headedness, said to me one day, you know, we don't say thank you enough to people, and we don't say I think you're doing a great job. And so I have tried to bring myself out of that shell of not doing it, and I will let people know that they've mean something to me and they have helped me and done things and have had an impact on me, even though they may not have realised it, or just say, you know, thanks, I got through that, you helped me there, you probably didn't realise that, but cheers. And uh also, you know, you see people online last night saying something, you do a great job, you know, well done. Thanks for keep communicating what you're doing. Um, yeah, so I like that element of community and and with our NRE groups. You know, I I have the farm open to a lot of people in a lot of groups. Uh, and you know, from I've got work experienced kids next week, we've got um seed recruitment trials, tree trials, pasture trials, tech trials, um variety, you know, cropping trials, host a lot of things like that because I want to help, and the PhD helped, you know, I put a value on it. When I lost data in my PhD, it's because guys thought the science was all shit. Yeah, and so as a researcher, I know the threat that you face of losing your data set. Exactly. It sucks.

SPEAKER_03 59:32

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 59:34

And so again, I've got that training and that skill set that I think I can complement and help. And yeah, like the pasture trial species we're doing now, like really driving Peter Ball to come back and just keep measuring. It's like Pete come back and measure, he's like, Oh, can I come in? And Pete gets very nervous about entering, like, because you seem a bit busy, it's like, no, I want you to measure it.

SPEAKER_00 59:51

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:51

I want to see the grass is pizzled, I want to see it come back, we need numbers. Absolutely, and out of that, we just you know, last week I'm forming a new pasture blend with him. I've I'm moving away from the species I was using out of that. You know, they look wonderful for five years, they're gone after five.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:04

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:04

And I think the trial initially started with only two or two or three years worth of funding. Yeah, but now getting these long-term studies like what we're doing and getting data around it, we can go, right? Oh, maybe they need to commercialise these blends. What happens when we have these drought dry spells? Um, and yeah, like my whole ethos in this farm has been bloody sandy again, actually. Um grow the weeds you've got, so that's fertility, whatever form you can get it, regen whatever, soil function and biology or human shit or salmon waste through to by the bag with soil tests. So I'm adamant on that. The next thing was eat the weeds you've got, and so that's fencing, fencing and infrastructure, so water as well. So being able to put sheep onto a paddock, graze it with the impact you want, and get them off and not let them back on. Yeah, uh, that's you lose a lot of good pastures and droughts by not being able to control stock. Um, and then change the weeds you've got. And that's the last step. So that's sowing these new species and stuff. And for me, that's a very minor, minor amount. The quantum leaping going into rotational grazing, in effect, whatever cult you want to put around it, yeah. Just getting that rotation going up my stocking rate from sort of two to two to eight DSE. Um, you know, so I've got a high stocking rate now, I've got ground cover, I've got sacrificial paddocks, I have a development system where I'm developing country up each time. It's an informed decision where I sow that pasture. But out of that change the weeds you've got, it doesn't grow in the bag. And I have watched that again and again and again. Uh, I put 12 tonnes of clover seed through a crop duster with about 20 tonnes of grass seed out of our granary that was all stale and sterile, you know, half a percent germination. So I just spread it on the north-facing slope by plain just to get it out of the granary. But um, you know, things like that, you've got to you've got to make those decisions and do it. It doesn't grow in the bag. It's like now, you know, I've ploughed the paddocks up, even with the super ill Nino coming on full cultivation with pasture renovation now. I believe the mechanical mixing of the soil and creating a uniform seed bed, textural seed bed, to get those seeds in and get them going outweighs any losses. And our organic carbon trials that we're part of, another bloody trial, show that even our dryland country is holding to growing organic carbon at depth and and in this, you know, the surface will always vary. It's a function of rainfall. Yeah. Biology doesn't work without a drink.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:32

Yeah, so that's yeah, it's it's a funny farming system, and I suppose I'm I'm happy to try and help people. I'm not a I'm not a great people person, if that makes sense. You know, I by mask, I suppose, is the term you'd use for it. So I can do it for a little bit, but I can't read between the lines and pick up people having trouble when I when I do see it, it's usually someone's really in the shit.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:52

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:52

But yeah, reaching out, you know, saying go and see this person or whatever, not quite me, but I'm I am happy to help love a technical conversation or nuts and bolts stuff trying to help people get it out. But yeah, bring people in. You know, I brought IT guys in to build a dashboard to create workflow.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09

And um I think the other thing too is create those human resources. Yeah. So create a good induction folder with that mission statement. So when people aren't going the way you want them to go, you can say, hey, look, you know, you signed onto this agreement. This is this is what we're doing. But also you've got SafeWorks procedures, having seen workplace accident that was quite very confronting to me. I I really want everyone to be safe and leave work happy and healthy, you know, that's the goal.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:35

It's a priority, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:37

Communicate, don't aggravate. It's another one, being feeling valued enough to be able to communicate whichever channel you want. But creating a workplace safety document with safe works procedures and an induction folder and an induction process, I think is incredibly undervalued because if you get the wrong person in the business, you tend to hold on to them because you don't want to get them out because you think how hard it will be to bring the next one in. But I think if you can create that proper induction process and you're not afraid to do it and you can onboard them easily, then it gives that opportunity and it gives someone who's probably not having a great time with you either an out. You know, you're not trying to lure them in, and and you can I'm not great at it, I'm one of the worst at it, probably, but then trying to get people to come through and and you're not afraid to put that job out again. You've got clearly defined roles, and you can bring people in to help you and get you through it. And I I'm really stumbling on this one, I won't deny it. But I have the paperwork in place, the induction folders, the checklists, and it really helps. You know, you can say, you know, this work is your experienced kid, it's just you know, this you need to fill these forms out before you come, and then we're gonna go through this thing. We drive around the farm, see the risks, hazards, safety points, all that, and then you know that they've got their first day at work. And I've just reading about a scholarship being put up for a young blade killed at work recently, you know, like it's it is a dangerous sport that we partake in and using tech to bring it out. Um, yeah, and that yeah with the accurate record keeping, agri web has been a wonderful tool for us. Yeah, and then getting creating the habits of using it. And so, like if staff want to go shooting or something, if I can log on to AgriWeb, everything's up to date, chemical inventory's there, treatments are recorded, yeah. Shooting, no worries, yeah. All those fringe benefits that farming has that add to that lifestyle element. But for me, yeah, I I I enjoy the challenge of it. Farming is a whole heap of very boring jobs individually. When you string it together, it sounds interesting.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:26

Yeah, absolutely. Oh wow. Well, um, thank you so much for your time. Um, it's been really great hearing your insights and and your story. So thanks so much for sharing, and yeah, and we look forward to kind of hearing more about how things progress in the future. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:43

See if we can get this ripper in the ground, huh?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:44

Absolutely, absolutely. Oh well, thank you so much. Well, thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Voices of Resilience. This podcast was produced by the Derwent Catchment Project. It was jointly funded by the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and the Tasmanian Government. Thanks for being part of the conversation, and we'll see you next episode.