Episode 126: The Benefits of Pasture Cropping with Colin Seis

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating our ecosystems, regenerating our health, regenerating the financial success and the opportunities in our rural communities and our farmland. I've been looking forward to this conversation today for a long time. Several months ago, more than several months ago, probably almost a year ago, someone suggested that I should or I saw this announcement for this new book called Custodians of the Grasslands. And I knew Colin's name, I knew a bit of the work that he had been doing from other people. But when I read the book for the first time a couple of months ago, it had been sitting on my shelf for a while. The book is remarkably well written. You know, sometimes we read books who have really great stories, but they're not very well written. And this is not true for Collins book. It's a book of an incredible story, but it's also written in a way that really connects. So, Colin Seiss, welcome to the podcast. I'm so delighted to be able to speak with you. You have this very well written book which is I think probably in the top 2 or 3% of agricultural books that I've read in terms of the beauty of its story and its writing. For those people who aren't familiar with your, tell us a little bit about your journey and both perhaps a bit of the work that you're doing today and then how you came to be doing the work that you're doing today.

My story, I guess is a long one, especially how I wrote that book. And it's related to my involvement in agriculture, with agriculture in Australia. And when I grew up with most of this knowledge being told to me by my father. So it wasn't very difficult for me to write it except for the really early stuff and that was related to our first or our family. My family's introduction to agriculture in Australia. That one surprised me because my father didn't even know about this side of it. And it turns out that my four times great grandparents, both male and female, were convicts in Australia, which is not uncommon in Australia. My great, my four times great grandfather was a farm laborer in England. He stole a shirt and ended up getting sent to Australia as a convict, which seems fairly, fairly harsh punishment. But as it turned out.

Well, actually it may be, as it turned out, maybe it was. Maybe it was the best thing to happen.

Absolutely correct. It was the best thing that ever happened because if he'd have stayed in England, he'd have Been a farm laborer all his life. But what happened? Because in Australia in those really early days, I won't carry on too much with this old stuff. People may not be that need rest in it, but it is an interesting and quite a funny story. As it turned out that because he was a farm laborer and people were starving in the early colony here in Australia, he was granted 50 acres of land because he knew how to grow things. And so he was granted 58 acres of land. He married a fellow convict called Eleanor. But he, because he had seven years as a convict and after he did his time, because he'd behaved himself, he was made a police constable. Now this is quite amazing. How could anyone be convict and end up a police constable? Maybe it sums up our whole legal system in Australia now. But anyway, I won't worry going too much with that. But that's our first introduction to agriculture in Australia. But it goes on from there. And my great grandfather, he came from well, East Germany or Prussia in the 1840s and was looked at the gold rush in Australia. And he found enough gold to buy horse team and a wagon and bought a wagon and started carrying business like carting goods. But he bought, bought a farm, which is farm here now, but we have all part of it. And so that was our introduction to agriculture. So this is how I wrote that book really about a family's journey, each generation of what happened and what happened on the land and how each generation did a lot of really good things. But all of us, including myself, did a lot, a lot of, a lot of damage to the land and our farms totally innocently. We're doing the best we could at the time. And an example of that is my father. He followed the best science of the day from the 1930s right through to he died at age 86. So he followed the best science of the day, but the farm was collapsing all around him. And so we need to be aware that it's just because it's the best science doesn't mean to say it's correct. And this science turned out to be not correct. And I might add now, and some people definitely disagree with this, but the green revolution that was started in the 1950s and 1960s after the Second World War, with all the good intent of growing enough food for a lot of starving people around the world, it certainly achieved that. But the methods used have done huge damage not only to our farms profits, but also now to our planet. It's been an ecological disaster to our farms and our planet. And that has to change.

You've experienced that. I experienced that on the farm that I grew up on. Many people have experienced that and many more perhaps haven't the depth of experience to remember what it was like and are ignorant of the change that has happened, or they remain willfully ignorant and choose not to see. And, you know, it's interesting for those of us who have observed the impact and the transition. Well, actually, I'd like to just ask you the question, what were the damages that you saw on your farm? What did that damage look like? How did it manifest?

I'll just backtrack a little because I grew up with this very experience with this form of agriculture. Now, I might add, when it was first adopted, it was very successful, it worked well, it created wealth for farmers, and my father was very good at it. It was very productive. A lot of the fertilizer and pesticides and that side of it were really good to start with. But what started to happen on the property here was things like we were just starting to notice that the pastures were not performing as well, even though we were putting a lot of fertilizer on, especially phosphorus fertilizer or. My father was. This is. This was really before my time. But I do remember my father talking about this and he got the best agronomic advice possible. And he said the advice given to him was to double the rate of fertilizer. That'll fix it. So it was already putting a lot on every year, annually. It was very common. It was. Almost every farmer in the higher rainfall areas of Australia was doing this. But the pastures continued to decline. Then our soils became acidic. That was the next thing. So then the advice was, was to put lime on. Then we started to get saline areas on the property, dry land, salinity areas, and they were growing quite large annually. Then we saw problems with our animals without sheep and cattle, just metabolic diseases in them, things like that, where everything was starting to go wrong, the wheels was just falling off and no one really knew what was happening. And my father really tried to address it with the best knowledge at the time, but there didn't seem to be any answers to this. And most people, well, majority of people didn't even know there was a problem. They just sort of went with it. And these were quite insidious, just slow creeping problems. So you had to be fairly aware and astute to even see them happening at the time.

So when we think about that history, I'd like to flash forward to today. I imagine your name is quite familiar to many people in the regenerative agriculture space. And for those of our listeners, for who it's not, look up pasture cropping and you'll find Colin's name associated with the original idea of that practice and development of it. Can you bring us forward to today and tell us about what your operation looks like at this moment and what the overall system looks like?

The farm is 2,000 acres, but today it is a, an Australian native grassland. It certainly wasn't 70 years ago, it was 100 years ago, but not, not 70 or 150 years ago. It was a grassland. So I, I restored the grassland in conjunction with that. If you look at the animals we're carrying, I'm carrying more animals now and we're running mostly sheep, merino sheep for wool production. Wool and wool and meat production. We're actually running more, more sheep than my father did in his era with all that fertilizer and pesticides and all those products. So it's far more profitable than it was and it's a lot easier to, to run and manage. We don't need the labor with the people working on here, as my father did. Far more profitable. It's more profitable because we're not spending the money on all these pesticides and fertilizers.

When you say that you have restored the native grasslands, what does the species diversity of forages and of plants growing on the grasslands compare today to what was present before it was intensively farmed.

In the green revolution? Things side of things in Australia it was promoted to grow introduced plants, plants that were not native to this country, that clovers, subterranean clover and it seemed to be the main one and phosphorus fertilizer. So, and it was called sub super or the phosphorus fertilizers called super phosphate. But so just it's interesting looking at some really old photos. Fortunately my mother took a lot of photos with a little camera over many years. So I have a lot of photos of what it was like and I get quite shocked when I look at these old photos. There's no grass on it on the property at all. I don't know how he ran any sheep at all, but he was feeding them a lot of the time with introduced grain and things like that. But back to your original question, what is what it compares like? So all of the pastures were introduced and because they were introduced into Australia, that has grown quite low phosphorus levels, low calcium levels, in other words, quite poor soils, you know, in our. And the soil on this property is granite, which is not highly fertile, certainly not compared to your soils through the Midwest. So Nothing like that at all now. Yeah, so everything we had was just introduced coming from basically around the Mediterranean, those areas in Europe, they're European types. Grasses. Now it's totally different. It's primarily about 60 species now of plants, mostly native grassland species here. And it looks different. It's three and four feet tall, the grasses here now. And I know every summer, even like in my time we had no feed in summertime at all. Now there's grasses, you know, three and four foot tall. And those grasses are similar types of grasses to what you have in the us like warm season grasses and a mix of warm season and cool season grasses in your prairies.

When you say that you have species diversity of 60 species, do you have an idea what number of those or what percentage of those 60 species are grasses and what number are forbs or broadleaves?

The majority would be grasses because we've measured all these actually, and probably one of the most researched in Australia, I might add, but certainly the majority would be grasses. Out of that 60, I'd say almost 40 would be grasses. The others would be forbs and herbs, some native. Now there are some introduced grasses or plants left that survive from my father's era that most. Some of the clovers are still here and that's okay, it doesn't need to be a pristine grassland. Some of the clovers are still here and they grow quite happily amongst the native plants anyway. So it's sort of a combination of both in saying that on some, the measurements that we've done here and some of our universities have done here, it's 80% native species, 20% introduced like species.

I want to also speak a bit more than just speak a bit, but dig into the story of pasture cropping and then I'd love to go back and talk a bit more about your journey of how all these pieces came to be. So tell us about pasture cropping. What is it, how did it come about and how are you utilizing it today?

Pasture cropping is actually perennial cover cropping and we know a lot now about COVID cropping, especially in the US where cover cropping is becoming more and more common. It's not as common like cover cropping with annual plants is unfortunately not as common here. Some people stay to adopt cover cropping and I've been promoting it a lot in Australia here as well as perennial cover cropping or pasture cropping. But pasture cropping is actually quite simple and it has an evolution, I guess, of millions of years because it just mimics how a natural grassland functions and In a grassland we have warm season plants and cool season plants and that live happily together and they grow at mostly temperature related cold season and warm season. Now on the farm here the majority are warm season native grasses. So. And they go dormant in the winter. Now winter is, isn't a cold winter. We rarely ever get snow here so we grow winter crops. But these grasses grow dormant in the winter which is a very natural thing. When the warm season grasses get dormant in the winter that's when the cool season grasses start to grow. So all that I've done is work with a natural system. Oh, Mother nature had it right in it correct in the first place. I've just worked with natural system and zero tilled cool season plants like wheat and oats and barley, small grain type crops into that grassland when those grasses were dormant are dormant in the wintertime. It's actually quite simple.

And is this no till drilled? Are you doing any soil preparation? Are you doing anything special to suppress the perennials that are present?

There's a few things we do. Grazing with animals is a very important part of the process. I adopted holistic grazing management in the early 1990s here and that ended up being very important in relation to preparing a paddock to plant a crop into in the winter and meaning that we had very large miles around 2,000 or 3,000 sheep on an area. And what that does is. Yes, that's right, two or three days. And that tramples the grass onto the ground and adds manure and urine. So it's adding nutrient to it but tramples it very much. Like when you run a roller crimper over a, over a cover crop to terminate it. So it does terminate. These grasses are dormant by then anyway. Terminates that remove any weeds that are in there and then plant into that. However, at times depending on what, what weeds or what other plants are there that are going to compete with, with the crop I do use, I can use a very selective herbicide. It can be an organic system but I'd leave it open for anyone with that. And I'm not organic myself. I want to have, I don't want to be restricted with anything that I do so. And I could be organic but I choose not to be. So we can use very selective herbicides and that means we don't want to kill any of those perennial grasses at all. And that means that I don't use glyphosate. So I haven't used glyphosate for 30 years. But I do use other herbicides. Desiccant type herbicides and more selectives just to manage and control some of those, those words and get better crop result. Yes, we're harvesting grain off these crops as well.

So it's an initial very heavy grazing followed by if necessary, an herbicide application. And then is there any soil disturbance or just being no till planted? Is there any soil disturbance?

No, no disturbance really at all other than no till drill.

When you are planting into perennial cover crops like this, do you adjust the population? How does the, how does the planting population compare to a tilled system or this crop that isn't going into perennial covers?

There's no real difference in the seeding rate. There's no real difference in anything we put fertilizer on. I still use just a normal fertilizer, normal granular fertilizer with the seed down the tube really with the seed. And you can use these other biological products and organic products now that we can use as well if people want to do this any way that they like. So there's not much difference really at all. I started with wider rose facings, but that's not that necessarily. Now with, with good disc planters anyway, that's, that's, that's fine. It can be almost the same with. When it's sown, it looks, when it's first planted, it looks very untidy. It certainly doesn't look like a normal crop. And I tell people don't show it to your bank manager until it's about, for about two months later because they look quite untidy crops.

What do the results look like? How does the final harvest compare with crops that are not associated with perennial covers?

There's not a lot of difference. You would think. One of the questions I get asked a lot is how do I keep the seed of the native plants out of the grain crop? Now I'm growing wheat or oats or barley, any of those. How do I get the seed out? Now one thing that does happen is as the crop is growing and this is into a late spring, the crop gets up above the grasses which are trying to come out of their natural dormancy. But these warm season grasses like full sunlight and they're not given full sunlight because the crop now is shading them. So the crop itself stops those warm season grasses from growing. It just keeps them suppressed. They're still greening underneath at that time, keeps them suppressed and the crop looks like a normal crop of wheat or oats or it very difficult to tell any difference at that stage.

How do the perennial covers express themselves underneath the cereal do they start growing while the grain is still small and then just remain somewhat stunted because they can't get enough sunlight and are shaded out. How do they behave?

Well, they don't try the warm season grass. They don't come out of out of winter dormancy until the ground temperatures are about, about 18 degrees. They start to try to grow and your warm season grasses are, would be, are about very similar to that. So they start to come out of dormancy, they're green underneath, but don't actually grow very vigorously. However, when the crop is harvested with a normal harvester, a normal, normal combine, as soon as the sunlight gets at them, they just explode out of the stubble of the crop. They grow incredibly fast once they get sunlight on them because they're sitting there for a while starved of sunlight. But one of the benefits, great benefits we've got, which many people don't realize is the amount of if you're running animals and growing crops, which a lot of people do in Australia, which we call mixed farming, we have animal feed grazing up to the point of planting the crop and then really high quality feed in the stubble after the crop is harvested. You've really got to work hard to lose money with this system. It's almost impossible to lose money because even if the crops are failure, what have you lost? You might have lost the potential of that grain, but you still haven't set your farm or that area back, still got all of your pasture and grasses and grassland intact.

You know, Colin, I'm curious about your rainfall and your levels of moisture because as I'm listening to your story, we have tremendous acreages in wheat production here in North America, as I'm sure you know. And a great deal the majority of it is dry land. And I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm reasonably confident that the great majority of the wheat acres are alternate year cropped with a summer fallow to conserve moisture, to build up soil moisture, which I have significant question marks around. And it does make me wonder, this perennial, if I might just comment on that. I've had a couple of experiences where there's one farm in particular that comes to mind, actually there's now a couple of experiences where they grew cover crops or they just let the weeds grow during the summer months. And those soils that had plants growing on them ended up having significantly more moisture and producing larger yields for the following wheat crop than that which was dry summer fallows. And so as I think about the way these perennials can conserve moisture when they are managed Well, I am curious how adaptable this system that you're proposing would be to dry land wheat production.

That's basically what we do here in Australia. It's almost all dry land wheat production or small grain production. They're certainly not irrigated here. So it's dry land.

What is your average annual rainfall in your area?

It's 25 inch rainfall, reasonably evenly distributed. But people are adopting this form like pasture cropping in areas where it is 11 and 12 inch rainfall and in some parts in other parts of Australia. Now in those areas, because it's a very low risk method of agriculture, especially if you've got, if you have animals as well. And that's part of the key to this. If you have animals, it is very low risk. Now there's a couple of things that I do and recommend people to do because I spend most of my life now, a lot of my life, helping people with their farming practices and on farm consulting and things like that. So there's a couple of things we do if we, we can use our animals more like if we. People are worried about. And there is a transition in this when people start. If people are worried about not, not storing enough substall moisture, what I get them to do is keep those grasses grazed quite short through the summer period leading up to wheat planting. If you graze grasses short, they also have a short root system because that just what happens if you graze the top off a plant. The roots will prune back. We've known that for quite a long time. So you can conserve moisture that way by simply keeping those plants short. The other way is to use, if they, if you really want to use a summer herbicide, fallow, but not glyphosate, we don't want to kill those grasses. So use a desiccant type herbicide which will slow the growth of those grasses down but not kill them. Because the greatest asset that we have on this farm now is our native grassland, we certainly don't want to kill it. And that could be the case almost anywhere. People often don't realize the value of a really good functioning grassland or at least a pasture that functions like a grassland. That's another story again. So it's easily possible to grow high yielding crops with this just by tweaking things a bit more. If people want to do that, depending on what they're trying to achieve.

I'm speaking from a voice of ignorance of the system that you've developed, but also with a bit of experience on ecosystems and I'm Just imagining what this might look like. And my imagination is coming up with a question. What I'm imagining is that there must be a very compressed time window between when the grasses would naturally begin going dormant and the optimal time for planting. In fact, I might almost expect that you might want to plant earlier than before the grasses actually start going dormant. And yet. So I guess my question is how important is the timing for that intensive grazing and that selective herbicide application? How important is that to coincide with the grass's natural dormancy stage? And how does that interact with seeding? And is my imagination completely off?

No, no, no, that's a great question. It does work okay in our environment. Here the timing is not really a problem in other areas in the parts of the world it could be here the grasses are starting to go into their dormant phase about a month before we normally would plant. So that's okay. They basically fully dormantly planting anyway. So we don't really need to try and shut those grasses down. I mean put them to sleep artificially. However, they certainly sped like anything, nothing so perfect. However, early crops onto here. Now forage crops just simply for grazing, which need to go be planted early in what you call fall, early fall to get good growth before the winter sets in. Those warm season grasses are still really actively growing. So it is really critical then what I often do is to do two grazings, one a reasonably short distance apart without a recovery time between them, with only about a month recovery, which is not normally what you do with holistic grazing management to stress those grasses deliberately more and, and get them shorter and then also use a knockdown type desiccant type herbicide to put them into winter dormancy earlier. But there's can be other problems if depending on the season, those grasses can recover from that herbicide, which you want them to do, but recover too early and then start competing for moisture with that newly emerging crop. So nothing's ever perfect with this, but it's a matter we manage things with all types of agriculture. So it's just another way of managing things.

Something that, when I, when I hear you speaking about a crop desiccant, something that we have learned that you may want to experiment with or maybe already have, is foliar applications with high doses of boron. We find that boron and for our listeners, if you're interested in digging into this, I wrote a blog post on this topic. But it speeds up plant senescence, it speeds up what the plant naturally wants to do anyway and it moves a lot of sugars out of the vegetation down into the crown. So in some settings, in some contexts, for some species this might work very, very well and others it might not work so well at all.

Okay, I don't know about that. That's really valuable information in regard to this. And I try everything, have over the years tried just about everything. So I will try that.

Yeah, I've seen some remarkable responses on forage crops where things senesced and went into winter dormancy very, very quickly. With a foliar application of boron, you don't get the same response from a soil application. It needs to be foliar applied. So you mentioned the. If you have grasses that are still quite vigorous approaching the planting period, you would go in with two back to back grazings 30 days apart, very intensely, with very little rest period for the intent of deliberately stressing the plant. How important is that? Whether you're doing one grazing or two, how important is it to get that the timing of that grazing right relative to the moment of planting? Or perhaps, perhaps a better question is relative to the stage of plant dormancy.

Yes, it needs to be reasonably close to natural dormancy. If it's done too early, the plants will just grow again, especially if there's reasonable rainfall. They will grow again. They, they certainly love to grow, so it certainly will help. So yes, that, that's quite critical, getting it at the right timing. But we know reasonably well just when the plants are going to be going to dormancy. Because, because most areas we know, most people know when we need to get a first, a first frost or, or the weather starts to get cold anyway and, and it often does fit into when we normally would plant, at least in this country, at least in Australia.

So as you've been consulting and working with other growers in different regions, we tend to learn the most from things that aren't successful and that don't go well. So what have been the scenarios where people have tried pasture cropping and it hasn't worked so well? And what have you learned from those experiences?

I think most of those I've done, yeah. And you're absolutely right. You learn from failures well in fact, the only time you don't learn from failures if you haven't learned something from it. So we should learn, learn from every failure and especially early days when I was developing a lot of this because everyone thought I was a total lunatic, of course, and I was copying all sorts of criticism and so I had no one to help me.

You know, you used that term in the past tense. You Said everyone thought I was a lunatic. Do they? Is that still past tense? Is that still present?

Probably. But no, they don't think I'm as big a lunatic now. But I said I had no one to help me. I'll tell the story how they started here eventually. But I had a good friend and neighbor we would playing around with a lot of this stuff together. But I'm very good friend with Dr. Christine Jones who I think's in the US at the moment or she has been doing talks there. And Christine, because Chris Lane. Christine's is many things. An ecologist and soil scientist and. Right. She's a grassland ecologist. I would just contact Christine where this is early days and I had. Would have a problem because I was communicating with Christine a lot with this because she was the only one from a science background that really understood what I was trying to do. And she could see things through a plant's point of view. She. She could see what the plant was trying to do. The perennial grasses or, or the things competing with crops. And she was a. A great help. And some early failures were related to not grazing. Grazing was so critical with it. One of them was to try and balance the carbon to nitrogen ratio with the grass. Like very high. If you've got too much dry grass there, your carbon and nitrogen ratio is extremely high, which is good in one way but not so good for. For the crop as far as nitrogen drawdown problems and that sort of thing. So that was one thing. The grazing of the animals was critical in many ways. That was one of them. The carbon nitrogen ratio, which we had no understanding of in the early 1990s. Got to remember when I was trying to develop a lot of this stuff and no one wanted to help because I was a total rat bag. Well, lunatic. I've got to remember not to use too many Australianisms. No one understands me if I use too many Australian.

We'll laugh at them anyway.

So. So things like that where I was getting really poor crop results. One thing that we need to realize with this is the basic agronomy still applies. It might appear totally different, but basic agronomy still still applies. Them basic science still applies, but we just are doing things a bit differently. You know, we're growing stuff into it. A living but dormant plant. But that plant, because it's dormant doesn't compete. And for forever we. We thought we had to kill everything to grow something. But Mother Nature doesn't do that. Mother Nature has everything growing together. So why don't we mimic that natural system A lot better. But, yeah, there was quite a few failures along the way. And even when I try things, sometimes things don't grow quite right. But that happens in agriculture anyway.

So when you were describing the contribution of grazing to adjusting the carbon to nitrogen ratio, I'd like to understand that better. And I think it's. Yeah, it's important for us to understand that. Well, because while I would be an advocate for incorporating livestock, we have a different landscape here in North America than you do in Australia. We have relatively few mixed farmers. Many do not have livestock. And so I'm sure the question that's going through many people's minds is, could this be mowed instead of grazed?

Okay, yes, it could be. It could be mowed instead of grazed, but then that costs money. It also doesn't add any nutrients to the soil. Also, when we put livestock over, like on an area, the dry material is pushed onto the soil surface so soil microbes can get at that and break it down. If it's just mowed most of the time, that dry material is sitting above the soil surface, oxidizes and doesn't really do anything. It gives us some ground cover and certainly can control weeds and things like that. But having it in touch with the soil surface is absolutely critical. Especially I haven't spoken about that yet. Especially. We start talking about improving soils and soil health. Animals are so critical in that. And unfortunately, we've seen in Australia here as well, a lot of the cropping guys have removed animals and the whole. Everything's falling over, it's crashing on them. And that's because nutrient cycling has stalled. Soil carbon levels are crashing, organic matter levels are crashing, and the whole system is falling apart. And it's not only because there's no animals, but partly because of that.

Learning about pasture cropping and the experiments you've been conducting has been fascinating. I'm sure there's so many more questions that are probably in people's minds. But since you opened the topic of soil health and you described at the beginning how degraded your soils had been, and you've. You've now been on this journey for the last 30 some years, how has your soil health improved? And perhaps the question to begin this conversation with is, what was the transition like? What's the journey been like?

To tell you the journey, I probably should. Should start at why I ever started doing this silly stuff in the first place. In 1979, we had a major wildfire which we call bushfires. Here in Australia, we had a major wildfire which destroyed the whole Farm. We normally run 4,000 sheep here on the farm and we did have then 3,000 of those sheep were killed in that fire. All the buildings were destroyed, houses and infrastructure, most of the fencing was destroyed. It was as though an atomic bomb was set off on the farm, on the property. So we went from going okay even with those problems I mentioned earlier to just being broke overnight and how do you survive from that? And the way I approached it and I won't go into how we read our numbers back up the street numbers, but that's another story. But the only way I thought of surviving and at that stage I had already taken over the farm from my father or in the process of doing that. And the only way I could think of surviving was stop spending money because we were spending a lot of money, $100,000 every year. I was spending on today's money on fertilizer. Not even cropping fertilizer, but fertilizer and pesticides and things like that. And I couldn't afford that anymore after that, after that fire. So I decided to look at low input agriculture and then, then I also looked at restoring the grassland because of the fire and being being broke. Now the pasture cropping thing has got an interesting story in itself. The My good friend Daryl Clough, he's a neighbor, not an immediate neighbor, he lives over the other side of the hill here and just good friends and we used to meet and discuss the world world's problems usually over a beer or two. But one evening we were discussing these problems over a beer or two and we had a lot more than a beer or two and this idea of why don't we when we're showing crop why are we killing with high rates of glyphosate why are we killing these summer grasses that we've got? Well we didn't have many but we were both of us were using a high rate of glyphosate to kill these grasses. Might add now that I was already zero tilling at that stage I had stopped plowing so I didn't need to change that. So instead of trying to kill the summer grasses I didn't worry about them. However, I did use a lower rate of glyphosate just before and I'm only talking about a day before the I sowed the crop to control any weeds that were in it because a lot of there was a lot of weeds on on the general weeds on the property at that time. So anyway just a lower rate of glyphosate which didn't kill the native summer grasses because they were already in a dormant stage. And then I just drilled in through them. All that I was thinking of doing was just growing very low cost crop just to feed sheep on the forage. But that crop ended up producing a good grain. So I thought, oh, we've stumbled across something here that's very interesting. We realized that we could grow this crop without killing those summer warm season grasses. And there wasn't me, there was only about 10% of the paddock had just one plant here and another plant about 10 yards away. And so there wasn't many. There was mostly weeds. I didn't start with the grassland. What actually happened where the crop was grown and mostly oats was better at doing this. Where the crop was growing. We started to find and we, both of us there are Clough and myself saw there was native grass seedlings growing in the drill row where the oats had been growing. That was the next summer, the end of the summer. We could see this and oh, that's interesting. And that started happening every year. What happened? And this is just a total accident. The whole thing's a total accent. There's no great philosophy or, or intelligence or anything in this is just two blokes getting drunk one night thinking about this rat bag idea. So that's really what happened. However, one of the things that came out of it, we stumbled across a way to restore grasslands. And none of those seeds, the plants that grew were actually sown. They were lying dormant in the soil. That could have been there for decades. Goodness knows, goodness could have been there for 40 or 50 years. Lying dormant. And what had happened was the oak plant itself around the rhizosphere, around the roots of the plant created an environment that was microbially friendly and friendly for this seed to germinate. So and now we've got more of an understanding. We certainly didn't know what was going on at the time, what was happening. But now with more of an understanding of soils and, and the soil ecosystem and how they all function now we know to a large degree where it was going. We created a really healthy environment around the seed and it was happy to germinate. And that's happened pretty well all over the world where anyone has done use these techniques very rapidly. Restored perennial species. That's the best part about pasture cropping. Not growing the crop, which we can do, but restoring grasslands. And that's often overlooked.

That's a fascinating observation and story and you know it is. There's a number of interesting comments that come to mind like it is. There are some idealists who would suggest that that shouldn't be possible. Since you are still using fertilizer, as I understand it, you're still using granular fertilizer in the row with the seed. You're still using herbicide applications and you're doing things that came along with the green revolution. You're also using cereal grains which are not native to your ecosystem. So in spite of those things that do not align with an idealistic worldview, you are still getting those results.

Yes, that's correct. And I hadn't thought of it quite that way before. Like, you're absolutely correct. We're still using sun fertiliser. Very low rates of fertilizer now, I might add. Very low rates. Especially with. Compared to some of the rates that are used with the cropping people in Australia and in other parts of the world. Yes, all of that I'd agree, shouldn't happen. One of the advantages I had, I was totally naive. I didn't know that it wouldn't work. It made perfect sense to me when I started to, to do this. But when I started to ask scientists about it and especially agronomists about it, they just said, oh, that won't work. That's, that's, that's mad. It can't possibly work. But I was that naive. I didn't know that it couldn't work. But it did work. So I think we'll learn more by watching natural systems than we will ever learn. We need to learn more about how nature functions and mimic that a lot closer. Then we'll start to get things right.

This is a fascinating conversation because I'm making notes of things that I want to follow up and ask questions about that my list keeps growing longer, faster rather than shorter. We do want to continue on the on your soil health journey and how your soil health has improved. But a question just popped into my mind on going back to grazing and grazing pressure. Grazing sheep versus mowing. Do you have any insights into the relative impact of grazing livestock, grazing cattle versus grazing sheep? Because we know that sheep graze much more closely and they would take these dormant species or approaching dormancy grasses down much more closer to the soil surface than livestock.

Yep, I do. Now that's true. Sheep will graze shorter, but only if we allow them to. Managing animals, either sheep or cattle, is related to how they're managed. You simply don't let the sheep graze that short. And that's what holistic grazing management's about. And grazing rotations Is about. I actually don't see any difference really in sheep or cattle if they're managed well.

Okay, so that leads to the obvious next question is, what is the type of residue that you like to see being left behind after the grazing pass or the two grazing passes before you are seeding?

Before I'm seeding, certainly you shouldn't be able to see the soil surface. It looks like. It looks like a cover crop, ideally with quite a lot of dry material on the soil surface. Looking at it three or four inches thick, that type of thing. It's a bit difficult to describe, but yeah, we still need a lot. However, in drier seasons, we sometimes don't have that much. In a dry summer, we don't have that much cover and it still seems to work quite fine. But if you haven't got that much cover, you tend to get more weeds in the crop. That's the main difference there. Covers definitely, definitely work in weed suppression.

All right, let's come back to your soil health progression. You've described for us how all of a sudden the native seed started growing again from the seed bank in the drill rows. How did all of this lend itself to improvements in overall soil health? You had salinity areas that were growing that you had to deal with. How did all of this evolve?

Very interestingly, because the farm's been monitored very carefully. But not from when I started because I wasn't expecting all these changes. I was just trying to survive, really. But when I started to see these things happening, I was asking myself these like, questions, what's going on here? This is not supposed to happen, Any of this stuff, like being able to just grow plants like that, especially native species. What I was also noticing was around the clumps of the native grasses when they were in their dormant state, like the ones that were left there, There weren't many. The crop itself was a lot higher. It was 30 to 50% better and greener in amongst the dry grass. Now, that was absolutely anti to anything else. We're supposed to kill everything to be able to grow a crop. But it was actually better amongst the. Around the growing right when it was right inside of that perennial grass plant. So there was all sorts of unanswered things. So I then approached our main research organization in Australia, a government research organization, and I finally got them to do some work on it. I said, there's all these raisings happening. Would you like to have a look at. Which they did anyway, so. But then I did my own monitoring as well, counting plants and Doing soil tests and all of that stuff because I was fascinated with what was happening. Now, just to sum that sum up, the soil health side of it, the soil ecosystem has changed really totally. And the obvious things about, well, if we just backtrack a bit from that, soil structure changed to start with, soils get softer and spongier and, and then we started to build soil and now we started with about 4 inches of topsoil, that's all. And now there's about a foot of topsoil of dark made soil. That's the obvious sort of physical things that we can see. So carbon levels and we measure mostly in carbon, more southern organic matter. In Australia, carbon levels have increased by over 200%. They've gone from 1% to about 3% in the top 4 inches. But we're measuring now to a meter with our soil testing and it's changing at depth as well. The soil carbon is the other really interesting thing. We measure the change in soil chemistry and measured everything we possibly could measure, including trace elements, the whole lot, and found that everything had increased like. And, and when we look at say phosphorus, phosphorus increased by 300%. Calcium increased by about, about 300%. I've got this off the top of my head. Organic carbon levels increased, organic nitrogen increased. All the trace elements in increased by a lot. The only things that didn't increase was sodium, iron and aluminium. They went, they decreased the things that we didn't want decreased the things that, that we did want increased. Now I didn't put anything on there except a little bit of fertilizer for the crop. How does that happen? This seems like alchemy. You can't do that. Well, I've been told that you can't do that. Must have fudged the figures.

So, well, some people would say, oh, you can't do that. And then other people will say, well that's going to run out eventually. You can't do that forever. What do you say to those people?

Ah, that's an interesting. Yeah, that's exactly. I get asked that all the time now. There's a few things that happen here now and I've bounced this off soil scientists. Actually Christine Jones was, was the one that helped me take those salt samples and, and because she was curious what was going on. So scientists involved in, in the first place, I've asked soil scientists all around the world because it's created a bit of an academic argument how can this happen? There's two things that are going on. This is granite soil. So there's. There's granite particles in, in the soil, like small granite, little pebble stones all through the soil. What I did was restore the perennial grass. You got to remember these are perennials, very deep rooted perennial plants. Probably not as deep rooted as your perennial plants. They are huge. Your big bluestem. A lot of those are incredible plants. These perennial plants are very deep rooted and so they're going down and cycling nutrients back up from where they hadn't been roots for 70 years or more. So a lot of it is just simply can be explained by bringing nutrients up from depth and cycling. But one of the things I haven't told you is that in that test was done, there was available nutrients and totals. Now totals aren't supposed to change. So the totals and the available change. So where did that come from? Now looking like it must be alchemy.

Just to be clear, when you say the total, are you referring to what is called a total nutrient digestion test?

Yes, I think that would be how you describe that. Yes. Yep. Yeah. So it looks as though we don't really know. I'd love some more science on this. As far as we know. And this is from source artists and, and people that really took it seriously. It's. And it is possible like all the, all the, the minerals and that we've got in our soils were on this planet in the first place. You know, they've always been here as rock. So everything that we've got in our soil has come from the parent material. Now the parent material, because this is granite soil, is still there. It's quite possible that these, the increase in these minerals and so and nutrients and everything in this soil that we're measuring are coming from the parent material because we've restored the soil ecosystem and those minerals are actually coming out from the parent material. That an answer that I've been given by some of the soil sites.

Yeah.

Being granite soil. Other source this is.

You know, when I was first going back probably 20 some years ago, 15, 20 years ago, I was exposed to doing soil analysis, total nutrient analysis. That was actually, it was a mining assay. These assays were done for geological exploration. And so they would measure every mineral that was in the total complete profile. And then a number of years ago, those tests were difficult to access and the labs were challenging to work with, but still possible. There's a couple of labs in Canada, here in North America that run these tests. But then the agricultural labs started running this total digestive assay. I had just made the assumption, which I now am quite certain is Incorrect that the type of extraction that they were running was similar to the geological assays. But then, as in with your experience, we start seeing these farms where the numbers on the total nutrient, on the total digestion analysis are increasing significantly, which I would speculate can't be true if you're actually measuring everything that's in the profile as they do with a geochemical exploration assay. And so, yeah, I think obviously it's coming from somewhere and it would appear reasonable to speculate that it's coming from the geological parent material.

Yeah, that's sort of the conclusion we've come to, but I'd love more work on that. And there's a lot of unanswered things with this, and not only what I'm doing, but many people adopting a different form of agriculture, which we commonly calling out regenerative agriculture, are seeing these things that don't add up when you compare it to conventional agriculture. And that's why I think sometimes regenerative ag, or someone doing it differently gets a lot of criticism because things start to change and we get these different results and no one can work out why it doesn't fit the model.

Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, we've had some fairly spirited academic disagreements where academics have said that it's not mathematically possible to build soil carbon that rapidly. And yet growers have said, well, here are dozens of years of lab data showing that it did. So are you saying the lab is wrong?

Yep, I've had exactly that same thing happen here. Yeah, like very spirited discussions with scientists especially. However, scientists that are ecologists actually understand all this stuff that I've been doing, they get it straight away. Ecologists, totally different because they're broader thinkers.

Yeah. So you've. Thank you, Colin. This has been such an enjoyable conversation. What are. What are important, what are important pieces of your journey and your discoveries that we haven't yet talked about?

Oh, well, probably one of the things that I have adopted more recently, or when I say More recently, in 2010, I started to look, even though, like, this is perennial cover cropping and there's 60 species of grasses in this grassland and we're planning a crop into that. How can we drive the soils and soils health, because that's where everything begins and almost ends at the soil. How can we drive it further? How can we continue to improve this soil Right through. When I was developing a lot of this stuff, I'd keep on running into problems, as you do, and things weren't working right and what I would do is ask myself to try and solve a problem. What would happen in a natural system? What would old Mother nature do to fix this problem? Answer's there, we just need to look for it. So that was the same thing that happened with me. I was one to drive the soils further. And the answer was simple. I needed more plants. There was 300 plants on this original grassland here. There'd be more than that in your grasslands and prairies in the US So I started to look at growing crops with more species in it. Just like a cover crop, like an annual cover crop. Except that that multi species crop is now my crop. It's not the COVID because then the perennials are the COVID in my. So it's the other way around. So I started growing these multi species covers and they moved it to another level. In many ways we started to get greater improvements especially even again in soil structure and pretty well all of it. But one of the things that I, that I really noticed because I was growing these for forage, for animals, for grazing. And the forage value on the, on the, on a multi species, I'm talking about up to 10 or so species is huge. And I did some trials here, grazing trial on the multi species because I was seeing to the weight gains were better and especially young sheep growth rates were amazing on them. And I said, and I started to look someone must have done some work on this and measured weight gains on these. No one had. So I did it myself.

I would speculate that the forage quality improvements that you saw probably did not show up in a laboratory analysis. Like you could probably do forage analysis on those and look at weight gain per ton or milk production per ton or whatever the metrics are that you are using and probably not see the differences that would show up.

That would be right because they're just mostly measuring biomass. But the weight gains were double compared to a single species crop. A single species like forage crop. I was comparing it to that and I had merino lamb split the mobs in half. I just set stock, left them on, on there and we grazed them for two months, 57 days. And the grazing crop was a barley crop compared to a multi species crop which also had barley in it. And the weight gains in 57 days ended up double on the multi species crop compared to the ones grazing barley crop. And there was some other measurements too. Soil health I wasn't expecting because I that was only a short period. I did, we did soil tests, just only to 6 inch soil tests. And so carbon levels increased by 20% that would have been labor or carbon not cycling carbon. Nitrogen increased, phosphorus increased. Not all of it or not all the nutrients increased on that, but the main ones increased on the multi species crop compared to the single species and the carbon levels increase as well. So that trial was extremely interesting. Not only weight gains on animals, but improvements in soils. So I've been talking in Australia, doing a lot of workshops all around the place. So I started talking about to people about growing multi species crops and people aren't growing them as covers for a cash crop here in Australia, they're growing them as forage. And it's the fastest adoption I've ever seen in this country. I introduced the concept in 2010 or 2012, probably by the time I done a bit of work on them here. And then you see them everywhere now, all over, everywhere I drive, you see multi species crops everywhere and it's been quite incredible. I've never seen anything adopted so quickly.

What are the popular combinations? Is there a particular grouping that has found, to be fair, has been found to be very effective that is facilitating the widespread adoption?

They're only very standard ones. I think oats is a very common plant that's grazed here in Australia and so most of them are based on, on oats and, and then forage brassicas. They use the fairly standard forage brassicas but the ones I use here, many people are still using those. Forage brassica. I generally put a daikon radish or a killage radish in it because most soils, most soils are fairly ordinary in Australia. Hard compacted soils. And turnips, Turnips are relatively cheap field peas and legumes and they're vetch, so there's seven or eight or so. But those fairly standard, easy to purchase plants, nothing extra special about them as far as purchasing. So it's been a very successful thing from a grazing point of view. The cropping guys have not adopted anywhere near like in your country with COVID crops in Australia. They don't seem to be want to change and they don't realize their farms are crashing around them.

Well, I don't know what perception. I think you might have been exposed to a microclimate of particular growers here in North America because in most regions cover cropping is still in the single digit percentages. We're just moving into low double digits, 10 to 15% adoption in some regions. So it's still quite low.

Yeah, well, you're probably right. Yeah. People I deal with, yeah. Pitching to the converted half the time yeah, yeah.

You described how you've collected a lot of data from your farm and others have as well. You, you talked about some of the soil health improvements, the improvements in soil nutritional profiles. What have been some of the other unexpected highlights that showed up in your data tracking over the years.

Ah, good point. Certainly all of it was unexpected. There's no, no doubt about that. One thing that was unexpected was organic nitrogen levels have increased in regard to soil tests have increased enormously. One thing that I, that this was related to soil chemistry side of it, the these soils are naturally very acidic. Granite soils, well, I'm not sure now whether they were naturally acidic or we made them. But all tests on granite soils are acidic originally. They may not have been like 200 years ago. They may not have been. But one thing that happened with those soil tests, that the calcium levels increased enormously without any lime being put on and the ph change from 5 to over 6, no lime being put on, things like that. Now that was certainly unexpected.

Yeah, yeah. I want to, you've mentioned how your nitrogen levels, your soil organic nitrogen levels increased and I to want, I want to explore that a bit further, particularly in light of your previous comments of the importance of getting the carbon and nitrogen ratios properly balanced in order for successful seeding. What is the carbon and nitrogen ratio that you're looking for and perhaps what specifically are the livestock adding? When livestock are grazing the forages, are they narrowing the carbon to nitrogen ratio or are they broadening it?

They'd be narrowing it because they're consuming a lot of the dry material. Yeah, certainly, certainly narrowing. And they're contributing nitrogen and contributing nitrogen. Yes, yes. Because it's a living growing system that you, you don't have a lot of because it's perennial system, don't have a lot of control on it. You sort of get what you get depending on the, on the season. Well, I mean we'll always have grassland in the summer, but lack of rain, it could be not as much biomass there as other seasons. So the carbon dioxide ratio can change in that sense from year to year. So in relation to, to that, what is interesting, I find we start off even with just an oat crop, not necessarily a multi species crop. We start with this huge bit about a biomass. By the time we get to our spring, you look for ground cover and it's all gone, almost all gone. It's just all gobbled up by microbes. There's vessel on there. The same with the stubble, the remnants of the crop that's gone within a very Short period of time, you just can't find any. So microbial. The soils now are extremely active and functioning very well. I guess that's also another surprise thing that's just come out of things. Things happen almost every day that you think, gee, how'd that happen?

Yep. Colin, this has been such an enjoyable conversation. I think perhaps we need to share this information with our audience and then welcome questions and feedback and have a follow up conversation because what you were describing is such a radical and a different approach that I think it'll be a significant jumping off spot for a lot of people and there are so many questions that could be asked that I'm kind of uncertain of what direction to take the conversation from here. And it sounds to me like at some point soon you need to come back to the States to, to talk more for longer periods about the success because I think there is, there's a growing group of people here who are, who are ready to take the next step and who are constantly evolving on their journey. So there's. It's an interesting time to be alive and to observe the differences, that's for sure.

Yep. Yeah, that. And that's always possible. Might add now that I'm actually going to be going over the States in end of this month. I'm doing a series of four talks over there. Workshops from one in Kansas, Oklahoma, North, South Dakota, North Dakota.

Who is organizing those? Where can people learn more about them?

Terrell Owens contacted me as a farmer in Kansas at the first place. Gee, what I should do is email, email you the details of those and yeah, the first one's on the third.

I would be happy to share that information once we release this episode and put it out there. If it's, if we're in enough time, I think we can get this out in the next couple of weeks and that would be enough to pull some people there.

Yeah, okay. Yep, that's good.

Wonderful. For, for all of our listeners I highly recommend Colin's book Custodians of the Grasslands. And you can also find out more information and some other presentations and other things that he has done online. Certainly worth looking at. And if you have any follow up questions that you are unable to find the answers to, please send those to me and I look forward to having Colin back for a further conversation to dig into any questions that you might have. So Colin, thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to share your wisdom and experience and for all the work that you do.

Thank you very much.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible, and since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess, we test. We analyze. We provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.