Episode 135: Diverse Approaches in Farm Planning with Darren Doherty

Hi friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know that we talk about all kinds of entertaining topics related to regenerative agronomy and agriculture in general, and the work that I'm able to do every day with our amazing team at advancing eco agriculture. But today I have a special guest in a special format. If you've been listening for a while, you know that historically I've been recording a lot of these interviews online, which brings its own element. There's slightly less human interaction. But we are going forward. I want to record a lot more of these interviews live and in person. And that is happening today with a guest who is here all the way from Australia, Darren Daugherty from Rigrarians. And Darren, first, thanks for being here. I've been looking forward to our conversation, but I'm struggling to know where do we begin? Because you have such rich work, a lifetime of work in landscape design and farm planning. And often I like to begin by asking people their history and their story and how they came to be doing the work that they're doing. But I'm concerned that if I start there, your history is so rich we'll never get to the part of what you're actually working on today. So why don't we begin? Why don't you tell us a little bit about the scope of your work today and what all you're working on.

Thanks, John. And thanks for letting us stay with you for the last couple of days. It's been an absolute treat to meet your family and be in your company and especially Lillian and Kathy, they're a joy to everyone. What we're up to today is going through yet another transition. I think that's probably why. Well, I think anyone who's been in business for long enough, we're 33 years at the end of this year. They've been in business for this long. You have to continue to adapt and change and right now we've got that going on. So probably the last, if I look at the last five years, if we can just start there, I think in 2017. Well, going back to 2017, we transitioned to being online. That was forced upon us after doing a long tour world tour in 2016 when we delivered 1310 day workshops, sort of two a month around the world on the Rigrarians platform farm planning program. And then Lisa's beautiful mother Pearl, who was in her early 90s, needed our full time care so we moved in with her and we had to reinvent what we were doing as opposed to gallivanting around doing in person courses, we found ourselves having to do online courses. So in order to keep the dream alive. So that's what we did. And that then led us to doing, to having our increasing our presence online considerably. So as an early adopter of forums and online forums, I started I think doing online forums in about 1995 or 6. It sort of seemed full circle to, to get to, you know, nearly 30 years later and, and have. And being full time online. So we started the regrabings workplace and from then it sort of changed completely the way that we were interacting with people. And in fact, as I mentioned, it was sort of like full circle because when I did whole farm planning as a course, I try. I did who whole farm planning train the trainer course at Melbourne uni University in 1994. And back then farm planning was a. Farm planning as a process was one that was where you taught people how to fish, that sort of adage. You had someone who went into a community, you organized aerial photos, you work, you know, you might have had five or 10 different families and you all got together once a month sort of thing and everyone together built their, built their farm plans together and with each other's council, as local farmers with each other. And that was a very powerful way of doing it. And then, well, the way out we started our business, we were creating other people's farm plans for them and then doing all of the work. And that was good and we got a huge amount of experience from that and feedback. But I think it ultimately was better that we got to where we are now, where we're teaching people how to do them and assisting people how to do their farm plans rather than do them for them and they're theirs.

So let's back up to the basics. What exactly is a farm plan?

That's a great question. I don't get asked that one too often, John.

It's my job to ask good questions. It's your job to have the answers.

It is. I often say, what do you do? People ask me what I do for a living. Answer questions. Yeah, thanks. So a farm plan is at its basic level, an integrated piece of planning, where you are looking at the layout of a landscape and then you are layering on different, what we call planning layers onto that. So in its origins, it started with as a soil conservation activity. People would take an aerial photo enlargement or these days on Google Earth or something, and then they would put a clear plastic layer over that and then they would draw on all of their existing features, so all of the fences and pipelines and water points and buildings and roads and all of those sorts of things that make up the features of a farm landscape. And then they would do additional layers where they would look at the land capability layers or land capability classes, of which there's eight, one being best, eight being worst or least capable. Capable for agricultural production, you'd mark in all of your water features and, you know, water lines and all of those sorts of things and then contour lines so that you could see what the topography was like. And that's the, that's the sort of base. And then from there there's a bit of art, I suppose, because art and method to, to try and realign the place so that soil conservation and land protection outcomes were delivered. So that's how I was originally taught. And but when I did that course, I brought in other methods. So I was raised on a farm that used the Australian keyline plan as its layout. So we had dams and trees and irrigation systems, et cetera, which followed those kinds of patterns. And then I also was exposed to the permaculture design method, which was in itself inspired both by soil conservation and by keyline. So those two methods, particularly keyline, follow more landscape shapes. And when you follow landscape shapes, you tend to, well, you tend not to have as many straight lines. And that back in the early 90s and before that wasn't as practical because we didn't have the kind of fencing that we had that we have now. We didn't have, you know, plastic pipe was, was available, but it wasn't as low priced as it was today. So we're in a really good position now to be able to use landscape lines a lot more than what we were. So that's in nuts and bolts of what a, what a farm plan is. It's an integrated model landscape plan where you're considering the limitations of the landscape and making the most of the others and trying to supply the needs of all of what you're doing there. And that as we discussed previously, most of our work has been with livestock operations. We found very few people who grow cereals and grain, legumes, row crop farmers, et cetera, engage with us because in the main they're working on landscapes which have inherently high capability. And secondly, they're mostly working with crop rotations. That's their main planning process as opposed to a landscape plan.

So what are the reasons why a livestock operation would desire to put together a farm plan? Or maybe if I ask that question a bit differently. What are the benefits of putting together a farm plan? Because when we consider adaptive grazing and intensive management grazing, these various grazing modalities, there are improvements in productivity. There's lots of motivations and incentives for farmers to adopt those types of systems. But what are the benefits of putting together a farm plan?

Yeah, it's a question I pose all the time. And we perhaps curiously often encourage people out of doing the development side of farm planning as opposed to the management side of, of just farm operations, of agroecological operations. And the reason why I say that is because as you just said, I mean when you're doing planned grazing or when you're doing all of these more management centered activities, I think that, that as a, as a realignment of what you're doing as on the road of practice change is actually more powerful than going and putting in more fence and, and putting in new infrastructure. Now that's not to say that that, that putting in that infrastructure won't be, won't be valuable to you in the end, but I think that most people, and this is something I've come to, I think it's a, it's a western mind thing that we, especially with men, that we feel like when we change we have to build things and we have to, we have to develop, have to develop something and to feel like we've achieved something. And whereas changing from within is perhaps more challenging. And that's for me, that's what management, management is defined by changes within as opposed to changing your landscape as such, going and building something. I mean often you'll see people, they run out of something so they have to run to the shop to buy the tool that'll allow them to do it as opposed to making do right. And that's, that's something that people often do. We see the same in agriculture people to engage in practice change, they have to go and buy all of this stuff or do all of these things in order to, which are physical things on the landscape in order to engage in that practice change. And we, we try and encourage people to have a management centered approach first if they can. Because you're absolutely right. I mean if you change management first, then that changes landscape function outcomes. And as you change landscape function outcomes, then you change ecosystem outcomes in favor of, in favor of whatever you're producing. And then that gives you, that we see, gives you the opportunity to take a pause and observe your landscape sufficiently. And that as Bill Mollison, the co founder of Permaculture, you Say, you know, apply a prolonged observation, protracted observation, as opposed to being really hasty about it. So taking a management centered approach for a starting point is a really good way to reorientate your, your view about the way you interact with that landscape and whatever agroecology you're operating on. And then that gives you an opportunity, I think a license, as it were. That's the way I talk about it. A license to then, or permission to then go and make decisions about how you're going to reorientate things or go and buy things and stuff.

Okay, I'm missing a few dots here. Darren, when I ask you about the. What is farm planning? You described it in terms of layers of infrastructure development, layers of water points, pipelines, fencing, et cetera. And now you're suggesting that we need to change the management system first and not the infrastructure. Be cautious about changing the infrastructure first. If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly.

I think that's correct.

So what are the components of whole farm planning that are management and not infrastructure? Because you described it in terms of infrastructure.

Yeah, true. That is a good point. Yeah, gotcha. No, well, when I think of a whole farm plan, I think of the output, I suppose the destination. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's where we've got to with experience trying to. I mean, most people only get one or two farm plans in their life in terms of the physical farm plan with an infrastructure layout. So you don't have many chances to get it right. And I don't think anyone gets it a hundred percent right. But someone like me, who's done literally thousands of farm plans, I tend to get it pretty, you know, a lot more right than most would. Right, as you would hope in your opinion.

Darren and I have been raising each other for the last day and a half.

Yes. I've been teaching John the crack, so, and his family. And I think it's something that might be a bit dangerous being here again.

But Darren, we're having this, we're having a very kind of principles or theoretical conversation. Can you give us an example, Give us an example of a farm that you've worked with, that you've walked through the planning process and what was at the beginning and what were the outcomes at the end?

Okay, well maybe I'll go back to, back to the 90s and 2000s and a typical process there. So people would contact us, we would send them a questionnaire, checklist, they would come back to us. It was all by mail back then. And then we would establish the aerial photos. We would do a survey, a physical survey of the place, get a 1 meter contour plan or a half meter contour plan. We would go and do soil tests over the whole thing, both geotechnical soil assays and also agronomic through the Albrecht method. So we'd get all of that. We'd really, we'd sit down with the client and establish what their brief and what they ultimately wanted to do. I would sketch up a mock up, if you like, of what the layout might look like and then that would go back to the client. Then they would come back with their any revisions or suggestions, usually which there weren't many. And then we would proceed with developing a project development or bill of quantities and a project development cost. And then we would over a few years go and do that as contractors. And then that design would be built. Right. What we do now is we can still do that, but it's in, it's extraordinarily expensive to do so. And now we work with people and we start with that's having developed the Rigrarian platform. We start with understanding them and we help them to understand themselves because we firmly believe that if you don't understand yourself then you're not going to be able to express yourself as well as you can in your agricultural and human life, which are inextricably intertwined. When we do that, we establish really well that most people want the same things. And we've literally asked thousands of people that those questions, you know, what do you want out of life? What motivates you when you get up in the morning, you know, what do you want to see your life have as its output? And most people want the same thing. So we start with that now as opposed to, you know, what do you want as a terms of a physical layout? And we find that that has become much more enriching. And it means that people are able to express themselves immediately through a, through a management based outcome. So that when they come to do infrastructure it's a lot more cautiously and judiciously expressed in a physical farm plan. And then, you know, that's all been tested for its profitability and all of those sorts of things. We used to do that, but it wasn't anywhere to the degree and we didn't, we didn't really consider anywhere near as much what people's context was back in the day. And that's been the big influence of something like holistic management, for example, in our practice.

So you described that historically you would Actually help set up this farm infrastructure and set up these farm plans. But today you are beginning by understanding the individuals, understanding the people in the operation, and then framing what their desired outcomes and objectives are and what they desire to express in life to develop the management of the farm. So the management first and then the infrastructure in the future. So what does that look like when you go through a farm planning process and you translate farm planning into management? What does the management aspect look like? How does management change as a result of going through a farm planning exercise?

I think that when we go through that initial process of the context development, then that has people also identify what they do, what they do now, and what perhaps they need to do differently in terms of practice change. So it really takes some sort of an audit, a self audit to do that of what your practices are and then talking about it. This is the way, like if you're a pig farmer, how do I do pigs right now? Or if you're, you know, sheep producer or whatever you're producing, how do I do that right now? And what does my year look like? Right, and if you do that and you do that as we do in a relatively open forum with peers, then that gives you an opportunity to invite others to make suggestions, including myself, about how that might change. Or have you heard about the way this person does that? Right, because there's plenty of, I mean, we're in a blessed time in the world now where we, you know, regenerative agriculture, whatever we want to call it, you know, better forms of agro ecological expression been around for a while. So we've got some track records to, to go and say, hey, this person is doing the best thing. And I can see that that would probably work here. You are different people, you have different starting points, you know, all of those, you're in different landscapes. But fundamentally what they're doing is something that you could mimic and make your own. Right.

You can learn from the foundational principles, basically.

Yes. So, yeah, so that's, that's again, you know, a transfer of management as opposed to saying, oh, you need to buy this, that and the other. Now they might, there will be, and there may well be that type of thing, but we generally will start with those, like you say, foundational principles of how you manage that system first. And then once you understand that, and then look at your landscape as we described earlier, in terms of looking the physical landscape and, and what you have now. And then what do you need? Like, you've got to understand the operating system that you're Working with, if I can use that polance. And once you do that, then you're in a better position to do the infrastructure planning. So that's how we proceed.

So I asked you to give me an example and you described how you used to do it. Can you give me an example of what it looks like today? When in the last five years are there example operations? What does the process look like of developing a farm plan today and what are the outcomes?

So these days we put people through what's called our REX farm planning course, which is a. We do two of those a year, they're 14 weeks. And so this is the teaching people how to fish thing. And I supervise and lead that, as do other people that we have working with us and a whole community of over 5,000 others. And so what people do is they again fill out a checklist so that we understand based on the rigrarian's platform form layers of which there's 10. We understand where they're at now. It's like a stock take, if you like, and it's a stock take of them and it's a stock take of the physical attributes of the landscape they're working in and what their ambitions are and so on. So we start with that and then we go through a process of. Which is based on holistic management, of creating a holistic context, which is fundamentally where you're asking people about what quality of life they want to have, what forms of production they want to engage in and what future resource base that they are trying to build over time. And that includes their own behaviors and changes in them that they want to see over time and also what sort of infrastructure changes and so on. So we understood that's what I would describe that and the development of a statement of purpose of sorts of that is what we call the rules of the game. It's sort of like you've developed your constitution, you've developed that sort of human framework which we can then leap from and use as a point of reference. Now we go to the physical landscape and we're blessed these days to have incredible mapping of pretty well all of the world in terms of topography and at the very least satellite imagery, thanks through the agency of Google Earth, where we start to build the map. And once we build the map when it's. It's kind of like, well, it's really no different to what it was. We're looking at land capability, we're looking at the land shape, we're looking at all of the features of an existing landscape. And so on. And then we start to build that nexus between what the. As I say, you know, you've got a human context and then you've got a landscape context. The landscape is where it is at now. You and your family or your enterprise is where it is at now. So how is that going to come together and how is that going to be expressed into. Into what you are visioning it will look like. And we don't try to go too far ahead with that. I think that's a mistake to sort of future cast, if I could use that term too much, because especially early because you're still learning and, and we're learning about your place and what you are. And so. But, you know, you don't want to suffer paralysis by analysis or inertia. So we tend to start with prioritizing what are the really important infrastructure things that are going to generate the most profit for you now with the, you know, maximum bang for buck. And in livestock operations, that's usually water supply, a more flexible water supply and a more flexible fencing system. So, you know, in many cases on livestock operations, that, that and a change in management which, you know, the way that you manage your animals, maybe bringing them all into one herd or simplifying all of that, or even. Even actually looking at your whole operating system in terms of the way you are running animals, maybe changing breeds or maybe turning into only operating during the growing season so you only do stockers or whatever. It will be some form of realignment which might be quite radical or it might be just quite subtle, is all part of that framing, which then allows you to then make decisions about what goes where. Right. Or what we should change there. That's the general pathway that we go on there. And then that is the same that sort of gives people license to then do the things that we might more commonly associate with farm planning, like where do we plant trees and where do we build water reservoirs and, you know, all of those sorts of things, they often, they sometimes do come first, but water supplies might come first. Trees and all of those sorts of integrations may well come later because there's too much to plan and it's too much to go wrong. That principle in, in the holistic management framework, where it says, you know, when you're planning for the environment, you should assume you're wrong. I think that's a very powerful thing because it suggests that nature is complex and agroecological systems are complex and they are. So don't get too ahead of yourself.

One of the things you Just said that I really appreciated is focusing on the things in the short term that provide economic value. And you mentioned changes in water delivery and changes in fencing. How do those changes deliver economic value?

Well, generally because most or many layouts have water supplies which aren't well delivered and the water quality is quite low. So it's quite well recognized in the livestock industry that if you increase the quality of water supply, then that that has immediate impacts on parasite loads and just general metabolic health. I think that's a, that's obvious, but so that. So moving in that way. And that might mean as a starting point, if you've got farm ponds, for example, as your primary water supply, which a lot of people do, that instead of allowing completely unfettered access to that, that you might fence that off and put a siphon over to a trough. It might be as simple as that. And so now because the water supply source has been protected from the feet of livestock and then their defecation and all of the rest of it, that there's not the sedimentation and so on, which makes it more difficult for animals to metabolize. So that's what we're talking about as a starting point. And then with fencing, we often work with existing fence layouts. A lot of, a lot of fence layouts on farms have already been fenced to some sort of landscape capability. That's not unusual, especially if the farm has which a lot of fences. Hark back to a time when farms were mixed, or what we call mixed farming, where there were livestock on cereal operations or there was like. So what's happened over the last 30 years or so at least has been that we've had a, a simplification of agriculture so that instead of what are now grazing farms producing some cereals, they only do grazing. Or some cereal farms, this is more common, I would say cereal farms which used to have livestock, now have no livestock and they've in fact removed their fences. But if you've got the former, where it's a grazing property that used to have crops, well, then often the landscape is subdivided according to some form of land capability. Because you grew crops, right? And crops only grow in certain areas. So there's those sorts of things that you can use that existing framework and use temporary electric fencing and maybe as a transition, have piped a small network of piped water supply, which would then allow you to get going. And when you do that, then you can have better rotations, you can have shorter rotation lengths. You can, and you can manage rotations better as opposed to having continuous stocking.

Darren, as I'm, as I'm listening to you describe farm planning, what comes to mind is we have here in a North American context, we have all these different conversations. We have conversations around agroforestry or alley cropping, incorporating trees or incorporating perennials into our agricultural ecosystems. We have conversations around the word permaculture, which frequently is defined in a very small scale, not really on a large agricultural scale. Then we have holistic management and we have the ideas that were developed around keyline farming, which originated on your continent. And it seems to me what you're describing is integrating all of those pieces together, agricultural skill, permaculture, holistic management, keyline integration, et cetera, and turning all of that into one unified whole.

Yeah, that's pretty accurate. And often when I describe myself when I'm working, sometimes I get hired by companies and I become a part of the, the company in a, in a sort of, in a, in a funny sort of way. And I described myself well, actually when I worked for Mars Incorporated in the, in from 2004 to 2007, and Howard Yana Shapiro, who is the director of plant science and external research at Mars, and he employed me, he described me as an integrated consultant. And I thought that was a pretty accurate description. You know, based on, and certainly goes with what you were just saying.

I think you need to hire me for a marketer. I just describe what you do better than you did.

Well, in a nutshell, you might need to hire me. No, I think you're right. And it's, I suppose we often find ourselves pigeonholing ourselves. I think, you know, I would classify myself as a leader in the terms that I go first. If you look at it from that perspective, and I always have, I've always been sort of unafraid. And in doing so, sometimes you need to latch onto something in order to prove yourself. I suppose that's, that's the way. So earlier in my career, I identified myself as a key liner or I designed as a permaculturalist or as a holistic manager, those sorts of things. So you often attach a label to something. But none of that really stood true with me because, you know, I was raised that you use whatever, use whatever works. And I think Kirk Gadzier, one of my early holistic management mentor, when I started understanding that more, he said, you know that you start with a full toolkit. Right. And so in the second section of the climate chapter of the Rugrains handbook, I've got a. I've Collected. And I've should be expanded now. I've got. It's called Regenerative Agriculture and Living Principles. And I've found myself being fascinated by principles and directives and those sorts of things. And I think that's influenced by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren's Permaculture design package because it's got three ethics and 10 or 12 principles. And the design principles are, I think, fascinating. And then I've started to look at a whole bunch of other principles and then practices, and I've accumulated those because to just be beholden to one as to one concept, which then becomes your dogma, is never going to work. Right? Because no one's got all of the answers. So. And so what we need to do is realize that and not. Not put ourselves, as I put it, into a methodological box.

So this brings me back to the question that I wanted to ask a bit ago. As you were describing the beginnings. What is, what is the origin of farm planning? You initially described yourself as you attached key line labels and holistic management. But can you tell us the origin story? How did farm planning come about? How did your approach to this come about?

Well, I think historically it's actually been. I am a person who, when I discover something new, I'm big on lineages. I mean, I really find it fascinating when I meet someone, it's like, I think we all do this. You know, the first thing you ask when you often, when you ask someone is where did you come from? What's your backstory? You know, what, all of those, it's, it's. I find all of that fascinating because I think it builds a context around what you're trying to understand. And the same with farm planning and all of those things. Farm planning I've found actually, strangely, to be kind of difficult to find the origins of. I, you know, I've looked at so many books that go way back to the 1700s and so on, which is about when more popular agricultural books started to be printed. And there's drawings of farms. And I don't think it was until von Thunen's Isolated State was written, I think in about 1780 or thereabouts that I saw the sort of. That was sort of meta planning where he said, all right, well, if you've got a village, then around the village should be market gardens and then around that should be dairy farming and around that should be be forestry. Because it was. Everything was revolving around wood burning back then and coppicing and all the rest of it. And then you went out into your rangelands and so on and cereal fields. So that was sort of the first sort of thing that I ever saw on met what I'll call meta planning, but that was more zone based as opposed to the intricacies of where a fence should go and so on. And I just started to see from, in my study of lineages that it was, there was nothing really nothing that followed a particular methodology. And really I don't think I saw anything until PA Yeoman's Keyline, which was acknowledged by Permaculture co founder David Holmgren. He said that Keyline was the first integrated farm planning package or program that was ever devised on a broad acre landscape. He hadn't seen anything and he's fairly scholarly about these sorts of things as well. So I think that that's where it started. But then in parallel because Keyline itself was developed out of soil conservation. Yeomans PA Yeomans, when he started Keyline he, he started with his, in his farming experience following soil conservation methods which started here in the United States of America in the 30s and 40s. And he became friends with J. McDonald Holmes, who was the professor of geography, economic geography at the University of Sydney and Heat and Professor Holmes he, he wrote the first book on soil conservation in Australia and New Zealand. And so they were good friends and colleagues. And so Yeoman's tried the broad methods of soil conservation which were, I'll say expressed most often in terraces and terracing, which, you know, if you fly across the U.S. or drive across the U.S. there's a heck of a lot of. And then having that contoured landscape which would then drain into a grassed valley. And so water was safely carried away. But then within that as well was the, was the development of land capability planning. So none of that I, I have seen to be promulgated into, you know, one whole as a methodology. And it wasn't until Yeoman's that he really put that together. And then, even then Yeoman's I don't think Yeomans in across his life fully got the A to Z of all of this, which has been my challenge as well. Because it's kind of like what you asked already. You know, what's your starting point, what's your end point? And I'd have to say it's, it doesn't work like that because there's so much, there's so many dynamics and changes that happen over your life. I mean I've worked for literally billionaires and even they, you know, They've got, as I often say, more money than God, but they can't even pull it off. So it's. By what I mean, pulling it off, they can't just go and impose themselves on a landscape and expect that that'll all be, you know, perfect. It takes time and iteration to, to sort of build and weave the whole thing. Keyline to an extent is I've seen a certain elegance with keyline planning in. It's in, in some landscapes where once you, if you have a particular landscapes, then the landscape form will tell you what to do. And then once you do that, then you can get closer to having a layout which is, which works fundamentally really well and for, and will for the ages. But I've not been able to find a sort of an origin story to farm planning really.

Well, what is, let's shift the question a little bit. What is the origin story of farm planning as you developed it? And maybe this is a different way of asking the question of what is your context, what is your background and story that brought you to this point? So what were the significant influences that led to, to this kind of macro version of farm planning that you have developed?

Well, probably the most important thing that happened was my father John being killed in Vietnam during the war there when I was 4 months old. And then that forced my 21 year old mother to stay on our family farm and therefore me with my grandmother who was only 44 when I was born, and my grandfather who was about 50, becoming parents again. I was like their ninth child almost. And so in having that outcome then that exposed me to my grandfather and my grandmother, who were both of an era where everything was integrated on, on the landscape and learning all of those cycles. And that my grandfather, in terms of the layout that he and his father to an extent had imparted on that landscape. They had built dams all over it. They, they saw the value of having trees on the landscape and of managing them. We basically had old McDonald's farm. So we had exposure, our exposure to every, every animal and, and also, you know, every crop that we could grow on that landscape. So from that perspective I had an integrationalist mindset from, from the outset and I also my grandfather, because he was born in 1915, he lived so he was 15 in 1930 when the Great Depression occurred or 1929 when the October 29th. So he would often describe like they were formative times for him. And he was a real, like, he was well recognized and as an extremely intelligent man. But he was the second youngest of 17 on a farming landscape. So back then you didn't have the opportunities, the educational opportunities that people have now. So that's the other part to this I suppose, is that I could see from him and what he achieved in his life that he was largely self taught and that there was nothing wrong with that, there was nothing to be insecure about, that he could hold his own anywhere because he read a lot. So I grew up with having a man in my life who wasn't afraid to read and wasn't afraid to talk things through and wasn't afraid to, to I suppose, be a bit vulnerable in that way. So. And same with my nana and to an extent my mother. But those two people, my maternal grandparents, had a extraordinarily deep impact on the foundations, I suppose, of how I, how I think. And so that integrationalist mindset was there very, very early. I remember. I wish I could find it. It's one of these things I would. I remember like yesterday when I was about 7 or 8, I redrew the farm map that we never had a farm layout of our farm, but I drew it when I was about 7 or 8. And that was the only time I did something like that until I was, I started doing actual farm planning. It's almost like a dream that I did that back then and it was a sort of like a precursor. It wasn't like I was sort of like Mozart who, you know, picked up a piano and off I went. I did it once and then I never did it again until I was like 25 when I started formally farm planning. And so. But I have always had a really integrationalist mindset. And that I think is. And I've always been, well, I'm a polymath and I'm auto like you. I think I would describe myself as an autodidact polymath. And because I get so bored with being interested in one thing, it just doesn't, it's just not my go. I'm as interested in animals as I am in, in trees, which is unusual because when I ask people, are you a tree person or are you an olives person? Are you a grapes person? So some people just focus their entire lives on being, being a viticulturalist or a vinologist or whatever. So they're very, very specific. I could never be like that. That's just not the way I'm built. So it's a natural profession. And the way that I've developed farm planning is a natural, I suppose my.

Output, yeah, it's an extension of you. And the, the follow up question that I have to what you described a moment ago is you've looked to many different sources of inspiration. What have been the major sources of influence that have shaped the development of farm planning?

I think Pa Yeomans, he. Yeah, I can't see any greater influence on physical farm layout planning than him and what he came up with. Now, like I said before, I don't see the A to Z of what he did. But that said once you. I think because he didn't articulate himself very well. I mean the common complaint of people who have read the Keyline books is that they're really, really hard to read. And I've probably done as much as anybody ever in who never worked or met PA Omens. I've met his, two of his sons and was very good friends with his son Alan, who was born in 1931 and who died earlier this year, went to work a week up to the day he died. So at 93. So God rest his beautiful soul. But Yeoman's really, I think, cottoned onto something. He unlocked the secret of believing in the landscape, I suppose. And so myself and my colleague Georgi Pavlov, who I've worked with for over 12 years, we're, you know, we're key line nuts and we've gone nuts over Keyline in the sense of trying to unlock its secrets and then try and then translate that to others in a really simple way and sort of unyeomens it in, as it were, because Yeoman's never used an editor and he didn't have the benefit of the graphic design and all of the things that we have today or the mapping technology. So he could see it all just.

A difficult time translating it, difficult time.

Translating it and making it obvious to people, which would have been inherently very frustrating for him.

You've mentioned several pieces that really caught my attention and I think the piece that comes to mind, the way that I would describe it, is that when you have a changed awareness or a changed knowledge base, it changes your perception of a place. If you go for a walk with an ornithologist or someone who is passionate about birds, you become hyper aware of the birds in the landscape because they're a central theme that you focus on. If you walk across the exact same landscape with a geologist, you can get a rich history on the history of this soil and this land from a geological perspective, looking at the rocks and the stones and the geologic formations and topsoil and subsoil horizons, etcetera. If you walk across the landscape with someone who is passionate about understanding trees or agro ecosystems, there's all of these different lenses that you can look at an ecosystem through. And any of those lenses is going to give you deeper perception and a deeper appreciation of a place. But you started several times in this conversation you've mentioned the importance of starting with management rather than starting with infrastructure. Because as you change the management of a place and as you observe and as you pay attention, the land talks to you and tells you what it is that is needed. I loved that expression. It reminded me of this verse that is in Job. A couple of verses. Ask the animals and they will teach you. Or the birds in the sky and they will tell you. Or speak to the earth and it will teach you. Or let the fish in the sea inform you. This is job 12, 7 and 8. And really what you are, as I'm listening to what you're describing as people go through your online course, what you are giving them is you're giving them a different frame of understanding of how to look at the landscape through new eyes or with fresh perspective and ask better questions and make better observations.

Yeah, I think that captures it pretty well, John, that's why I need to hire you. Don't know if I can afford you. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I often talk about giving people that license. A lot of people, I think for various reasons, the way they've been parented or the way society and their conditions, society and its conditions have bore down on them, that they often don't have or haven't given themselves the license to express themselves in a whole bunch of ways. And you know, I often talk about intent and that goes to what you were just talking about, those biases of particular, you know, geologists will look at it, you know, botanist will look at it, an arborist will look at, you know, all of those different things. But, and that's good. It's good to have a concentrated intent of observation about things because sometimes you need to do that. But to give people the license to not only at the landscape but inside of themselves is something that a lot of people have, I find that they find challenging. Especially men, and especially men who are probably over 40 or 50, I think younger men these days, I think often have been exposed to that sort of touchy feely sort of stuff that perhaps men of my generation, older certainly were not super encouraged to do.

Which is interesting because if you go back in history far enough, actually you don't have to go that back that far at all. There was this celebration of the Renaissance man. The celebration of an individual who was highly informed, deeply informed in many different areas. People who were well rounded, they were athletically capable, they were good at art and they were good at physical activities, intellectual activities. They were considered well rounded individuals. A Renaissance men. And yet today we've, it appears culturally we've lost many aspects of that where we, we celebrate specialization instead of generalization.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean I was reading about Da Vinci and Da Vinci was a gun for hire. You know, he's got canals that he designed and you know, he did, you know, he didn't just do the Mona Lisa. Oh, hey Leo, can you come and I've got a canal. Can you take this canal to Florence for me please? And avoid, you know, I need you to go past this villa, you know, there'll be those sorts of things that a bloke like he did. And as we spoke about the other day when I looked at the entrance exam for a civil engineer to, to Cambridge or Oxford, I mean the first two things that were required was being able to speak Latin and Greek.

What time period was this?

That was like in 1900 or so. Right. So you know, so people go, oh, why do you need to do that? Well that's because you need to be rounded and you need to understand context and perhaps you need to be able to have the, the humility to go back and look at, at the value of those of those peoples and what they understood. It's interesting, when you were saying about the Renaissance people and people of before, as I just did, we'll talk about the Da Vinci's of the world and those people that are household names. But what we don't necessarily understand is, is what the common man and the common woman at that time were, how their life's practice was. If you're a peasant farmer in Europe, well then, you know, they're not written too much. Well, their voices are not being heard. So how are they getting on? And if I often, often, you know, when I've traveled through parts of Europe and I've seen the residues of that in family life and so on, it seems to me that a lot of those people were functioning in an extremely rich way, even if they were tenant farmers, which a lot of people were, because Europe was largely feudal at that stage. So I mean even being involved in your community just over the last couple of days, I can see that there's certain ways of being in the armies tradition which are, which hark back to that time and they're extremely good. I mean, the family centered, the. This family centeredness, the. The acute discipline of human connection to me is. Is extremely good. And that's something that every, you know, people back in the day would have taken for granted. But with the advent of technology, which has allowed us to separate more has.

We now have to be conscious about.

We don't have to be conscious about. And, you know, Amish people have obviously thought about that. So, you know, when you think about the Renaissance person, they were expansionist in their thinking. But the other thing about the Renaissance was the death of God as a concept. So there's also that side of it.

The other piece that came to mind as we were talking about this is in one of Scott Adams books, he describes the compounding value of skills. So when you look at your work or my work or many other leaders in this space, the people who are very valuable, who are considered to have valuable perspectives, let's say the Da Vincis of our world for the moment, what makes them particularly valuable is having a skill in many different areas. Agroecology, geology, ornithology, botany, the list goes on and on of all these different areas. So rather than being specialists, they have good working knowledge of many different areas. And Scott Adams makes this point that when it comes to adding skills and learning new skills, there is this compounding effect where one plus one does not equal two. And we talk about this, I talk about this quite a bit in the design of agronomic management systems that combinations of nutrients and combinations of nutrients with biology is sometimes an order of magnitude more powerful than individual treatments alone. And the same is true in us in developing our own skill base, where as we add more skills, our observations become so much better and more valuable, not just for us, but for everyone around us as well. We're able to add more value to our communities, to the people that we interact with and we work with. In that spirit, I want to come back to something you've mentioned several times now in our conversation, which is the internal development piece, the development of the individual, the development of the people on the farm, the people in the operation, and the hesitation that people have around that, because it seems to me like that's one of the foundational pieces. If we can talk about adding additional levels of skill and different types of skills. But what foundation are you adding those to? This is a foundational aspect.

Well, and I think the point that I would make to that is that. Well, two actually. One is that if you are involved in agriculture, you're probably involved in the most complex pursuit that humans are currently involved in. And I said that at a talk in Ithaca a couple of weeks ago and a woman in the audience said, well, I would disagree. I work at NASA and we do much more complex stuff. I said, well, but I said, well, that's reasonable in one context, but you're working on one thing, so you're not getting what I'm talking about here, which is exactly to what your point is. When you are engaged in even the relatively simplified versions of agriculture now, you're still involved in a whole range of different disciplines, which gives you a skill base and I would say an outlook which is quite different to other people. There's a capability I often talk about. You know, there's landscape capability. There's also human capability. I'd probably prefer to be wrecked on a desert island with a bunch of farmers than I would be with a bunch of rocket scientists. No, no, no dissing involved. But, you know, they've probably got the kind of skills that are going to get us by in that situation. But my grandfather used to have quite a few axioms, and one of the things that he said was that the, the rural skills that I teach you now will hold you in good stead when the proverbial hits the fan. And he also said humans are just like yeast. They'll eat all of the sugar and they'll die in their own proverbial. So those are things that he inculcated in me at a very young age, that it's important to have a rounded skill base because if you don't, then you won't be particularly useful when things go wrong. Now, his benchmark to that was the Great Depression. Things went terribly wrong in that.

And also when you look at agricultural ecosystems, every organism.

Yeah, absolutely. So I look at it from a different perspective that Charlie Massey, who I don't know if you've talked with Charlie, but probably should or could he, when he did his PhD on broadly looking at why did people transition to what we'll call regenerative agriculture? In most cases it was because something went wrong and really badly wrong and so on, that to that point, you don't need something like as calamitous societally calamitous as the Great Depression to have to rebound from that. And for a lot of people these days, I mean, I've had such a rich life, I've been exposed to so many people from so many different walks of life, but I've seen people many times who've described that something's gone wrong. And they've said, but I've got a PhD in this or I've got a bachelor in this. And the world comes caving down on them. Whereas other people who I've known who've been more round when something goes wrong, they look at it immediately as an opportunity. And they look, you know, they might be down for a moment, but I mean I've certainly had those moments. I think most of us would that you're down for a moment, but then that's a moment and then you're going, okay, what am I going to make of this? What's the next version of me going to look like? And that's, that's also built around the foundations that you've built around you. I think Gregory Landway and Ethan Rowlands Eight forms of capital are a decent way of framing what we should try and build around us as a foundation of other forms of capital. Because if you continue to build that, then when the need to adapt comes, you've got that capital there, whether it's experiential capital or intellectual capital and certainly social and financial capital. But you know, not just relying on one form of capital is, is very important. And if you're cognizant of that in the way that you take yourself forward, then you're going to be, your life is one, going to be richer and two, more easily able to rebound and perhaps reinvent in a better form of yourself than you were before. Which is, you know, has been my experience. And so we again we try and remind people of. Or coach is probably the wrong word, but we try and remind people that you're not the first one to endure hardship. The hardship of the people that got you to this point has probably been a significantly greater than what you are feeling now. So that doesn't take away from whatever you're going through, but by the same token you're made of some good stuff. So take that as your strength and try and give yourself the license to. And talk, talk with others. People all over the world are helpful, so do that.

On our journeys through life, all of us experience trauma and experience difficult times. And when I look back in history at the stories of the people who migrated here to North America from Europe hundreds of years ago and the amount of loss of life deaths in the family, people who lost multiple family members on the journey over, it was like there was tremendous heartache and grief and they had to, there was no choice. They had to buckle up and keep going the next day or the next moment.

Next moment, yeah. Absolutely. And what they had to not unsee.

And not undo, it makes our hardships and challenges pretty pale in comparison.

That's right. But it's the here and now. So, I mean, I still need to honor that and I do. So. Yeah. So we just try and give people again. I keep using the word license because one of the things when people ask me about what's the worst thing that you can do to a human? And I think it's disenfranchisement. And what I mean by that is removing their ability to be a human. And, you know, there's such a special species that we are this creation, this evolution, whatever you believe we are a remarkable species. And you need to honor that and realize that you are probably. Well, you are more capable than you realize.

This is slightly different, but still similar aspect. If you would have asked me that question without any preparation, I would have said the most damaging thing you can do to a human is to ignore them. Which is similar to what you're describing.

It is, yeah. Yeah. When I think of, like, disenfranchisement in a more conventional sense is thought to be, you know, you lose the availability to vote. Right. Well, for me, it's being ignored, being separated and admonished by society, you know, being cast away. And that, that casting away can be not just not a complete casting away, it can be, you know, death by a thousand cuts. And each of those cuts is getting there.

So as you work with people to explore themselves as a part of their farming operation and to develop themselves, what does that process look like?

I think, well, trying to understand them and giving clues as to understanding themselves. It's a deeply personal process. And as I said a few times, it's really, really challenging for some people, particularly men, to do that and then to do that in a relationship, because more often than not we are dealing with families. And so you've got the dynamics of coming into a family and all that goes with that. And that's a, you know, it's just like we've been talking. You know, you've got. You've got stories. Every family has a story. And then when people get married or come together, then it's a joining of those stories and it's a joining of good stories and bad stories and everything in between. So. And how you relate to each other and all of those sorts of things. So I've often found it, as I was describing to you and Kathy yesterday, that it was very challenging and intimidating and something that I didn't anticipate until I started coming to a kitchen table and then having, usually a wife and a husband at a kitchen table greeting me and sitting down and having a cup of tea and getting to know each other. But then I found myself. I went straight back to my hospitality days, which is, you know, another part of my story. After I left school, I was involved in hospitality, and when I did my first formal training in hospitality, I was trained by a wonderful man called Mark Delbray on table service. He was a classically trained matre d from. He worked in the best restaurants in Europe and, you know, France and all the rest of it. An amazing gentleman. And he. And he just had this bearing to him, but he had a kindness to him, which, Which I. I found was a very deep influence on me because I could see that by being kind, you could not just get your way. I suppose that's the wrong way of putting it, but. But that you could have people feel safe.

You can change how people respond to you.

Yeah, exactly. And you could change how people respond to each other because they could see that they feel safe to do that. So. But he did that, which I thought was remarkable. He did it with what he called control dimensions. So when you would come to a table and you'd meet someone. Which is, which is why I go straight back into that every time I meet someone, I go straight back to the table where I've walked up and I'm going to be your server, but I'm going to be a bit more than your server because we're talking about fine dining. We're going to have a relationship, and I have to judge how much I'm pushing and how much I'm pulling on that relationship. So that's quite. I mean, there's quite a lot of psychology in that. And I've never really been able to grasp or find any resources to sort of say, oh, this is the way you do this. Maybe everyone, when they start farm planning, needs to become a fine dining waiter. I don't know. But that idea is that you are coming up to the table and then you're trying to make people feel comfortable. Comfortable. And he said, you know, you've got two purposes. You know, if I, if he cut it right down, he said, you've got two purposes. You, you're there to make this the best experience of those people's lives. Because it. Often it's a very special moment. They're coming out to celebrate something. You know, it's expensive, all of that. And to get $200 a plate right now, if we transfer that to what I do now or have done when I come to the table. I've got two responsibilities. One is to. Because I know that if I have those people have a better relationship with each other and a better relationship with me, well, then that'll mean they'll, you know, 99 times out of. Out of 100, that'll mean they'll have a better relationship with their land and they'll have a better growing experience in terms of growing with what they've got to grow with. So that's. Which is the 200 a plate thing, right? There's a psychological outcome which then leads to a whole set of physical outcomes.

So far in our conversation, we've been talking about many important things, but very much from kind of an intellectual space, an intellectual level. I'd love to hear from you. What are some of the memorable moments? What are some of the stories that really stand out in your memory as you've gone through this process over the years? You love telling stories. Here's your chance.

Oh, my goodness. But to tell the best of. I don't think I've ever been asked that before. And a lot of them probably can't be repeated on, on such a. I think this is definitely pg.

Well, you just. You just filter out certain Aussie aspects.

Oh, look, this is so, so many. I mean, some of them are a bit dark, some of the memories. I. I know. And Lisa. It's a pity Lisa's not here beside me because she's been my wife, Lisa Heenan. She's been along my. Alongside me the whole journey of this, this particular part of the journey. I remember years ago to the point on it. On integrationalism, that we're in Tennessee and I think. I think, anyway, we were at this place and this young woman came up to us. She was probably about our age, so quite young and not as. Not as youthful as you are, John, as you keep reminding me. Shaking head over here. Sorry, there's no video here, I'll just tell you. But yeah, she came up to us and said, and Lisa. Lisa often fills this when we are out teaching and training or consulting. She's like, like me people, she's very gregarious and people immediately feel safe with my wife, which I think is a great gift of hers. And they just share stuff with her within a couple of minutes with meeting her that they probably have not shared with a lot of people if. If anyone. For some reason she just has that. That bearing. And anyway, they. This woman came up and said she. Lisa Said, how you going? And da, da, da. And she, she said, my husband, he just can't stop innovating. He just cannot stop doing new things. And like I said, they're about the same age. And Lisa said, yeah, Darren used to be like that. He couldn't stop innovating. It was because I am. I mean, if you, you know, from a personality disorder, I'm sorry, analysis, perspective, I'm a classic innovator, but I've had to put my genie in the bottle because, you know, being an innovator is a really good thing and it's a valuable, it's a, it's a valued thing, but it, it comes at a cost. So you've got to understand what those costs are. And then that's part of the journey, I think, is to, is to try and pull the levers on your life for what is important. And that's, that's what being holistic is about. Right. And that's, that's about you again, acknowledging a context and understanding yourself well enough so that you can pull those levers through your life and make it so that you can still feel happy in your life and, well, in your life and nourished in your life, but at the same time have the other parts of your life which are not necessarily innovative, also be nurtured. And. Yeah, anyway, so that was a very powerful moment for us because for Lisa, it somewhat endorsed the changes that her husband had gone through me, that she had helped me with, but it also, it helped her, that woman. I don't. We never saw them again. We don't know what their continued story was, but that was a very powerful thing for us to, to and also to just understand that. And I've often recanted that and, and said to people, look, don't feel like you have to do everything because trying to do everything, I mean, the world, if you, if you watch all the videos on, you know, all the, it's impossible. I mean, people try to create a, I'll use the term permaculture utopia that people try and have it all yesterday and it doesn't like a forest doesn't emerge like yesterday. It takes time. So follow, follow the lessons and the patience. You mean you can set the. One of the. Of nature, but one of the Prince Molsonian principles of permaculture is accelerating succession and evolution, ecological succession and evolution. And you can certainly do that, but then, even then, you can only go so fast.

Right?

And that's got to be, to me, it's not going to Be at the. At the expense of. Of your family. Right. Because most people, again, if you ask them what's the most important thing in their life, most people, the first thing they think of is their family. If they don't, then that's a bit of a red flag. And I've seen that with some people. I know one person who said that permaculture was in front of their wife and daughter said that permaculture was more important than anything. And Lisa said, more important than your wife and your daughter. He goes, oh, yeah. And we went, whoa. I mean, that. That to us was a big red flag. I think that person, I still know them, has changed a bit, but we went, wow. So, you know, when you ask the question about stories, it's. I often go to the. Not to the good times and the wonderful chats that we've had, but I often go to the sort of things where you go, wow, that's where people are willing to go or have gone. And that's a warning to others to be careful about what humans can do.

When you think of these memorable moments, what are some memorable moments where people shifted significantly that then resulted in significant shifts in their operation?

I remember something similar in the vein to what I was just talking about. I had a client who will be listening to this at some stage, so they will know exactly this situation and will laugh because we have. I've got some clients who are wonderful friends. And that's when I. When I talk about people I've worked with. People ask me, what's a benchmark of success? I say, it's the speed with which I stop sending invoices and that we become friends, which I've been so blessed to have. I've got thousands, literally thousands of those sorts of people all over the planet, which is incredible. But these particular people are in that cadre. And I remember being there one day and going around and they had added all of the. He had. He's an innovator, a wonderful fellow, and he had added all of these. Like, he. He'd done the Saladin thing. Right. As I was saying, Polyface event that you and I were both at recently, Stockman Grass Farmer event. I said, you know, I've had to undo Joel's stuff all the time. And I don't think that's Joel's fault. It's just that Joel is so exuberant and so excited about what he's been able to do, and his ministry on that is palpable. I mean, he's just a wonderful Exuberant, life filled, spirit filled, individual. So it's sort of no surprise. But then people then go and try and replicate Polyface and all of its layers and I've had to go around and sort of try and undo that because, you know, Joel is very fortunate that he has his wife and his mother and his son who are not like him and are continually saying, Joel, that's a really crazy idea. You're not going to feel like as if it was left up to Joel by his own admission. Well then it'd probably be a mess because he hasn't had the counterbalances. So this person had gone on that sort of accelerated polyphasianization.

What did that look like?

Well, it looked a mess. Why?

How? What?

Because the mess, well, the mess was that they were not doing everything as the systems, the animal systems that they had layered in were starting to lose the proper attention that's, that's required to get the kind of output that's that they were expecting. They had pigs that were in a position in the landscape which were going to, which were already damaging that landscape. It wasn't, you know, when I look at their core expression of what they wanted to achieve on that landscape, be profitable, have the land in a better state than when they started and all of those sorts of core values, they were not even being close to being achieved. I mean, they were polluting a waterway and getting sediment lost and all of that sort of thing. So I said, you know, this, this has got to pull up a bit. And anyway, the gentleman's spouse said to me, oh no. He said to me, all right, Dazza, because he knows me well enough to call me that. And they go, does well, if you were me, what would you do? And I said, that's a really good question, mate. I said, I think it was 20, 15 or 16, I can't remember now, but I said I would make 26 the year that you. That became boring. I said, you know, you need to stop innovating and just adding on all of these different layers of activities. You need to turn your innovation genie into innovating ways to monitor better, to measure better, to do all of those sorts of things and reduce significantly the number of layers of activities that you've got, because you've got a lot of things and you're doing them all at about 20% of what they could be. So why don't you just focus on one or two things and do them as, you know, aim for, to get them to being 90, 100%. And so that's what he did. And that. I think we've often laughed about that. But if you go and look at that operation now, I think he's got maybe three enterprises going and they're. And they're all going quite well from the last time I spoke to him, so. And it sort of helped their marriage a lot too, because often I'm not taking credit here, but I think, you know, influences in people's lives are sometimes important, especially when you have an outside influence come in. And it can be something that people can hark upon, whether that's a minister giving a good sermon that you heard or some sort of sound bite that you got. That I was able to provide that at that time. And that, amongst other things that they have been influenced by, I think was helpful at that time and has continued to be. I can give you a lot of examples of things like that, but that's one because I know this person is listening and I want to acknowledge them.

I described a bit ago the benefit of having a multitude of perspectives. When you walk across a landscape. Where are the significant opportunities for most farms and for many of the different operations that you see? What are the easy pieces to begin working on and to solve that you find to be very common?

Well, if we look at grazing places, I mean, I'm often say that life begets life. And if you look at the amount of agriculture is founded on the production of biomass, right? The conversion of sunlight into plant material, fundamentally, and then. And then its consumption by others, whether it's other animals and then their sale or otherwise, and the amount of labor units that that takes. And so often when we look at grazing places, the expression of how much biomass can be converted from sunlight and air and water is often very underwhelming. And so just being able to try and get that turned around very quickly, which we know and we continually. I continually get surprised by just how incredible nature is by taking a small amount of management change to. To being turned around. I was just at a place in Mexico, for example, which gets 8 inches of rain, gets very alkaline soils, was on a rocky slope. I mean, it was incredibly rocky. It was probably the surface was about, I'm going to say about 70% rock. And then there was soil in between and the soil was shallow and. And capped. And what I mean by that is that the soil surface had. Had formed a. A surface capping which was resistant to infiltration.

Formed a crust.

Yeah, exactly. And so the owner of that place had met Jimmy Elizondo and. Or Jaime Elizondo Brown and a Mexican American grazing coach or consultant. And Jimmy had advised on, you know, bunching up the animals and, and using portable electric fencing on this quite probably about a 45 degree, 30 to 30 to 45 degree slope and move the animals through. And that landscape was absolutely transformed by one pass of grazing. It was just unbelievable. And the most remarkable thing for the bloke I was there with the client was he said I don't know where all these grasses came from. I said well look, here's how it works. I said in one part grasses have evolved to be incredibly opportunistic. Their seeds stick to everything. Their seeds, if they don't stick to everything, they fly everywhere. I said, you know, when you say you get lots of dust, you get lots of wind in the deserts there's always grass and forbs floating around in the sky and sometimes they land and it's not good for them to germinate. So they wait and they wait and they wait and they can wait. Some of these seeds can wait for 100, 150 years until the conditions are right. And so he said where do they come from though? I said well if you drive along the roadsides here, I said I saw plenty of green grass on the roadsides because the roadsides are mowed or they're grazed once a year or something, they get good recovery and they're the, they're off the only bastions of, of perennial grass that you've got in a district. But anyway it just emerged and he said well you know, this is great. I said yeah, well it can happen or anywhere. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. I mean my good friend Neil Spackman did that work in Saudi Arabia and it similar. I mean and that got 50, it's got 2 inches of rain in a year. I mean and still the landscape wanted.

To live, still regenerated, still regreened, still regrained. I mean it's some incredible video and photos that he has shared.

Yeah, I've been blessed to have Neil as a student and as a friend and, and gone through that whole thing with long discussions about how that was and it's of no surprise. So when we see that that really just highlights the value of that management approach and with, with a small amount of infrastructure to being able to, to get a radical change very quickly. And then once you get that biomass change, well then you know, the trophic pyramid starts to, to shift. Because the foundation of the trophic pyramid is, is vegetation as biomass. And then I remember quite well, going to a ranch in Argentina years ago where they had been doing planned grazing for, I think about a decade. It was funny because I remember the guy came up to me and he said, hola, senor. Mi nombre es Thomas Murphy. Another version of an Irishman.

Yeah.

Anyway, Thomas and his family had a wife from the United States, and their ranch was the trophic pyramid personified. They had the giant condors. They had. Because when I looked at it, it was like the expression was there. They had multiple orders of different organisms all throughout. It was just like this beautiful, beautiful thing with condors and, you know, lots of predators. And like, if you see lots of predators, you know that there's a foundation which is really great. They had all of these, a mixed herd of livestock, which was sort of megafauna mimics or analogs. They had, you know, pumas. They had so many birds. It was incredible. It was a wonderful scene to see and really gave me evidence of how. How the work that we can do can create that as a. As its own outcome without even really trying. Now, that's the work that we've seen in Mexico with the people there as well, with the bears and the jaguars and all of the birds, etc. Returning is evidence of that.

Darren, it occurs to me that one of the things that you're perhaps particularly good at is learning. And as we go through life, we are all on this learning journey. And the learning curve for shifting from contemporary ranching and agricultural models to these regenerating models, these regenerative models that we've been talking about often requires a steep learning curve because we are shifting from one operating system to another type of operating system, or we're significantly shifting the way that we perceive the world and how we show up in the world and how we think about managing it. So what are one of the best ways, of course, to learn that we already spoke about is to ask the land, just pay close attention, be very observant and be aware. But of course, our awareness shifts and change as we learn, as we grow. So what are some of the best ways that you have both for yourself and for what you've observed with other people? What are really good ways to learn effectively and efficiently? Because none of us is ever going to know everything that's possible. Even though I am tempted by that idea sometimes we can't. But what are. What are the ways that we focus?

I thought you were chatgpt.

No, all of us. All of us humans are way better than ChatGPT.

Yeah. What there's different modes of learning, and that's part of the journey as well, is trying to learn what style of learner you are and then from that, defining what you need to learn more about. What are the. What are the. What perhaps are your. Your weak points or however, your blind spots. But generally, like in the livestock thing, we've often spoken to people about a few things. One is that your landscape now is not as it will be. And this. This came to myself when I was looking at the way that people were using a lot of earthworks on landscapes as the first option. Or my. My water cycle's not working properly. So therefore I have to get this. I equated it to doing plastic surgery on a.

Build a dam.

Yeah, I have to build a dam, I have to build swales, I have to keyline, plow. I have to do something. Something quite surgical. In fact, some in the permaculture field called it reconstructive earth surgery. And I find that really, it just gets to me, even though I've done a lot of earthworks in my life and I see the value of them, but there's a time and a place, so there's that. That when you observe the landscape now, it is not in function generally, or it's in a state, it's in its current state and it's not as it will be. And when your landscape is. Has good landscape function, therefore it's. It's infiltrating water, it has more effective nutrient cycling and the soil is more stable and it's starting to build natural fertility. That's a completely different landscape performance. When you have that, when you get there, you will know. And then when you get to that level and that it might only take two, three, four years and you've got there, it doesn't take that long, which is great. How good's that? That you'll get that reward and generally just from doing management. So then the second part of that is, we often say to people, this is particularly valuable with grazing is that. Let's just say you do daily grazing, right? So if you're doing daily grazing, you'll interact with your landscape, depending on how big it is and how many animals you might move, that you'll move those animals, you'll have 365 opportunities to interact with the animals. 1. The interaction with the animals is also in part for you getting the feedback of yesterday on what you will decide to do tomorrow or today, I should say. So what I mean by that is how much grass to allocate right now. That'll be different if you move to another area of the property. But when you go through the whole place and then it's time to do the next rotation, you're probably in a different season, right? So you've got, and then you've seen the feedback, you've seen the feedback on day one of your move. But then you've also seen the feedback of, you know, let's 3, 4 months, 1, 3, 4, 6, 12 months depending on how long your rotation lengths are. So you've got, you're getting feedback and it's in an accelerated form. Now. As I had this young, quite well known farmer in Australia lament to me one day, he said, I don't think I'm ever gonna, you know, the farmers in the district are giving me a hard time. I'm not as experienced as I said, mate, here's how it goes. If you go through that year, you know, they move their animals, they're in continuous grazing, they move their animals, they have 12 interactions with their livestock and their landscape really in a year. And it's not really a deep interaction because they're just moving from one paddock to the other, right? They're not going out and measuring the.

Grass, they're not paying attention, they're not.

Doing the monitoring and the measuring and all of that that you are doing that you are really going on an accelerated learning pathway here. So just bear witness to that and honor that and be enriched by it. So be encouraged by it and, and love it. You know, when I have those stories happen from those incidents, I then bring them forward to people who I meet, who I know are probably going to have that same question or that same doubt because people want to know what's coming, right? So we, I often will say, look, these, these are the things that you do. So feel safe to run through your landscape with minimum infrastructural attention in the first go. Because as I was saying to you the other day, one of the first things that happens when you engage in some sort of form of practice change or when you engage in new learning, there's the Dunning Kruger affirmation bias, I think it is. So where you go and read a lot and immediately you think you know more than you do, but you haven't, you haven't built the knowledge that, the experience based knowledge yet. So it's important to go through that. So that's what we say to people. Don't just read the books and then go and put water and pipe and dams and fences and stuff Go and run the landscape in a cheap way. Get that infatuation out of the way and put your infatuation energy into that.

Yeah.

And then come back from that. And then we're ready. Right. That's what we've done. So. And it's, it's pretty remarkable. I remember when, when we made the Poly Faces film, or my wife made, we watched it the other night. We hadn't watched it for a while. And I watched the scene where I go up to Oakley's, who has since passed, but Oakley was a neighbor of Joel and Joel, and he asked Joel to come and start running animals on there. And there's a scene I'm up on his ridge and it was really dry and really hard and like manure wasn't incorporated. Just no species diversity. You could just feel with your hands. There was no infiltration and it was only like, you know, the same ridge over on Polyface had grass that was like 18 inches tall. Oakley was lucky at the same rainfall, same geology conditions to get, you know, 6 inches out of 6 inches of growth out of a 36 inch rainfall area or whatever they get there. And it was like, whoa. And then I came back a couple of years later for a second shoot that was 2011 and then 2014, I think, and it was completely changed. And that was because they had done these things. And I've seen that repeatedly all over the world. People pay that attention and away it goes.

I really like the way you framed this development of experience because, you know, every one of us, we have no choice except to learn from experience. And we have no choice except to pay for that learning. Some of us are wise enough to choose to learn from other people's experience in some ways. In some other areas, we have to learn from our own. But what I like about the way you framed the intensity of experience and making multiple observations per year, you know, it's a quote that comes to mind. I forget who it's attributed to. Perhaps a Charlie Walters, but he. I think he used to say that very few farmers get to have 40 years of experience. Too many farmers have one year of experience 40 times. And what you're describing is by managing more intensely and also by observing more intensely, you actually generate experience faster. We tend to think of experience in terms of years of experience, but it's actually not years of experience. It's depth and intensity of observations within a year. Which is why it's. One of the benefit of being a consultant or being an agronomist is you don't get to see one farm in a year, you get to see 150 of them in different geological contexts. So that accelerates the experience and accelerates the learning even more.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. My experience on that is greater from the livestock perspective than it is from the agronomy experience. I would say, in terms of the kind of work that you, you find yourself doing with, with crops and so on. I think if I go back to the first half of my career when I was working a lot more with tree crops, in particular a lot of olives and vines and those sorts of things, and I was, I would do probably around 150 to 200 all brick tests a year, which is not a lot, but it was still enough. And I was relating those. I actually, I remember drawing a table up. I was fascinated with the whole Albrecht thing back then, did the Neil Kinsey workshops and whatnot. And, and I found a. I found that they were really rewarding in terms of landscape outcomes or in terms of production outcomes, I should say. But I did a table which, to my own interest in geology, I put all of my Albrecht tests into a spreadsheet which was, which was categorized according to geology because I was trying to see like our. The area of central Victoria I'm in is extremely geologically diverse like this. There's alluvial landscapes, sedimentary metamorphosed sediments, there's granites, and there's different ages of volcanics all within 100 kilometer radius. So. And as I was doing a lot of earth moving and doing a lot of tree development and sitting on a tractor and doing ground preparation, when you're doing ground preparation for trees and doing earthworks for building dams and roads and all the rest of it, you become inherent like the, the geological part of agriculture becomes much more interesting to you.

Yeah.

And I was trying to see the correlation between that just in through my own interest. And it was fascinating to see the patterns almost to the point where I wouldn't say it was at the point, definitely not. But if that landscape had a similar production history, which a lot of them did, then you could see the numbers came out pretty well the same on that geology, which was pretty fascinating. But that, you know, that's just the one specific strand of accelerated learning that I put myself on by paying attention. Yeah. And I've got lots of incidences of where I've self, I've self directed my learning as an extremely poor student because I was never interested in anything at school apart from socializing and ag science. Yeah.

Well, the key part of that phrase Is at school you're interested in many things, just not at school.

If I had Mr. Turner as my teacher in every different class, I think, I mean, the teacher makes a big difference.

Right.

Someone who's actually, you feel is interested in you, even though he might have 30 people in front of you, made every one of you feel like you're an individual that he was paying attention to and engaged and enthusiastic, not. You didn't feel institutionalized at that moment. Yeah.

You know, coming back to our conversation about layering of skills and layering of observations, something that I like to share from my personal experience and observation, my. One of my hobbies or my one hobby I should say that I'm really passionate about is beekeeping. I've got 100 colonies of honeybees. And it is striking to me how there is very little knowledge, comparatively little knowledge of nutrition management in honeybees and how different plants in the landscape produce nectar and produce pollen, of different nutritional profiles and of different values based on what's happening in that geology. And I would have loved to read books on this topic and read papers, but they don't exist or at least I haven't been able to find them. And so my solution, of course, is to observe. So I start paying attention. I live in a very geologically rich region and it didn't take long to observe that certain plants that are grown in very sandy soils produce a much higher nectar concentration or quantity, a higher nectar quantity that is also much sugar than the same plants in clay soils. And so it's been. I actually have a geological map of Northeast Ohio overlaid with a map of the. Of the different dominant species of some of the nectar species that I sketched all this up and drew it all myself because it didn't exist. And I've been able to identify the locations where I can put a yard of 20 honeybee colonies in one location and a second yard two miles away. And the first yard can produce four times more honey than the other one that's a couple miles away. Simply as a reflection of local geology and local plants nectar production capacity in that geology. It's like that is. This is just a hobby. This is fun for me. But that was a combination of a compounding of skills of looking at things through. Looking at things through a different lens than the way most people have looked at them.

Yeah. If you hadn't had what you had up to that point.

Right. I wouldn't have known the questions to ask.

Well, and if you hadn't have had the outlook which you know you clearly do and I would say I have as well and what we're trying to encourage others to do to make their lives richer.

So Darren, you have an incredibly rich life's work in the last 30 plus years. Where can people learn more about your work and how to become less confused by the things you have to say?

Well, that's all going to change a little bit over time but currently the way that we are working is that we're going through agrarians.org that's and I suppose we can sort of let people know a little bit. So we've been working all of our members so we have a membership base so people get access to the different services but in, in particular most of our members sign on and become get access to our farm planning courses. Like I said earlier, we do two 14 week courses a year and that's, that's our go to. But the place that we are currently using is, is disappearing. So part of the reason why I've come to see John here is to, to navigate the, the migration to the wonderful Kind Harvest programs platform. So you've heard it here first. So we're very pleased to say that that will be happening over the coming months and that we'll find ourselves a new digital home. Well, as Alan Savory said to Joel Salatin and I years ago, if we're not all sitting at the same table and trying to get ourselves organized in a coordinated and collaborative way, well then none of us will get to what we, what we know is possible. Yeah.

Well, thank you Darren, that's, it's quite an honor and I'm excited to have you join the Kind Harvest platform. It's very significant for us and also for all of our listeners.

This is.

The exact timeline is uncertain, but sometime in the coming months there will be a release of the Kind Harvest app as well, which is something we've been waiting for for quite some time. And why I haven't been talking about Kind Harvest more publicly and promoting it more because I. We've been waiting for the development of a high quality app.

Yeah.

So it'll be an exciting development to have a platform. You have 5,000 some people on the Bragarians platform right now who are all aligned, thinking about these topics, discussing them. Imagine being a part of a community that isn't cluttered by a lot of.

Oh, it's been, I mean it's probably been one of the most important things that we have done has we had, I think we had a 20,000 member plus group on Facebook at One stage and it became. I know there's others that have emerged since that that have gone very well, but for us it was, it was chaotic and it wasn't, it just wasn't organized enough for us. So when we started the rigrans workplace and that digital platform and involved a membership and a payment paywall and all of that, that was, that was such a big leap for us on so many levels. You know, that platform became our social media. Yeah, I mean, I think social media is great, but however, I think that it's too distractive and it's too, it's too all over the shop and you find yourself navigating too many platforms. And so once we made the leap to bring, to create our own, as it were, I very rarely go outside of that because everything that I need is in there. Right.

Well, there is something about different platforms, if you truly want to have deep, authentic conversations, that's challenging enough to begin with the use of technology and online platform rather than in person. And one of the things that I realized that led to the development of Kind Harvest was that these different social media platforms have each has their own ethos of what is considered to be acceptable behavior and it changes the quality of the conversation dramatically. And so the opportunity to have a social networking platform that is dedicated to having high quality conversations around these agricultural topics is. I've found it to be an incredible experience.

Yeah, well, same. I mean, we went from that Facebook group that I mentioned to Lisa, said, I've already had three children, I don't think I need 20,000 more. Just with the, just. We couldn't believe how people would behave and how they would talk to each other. I kept saying to people, would you talk to someone like that across your table? I mean, you know, anyway, putting that all to one side. But when we went to the platform that we have, and I've witnessed the same in Kind Harvest that it doesn't need moderation because people just know inherently how to behave in a civil way. You can have a robust conversation, but that doesn't mean that you need to be rude.

Exactly. This is actually an incredible data point. In our rules of engagement, we have rules of engagement for the platform. And the first one is be kind. We called it Kind Harvest for a reason. And when we started, it was with the intention of we will moderate the conversation. And we of course offered the tools for users to flag any post or any comment to flag it, to bring it to the moderator's attention. Guess how many flags we've gotten in three years? In Operation Zero. Zero. Yeah, we haven't gotten one.

I think we've. And we've got more traffic than what you've had up to this date, but we've. I think I've had three. And they were mild. Yeah, yeah, they were. They were really nothing compared with what we saw on Facebook. So. Yeah, I mean, it is so. And I think that comes from leadership again, and it just comes from people understanding the culture that you should be a part of and that people like you and I and others are trying to recalibrate in this in the new ways going forward. So that's very important.

It's an incredible time and an incredible space to be working in. And I think that in agricultural ecosystems, all the organisms thrive and do significantly better when they begin behaving as a superorganism and they collaborate with each other. So we would be wise to learn from that and to collaborate with each other instead of to constantly think about competing with each other.

The quorum that we witnessed at Polyface, and then again my wife's film, Poly Faces, that's what we saw over time, was the. The quorum and the sense that you get from that and the signals that you get from that are extremely powerful. I mean, that was such a gift, to be able to make that film and then see that, you know, that quorum in operation. And that's, again, what we're. We continually see that expression emerge over time, if only people get on board.

Yeah. Well, thank you, Darren. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it and I look forward to many more with you in the future.

So, mate, thanks so much for your hospitality and for allowing me to spend the time with. With dear Lillian and beautiful Cathy and enjoying our wonderful and fun in inverted commas, breakfast dinners and lunches.

All right, thanks, Darren.

Thanks, man.

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, and 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.