Facilitating Large Scale Transitions to Regenerative Agriculture with Terry McCosker

Hi, friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health, and ultimately public health. This podcast has a lot of listeners from the land down under, but we haven't yet had a guest appear on the show from Australia. And today I am very pleased and honored to have Terry McCosker here. Terry has a very intriguing story. He is one of these wise elders of regenerative agriculture in the Australian landscape has had a tremendous influence and tremendous impact on the adoption of regenerative agriculture across Australia. So, Terry, I'm very excited to have you here and to get you to share some of your wisdom with those of us here in the States. I think there are many people in the regenerative agriculture space here in North America who haven't heard your name, who are not familiar with your work. I'd love to begin this conversation by hearing more about your story. Tell us about your pathway and what brought you here. You've been in agriculture for a number of decades and have a lot of wisdom to share. So what's the story that brought you here?

Thank you, John. And thank you for having me on your podcast. I'm. I'm a great fan and there are many, many Australians now that are listening to your podcasts. Myself and my children and many of our staff now are really great fans of yours. So it's an honor to be on your podcast. I think I arrived at regenerative agriculture partly by accident, but partly by design. And I have been in the game now for five decades, but not necessarily. I think I spent my first two decades in conventional agriculture. When I was a young person, I had an unbelievable opportunity to work for an American company on an Australian cattle station. And there was enormous problems and they were losing a lot of money. And my job description was they wanted somebody who knew something about growing grass. And I thought I knew something about growing grass. So anyway, I got a job and I found that all the management practices and science that they'd been trying to implement on that particular property, and it was, you know, 800,000 acres and we had 12,000 cows and 4 or 5,000 horses and another 4 or 5,000 buffalo. And that scale was new to me. But when I went for the interview, it was a three day interview, and they said, well, you've got the job. And I said, well, I don't want it. And they said, well, why not? And I said, well, I don't know anything, you know, I, I've never worked in this environment. I don't know these trees, I don't know these plants, I don't know these soils. I've never worked on anything of this scale. I don't think I can help you. And they said something to me then that I have never forgotten. And they said, no, we want somebody who has no preconceived ideas. So on that basis I took the job and I spent time looking at what was going wrong in the business and particularly with the ecology. And there was a lot wrong. And at the end of six months, I said to them, look, just sell up and get out of here because what you're trying to do is not working. And they said, well, we're not used to walking away from a problem. Tell us what we need to do. And I was 28 at the time, and I said to them, well, give me, you know, a million bucks in three years and I'll sort it out for you. So they said, well, you better do it. Well, I sat back on my heels and I thought, whoa, what, what hole have I just dug myself into here? So I put together a research project to solve the problems that I'd seen when I was driving around. And a funny thing happened. I put this project together and then my intuition started playing up and my intuition kept saying to me, there's something wrong with this. And so I said to one of the guys I was working for, I said, look, there's something wrong with what I've just put together to research. And he said, what is it? And I said, I don't know. But I said, I need to go and talk to more people. So what I did was I went back to my roots in, and I used to work for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and had good connections with a lot of scientists in csiro. So I went back and met with a lot of those people and spent three to four weeks. And what happened was every time I explained my situation, I actually learned more about what it was. And it wasn't necessarily what people said to me, but it was me having to repeat my story. And every time I repeated it over about three to four weeks, it got clearer. So I flew back to the station after that and I said to Cliff, well, Cliff, we've got to go 180 degrees away from what we've just decided on. And we sat down on our front lawn for two days and argued. And at the end of two days, I had him convinced that we needed to change 180 degrees and the guys, this few executives were coming out from New York a week later to approve the first R and D project I'd put together. So I sent them off at telex, so this is back in the 80s, and said, you know, I've changed my mind, we need to do something completely different. So they, they came out and I gave them about a six page report on why we needed to do something different. They came to the station, grabbed that report, went straight back to, to town and, and stayed there for about three to four days. And we found out later they were trying to sack, get rid of Cliff and myself because we'd, we'd lost it. And anyway they, they couldn't replace us in three to four days. So they came down to have it out. And we spent another three days with a big whiteboard sitting in a shed arguing. And at the end of three days, I had them convinced that where I'd got to was right. That's an unbelievable thing to get these very senior executives with a lot of wisdom and age behind them and a 28 year old kid basically saying that everything you've been doing for the last 12 or 13 years is wrong and so is all the science and let's start again. And I guess that was one of my real epiphanies. And I knew then that I didn't know anything. And so I had to work out everything from first principles.

What was the conclusion that you came to? What was the pitch that you were presenting them that was so different from the mainstream?

Well, in the Northern Territory it was in those days the common form of production. It was, it's very extensive and it was basically cattle hunting. So there was no fences and no infrastructure and you would go out with a team of people and helicopters were just starting to come in in those days. And you would go and find cattle and bring them in and anything that was big enough to sell, you would just put it on a truck. And if the price was okay, you'd send it off to the abattoir and then you just let everything else go. And if the price was right, next year you come back and do the same again. So there's absolutely no control, there was no animal production. And the production in that system was very, very low. But so were the overheads. And what they had done was moved into what I would call middle ground. So the option was they were running, we're running basically a beast to 100 acres. And we were getting 44% calving, 15% mortality in cows. But under that old system, that Was, okay, you didn't measure any of those things and it was cheap to do. The alternative to that was go to a complete high input system where we developed pastures where we could run, you know, bees to 2 acres and get improved animal performance and total control over the system. But where they were was in no man's land of sowing legumes into native pasture and putting super phosphate on. I remember the first year I was there, they'd ordered a thousand tons of superphosphate. And one of my first jobs was to go out with aircraft and spread that superphosphate over thousands and thousands of acres. And it was really a waste of time. So the basic that I got back to was said, well, we're throwing phosphorus on the ground to try and get it to an animal. We're planting legumes to try and get protein to an animal. Why don't we just feed protein and phosphorus directly to the animals and then go and develop replacement pastures for at the high input end? And where that ended up was still had low animal performance but had built higher overheads into the business. So they're actually in no man's land. And so what I said was, we've got to go back to the two edges, get out of where you've been. And we have to develop the technology to feed animals and manage them extensively and increase the reproduction rates and decrease the mortalities. And then we have to develop pasture systems that are more intensive from scratch. And that's what we did.

So how did you approach regenerating? I suppose regeneration is not quite what you're describing yet, but how did you approach implementing these changes on that type of scale? And then what happened? A few years after we did very.

Extensive research and my breeder trial, my cow trial, for example, I had 1300 cows on 20, on 30,000 acres with a number of treatments, looking at reproduction, looking at nutrition, a whole range of things. And that was, and I took the carry the stocking rate rather than down to a base to 35 acres. And then at the other end we screened a whole lot of plants that I got from the scientists and that were, that had been brought in from all over the world. And so we found plants that were going to grow in that environment as a result of that. Where we got to was we actually solved every problem we set out to solve. We also found a lot of problems we didn't know were there on the way through. And with the, the cow herd, for example, we took the mortality from 14% down to 2% and we took the reproduction rate from 44% up to 72% and increased the weight of calves taken off, et cetera, so we'd significantly increase productivity. But one of the things I noticed was that even when we shifted from a beast to 100 acres to a beast of 35 acres, our desirable perennial grasses were in decline. And within a four year period, I was measuring a decline in those good quality grasses. And so I went looking for solutions to that. And I bought a number of ciders in and I drive them around and say, look, this is what's happening. You can see these plants, you can see things going out here, what's happening? And the response I got on every occasion was, oh, that's just normal. And I tucked that away and I didn't want to accept that that was normal. And it wasn't until five years after that that I then met Dr. Stan Parsons, a Zimbabwean who actually had introduced Cell Grazing to the US With Alan Savory. I met him and once I started to understand what he was saying, then I had a solution to what I had seen in the territory. By that stage, they sold the property and moved on. But for me, one of my big learnings was I learned not to be a reductionist, but that we were working with systems. And I had access to people in all sorts of disciplines, experts from all over the world, in any field that I needed it. And so I had consultants and experts visited me on a regular basis and also did an enormous amount of reading. But what I found was that a lot of, you know, you would get an expert would come along and with their blinkers on, each expert could solve 80% of your problems. And you know, mathematically you get 10 experts together and they're each solving 80% of your problems that, you know straight away that doesn't work. So what I developed the skill to do was to pull out what would work and how that would fit into an overall system that had a design and outcomes around it. And I guess that was my first stage towards moving towards being holistic and was really developing that systems thinking and challenging everything that was going on around me. I didn't accept, after that conventional science and stuff that was published, if it didn't fit and it didn't look like it was right, then it wasn't right. I didn't accept it.

You were then very influential in bringing Cell Grazing and Stan Parsons work into Australia on a really significant scale following this, is that right?

That's correct. So, yeah, 89. I first met Stan and immediately we decided to work together and bring stuff to Australia. I was still quite skeptical about the cell grazing stuff, but everything else he was saying made a lot of sense because it was. It was holistic. He was dealing with the people issues, the financial issues, the production issues, the ecological issues, the grazing issues. All of those things were fitting together into a neat package. And for a while I was actually quite skeptical, thinking, well, nothing's that neat, you know, it can't be that neat. Because I was coming from reductionist training and actually reductionist experience. It took me a little while to accept, but not just holism, but accept that when you work with Mother Nature, she actually works with you. And it does work, it does fit together. Provided you get out of the way and let nature do what she wants to do, things are actually simpler and do fit very nicely. So that's where we started.

I'm curious what this process looked like for you. You were approaching this from the perspective of a skeptic. So how did you validate to yourself? How did you become comfortable with the idea that cell grazing and this holistic approach were the right approach?

So, firstly, I was threatened by a very senior officer in the Department of Primary Industries that said, look, I hear you bringing Parsons to Australia. And I said, yep. He said, well, we've got a pile of literature 3 inches deep showing how Parsons and Savory have destroyed land all over the world, wherever they've been, and we're going to run him out of the country and if you get mixed up with him, you're going to go down with him. And they tried very hard to put us out of business and very, very nearly succeeded. And so I had to decide who was right. Was all this literature right, or was Stan and Alan Savory right? And I was very fortunate to get a Churchill Fellowship. And that Churchill Fellowship enables me to travel through the United States and through Africa, through Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa. And I went everywhere where Parsons and Savory had been and I went right back to their roots and I visited places, people they'd trained, I visited people they'd work with. And very, very quickly it became very evident that that holistic approach, and certainly the cell grazing approach to grazing, was the answer to a lot of issues that we were seeing in our ecosystems. And so that trip very quickly confirmed to me that I was right, that they were right, rather. And then I had to decide, well, how am I going to handle the opposition? Because every scientist, grassland and rangeland scientist in Australia was dead against what we were saying. And the opposition was. It was phenomenal. And we tried to talk to them and tried to reason and ask them to come and see what we were talking about and what we were doing, and that didn't work. And I remember sitting in Harare in Zimbabwe for a few days, waiting for an aircraft to fly home, writing up my report, and I had to decide how was I going to handle this opposition when I got home. And I decided there and then that I would never again try and convince people that did not want to listen, and I would only work with people who were ready to listen. And that's what I did. And the way we went. And it's grown enormously from there. And that strategy has worked really, really well.

When you say it has grown enormously from there, I think that's a statement that needs some clarification for our audience. It's my understanding that you have worked with close to 10,000 farmers, approaching 10% of Australia's farmland that has been under your coaching over the last three decades.

Yes, it is. It does cover a little bit of landscape. Not all of that, by the way, has been successful. You know, people make mistakes, don't actually get the principles or don't get the holistic approach, because we've all been raised in this reductionist approach to everything. And getting that head shift is quite significant. Charles Massey, who wrote the book Call of the Reed Warbler, his claim, and he did his PhD on looking at regenerative agriculture. And most of them, a big majority of the people that he interviewed were actually were our clients. And he came to the conclusion that I'd influenced more landscape positively in Australia than any other person. So that was Charles's take on it. It's not something that we claim, but it. But I'll take it.

Yeah, it's a significant compliment. What was that pathway like from those early days of learning about holistic management and Stan Parsons and Alan Savory's work bringing that back to Australia? What was the pathway from there to your organization of RCS as it exists today?

So RCS had actually existed for five years before we went down this track. So we were a conventional sort of consulting firm, not making much money, not making any headway. And then I met Stan and I realized then that what I had to do basically with the rest of my life. And so we, I committed, Pam and I, my wife and I committed to going down this holistic track and introducing this stuff to agriculture in Australia. And so initially it was Pam and I and Stan would come out two to three times a year. And initially he would do the teaching. And it took me about three years before he would allow me to do any teaching. And I was doing consulting and follow up in the background. And we realized very early on that the numbers were building quite quickly and therefore the ability for me to consult and follow up with all those people was very limited. So we started developing group work. And one of the concepts and products we developed was a process called Executive Link, which is a peer to peer learning and support process. And it's probably one of the most powerful things that we've done. And Executive Link, where we put businesses together in boards of six businesses and each business then helps the other business. And so you end up with two very powerful things. You end up with peer support for tough decisions and you end up with peer pressure when actions are not happening. And the combination of those two things creates massive change and gives people the confidence for the sort of changes that need to be made. And so in the first three years of Executive Link, it was not very successful. We had about a 50% attrition rate. In other words, 50% of people were leaving within three years. And so at the end of that first three year period, I sat down with one of the great guys that was working with me at the time, Stuart McArthur, and we said, right, what's wrong with this and how do we fix it? And we interviewed a lot of the people that left and we also worked out ourselves what was wrong. And one of the things that was wrong was there was no accountability in terms of economics. So I then built, worked with a local university to build our own benchmarking and business analysis software. And once we got that software into it, and then everybody was benchmarking and analyzing their numbers in a very consistent way, and those numbers were on the table, the honesty levels changed and we had some real stuff to work with. And that was one of the catalytic things that changed the way it operated. And we changed some of the just sort of processes and the way we were doing it. And so that was about 94, 95, we got that really starting to crank. And in the last 25 years, it really hasn't changed much in format and it's still as powerful as it ever was. And what happens in that process is that it takes a little time to build trust. But as that trust builds, more and more stuff comes out. And my experience indicates that the biggest holdup in every business is not economic and it's not ecological. It's people and it's people issues. It's communication, it's intergenerational communication and issues, it's gender communication and issues. And once people are in a very, very safe environment and they can start to bring up those very, very personal issues, it's then possible to shift some of those people issues. And the moment those things are out of the way, everything else then flourishes. Getting a very clear vision and way forward that's agreed is a real key to going from there.

I've always been intrigued by the process of trying to understand what is the process that we use to make decisions, that we as humans use to make decisions. And it's interesting actually, when you dig into the science a little bit to discover that fundamentally not a single decision is ever a logical decision, but they're all emotional and there's some really interesting science behind all of that. I was intrigued a moment ago. You mentioned Charles Massey's book the Call of the Reed Warbler, in which he described that of the people that he interviewed, 60% of the farmers began adopting regenerative agriculture practices as a result of some personal crisis. And whether that was a health crisis in the family or an economic crisis on the farm. But then it wasn't clear to me, or perhaps I missed it. It wasn't clear to me. What about the remaining 40%? And has that 60%, 40% shift been true historically? Is it beginning to shift now? So I'd love to hear your perspective. Are more farmers now that you have, if you have impacted personally and through your organization, if you have impacted 10% of the agricultural landscape, is it approaching the threshold where it is becoming normal and people adopt a different management practice without the personal crisis, what does the future. So there's kind of two questions here. One is, what's the process that farmers go through to arrive at this decision? And how do you see that changing and shifting in the future at all?

I believe it has shifted. Our biggest selling point is word of mouth. And so our clients tend to come from recommendations and that usually there's family and then there's friends and then there's local people in the local district, and so little groups and hubs start to develop. What I find now is the thing that probably drives the change and drives people into the education more than the crisis is funding. And when there's funding available for education, people will come and do it. And it's a strange thing. It means that people are not valuing knowledge as much as they should. They don't value it as something that they should invest in. But if the government comes along and is prepared to invest in their education, and that education is the right education, and it then turns them on to learning. Then they're on a lifelong learning journey from then on. It's interesting that I think the schooling experience, I believe, has actually turned off a lot of people to be learners. And once they have a really good experience with learning again, then they become much more interested in continuing to learn. So I'm finding at the moment that probably 20% now of the people coming through our programs are now second generation. In other words, I have taught their parents, and these are now people in their late teens through to mid-20s or so that are now coming through. And I've been around long enough now to I'm up to number nine of the of grandchildren. So in other words, I taught the grandparents, the parents are now the grandchildren. That's very rewarding to see the next generation that's grown up with some of these principles coming through just as part of their education, as a standard, part of what they need to do. We're also finding that the cohort that we're getting has changed age. When we first started, and I would say for probably the first 15 years is a rough rule of thumb, the majority of people that were coming to our programs were from 45 up. Now the vast majority are from 45 down. And one of the for the first 15 or 20 years, one of the biggest obstacles we had to deal with continuously was succession. And I found that the generation that's in the late 70s and into their 80s and 90s now did not do succession well. They held things to themselves. They were poor communicators, and they made it very, very hard for the next generation. Right now, we're finding that the baby boomers are starting to do succession. And as a general rule, I find that they're doing it earlier and they're doing it better. And so I think that's a reason why we're getting a lot of younger people coming through. So now, whereas 15 years ago we would have had an executive link, for example, we would have had 70 to 80% of the people would have been dealing with a succession trauma. Now it would be 20% or less and 80% have completed it and now have debt, have control, and are coming to learn and change so that they can make a difference and have a really good business and a really good life moving forward.

I think this is a really important issue because we are here in North America, in the States, at least, we're at a moment in time right now where 50% of the farmland in the country needs to go through succession in the next 10 to 15 years. And that's more farmland changing hands than has ever changed hands in such a condensed period ever before in history here in the country. What advice do you have for people on both ends of that succession process? What have you observed that has made that. What has brought about this shift from the prior generation to the current generation facilitating succession much more smoothly?

Firstly, it's being talked about a lot more. There's, you know, there's field days and there's workshops and all sorts of things now where succession is being encouraged and talked about. I think that's the first thing in terms of supporting succession in my mind. There's absolutely no doubt that the thing that makes it either smooth or bad is communication. Part of that communication is respect, and it's respect in both directions. Younger generation must respect the ownership of the older direct and the knowledge of an older generation. And the older generation must respect the needs of a younger generation. The worst thing that I think families can do is go and talk to lawyers and accountants to have them deal with succession immediately. That just starts the thing down a track of dealing with function, dealing with structure rather than with communication. So my belief is that they need to do some training themselves in communication and learn how to communicate better, understand different personality types. All of that makes a big difference. So communication firstly. The second point then is that once you're able to communicate honesty and putting things on the table, including goals and visions, it's surprising how many.