Now when we talk about the chemistry story, one of the stories that I think it’s fair to mention is that every culture at some point has asked the question…
And then we look at the agriculture model where, if you have a good look at this and you can Google to check, every year … I call the last 100 years “the chemical experiment”…
I want to just tell you a little bit about pruning techniques. What we’ve got here is a pair of bypass secateurs. These are basically with a hook there and a blade there. Keep that as sharp as possible.
If crop rotation is about controlling pests and diseases, why am I planting a crop that’s just as susceptible to this particular problem in the ground in the same bed? So I moved it. I kind of got thinking crop rotation is a good rule…
Extending your harvest using varieties can actually be a really good way of going. That goes with successional planting as well. Just making sure that you plant that…
So grow what you love, and do it in the way you love. There’s many techniques, there’s so many techniques of growing things. I don’t know, a lot of people get caught up on I want to go biodynamics, I want to go permaculture…
So you’ve bought your block of land. Where do you start? Well, plan … I actually start during site analysis. It’s a simple thing. You identify where north is, so where your sun’s going to come across, and make sure that you also do…
Organic certification is one way around that, but there’s a lot of farmers who are not really interested in becoming organically certified, but they still want to produce using biological methods. Fair trade certification.
It’s a total myth that free trade will solve hunger. The world already produces enough food for the expected population in 2050. We’re already producing food enough…
I spend a bit of time in the book talking about technology and research, and the paradigms of research. These days, most agricultural research is funded not by governments.
The government keeps saying to farmers, increase your inputs in order to stay viable, and yet it’s all those inputs that are part of the problem. The answer for a lot of farmers is reduce their inputs as much as they can.
There’s a rapidly growing movement I think of farmers who are becoming more interested in changing their methods, because the old methods cost a lot, and they basically don’t work anymore, for a lot of people.
I don’t know if anyone has heard of Bruce Pascoe, he also lives in East Gippsland where Alan’s from. He wrote a very important book that was published a couple of years ago, Dark Emu. Has anyone heard about this?
We’ve got everything; apples, peaches, pears, plums, apricots, several different nut varieties. We have juneberries and buffalo berries which are native to our environment. There’s probably about 20 different species of fruit…
Well, realize that grazing is a tool, and it’s not a perfect world. Because of time constraints, there’s times when we don’t graze at as high a stock density as we like. But, in saying that some is better than …
Now that Haney Test I talked about, that’s the best test out there available in the States, and Dr. Haney’ll give the protocol to any lab anywhere in the world that wants to use it.
Gabe, you mentioned before not waiting to put out fertilisers immediately. If you were going to wait up, would you use a more rock phosphate fertiliser, or just a chemical fertiliser?
You know probably the best answer to that I heard up in Cairns from Haggerty’s out in Western Australia. They’re letting whatever comes naturally, the grasses come, you know?
What we usually see, you have to get to what’s the real problem here? Why did those noxious weeds, they are just a symptom, why did they start? Well they started because it was over rested really.
It’s all about a healthy ecosystem, because if we can improve the diversity, the health of our soils, diversity of the biology, the diversity of the plants above ground, then we’re going to provide the nutrient needs for our livestock.
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