Show Notes

• Forage Farm website
• Australian Story with Peter Andrews on natural sequence farming
• Charlie Massy Unstress episode on five basic functions for ecological literary
• The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage book
• Alan Savoury Unstress Episode on the importance of management for climate change
• Tim Wright Unstress Episode on regenerative farming
• Fred Provenza Unstress Episode on behaviour-based management of landscapes

Timestamps

• [00:00:05] Introduction to Stuart Andrews and Natural Sequence Farming
• [00:03:37] What is Natural Sequence Farming?
• [00:06:15] European vs. Australian Farming Practices
• [00:10:23] Reliance on Chemical Inputs in Farming
• [00:13:07] Growing What You Want vs. What You Need
• [00:18:02] Letting Nature Guide Farming Practices
• [00:22:25] Five Pillars of Natural Sequence Farming
• [00:29:52] Importance of the Human Social Cycle in Agriculture
• [00:35:00] Consumer Influence on Sustainable Farming Practices
• [00:44:23] The Practice of Moving Chickens in Farming
• [00:52:09] Replication vs. Scale in Sustainable Farming
• [01:02:04] Change in Farming Mindset Due to Financial or Health Crisis
• [01:05:01] Grazing Management: Set Stocking vs. Rotational Grazing
• [01:13:07] Importance of Biodiversity and Plant Diversity in Farming
• [01:18:02] Closing Remarks: Replication, Local Farming, and Healthy Food

Stuart Andrews: Farming that Restores the Planet

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:05] Well this week talking about knowledge and land. And when we think about the amount of degradation in our landscape that has gone on up to 200 years farming, we definitely do have a problem. And today’s guest is has spent a lifetime with him and his family trying to overcome those issues and has done so very successfully. My guest today is Stuart Andrews. Now Stuart is from Forage Farm just near Gympie in southern Queensland, but he comes with a pedigree in managing landscape and farming that is world renowned. The story behind Forage Farm begins in the Bylong Valley, where three generations of the Andrews family have lived on Town Park, the celebrated home of natural sequence farming, as developed by Stuart’s father, Peter Andrews. Now Stuart refers to his father in this episode as pay, so pay. Peter Andrews was awarded an Order of Australia Medal and I am in 2011 and there is a great episode in the ABC iView Channel on Australian stories of Peter Andrews and natural sequence farming. It’s a very compelling story. Just Google it. We will have links to it in our show notes. Now, for over 40 years, the family has dedicated itself to understanding, practising and teaching methods of land rehabilitation, natural sequence farming. And we’ve done a lot of programs on regenerative agriculture. And this is different to that. This is about reading the landscape keeping. Well, I’m not going to spoil it. I’ll let Stuart explain it all. Natural sequence farming is a farming system focussed on implementing natural landscape functions back into degraded landscapes. Yes, the land. If we listen and look at the land rather than trying to dominate it and we just enable it, things good things can happen. Stuart talks about a farming practice, about food production that is good not only for the animal, not only for people, but also for the planet. We also talk about the difference in agriculture between replication and farming that is just built to scale. We talk about local versus global. Another theme that has been we’ve been championing on this program for many years. He also talks about the five cycles of natural sequence farming and the idea of want versus need. Look, this is a great conversation. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Stuart Andrews. Welcome to the show, Stuart.

Stuart Andrews [00:02:52] Thank you, Ron. Good to be here.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:02:55] Stuart, you know, we’ve been very passionate about regenerative agriculture. I personally have been for quite a few years, 15 or 20 years. And in my podcasts I’ve interviewed some real legends in that space. And I know the Andrews name is one of those legends that I haven’t got around to. But here you are today and I’m really excited about talking to you because I know that improving landscape has been a really important part of your family’s life. Specifically, I mean, your father has is famous for natural sequence farming and has been recognised nationally for that. And I know you’re carrying on a lot of that work. What is natural sequence farming?

Stuart Andrews [00:03:39] Yeah, well, it’s, it’s a it’s a man such a name obviously it’s been coined by an associate of his. He would like it to be referred to as the understanding of how the Australian landscape built. Pretty much that’s the simple thing. The way I like to talk about, as I like to say natural, is nature. So it’s following nature. Sequence is a sequence of events started by a rain event, and farming is how you can overlay that understanding into a farming system and see, I guess, a key difference between the way we’ve conducted farming everywhere throughout the world is that we go to a piece of land and we command that piece of land to do what we want to do. Where natural sake was farming is an understanding of how the landscape used to function and then fitting an appropriate farming enterprise into that. So it’s just pretty much a back flip, a complete switch around. I, I tell people when we do our course, if you wake up in the morning and you have an idea of doing something in nature or an understanding of how you think it works, probably do the opposite, because that will be right. Because as you. Humans. What we tend to do is is counter intuitive. All the landscape operates counter intuitive to how our mind thinks. Which is a bit unfortunate, but that’s probably been bred into us over over many years of our removal from nature really is pretty much as simple as it is. So getting back to nature and understanding how it functions first and foremost then allows us to determine what sort of enterprise fits to that landscape at this point in time. Doesn’t mean that it’s, you know, you’re stuck there forever. It just means that there’s a starting point. And from there, you can, you know, you start to build your landscape.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:05:44] We want to dive into into really what that is nuts and bolts. But I wondered, you know, because a lot of people don’t give thought to, you know, they buy their food and they just assume it’s fun and that’s it. So I wondered if we might paint a picture of how I know Charlie Massey talks about we’ve tried to dominate nature rather than enable it. And I guess that’s really what natural sequence farming is about. But how have we dominated nature? Have we changed the landscape and how do we keep it productive?

Stuart Andrews [00:06:17] Well, I guess a big issue that we face in Australia is that we use the European farming principles. And in Europe you’ve got a landscape which is much younger than Australia, far more fertile. Built in a different way than the Australian landscape. And so therefore, because when, when white man arrived here, they decided that the best thing to do would be to to make the land more productive, we need to drain it. So we need to get rid of areas where, you know, the higher fertility soils are tended to be very wet. So we drained those areas. As a result, we drained away both, not only the water, we also drained away the fertility. And then we moved in, ploughed it, you know, cleared trees, did all of those sorts of things which just hurried up the loss of the fertility. The downside is that this country did not have abundant fertility and and, you know, beautiful fertile soils like in Europe or the Americas. So we’re starting from a low base. And it was a it was a fragile ecosystem that needed to be managed more carefully. And so that’s where I think, you know, P likes to stress and we like to stress that. This landscape, the Australian landscape. Is the the plan or the the the the process that we can use to really rebuild landscapes throughout the world, because this is such an old landscape. It was able to work without the backup systems. So when Australia moved away from separated from Antarctica Gondwana land, it lost the backup of its major river system. So it didn’t have the feed of nutrients and and water over an extended period of time. Everything was based on a rain event. Everything started with the next rain event. And so in Europe, in the Americas, they had a freeze and a thaw. So it was consistent every year. It was the same thing. You would lay down a heap of fertility, then you would have snow and ice laid over the top. Then you reach the thaw period and you’re releasing both fertility and water over a landscape, which means the landscape can build because there’s enough of all of those components to grow plants. Now, Australia didn’t have that. So we had none of those backups. We only had the rainfall that fell and that started to move fertility. And so it did it extremely well. It did a fantastic job of managing this system. But we drained it, which meant the wetlands, which were, if you want to compare it to, say, Europe, Europe had the the big mountains with the lots of vegetation and snow and ice falling over that over that vegetation when it’s dropped on the ground. Australia had wetlands. So any fertility that moved from a point higher up would be captured and processed in a wetland. Well, we’ve drained something like 80, I think it’s 86% of the wetlands in Australia have now been drained. So we’ve got none of those back up systems to to to be able to build the landscape. So that’s a really a key understanding, The real difference between how we are in Australia and Australian farmers generally are considered to lead the world in their farming practices because we work in fairly arid type conditions a lot of the time. But it wouldn’t have always been that way. You know, once upon a time, we had good fertility, just not deep, good fertility at the surface, which enabled us to be hugely productive. Most of that is now gone. Most of that fertility is now in the ocean. So we’re now at the point where where we need to start to rebuild that fertility back to the surface, where we need it to grow more pots.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:10:23] But the vast majority of of of farmers in this country to keep that infertile soil productive are relying on, well, I guess, chemical input.

Stuart Andrews [00:10:37] Yeah. Yeah, of course. And I mean, some of the chemical input has been part of the destruction, you know, so. So by making our soils less microbial reactive because maybe we, maybe we used a little bit too much of this soluble fertility, therefore we make our soils more vulnerable to erosion. And so the one key thing that people don’t seem to think about is the are these really simple two simple components that we don’t manage well. And one of those is sunlight. And the other one is gravity. Those two elements are the two elements that build a landscape. Those alone, they’re both free. They cost us nothing. And not one farmer wakes up every day thinking, how are they going to manage those two? So if you think about the complexity, well, how can you manage it? Well, guess what? Plants manage all of those, both of those with without question, all plants manage it. The moment we remove plants, however we farm, it doesn’t matter how you want to label a farm or whether you want to label them regenerative or conventional, whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. When we remove plants, we remove the one major component that manages those two free energies. And so however we farm that, that’s where we need to run our basis. So with industrial or conventional farming, if you want to call it that, generally that’s about only growing the plants that they want to grow rather than plants that need to grow. And so as a result, to keep that to prop that system up, it’s like a hydroponic system, really. And if you if you’re if you set up a hydroponic garden and you put in no fertility, you won’t grow anything. Well, you won’t grow. You won’t grow fruit or whatever it is you’re trying to grow vegetables or whatever. You won’t be able to do it because you’re only feeding them water. You know, they can only do so much. So the Australian landscape or the way they’re farming today with a conventional system is a hydroponic system. They’re feeding plants only a couple of elements that are soluble in water. So the plant is growing on on very little. And there’s nothing building the soil because the plant is merely surviving on that fertility and it’s not working in conjunction with biology. And those two working together are what build soil and what what makes a landscape resilient.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:13:07] You mentioned she mentioned so much there that I want to unpack because, you know, sunlight and gravity, you know, may be really important in the farming world, but they’re also important in everybody’s lives, you know, in their own life. And we could unpack that and actually growing what you want versus growing what you need is a very interesting statement, which I’d love to unpack a little bit more. What’s the difference between growing what you want and growing what you need?

Stuart Andrews [00:13:38] Well, we always go back to the landscape and ask the questions of the landscape. And every every landscape is different because it’s it depends on how it’s been managed in the past. But the landscape will give you indications as to what it’s capable of growing. So, you know. A lot of people have been made to believe that there are some plots are our enemies. And so as a result, to make sure that they are considered to be enemies, we create a name which resonates with them being an enemy. So we call them a weed. So what nature does is nature puts a plot that it believes it requires in the right place at the right time to do what needs to be done. Now, if we farm in a way that encourages that to be predominantly what would be referred to as weeds. Then that’s what we’ll get. But instead of understanding that that those plants are only being put there because of our management, then what we do is we go out and we kill them in whatever form, whatever way we can do it. And so we never escape that system. Let’s say look at our place it at that Royal Stone. We were just down there fencing in the last ten days, Megan and I, and we’ve got a big a reasonable amount of Blackberries, you know, our Blackberries, our wild Blackberries growing on the place. Now they’re a hide it plot look like they’re they’re a pretty hardy sort of species. But what that’s telling me is that landscape is trying to get back to trees in to a woody type environment. That’s what it used to be. It used to be forest, probably open forest, not closed forest, but close canopy forest, but an open canopy forest. Those trees have been lost whether been cleared, you know, died over time because of the the loss of the ecological. I mean, it doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. So what nature does is it throws back plants to start to move. It progressed back to that point. Now, if you go white, well, I just don’t want the Blackberries, so I’m going to kill them. Well, all you’re doing is fighting that. That change in nature will always win because nature has been around for a whole lot longer than any of us stupid people and will be around for a hell of a lot longer than all of us. And so we can we can play this game and play this war fighting all these plants only not to win. Or we say, okay, so nature is saying to me that it needs more woody type plants in here while the BlackBerry makes me a little less efficient or productive in my system because I’ve got all these Blackberries growing, you know, on landscape where I could be growing grass, where I could be grazing cattle or sheep or whatever. Fair enough. That’s a that’s a logical, logical assumption to come to. So how is it do I get what I want and nature gets what it wants. That is, we need to put a plant in. That is Woody. That doesn’t take away the grass. Guess what? That is a tree, just like it used to be. But what we need is we need the trees in a in a format that fits with our farming system. So if we were, say, cropping, then having trees all over the paddock would probably be difficult because you’re driving machines out around them and blah blah, blah. They’re all they’re all part of the part of the issue, which is why, why people clear trees or on cropping country to get them out of the way. But what if we were to to do a contour type system where we planted trees on contour? So what we’re doing is we’re saying to nature, here we go, we’re going to put all of these trees rather than scattered across the whole landscape. We’re going to put the trees that that are needed for this system on contour in between the rows of trees. We’re going to plot a crop. Therefore, we get what we want and nature gets what it wants. Therefore, the insistence of nature to keep trying to fight back, to put back, put these other plots which we are not finding acceptable in place, disappears, gone like that. So it’s about reading the landscape and saying, what is it that you need us to do rather than our desire just to make it for, you know, make it heal to what we need it to do. We can still achieve the same thing. We just go about it in a different way.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:04] There was this great book, The World’s Biggest Estate by Bill Gammage.

Stuart Andrews [00:18:09] Gammage The greatest bill.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:10] Gammage The greatest estate on it. That’s right. And and when the first settlers came, they observed that the land was like parkland. Have had the indigenous people worked out natural sequence farming over 65,000 years or what? How do you view it? How do you view that book in in the in this framework of natural sequence farming?

Stuart Andrews [00:18:36] I got to be a little bit careful in what I say, Ali, because, you know, some people are very sensitive to what we when we talk about Aboriginal land management. And fair enough, I think there’s other reasons why we’re so sensitive. But I think the thing that I try to get people to think about is that there is not one landscape in the world that any human has been on without causing damage. Now I don’t care whether you are indigenous, whatever colour you are, it’s irrelevant. I think what we need to face the fact is that every human on this planet has destroyed landscapes because that’s what we do. We just do it in various ways. The Aboriginal people changed the landscape, but they changed it at a much slower rate and a much more considered rate than what US whitefellas have done. But they did it with the use of fire. So would there have been heavier timber? Possibly. But what there would have been that prior to the use of fire is there would have been more diverse and much wetter timber areas rather than what what we saw when we came here, which were much more dry type forests that need fire to to survive.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:19:53] And and they didn’t they didn’t have thousands of cattle and sheep as well, which would have kind of made a big difference as well.

Stuart Andrews [00:20:02] I guess we’ll see that the impact of the cattle on the sheep. This is this is another thing that probably a lot of the guys who are in in, you know, doing really good grazing practices probably don’t necessarily agree with is that if you’ve got a hard hoofed animal in a landscape that didn’t evolve with hard hoofed animals, we developed a very soft soil. That soft soil is not there anymore, in part due to our hard hoofed animals. Now part of that can be down to management, but as a result, all of these plants we go back to where we started. All of these plants that we call weeds, those plants evolved with the animals that we now run. Therefore, we cannot run a landscape with these animals without those plants because those plants come in to undo the damage caused by the animals. So a lot of people won’t accept or have trouble accepting that hard hoofed animals cause compaction. Everything causes compaction and machines cause compaction as walking around cause compaction, the animals cause compaction. What fixes it? Plants. And so depending on the degree of manageable, how it’s managed is how many of these plans come but need to be there to correct to undo the damage caused by the animals we run. Now, none of it means we don’t run the animals. Of course I like eating cattle. I getting sheep. I like eating pigs. They’re all critical. They’re all essential components. They’re essential to the landscape being healthy. But at the same time, they don’t do it without some form of damage. And the heroes which never, ever get recognised, the heroes in all of this, other plants. Humans are way down the list. They’re definitely nowhere even close to being the heroes. The animals are a critical component and they certainly sit higher up the list than the humans do. But the heroes. Are the plots beginning then?

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:22:12] Well, that leads us into the five pillars of natural sequence farming. And you’ve talked about contours and all of that. I wonder if we could just unpack those five five pillars and talk a little bit more about them.

Stuart Andrews [00:22:25] Yeah, sure. So we set these the pillars up for our training, principally for people that come and do our course. If they let’s say they go back in there, they’re sitting in the pub or somewhere having a chat with their mates, and their mates may well not feel that that that they are interested in farming. Like maybe, maybe they are. And so they say, what’s that? What’s that? We know cause she just went in there and rather than have to go into detail, they can just come up with these pillars and they can say, Well, we’re looking at slow the flow. Let all plants grow. Be careful where the animals go. Filtration is a must now and return to the top to recycle the lot. And so then if the person goes, well, that sounds like a lot of shit to me. Or they might say, Well, what does that mean? Well, slow the flow. I mean, slow. The flow is pretty simple. It’s about how do we slow down the movement of water. And so why is it you would want to slow down the movement of water? Well, the water is carrying out productivity away, so it’s carrying our fertility. So if we can manage the water, which is moved by gravity, we can now hold the fertility. Because one thing that always happens, it always rains. So you’ll always get water back at some point, but it never rains fertility that you never get back. And so if we can manage the water, we manage the fertility, then we’ve got little plants grow. So what’s that all about? And I like the sound of that. I don’t I really don’t like Blackberries, you know, And everywhere I go is it’s a different thing. I don’t like fireweed if you’re on the coast or I don’t like Lantana or if you’re on the coast or if you’re up here in Queensland, you head out to central Queensland. All that like trees, you know, it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s got a particular plant or several that they don’t like. So what are you what is that all about? Let all plants grow. It’s a and that simply is well, well that’s about understanding that the plants that that nature puts there, it puts there for a specific reason. If we don’t like them, we just need to work out what plant can do the same role that we find more palatable. Easy. That’s our worries. Okay, well, what about this little bit careful where the animals go? Well, that’s about understanding. The Australian landscape was very fragile. It didn’t evolve with the animals that we run today. Therefore, they had an impact on its ability to manage water. So if we recognise that the animals are this key areas in our landscapes, like our wetlands, like our flow lines that are sensitive to these hard hoofed animals, perhaps we could look at how we can manage them differently around those areas once again, doesn’t mean that we can’t run animals. It just means that we have to. We would better if we understand a little bit more about what damage they could cause and in what areas, and then restrict their access to the and then we’ve got filtration is a must know. Well this landscape used to have abundant wetlands, massive wetlands. All of our flow lines had wetlands on them. So getting wetlands back into the system are critical because guess what? Every time it rains and water moves, the fertility always moves to the low point. If we’ve got a wetland there, we’ve got the the ability to that capture that fertility and therefore we’re not losing it from our farm. We’ve got a little bit a better way of managing it. And then we’ve got return to the top to recycle the lot. Well, if we’ve got these wetland areas which are not always wet, they’ll be they’ll be periodically wet, periodically dry, depending on the season. So in a dry time, we can go in there and we can harvest the plants that are growing on the fertility that was lost from higher up. We harvest that material, we transfer that back to the top, bang, bang, boom. Now we’ve got fertility back at the top. So now we’ve got a system where we can manage our fertility loss from our landscape because we’re managing our water, recapturing our fertility. We’re growing lots of plants and we transferring that back to the top. Now, if you look at, well, how does that make sense with how this landscape built? Well, let’s think about it. So we’ve got a land mass sitting in the middle of an ocean. Any fertility that moved from the land to the ocean got transferred from the ocean back to the land, either by placing, you know, washing up from the ocean or or birds catching fish. Going back up to the top of the hill. Pooping fertility returned back onto the land again. That’s been going on for aeons. As soon as we got here, we removed that process because one of the things we did was decided in our in our logic to remove trees from the high ground. As soon as we moved the trees from the high ground, we stopped the birds flying from the bottom to the top. There you go. Broken system. So if we understand that’s how it works, then how do we put that back onto a landscape? It doesn’t mean that we have to have hills. Doesn’t mean anything. Just means that a high point is where the fertility goes. You know that from that high point, the fertility will move to the bottom where we want to capture it so we can return it back up to the top. You’ve now got a system that requires no inputs. You know, this is a system that works has worked for for aeons very, very successfully. But we just don’t do that because we allow most of our water, most of our fertility to run away. And in the process, it causes massive destruction, causes flooding, you know, washes people’s land away, washes people’s houses away. All of these things happen. And they are a direct result of how we as farmers or not, I would say farmers, because we’re farmers are a little bit restricted. Government tend to have apply a fair hand in in what happens. Well even the consumers unknowingly the consumers play a massive hand. And at the end of the day, they are the solution, not the farmers. The farmers are merely the ones that can do it, but the consumers are the ones that drive it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:28:43] Well, I know that we’ve had the pleasure of Charlie Massey and Alan Savoury coming onto the program a couple of times, and I know Alan Savoury has always talked about four cycles, the solar cycle, which is the sunlight you referred to, and that wonderful process we all learned about in high school photosynthesis, the water cycle which you’ve just referred to. And I remember Graham Reese once telling us that in in healthy soil it takes about a minute for the water to penetrate several inches into the soil, whereas in unhealthy soils it could take 20 or 30 minutes in the process of which water goes off the property along with the fertility you mention. And then they talk about the soil minerals cycle, which is all about the biodiversity of putting, you know, the microbes in the soil and the diverse biodiversity. But the human social cycle is the key. And the one that Alan said that Charlie Massey has added on and here you are saying exactly the same thing. The human social cycle. We as consumers have a huge role to play.

Stuart Andrews [00:29:53] Well, I mean, just think about it. It’s it’s logical. It only makes complete sense. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it to the detail that I do today because we run a farm where we produce products that we sell direct to consumers. Now, that opens your eyes a little bit more than someone who produces a a, you know, a big amount of product and just sells it into a system and never knows where it goes. And, you know, the disconnection between people and food and how it’s produced is has been quite surprising to me over the last ten years. And I realise that doesn’t matter how many farmers I get to talk to, how many farmers that actually take on natural sequence farming or any any of the other ways of managing landscape out there. If the consumers aren’t on board, it’s a waste of time. You know, consumer at the end of the day walks into the shop. Let’s say our biggest, the product we produce the most of pasteurised eggs. So a consumer walks into a into a shop and they see pasteurised eggs. So our eggs probably retail anywhere from $9, something up to I think probably the highest one is probably $12 somewhere in stores to sell into. So they go and compare that to, say, a caged operation or a free range operation, and they might be able to buy those eggs for 5 or $6. And they don’t realise that even though they are cheaper, there is a cost associated with that. And I know that people are on a budget and that’s fair enough and that’s always going to be the case. There’s going to be people that that can afford to pay more for food and or more that that card, at the end of the day, we all pay the same just pay at a different ends of the spectrum so we can pay for food like good quality food when we’re younger, which prevents us having to go hopefully to the doctor when we get older quite as much, or we eat whatever we like and we spend all of our life probably from from our 40s onwards, regularly visiting the doctor, at which point, you know, unfortunately, probably given some other medication to prop us up rather than concentrate on what’s the real issue. And the real issue is food. And so our drive here at Forage Farms is to. Educate the consumers that these are the choices that they have to make. They don’t have to make either of them do whatever they like. It’s a choice. That’s a thing. And like with farmers, we just give them a choice. Here is a tool that you can use to build your landscape. If you don’t want to use it, that’s fine. It’s just a tool. You know, there’s lots of tools out there that you can use and they’ll all do different things. People have got choice. You should always have choice. The moment you take away choice and you force someone to do something. Guess what? They will do the opposite every time. That’s human nature. That’s how we operate. We wire that way. So by by just getting that story out to people to say, well, these are the choices you’ve got. You choose. And then we leave it at that and it’s no different. And it’s interesting how people how people work in running this business. We get to one thing we do get to do is we we get to set the price of our products. Now we get to set the price of the products and the consumer gets to tell us whether they’re prepared to pay that or not. And anyway, we were running at a price, you know, years ago at a price that I believe was was too low for the value of our product, certainly too low for for our cost of production. So our cost of production is a lot higher than, say, a conventional or industrial farmed product. So it needs to be higher. So we lifted the price because we needed that so that we were going to be sustainable in this system so that we could keep operating. We lifted the price. Guess what happened? We sold more products. You know, because that’s once again, some of the craziness in in our heads is that we believe that if we pay more, we get better. And in a lot of cases, that’s true. But in a lot of cases, it’s not true. And see, there comes another problem for the consumer. They’ve got to try and work their way through. Dare I say the bullshit? And there’s lots of it. You know, we’ve got to work our way through. And so what we say to people is just the beauty we’ve got today is we’ve got a thing called Google or whatever search engine you want to use put into there and find who that person is that’s producing that product. If you can’t find them, don’t buy that product. Because I can assure you that’s probably not where you need to be. You need to be able to find where that food is produced and then you can know that it’s real and it’s and it’s more than likely an okay product.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:01] Now it’s so true. Stewart And that’s another thing that our program, this podcast, is very passionate about, and that is drawing attention to the hidden costs of seemingly cheap products, because usually the health and environmental costs have been externalised. You know, they haven’t been included in the product. So something that seems cheap. Well, we end up paying for it in our health care system and in our environmental trying to rehabilitate the environment. But the product we bought look cheap. So I agree with you there. It’s interesting to hear about the bullshit because I was in this in a well, I was in Harris Farm the other day looking at all the eggs. And I’m fascinated when I see the arrangement of eggs who call themselves free range and within the one area is a free range, which very proudly announces it’s got 10,000 hens per hectare, which works out to be one square metre per chick per hen, and another one which says 40 hens per hectare, you know. And there is quite a range there, but both of them have got free range written on them. And so, you know, it’s something that you really need to think about what you’re doing and developing relationships with your farmer is a very good way of doing it.

Stuart Andrews [00:36:16] We you’ve touched on it. You’ve touched on a little subject there for me that I can’t brush over and that hold him, that whole hens per hectare thing is part of bullshit. Okay, so let’s say Lasix. Mine. Yeah. Let’s say the person that says that they’ve got 10,000 chickens per hectare, they just forget about the number. But let’s say what we use, the numbers that you were talking about. Let’s say that person has 10,000 chickens per hectare, but they move their chickens every day, so they move their 10,000 chickens regularly. This won’t be happening in that scenario, but let’s just say these. But they’re constantly moving those 10,000 chickens. So they’re actually moving. They’re saying every day 10,000 chickens get a hectic. But let’s say every day they get a new hectare. Now, that’s that’s actually not a bad system that would work. Okay. But let’s say you got the person that runs 40 chickens per hectare but never moves them. Interesting. See? So. So in actual fact, the 10,000 chickens on one hectare moving every day is a better system than the one with 40 hens per hectare that never move. So you so that’s that was a number because people wanted the consumers wanted numbers and they just came up with this another bullshit number that made it even more confusing. The only way you can know whether that works or not is go to the farm. Go to the farm that’s producing it now. The only way you can achieve that is if the farm is actually in the same state that you’re buying your product from. If you can’t drive to the farm, don’t buy the product. End of story. That’s how it should be. That’s how we operate. We do not send our products further than a capability of someone to be able to come to the farm to justify that we are doing what we say we’re doing and we’re not bullshitting because that’s the problem we have got. And this for us, our philosophy is that we want to show people that they can farm this way and there is a sale for your products. And the way you do it is you set it up where you are producing the amount of volume that you can send within whatever area you’re working on. For us, it’s because we’re in Queensland. We’re looking at the Sunshine Coast and the Brisbane Gold Coast market, which is massive, the big pocket, but we don’t go into New South Wales or into Victoria or into South Australia because what we want to do is we want to encourage somebody else to do the same as us there, which there are, there are other people doing that. And so when we get people contact us from, from further afield that are part of our supply area, we say, look, yeah, that’s great, but sorry we can’t supply you. But here are some people that are in your area. You go to them. Now, if if what that does is that a lot of these small farms like ours are struggling to survive because it’s so much work and in selling enough products to make it to get us enough viability, enough size to be viable is difficult. So if I then go and take one of their customers, say in New South Wales, then that prevents that person being able to grow. Where if I refer someone to that person that allows them to grow their business and see what we can only why we can ever make this work is by replication. We can never do it by scale. Currently I hear people talk about, we got to scale this bullshit. That is exactly the thought that got us through the farming process processes that we’ve been talking about. Scale, scale, scale. Well, what scale does is it works. Very short term. Eventually we get to the point where we can’t run it because the scale is so big. Now we’ve got to cut corners. So we’ve got to use chemicals. We’ve got to do all of these other things to speed the process up. We get bigger machinery, whatever. That’s not how we produce quality food. The way we do it is that the consumer must pay a fair price for the food, and the farmer needs to have a scale that they’re capable of, of operating under and operating under to produce good quality food at the same time and not at the expense of the landscape. So we must be able to build our landscape and produce healthy food at the same time. And I can assure you there are many people that do both, unfortunately.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:40:55] Well, Stuart, you’ve just said two things there that are just really I mean, drive to the farms are criteria as the criteria for how you purchase food. What you know, I mean, I’ve I’ve I’ve been buying some fruit and vegetables through Ruby which is out of our own backyard which kind of puts a 400 600km sometimes 1000 kilometre range. I think that’s almost a bit too far. But I love this idea of replication versus scale because I think one of the things I was going to ask you about is also about farmers health. You know, the fact that farmers, you know, we often hear a lot about farmers mental health issues on the farm in parts of the world, suicide. And we hear a lot about the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset, which I think is putting is is kind of attacking the farmers that you have. You are exactly like and talking about and they’re talking about scale the Great reset and you’re talking about replication of building landscape and growing healthy food. I mean, there is two very different models, isn’t it?

Stuart Andrews [00:42:10] There is. And unfortunately for for those guys in the Great Reset, they’re not going to win that argument because the humans are pushing, I believe, are pushing more to a food system like the one we’re talking about. The days of the one that they’re talking about gone, finished showing that it doesn’t work and produce massive amounts of food, but poor quality food. So, you know, I really think that it’s going to be a struggle. But what it requires is it requires people, the consumers, to wake up. You know, I’d love to be able to grab hold of so many of the consumers by the shoulders and just give them a shake and say, you know, what exactly are you doing? Think about what you’re doing. If. We start to think about stuff because everything, everything we do is about not thinking anymore. You know, we go to social media for all of our answers to all of our problems rather than actually dealing with them ourselves. You know, and we look at all these other rubbish, which just distorts our view on what’s going on. And that’s it’s a difficulty even for me because you see all this stuff out there and you go, God, I don’t know what to believe or what not to leave. But I believe what I can see. Outside of that, I forget about it. And so by having people being able to go to the phone, we struggle to get the people that buy our products to come to our farm because they just trust us. But they shouldn’t. They should come here, come and do farm tours because we offer farm tours to get people in. But every time we run a farm to I like the last one, I think we had 100 people attend the farm tour. I said, How many people here currently buy our products? Then there would have been no more than ten hands go up and hands of the people coming. Now you’d say, that’s great. But where are the people to buy our food? Where will we packing eggs Tomorrow? We’ll pack. I think 45,000 eggs tomorrow. Wow. And that’s one week’s production in our all parts. All the chickens are out in the paddock. Everything’s moving. But those eggs go to how many families? Why are they coming and looking at the farm? You know, it’s great that they all get it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:44:23] That’s a testament to you. And I’ll bet you the other 90 that weren’t your customers became your customers. So, you know. But but you’ve mentioned something that about moving the chickens. And I’m now referring back to the second podcast I did on this program with the legendary Joel Saletan, who who moves. Tell us a little bit, because you’ve mentioned it and I know what you’re talking about. But when you’re talking about moving chickens, I don’t think everyone may understand quite the importance of doing that. First, just run us through what what it is and why that’s important.

Stuart Andrews [00:45:01] Yeah. Okay. So anybody who’s had backyard chickens will know because most backyard chickens don’t get let out into the backyard because they might have dogs or they might have foxes or whatever. So so they have an area, they call them free rides because they’ve got an area to walk around in. But within no time, it’s no longer grass or plants, it’s dirt. That’s pretty much how it works. Or you might have nitrate type plants. Some people would refer to them as weeds coming up because of all that chicken manure building up in there. Over time, plants like marshmallow and BlackBerry nightshade, all of these plants come up stinging nettles as a result of the excess fertility created by the chickens because they don’t get to move. So that’s one system. The system we’re talking about means that the chickens have whatever activity usually for laying hens at scratching. So they do a lot of scratching out there, scratching for bugs and all that sort of stuff. And they cause an impact on the landscape. Now, if they keep impacting the landscape, it ends up dirt. But if we move them all the time, then they start impacting on another section of landscape. And the bit they are on before gets a chance to rest. Let me put it like this. For your listeners. Let’s say you work a job 24 hours a day, seven days a week. How long can you keep doing that for? Not very long, can you? So if you have a landscape out there that is working 24 hours a day with animals on it, it will die exactly the same as us. Look, there’s not a thing in the landscape that’s different to us. There’s not a thing in the landscape that’s different in its health. To our health. All of the same things exist. It’s no different. We’re all part. We’re all one with. With that whole system. So if we keep moving our chickens, it means we’re allowing the plants that they impacted yesterday get a chance to rest. Then you determined as a as a farmer, how long does it need to rest? Well, guess what? You don’t need to work that out. The plants will tell you when they’ve recovered. They’ve had enough rest. It’s like you, you know, you go to bed at night. Let’s hope you get eight hours of sleep. That means you have recovered enough to stop the next day, you know? And so it’s no different. The plants need a rest. And so we need to remove the thing that causes them that the toil, the hard work. And so we remove the chickens on, which gives those plants a chance to rest. No different. It’s what Allan Savoury would have would have no doubt spoken to you about with how he talks about the migrating animals, how they come through. They might really severely impact that piece of landscape. But then they leave and they don’t come back for 365 days or whatever the time might be, which means the plants regain the plants of the heroes. The plants have got a chance to recover and rebuild that landscape back from what the animals did to it. So the chickens are the same, and people look at a cow and say, well, you know, cows, 500 kilos or 600 kilos or whatever it might be. So it has a massive impact on the landscape. But I can tell you what a chicken weighing 1.8 kilos has a bigger impact, but it has it all at the surface level, so it doesn’t create compaction like say, cattle do, but it’s highly destructive on the plants because it’ll shred that area very, very quickly. So it needs to have enough rest and you need to make sure that you’ve got enough diversity of plants coming back through to undo the damage that that that the chickens create.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:48:49] I think so. You are lit. Yeah, you are. Literally. It’s a mobile chicken pen.

Stuart Andrews [00:48:55] Yes. Yes.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:48:56] Correct. Along the ground.

Stuart Andrews [00:48:57] Yeah. We’ve got so we’ve got 20, 20 chicken houses all on wheels. And so Lochie our youngest son three times a week, he moves the chickens so he moves them a set amount of distance forward. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have access to the land behind them. What we then do is we bring a fence up behind them to keep them from accessing the land that they’ve already grazed. So depending on how much activity we want on the land determines how quickly the fence comes behind them. But three times a week, he’s moving these. It takes him takes him half a day to move all of those all of those chickens. So three times a week is a lot of time. It’s a lot of labour. And, you know, you’re talking about 600 birds per flock and six flocks. And so he’s moving these all the time. Well, one free range operation. Free range operation would have those birds times 3 in 1 shed, all managed by one person, maybe two. Yeah. Yep. So that’s the difference between what we do and what, say free range operation would be. And caged is even greater. Again, there might be 50,000 birds in one shed of a caged operation. That’s why those eggs can be three bucks and ours are ten, you know. So this farm here employs ten people. Five of them are full time. Five of them are part time on 270 acres. So you think about that on a scale, how do we create employment at the same time as producing good, healthy food? This is how you do it. Now, if we can’t sell our products enough, we can’t afford to be paying those people. But it’s once again, it’s all replicable. Imagine if you had, you know, multitudes of these farms around all of the cities around Australia and at least a couple around every town. Now, could we supply all the food now? We could, because not everybody could probably afford it. But when people start to realise that rather than buying that car, maybe this week, maybe they’ll actually buy food, you know, good quality food or a bit healthier food.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:51:18] Yeah. Well, when this comes back to building in the health and environmental costs and governments actually recognising that and possibly subsidising it with a very, very good return on investment. And you talk about employing people. I mean, we’ve moved into the world of workplace well-being and the number of people that are doing. You’ve used the word bullshit a few times, but the number of people doing bullshit jobs and not having meaning in the work they have, not being engaged in the work they have. I mean, you know, being outdoors, producing food in nature, you know, if that’s employment, if that employs more people than some of the bullshit jobs that are out there, then that would be a win win win for everybody. Well, I’m I’m sorry. Did you want to add anything?

Stuart Andrews [00:52:09] Yeah. I’m just I mean, I think about the team of people that that, you know, the forage farms team that we have here. Apart from our sons, the rest of them and farmers, you know, we got one. One lady. She was the boss of a big W store. Another young girl. She was only doing, you know, filling jobs here and there. Another girl’s been to university, but she’s from the city. She’s originally from Sydney, and she’s training. She wants to to run a farm someday. So you’ve got all of these different people that are aren’t farmers. They didn’t grow up farmers, but they love it. They absolutely love being out doing this because it’s so rewarding and it’s so positive. Look, the wages, I’m sure they could earn a whole lot more doing some other job, but the mental downside of doing that shit job day after day and I say this to people all the time. When you reach 65 and you look back and go, Well, that’s what I did all my life, I hated it. You just lost 65 years of your life. And for what? Because you were able to to put more money away or whatever it might have been. There’s opportunities that come out of doing, you know, being on on farms. Like I say to our guys here, this is what we do. This is the way we run our farm. We can’t afford to pay you probably as higher wages as we’d like to pay. We we pay exactly what we need to pay, but we can’t give you as much as we’d like to. But what you do have the opportunity to do is to be involved in the farm so young. Stephanie, who works on the farm, she runs sheep and she runs cattle as part of, you know, that’s that offset. So she’s able to do that. What I want to do is I want to encourage people to use their initiative. I’m not going to hold their hand. They need to come to us and say, well, this is what I’d like to do. What do you reckon? Yep. Bloody earth. Go for it. As long as it doesn’t impact on our ability to earn enough money to run the business. Go for it. Do whatever you like. We’ll support you in doing that because. Not only do we run a business in in producing food, we run a business in trying to support people and get them to do more. The downside to that is eventually those people end up leaving because that’s just what happens when you do a great job of training people. They usually go on and find bigger and better things to do, but that’s the name of the game. If you can do that, then you set those people on a good path.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:50] Yeah, well, if that’s replication, then that’s a job well done. And, and again, I come back to if governments recognise that building healthy landscape and building healthy foods was worth supporting, then that that would be a win win win for everybody. The other thing that intrigued me I about in the beginning of 2019, at the height of the the drought, I had the pleasure of going up and spending a day with Tim Wright on his regenerative farm in Uralla near Armidale. And we drove down a road and this was at the height of the drought. And on one side of the road was Tim’s farm, which he had had a lot of vegetation. There was, it was dry but there was a lot of vegetation there and on the other side of the road was barren landscape. I mean it was almost a desert and that was his neighbour. And what I asked him was and I ask you the same question, what is going on in the farmers head on the other side of the road when he looks at the two landscapes? For me as a dentist, it was pretty obvious there was a huge difference and presumably the rain had fallen equally on both sides of the road. What do you think’s going on in the heads of these farmers that look at that and go, that’s interesting, but I’m not interested.

Stuart Andrews [00:56:15] Look, I think. Unfortunately, people just get stuck. You know, they get that get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. And before they realise, let’s say, drought, it could be anything. It could be drought, it could be could be extremely wet. But time they make their decisions. It’s too late. You know, they’re too far into it because they’ve usually been feeding stock. In that case, I know Tim and I know how he operates. He’s a very, very good manager. And the people next door, no doubt would have been already hand feeding their stock. But you get to a point where you’ve been hand feeding your stock so much that the price of stock has fallen. And so for them to sell, which would have been the best thing to do, of course not to win any time yesterday was the best time to sell. But for them, they look at how much they’re going to lose because what they’re doing differently to Tim is they’re not valuing their landscape. Now, when we’ve got an abundant landscape, we can do that because we know if we lose half an inch of soil when it rains next, there’s there’s another half inch underneath that. But we’ve passed that point now. We don’t have the half inch left underneath it. We got nothing left. So every time we lose the next half inch, we’re now into the subsoil, which means we’re that much slower to come back. And we stuck in the cycle. Now, the unfortunate part. Is that there are two key reasons why somebody changes what they do in farming. At least one is. Financial. The other is their health. They’re the two things that I see of reasons why people say, come and do our calls. Or they might go and do an assisted resource consulting services, cause they do it because financially they’re becoming less viable so that the person next to him will reach the point where they’re no longer financially viable, viably able to run it. But guess what? The best way for them to learn would be to go and talk to Tim. Guess what they’ll never do. They’ll never talk to Tim and look at it. In all these years, we’ve been running training courses. I get people ring up and say, look, could you come and do a course at our place? Because we’ll get all of the locals to come and do it. I said, Listen. Happy to come and do a course at your place. But I want you to be aware that you won’t get any of the people coming from around you. I said, This is the craziness again of this the psychology of humans. Those people, it’s not that they’re not interested. They just don’t want anyone in their local area to know that they’re interested because that threatens their pride in that they’ve been farming or their dad’s been farming that way for so long that they’re saying, well, that doesn’t actually work. It doesn’t work. So we’ve got to do something different. That’s difficult to do. So it’s easier for them to travel 200km away and do exactly the same course where they fear that where they find that there won’t be any issue with seeing their neighbours. Guess what happens? I see the divers at the same course because we don’t think differently. We all think the same and we all do the same thing. That’s the thing. Our landscape and that’s what one of the things that I teach people. Our landscape has patterns. And when people come, when they leave our course, they come and they spend four days with us. What I’ve one of the things I’ve taught them is to see patterns. Now, once you can say see patterns, you can see patterns in people. You can see patterns in everything. Because our landscape, the people, the animals, everything has patterns. And so once you can start to see patterns, you can work out what’s going to happen next. Because we just keep repeating the same patterns. Landscape repeats the same patterns. Let’s say for your listeners. Imagine a tree. Imagine a tree with no leaves on it. And you’ve got one branch with two stemming off it. And then two stepping off it. And then two stemming off it. And so it goes. It’s the same pattern being ever repeated. If you turn the tree upside down, the root system looks exactly the same. If you look at us, you look at our lungs or our kidneys are seeing the same patterns. Look at our river systems. Same patterns. They these same patterns used over and over and over again. And so these these same patterns exist everywhere. Which means they exist in us, in our heads, in our hearts, wherever. And so understanding your pattern is key to your survival. Because then you can start to work out what you’re going to do next. Every time you start something up, I’ll bet you I’ll bet everybody listening. If you think hard, you’ll realise that the one thing you’ve stuffed up, you’ve stuffed up multiple times. Exactly. This time, because we have this pattern of doing the same stuff. I know. I stuff up the same stuff over and over again, and I fight against it. I don’t do that because, you know, that’s what the result will be. Sometimes I can pull myself up. Other time you do it. You know the saying it’s always been your dad would say, Do you learn from my mistakes so you can’t make them? Well, guess what? You can never actually learn the mistake until you do it yourself. It doesn’t matter who who else makes the mistake. You unfortunately have to go through it at some point. So for it to make a lot of sense. So anyway.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:02:04] You know, it’s so interesting to hear you talk about crisis of finance or environmental crisis forcing change because as in health care. So, so often people it’s not only when they are faced with a diagnosis that’s life threatening that they make significant changes. And and it’s not unusual, although it seems strange to say that some people will say, that diagnosis was the best thing that ever happened to me because I’ve done X, Y or Z since it and I’m much better for it. When you do this natural sequence farming and you sort of take a landscape that’s very degenerated, you know, degraded. How long does it take to see change? I mean, it’s months. Is it years? Well, I would.

Stuart Andrews [01:02:48] One rain event.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:02:50] One rain event.

Stuart Andrews [01:02:51] One rain event.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:02:52] Okay, So.

Stuart Andrews [01:02:53] Look, the system starts to change straight away. All we’ve got to do is given an opportunity to. This is another thing that I say to people. Think about when do you see your landscape change the most? And the answer is post drought. Why? So why is it that you see the most amount of change after a drought? Because it had a chance to stop. It probably lost a percentage of its plants, which gave it the ability when it got rainfall. Plenty of sunshine, but no rainfall. The limiting factor was the rainfall. When the rain falls, it can now use maximum amount of sunlight to grow huge diversity of plants where before it was probably limited because of depending on how the place was being managed. It may not have been able to get enough sunlight in there to get the most amount of diversity that it required, so that stimulated change. So everything we do, that’s something dramatic like a drought or we overgrazed a paddock by mistake. You know, everyone does it. I say it is a bit of a joke to them. I say it. There’d be no one in this room that’s ever overgrazed a paddock. Would they ever want to say little snigger? Everybody at some point has overgrazed the paddock, even the best managers out there when they should have been out and moved the cattle in the morning and something happened, they couldn’t get there and move them in the afternoon. As a result, they overgrazed it. Now it’s not a drama so long as you don’t keep doing it. If you did it once. It’s not a problem. As long as you allow the recovery for the plants to come back in and recover the system. It’s no different with us. You know, as a as a human, we might push ourselves too hard at some point. But so long as you give yourself a chance to recover, you’ll be fine. But if you keep doing that day after day, you’ll eventually something will come and attack you and probably kill.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:05:01] But when we come to grazing as an example, I mean, for most farms, I think what they call is set stocking where they just leave cattle out in a big paddock for, you know, the whole time. Is that is that pretty typical of how a lot of people graze their property?

Stuart Andrews [01:05:18] Yeah, I’d certainly yeah, it’s changing. I mean the the good work that that the likes of Osseous and holistic management people of the education systems have been educating people on how to manage their grazing life. They’ve had a good impact, but it’s still only tiny, I think. Probably be lucky if they’ve impacted or changed any more than 5 to 6% of the farming world to to graze differently. There’s other people out there that may not necessarily do a course, but they see someone doing something differently and they give it a go. They don’t really know why and maybe they don’t get it exactly right, but they’re doing things differently predominantly. Most people are what you would put into the basket of said stocking. Yeah, it’s it’s look, it’s a much easier way. But Don, don’t look at that and say well you’re a set stock. I say you’re no good because that’s not necessarily the case because you can have people that are very good managers that set stock. So even though they probably are overgrazing certain plots in their system, they’re mindful of that. And so they get their stocking right to a point where it works. Now, are they as functional as they could be? No. No, they’re not. But they’ve got a system that’s probably working and probably not degrading the landscape to a massive, massive point. And the other thing is, too, is that there are there are what are they like? The the the landscape has an armour. And I want your listeners to think about this. If we have our animals out there and or flowers or whatever it is, and we keep denuding the plants, let’s say in this case it’s grass. We keep denuding the grass because our animals keep coming back and grazing that same plant all the time. What do you think nature would do? So what nature does is it puts a plant up. With prickles. So it puts a plant up with prickles so the animal can’t graze that area anymore. And and you can determine straight away how well or how badly a landscape has been managed by how big the prickles are on the plants, you know. So a landscape, if it keeps getting pounded all the time, it keeps growing plants with bigger and bigger and bigger prickles. So eventually you can’t have any animals or nature throws out plants that are toxic. So it kills the animals. So if they don’t hate that, then it will put a blob there that’s poisonous. That’ll kill it. Nature will always win. Or At some.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:08:05] Point. Well, this is this raises the whole issue about the intelligence, in inverted commas, of plants and how they respond to their environmental threats. But that that’s that’s another story. I there was another thing that we talked about with Fred Provenza. You know, he talked about the intelligence of animals and how they choose the plants that they they they select. You know, this is kind of an intelligence in plants and intelligence in animals. We’ve got just so much to learn from from. You’ve drawn that that in in so much of what you’ve said about we we are so much connected people and plants and animals and land it’s all pretty much the same system, isn’t it?

Stuart Andrews [01:08:55] Yeah. It’s another thing I say to people as one species on this planet, that is what’s the most stupid species on this planet? And everybody goes, Humans. I said, You’re damn right there’s not there’s not an animal out there that is more stupid than humans. And I don’t say that lightly. Humans got to put themselves up on this high pedestal that we’re supposed to be some higher thinking being. But in actual fact, we’re not. Because being that high thinking, being we being we remove ourselves from the one thing that we need for our survival. That’s our landscape and that’s nature. The animal never removes itself from nature. And so it is instinctively doing what nature tells it to do. So it instinctively eats a plant because its body is telling it. It needs to eat that plant. Humans, no frickin clue. We load ourselves up with sugar and all of these carbohydrates and so forth, which which eliminates our ability of our body to say what it craves, what it needs. Because the thing it craves is that simple product sugar or, you know, some sort of carbohydrate. An animal doesn’t have that. So if it’s low in copper. It ain’t Paterson’s curse. Now the farmer kills a Paterson’s curse because he’s told by the the local government authorities that that will take over his landscape and he will make no money. The animal chooses it as its like its health food store. So it doesn’t live on it, but it goes there for its health. So it uses the Patterson’s curse or Salvation Jane, for its copper. And then it goes over here and it eats a bit of mustard weed for its sulphur and then, you know, just keeps going around the chooses all of these plants. The only thing that gets in the way of the animal doing that are the stupid two legged things that control the fence, that locks the animal in there without having access to those plants.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:10:55] Yeah. Well, Fred was showing in his research that if you put in a feedlot a whole lot of food in one pot, the animal will, of course, eat that whole pot. But if you separate it out, the plants, the animal will selectively choose the plants that it needs and actually consume less.

Stuart Andrews [01:11:13] Yeah. Look, I have people come to us all the time. They say, look, what about these bloody lantana? It kills my cattle. I said, No, you killed your cattle, not the lantana. I said, What you did was you limited the ability of that animal to get the nutrients it required, and so it would have become deficient to the point where it gorged itself on Lantana to try and gain that fertility that it was lacking or that nutrient that it was lacking. And as a result, it poisoned itself. It was never the animal.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:11:46] Which comes back to Charlie Massey and Alan Savoury biodiversity and your let all plants grow consent really isn’t it?

Stuart Andrews [01:11:55] It is. But I mean even within that, you know, those guys are, you know, great, great people in their field. But a lot of the people in grazing focus on grass. Even Graham I tip Graham a couple of years ago because he you know in the KLR marketing course they talk about grass grow having grass money in the bank or livestock right. So. And and I said, but by you using the terminology grass, you you automatically subconsciously get all of the people doing your course thinking that the thing they want is grass, where if you talk about it as plants, then we don’t start to say, well, we only want. That one grass. And same with, you know, with the grazing guys, because they know that the their listeners are wanting grass wool. I think they want grass, but they bloody animals don’t their animals want diversity. Interestingly enough, I heard the other day Christine Jones was doing a you know, who Christine Jones is. She was doing this.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:13:07] Legend on soils.

Stuart Andrews [01:13:08] Yes. So she was doing a talk over in the States with a guy by the name of John Kemp who who does a podcast as well. He’s a great agronomist, but he’s an agronomist for people doing things differently. Anyway, they were going on understanding what she was talking about was the fact that the prairies in America, these grass prairies weren’t friggin grass. It’s the same is Australia was not dominated by grass. It was dominated by her basis. Plants, herbs. That’s what our animals thrive on are these herbs, and the herbs are the ones that build the soil, not the grass. The grass supports it. But what we do is we, we put our plants when we go through talking about let all plants grow, we have these three areas. We have plants that we call accumulators. We have plants that we call exploiters and we have plants that we call balances. Now, I did this at the last call, a bit cheeky. I said, What are you where do you think you guys fit? And they went accumulators. Yeah, that’s right. So you’re the accumulators. So I said, where do the politicians fit? All they had the exploiters. Damn straight. That’s exactly right. That’s how the system works. You guys are building it. And they exploit it. Yeah. So it’s no different with the plants. We need these plants as accumulators to build fertility so that you can grow the exploiters, which are the grasses. So we need the all of these plants are critical to make the system work. It’s like having a you know, you have a football team with no captain. You just got, you know, 15 guys running around the field with no frickin clue what they’re supposed to be doing. But there’s one guy who’s supposed to be the leader, leads the team around, but they work as a unit. These plants all work as a unit. As soon as we go, well, we’re just going to have these ones. We’re just going to have the exploiters. Our system falls apart because they exploit all the fertility and then they disappear. Guess where you end up? Back at the accumulators and the whole system starts again. So, you know, we we look at how do these plants fit into the system. We need to have the accumulators to rebuild the system for the exploiters. And if we go too far, we push the fertility too far. We have the balances which balance the system and they pump more carbon into the ground and extract the excess fertility out. And then it can move back to the exploiters again. And so this this is to ING and froing all the time, depending on where and how that landscape is being managed, it’s managing it with all of these different plots. And so it’s it’s critical that we have these herb oasis type plants in the system because they’re enabling these guys to sit in the middle. And, you know, sometimes frustrating sometimes It always frustrates me when everyone talks about grass because, yes, I know that’s what everyone wants. But for us, we’re not about telling you what you want. We’re telling you what you need. This is what you need. You need all of this spectrum of plants so that you can get a system that works. Your animals want it. Just go and put your animals in a paddock and spend ten minutes. Sit on the bike. Turn it off. Just wait. What’s your animals and see what they do? And what your animals will do is they’ll run round and graze all of the plants that they didn’t have in the last panic. If the last paddock was all grass in the next paddock, they’ll eat all your weeds because that’s what they need and they will absolutely devour them because they’re lacking because the last paddock didn’t have enough of them. So it was really interesting hearing these these guys espousing how biodiversity all plants are critical component. It’s I p I dad he’s been going on about this for 40 years banging on about it for 40 years. You need to have all these plants because they’re the builders of the system. Why are we and here we are 40 years later, finally it’s becoming more spoken about in a rather than just talking about what we want to hear, we’re talking about what we need to hear, the information that’s really critical for for our survival. Yeah. Anyway.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:17:37] Well, Stuart, that’s a great note for us to finish on and reminding us that enabling nature, reading, nature, respecting nature is a far more sustainable way to go than trying to dominate it. Thank you so much for joining us today. We’ll have links to your site, to your forage farm for those that are very local to you, but as a way of replicating it rather than scaling it up. Thank you for your inspiration and knowledge today.

Stuart Andrews [01:18:03] Good on you. Thank you very much, Ron. Been great.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:18:05] Replication versus scale. I mean, Stewart acknowledges that what he’s doing is great for the landscape, producing great food, good quality food. And actually, when the health and environmental costs are built in to food, we realise that our seeming seemingly cheap food is actually not that cheap at all. We’ve got to be playing the long game here and that long game is life. So replicating what what Peter’s been teaching and Stuart has been teaching and what Stuart is now practising is really the key rather than just scaling up into mega agricultural programs and also local versus global. I mean, Peter Stewart makes the point that if you can’t drive to a farm, then you probably shouldn’t be buying the food from that farm. And I think this is all about local versus global. And there we are back with five cycles. We’ve got five stress levels, five pillars. Charlie Massey’s got the five cycles of of regenerative agriculture. And here Peter Andrews and Stuart Andrews have the five cycles of natural sequence farming. I guess it’s got something to do with the fact we’ve only got five fingers on each hand. I mean, their mission is to build a resilient landscape by educating landholders, organisations and governments on natural sequence farming. And their vision is to lead the world in understanding how landscapes function while empowering people to restore them, to be more resilient, productive and healthy. Not just be healthy themselves, not just the land that they they they manage, but to produce healthy food and healthy people. I mean, that is just a win win, win, lose perhaps for the chemical industry and lose for the pharmaceutical industry. But as far as I can gather, there are an awful lot of winners in that and they are the farmers and producers of food and they are the people that consume it. You and me, we need to be engaged and from soil to plate support a local farmer. So I hope you enjoyed that episode. I hope this finds you well. Until next time. This is Dr. Ron will be well. This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. This content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.