Your reflections on what you've heard there, you know, what do you think about the title of the Oxford Farming Conference report, Grasping the Opportunities? What does it make you think of? And what do Louise's responses make you think of?

Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly interesting.

I'm always slightly perverse in these things.

I mean, when I started out, I was a younger brother, so I had no farm.

And the great opportunity I hoped for was that everybody else would go bust and the price of land would crash, but I would have an opportunity.

So churning an industry is itself an opportunity.

So So defining opportunity is an interesting thing in itself in as much as most of the time we define it as the maintenance of opportunity for the status quo rather than that churn.

Andy, to what extent do you think farmers feel able to focus on all of these or is it is it is that just too much and you know focusing on one two or three is all they can manage what what's your experience

yeah, thank you.

So, yeah, my name's Andy Gray and I work with Central Otway Landcare Network and have done for 13 years.

Prior to that, I have a business in Anglesea.

It's an environmental education business.

So there are people that now work there and I work as a full-time land care facilitator, which has given me a bit of a background in, I guess, the conservation part of land management.

But since working in land care, I've then spent 13 years trying to understand the agronomy side or I've studied a bit of agroecology to try and catch up on what's happening in the paddock and combining those things.

The project in our area, like we mentioned before, came about because of those observations and seeing there were generics, farm planning and property planning programs, but they weren't necessarily hitting smaller landholders who might be wanting to do a little flower farm or running some horses or something like that.

Yeah, I think that the flexibility of the program was kind of it, really.

Why is that?

So the purpose of a living mulch is to feed my soils all through the year in the sort of full regen type of way of thinking, where that soil biology has got this continuous flow of sugars and, uh, and other food into it, which maintains my soil biology.

The problem with maize is that, of course, uh, you have bare soils in the spring when you establish it, which make them highly vulnerable to being washed away in thunderstorms, and also that soil biology is continuing to burn its way through the carbon in your soil and actually ultimately damage your soil structure through, uh, breaking down the bonds which hold all those particulates together.

How long have you been trying out this method?

So we were lucky to have innovative farmers give us a field lab from about, uh, four years ago, five years ago.

And the joy with this sort of thing is that it gives us the opportunity to collaborate with scientists and at the same time just give things a go and see if they work.

And it, funnily enough, it didn't work.

The clover basically smothered the maize because we didn't destroy wide enough strips of the clover when we established the maize.