Gabe Brown

I don't know that you understand the deep honor it is to get to interview you today.

I called Gabe Brown probably, oh man, it's been a decade ago now, and I was broke.

Our conventional model wasn't working.

I just changed my lifestyle and health and therefore was able to go off medication for the first time in eight years.

And I know we haven't had agri-carbon baseline done yet, but in the top layer, we know we're definitely increasing carbon stocks on our farm.

So one of the things for me personally, when I started looking into the Regen stuff and I sort of read some of the books, you know, that were available, I remember reading Gabe Brown, Dirt to Soil.

And one of the things he talks about is the 200 year plan.

And I'm a little bit obsessed with succession.

I think a lot of the time we will look at, well, what will benefit yield, but we can also think about what benefits nutrition from whatever comes out of or is in the ground.

And anybody that's familiar with the work of Gabe Brown and Dirt to Soil will know that all of those elements go into this overall system that leads to better food production, production, uh, and, and yeah, better farming.

I don't know if you caught, uh, there was a study came out in, in August there by Tom Crowder and some of his colleagues, so they've been doing some work in the States looking at the effect of having natural vegetation around fields in different parts of the United States, and a very strong finding coming out there that that natural vegetation around the field is actually a really significant predictor of yield variation alone within the field system itself.

So we have to do all of these component pieces to get the overall right answer for the system.

I'm growing food that I wouldn't want to eat because of the chemical content in it." And it just seemed that everything we were trying to do was again- working against nature, the weather, everything we were doing really.

And so I came across Gabe Brown's book Dirt to Soil, which I think quite a lot of people- Do, and it, that was my light bulb moment, really, of working out how actually I go about changing the system and the way I was running the farm.

Um, and then I think I sent Gabe an email, and he replied literally the same evening, so that was a shock.

And I thought, wow, if somebody can be as interested in that, in somebody else halfway around the other side of the world and how they're farming a little farm, then that must be quite the good gang to be involved with really.

Oh

... you can't get it in this country at all.

I think I asked Gabe Brown about it, and he told me something very simple as to the reason why not and I should work that out.

I think it's to do with climate.