first took you down the holistic farming natural capital path michael

yeah i suppose it was probably a culmination of i left uni in the early 2000s and went back into our farm on the riverina in the millennium drought and just knew that things weren't working you know we were feeding a lot of livestock watching our resource degrade in front of us and we weren't really making a lot of money so i started looking for different ways to do things and then in 2010 i stumbled across the holistic management So that's probably what led me to it.

And then when I started investigating that, probably being a pretty big sceptic of it all the time, it started to sit really well with me and the people I saw doing it were doing really well.

You sold your grain silos to fund putting in more water and a lot of soil testing?

Yeah, it was a fair bit of that.

Yeah, we undertook a soil carbon project probably later on in some ways.

That was about four years ago now.

But yeah, we're hungry for a lot of knowledge.

How did you get into it in the first place? Were you a conventional farmer back in

the day? Yeah, yeah, very much so.

So I'm, you know, fourth generation on that.

The property that we're actually running is like my parents bought it in 1988 as an expansion of a bigger family business.

And I sort of...

You know, I had an extremely privileged upbringing growing up, you know, on a farm in the Riverina.

And, you know, it was a pretty prosperous time in the late 80s with the wool boom and whatever.

Sorry, how much is going to...

why does it have to be so divisive? There's got to be a way where it doesn't have to be that way.

Well, it's a really, I mean, water's really complicated in a lot of ways, and we've got some genuine first-hand experience of it.

Being an irrigation farmer, we've got a mid-Murrumbidgee general security allocation, and that's really how we manage that and how that, operates now compared to 20, 30 years ago.

It's completely different.

So now, like we're really under some pressure to, a lot of the time it's not economical for us to use the water like we used to.

So we used to irrigate pastures, you know, grass-based pastures, and they're reasonably productive.

And traditionally that would have been quite a common practice in the MIA or, you know, along the rivers.

What value do you see in having a week like

But in terms of how Farmers Helping Farmers will work, there is growing support for you guys to do this? Very much so.

Yeah, no, we've...

Yeah, we've got support.

We've got some funding partners that are really helping us promote this, which was really lovely that that sort of approach came to us after we weren't really going out cap in hand as such to say, look, we need some money, but some approaches.

So MacDoc have been really generous to help support us.

not only with the launch, but then also going forward as well.

They can see the benefit in there.

Where can you see us going?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, a little bit like that.

Like, obviously, geographically, there was a lot of members in the Riverina.

And so, yeah, when I sort of became a member, there was – it is still pretty strong, but there was a pretty strong cohort sort of, yeah, in the Riverina area.

So – and you'd often have local days up this way, so that was really great to be able to be engaged.

And a lot of things, like I'd been involved on some other previous boards over the years.

And it's something that, you know, personally I hold quite highly in terms of volunteering roles like that.

And so, like, yeah, what's the impact? What's the secret? And, like, what's in store for the future, perhaps?

What sort of tools are you using to manage that grass?

Well, I suppose first off on the seedstock part of it is our sort of rule of thumb is we, between 60 and 70% of our carrying capacity, we have as seedstock bus- uh, as our seedstock animals.

Uh, that's including their followers, obviously, 'cause the followers in a seedstock business are, are, are worth a lot to you.

We tend to sell most of our bulls as yearlings, so that sort of helps in some ways.

Although from a pure pasture budgeting perspective, you know, ideally we're selling most of them at 14, 15 months of age in that second spring, which is often when you don't necessarily want to be selling.

From a pasture management perspective, you might have 50 animals going, but You don't really need them going off for the pasture budget, but we often trade them, swap them back out with a trade animal.

That trade animal may well be a heifer that we join with some of our own genetics and sell them on again, but it's still, still matching your stocking rate to carrying capacity, but you're doing that, yeah, as a trade at that time of year.

Yeah.

Can you give us a little bit of the history of what you've done and why you've introduced the collars?

Yeah, thanks, Bec.

Yeah, so I suppose we operate on a lot smaller scale to Graham.

So our property's 400 hectares, and we lease a little bit more.

And it was traditionally a copping block, so we didn't have a lot of fences in.

And when we got into the cell grazing, I'd first seen the KiwiTech fencing in the early 2000s in New Zealand.

And so we jumped in and started using the temporary electric fencing.

I don't know anything about collars at all.