Ep.45 Silas Hedley-Lawrence “thing with regenerative is, some people get so triggered by that word”

Yeah, and I guess I've been in this world of thinking about how does nature and natural ecosystem processes, like how do they really function on farm? When I say that, we're talking about things like our carbon cycle, water cycle, mineral cycle, and all this kind of thing.

And basically how on your farm do these different layers of your farm such as me, the human being, infrastructure, but then the livestock and the plants and our pasture and the wildlife and the ecology and the ecosystem and obviously the soil, how do we get as much kind of synergy between those things as possible? Essentially look at them as one single organism.

And if we get the management right...

It all kind of clicks.

If my decisions as a human being and how I use infrastructure like mobile fencing and mobile water, if I set that up in a way that's designed to optimize the grazing of our livestock to really get the most out of the plants in our pasture, then those plants are thriving and healthy.

Lovely big plants, big deep root systems that plants that aren't stressed out.

you know, again, which proliferates that diversity because they're not overgrazing.

And then essentially the plug from the sun to our soil and that plug is the plant, right? basically a big solar panel, that is as effective as it can be.

And then the more energy we can get pumping through that system with that optimal grazing management, it all bounces back up.

The plants are driving energy into the soil, feeding that biology and all that microbiology, all the living things underground.

They're like our courier delivery drivers.

They're moving all the nutrition and all the water underground to the plants where they need it.

And the more that biology we have and the more we lift that mineral cycle, then our pasture performs better.

It's more nutritious and again, more diversity as well.

And obviously our cows are grazing that.

So our growth rates are high.

Vet and med is super low because they've got all the micronutrition they need because we've got that strong plug between sun and soil through the plant and all of that benefit of the energy, the carbon, the minerals, it is pumping and flowing through those different layers.

So...

That's kind of how I designed my systems where how that actually looks on the ground practically, like how do you graze cows and where are they and how much space and how long for and how much of the grass we're going to graze and how much we're going to leave behind, all these different variables.

That looks very different across the year.

But when we can try and get that right and get that synergy... actually doesn't take much time and management for me all i've got to do is as i say i spend maybe one day a week setting up a bit of mobile fencing picking up what i've used and setting new fences out for the next couple of weeks ahead and all i've got to do is check them lift up a fence maybe remove a water trough so across the two herds it's maybe an hour at each farm maximum a day on average and then You know, as I said, the cows, the pasture, the soil, ecosystem.

The pasture itself.

Exactly.

So with that in mind, I mean, how has this summer's weather events affected you across the pasture? You're in the Cotswolds, right? So as far as I know, this year, not blessed with much rainfall at all.

So what impact has it had?