So, first up I'll call Darren Doherty from Regrarians to introduce us to the plan and
his visions for Savannah Farm.
Welcome, mate.
Well, welcome, everybody, and it's great to be on this main reach.
I'd like you to all hold up your hand, not as some sort of form of black power, salute
or anything.
You're all carrying with you a landscape, as my friend Brock Doleman calls it, a handscape.
And we're right on top of what P.A.
Yeomans, the founder of Keyline, called the main ridge, right along here.
And off that main ridge are a whole series of corrugations, just as would happen off
many of your roofs.
You've got a ridge along the top of your roof, and then you've got a whole series of corrugations,
which go on either side, off that roof.
They're called primary valleys and primary ridges, and the one goes to the other, to
the other, to the other.
The smallest of the landforms on your handscape are the primary valleys.
And how nature has it on these foothills landscapes is that most of the water that sheds off these
landscapes goes from the largest landforms to this, and concentrates in the smallest
landforms.
And as my Spanish students once said, votas de la cresta.
Stand up for the rights of the ridges, because what we have here is a situation where we're
shedding all of the water off these landscapes to the smallest components on their constant
call back to the sea.
And that sea is the soup that takes in liquid, all of the minerals that go with that.
And that's what I'd like you to just think about today.
We're right at the start of the main ridge here.
And there's a lot of things in our planning that will come from that.
Now I'm a farm planner.
I've been so since I was a little boy, I grew up on a property outside of Bendigo, which
was in our family from the 1850s.
And our property was developed by my grandfather using P.A. Yeoman's key line system.
So I grew up with that system, moving water around and managing all of that as a child.
And I can remember doing my first farm plan when I was about seven, I redesigned our
own farm.
I wish I could find it because I can still remember it.
So I've designed a few thousand farms now.
And I'm always designing every farm I drive by.
As my wife, Lisa, who's here, and I should acknowledge her this morning, because it's
a...
Regrarians is our daughter Isabella, who's here filming, and my wife, Lisa Heenan.
And myself, when we drive, or when I'm behind the seat, it's not a safe place to be in that
car, evidently.
Because...
And she said that she got into a car with Costa once, and he's the same.
He's worse.
Now, when I come to landscapes like this, if you'll excuse my expression, this is like
a key line wet dream.
It's you come here, and these landscapes are just screaming out for the patterns that P.A.
Omans was the first person to envisage, where water, when a raindrop hits this surface,
that we can actually bring it under control and do it such that the farmer can be under
control as well.
And when we come to what Phil and Michelle are trying to achieve here, and what Joel
has achieved through his life with his family, these are people who are in control as much
as they can be.
And with so much of what we are doing in agriculture, we're spinning out of control.
We don't have that control that we once did, because terms of trade are not in our control.
We're dealing with futures exchanges.
We're dealing with manipulation of markets, which are well outside of our control.
We're also dealing with bureaucracies and regulations that also diminish our capacity
for control.
And I'll just give you some little figures here to segue into that with regards to water.
On this particular property, I'll quit it this way.
If one millimetre of rainfall on every square metre of ground, that equals one litre, right?
It's much easier for us to work that out than you are imperial gents.
It's quite shameful of the Americans that they haven't paid homage to the French and
their metric system when they paid for the revolution.
Sorry, Joel.
That's great.
So, if we've got 232 hectares of this block of Savannah Farm, then that equals, and this
is where you have to turn your iPhone sideways, right, because the numbers are really big,
we've got 1 billion, 160 million litres of water.
So 1.16 billion litres of water are falling on this 232 hectare block in a calendar year
with a 500 millimetre rainfall of year, right?
1.16 billion litres.
It's sort of an unfathomable amount of water, so that's 500 litres of water for every square
metre.
And this is what I find quite bizarre, that if I was to have a 500 litre tank of water
and I had a drip irrigation system out of that, do you think this landscape would be
green all year round and perennial all year round?
Oh, goodness, it would be.
So our loss of carbon out of these soils has really been telling, because every unit of
carbon that you have in the soil is about 4 to 8 units of water that's held, because
carbon is a sponge.
So we don't lack for water.
We want to build as part of this system, as part of the design, which is that I came up
with, well, I won't say I came up with filler, Michelle, particularly filler myself, spent
a couple of days here on the dining room table scratching this thing out.
And the water design, we went over quite a bit.
We came up with these figures and we're sort of, I do it all the time, but it's still,
the numbers just boggle me that they're so big.
And all we want to do with this property is build two dams, which will total about 8 million
litres.
Right, that's, again, try to work that out, it's 0.006% of the sum amount of water that
falls on this property, right?
It's nothing.
It's insignificant.
It's a landscape that is bereft of this sort of technology to harvest water.
I think we've got a few puddles that are out there that apparently are going to be required
to be destroyed in order for us to have our appropriate, what I would call our appropriate
development.
I'm not holding back here, because it really, I just think it's bizarre that development
and people choosing to take control are not possible.
It's really tough.
When I had, I'll just give you a quick go back for a moment, our process, our regrarian
platform that I developed a couple of years ago is based on P.A. Yeoman's Keyline Scale
of Permanence, which he developed in 1958 and outlined in his great book, The Challenge
of Landscape, the practice of, the development and practice of Keyline.
He wrote that in 1958.
And I looked at that whole scale of permanence as being quite amazing.
And then I took it and remodeled it to include people in it and to include economics.
So our regrarian's platform starts at climate.
And climate is the thing that when you come to a landscape, that's really what defines
it.
We define whenever we meet each other, the first thing we ask is, how's the weather?
How much rain do you get?
When do you get rain?
You know, so climate really defines the agricultural systems or production systems that we have.
But I also think it's the human climate, which is really telling here.
So when we take, when we look at the climate itself, but the biospheric climate being difficult
to change, I think that the human climate is even more difficult to change, right?
So these are, these two elements at the top of the platform are the most difficult things
to change.
And for us to change the geography, we have to use those big yellow machines a lot.
That takes an enormous amount of energy.
So then we come to water.
And so there's a fixed amount of water relatively in a landscape that relates between the topography
of a landscape and the climate.
So how much rain falls and where it falls and where it concentrates and flows.
How much carbon you've got in your soils, all of those things.
And then what are the things that we can do to remedy that so that we can practice perennial
agriculture hopefully.
And then we come to access.
Where does access fit into a whole landscape?
Because you need to get around.
How can we do that in a way that's not diminishing and degrading our landscape?
Because roads tend to, if they're put in the wrong place, do that.
They drain landscapes, they erode landscapes, etc.
So we've come up with ways, as others have, to get around that.
Then we look at forestry.
These guys, their ancestors came up with the term savanna for this farm.
I love savannas.
I think all of these broadacre, silvopastoral landscapes should be just that.
They should be savannas, silvopastures.
So when I look at any agricultural landscape, the overriding landscape position and default
position is a forest.
It's just a matter of what density of forest.
And then when we're looking at development, are we putting in different forestry systems?
Are we putting in orchards?
Are we putting in shelter belts?
Are we putting in wide space systems?
Are we putting in alley farming?
There's lots of different ways that we can assemble forests, be they ones that mimic
nature ultimately or ones that are artificial.
And then we look at buildings, because buildings don't last as long as forests.
And it was William McDonough, a famous ecological architect who said, if humans are so smart,
why did it take us 5,000 years to put wheels on luggage?
Right?
Well, I'd ask the question, if it goes beyond that, if we're so smart, why did it take us
even longer to put buildings on wheels?
Why have we got stuck in this place where the generative infrastructure is what we invest
more in than anything else?
Such that a lot of agricultural systems put most of their capital expenditure into the
construction of very, very high cost buildings, which are ultimately degenerative.
So, and Joel here is an example of a person who's come up with an enormous amount of innovation
about putting pretty well everything on wheels.
I think his house is almost on wheels.
You know, it's incredible.
Then we go from buildings and then we go to fencing, all of the different fencing systems
that we have.
There are so many now.
And as we'll talk about today with the Kiwi Tech Fencing, Dan, thank you, Dan, for bringing
some truck net or, as I call it, some from Chicken Caravan out here, that electric net
fencing, I mean, these fencing systems allow for us to be able to manage what are migratory
animals in a migratory pattern on our sedentary landscapes.
I mean, these agricultural systems are not natural systems.
What we have to do, if we're going to make them regenerative, is mimic natural systems
and the technologies that we have available to us now allow us to do that, whether it's
plastic pipe and the ultimate flexibility you get from that and reticulation using gravity
to these electric fencing systems to wheels being put on buildings.
All of these things allow us to practice some sort of biomimicry.
And then next from that is after we look at fencing is soil.
Now, a lot of you here will have in your lifetime witnessed the appearance of rocks on your properties
or on your neighbour's properties.
So I remember very well, I was in Mexico years ago with a peasant farmer, a campesino, and
he said to me, when I was a child, there weren't so many rocks, where have all the rocks come
from?
And I put back to him, where's all of your soil gone?
He's lost altitude, and it's got rockier.
That's what's happening.
We're starting to wear down the landscape, so we're getting down to the skeleton.
And there ain't that much here, and when we get to really old landscapes like Australia
where the skeleton was pretty close to the soil surface, we've got to be really careful.
Soils diminish very quickly in their fertility, but they can fortunately, using all of these
wonderful techniques that so many people have been able to develop over the particularly
last half century, we can develop them very, very quickly, so that's there.
Now we come to the elements that are outside of a bit of Yeoman's scale of permanence,
and that is the element of marketing.
You can't be green and in the red.
If we're going to have profitable and regenerative agricultural systems, they've got to be profitable.
People have got to be able to turn up to work feeling like they're valued.
Now there's a lot that goes around that, of course, but we need to be able to have marketing
systems that are free in their market.
We've got to have free markets, I've actually got to mean free markets, and that means getting
a bit more control, and it'd be great if our regulators actually supported the common person
in that instead of supporting, as it would appear, the really minute number of people
who control our terms of trade, they get a lot of support.
The common person doesn't, and I find that abysmal at the least.
Then we get to energy.
Now energy is increasingly expensive.
We're in an era where we've reached the top of the fossil fuel mountain, so we're never
going to get to a point where energy is going to decline in its cost relative to the prices
that we get.
In a few years' time, oil will stabilise at prices which will make some of the agricultural
production systems that we currently use completely unfeasible.
You either get on board with that and start to strategically act now, or you suffer.
It's as simple as that.
When we talk about energy, the most important thing that I like to think about is how can
we extend the gift that science has still not been able to crack, the gift of photosynthesis?
How can we extend that over the longest period?
That's what our annual-based systems don't do.
We only get green while we have moisture coming out of the sky.
That's it.
As soon as that's done, the green's gone.
More perennial-based systems which are carbon-rich in soils tend to stay green for longer.
We have a lot of plants in this country.
Australia is enormously gifted with both summer active and winter active perennial grasses
which will be green all year round even though it's not raining.
They're the sorts of systems that we want to see.
We also want to see all of the tree crop systems joined in and all of the rest of it.
I went through that process over a day or two with Phil and Michelle a couple of years
ago.
I think it was last year, it seems so, was it last year?
Yeah, crocky.
It seems like it was a long time ago.
I got a very good sense of the whole process that they want to put this property through
both for what they do they want to be intergenerational?
Absolutely.
Bloody lootily.
Right?
That's the climate of this property.
What we want to be a regenerative agriculture is a regeneration of agricultural people.
So we want to have a continuation of lallies on this property.
We also want to have a landscape, the geography of this property and its interaction with
all of the humans whether it's in concentrations of populations like Clare and all the way
down through to Adelaide and everything in between.
We're going to interact with all of those people within our geography as well as change
the geography here somewhat.
With water, the first thing that Phil said to me when I asked him about water, I said
what do you want to achieve with water?
The first thing he said to me, I want to get off that pipe.
I want to get off the grid.
Now people talk about getting off the grid with power systems.
What about getting off the grid with water systems?
I often talk about this property and the idiocy.
It's a gift that we've got a pipe, right?
Let's not get around that and it's been, it's an enabler.
But don't you think it's kind of crazy that the Murray River where it gets pumped from
is probably a 20 metres above sea level and we're at about 500 metres above sea level?
Now someone who designs irrigation systems and any of you would know to pump 500 odd
metres in static head even just from here to here over a short distance, that would
need an enormous amount of power, right?
And it would need an enormous pipe, right, to be able to do that.
How long can we keep going with that?
Are we going to be able to assist with these degenerative infrastructural systems and their
maintenance when all we have to do is just capture a little bit of the water that comes
on our property by a rainfall, harvest it, harbour it for some time and then reticulate
it through a couple of inches of best use of fossil sunlight, plastic pipe, right?
That's all we have to do here.
So, you know, I find it quite unreal that we're somewhat constrained in our ability
to do that via regulations, etc.
So that's something I think that needs to be an ongoing discussion and one thing that
regulators are going to have to take a pretty strategic view about if they're really serious
about the energy issues and the cost of, you know, the ongoing costs of maintaining degenerative
infrastructure well into the future.
It's just not possible.
It's bizarre.
Right.
So, these are the things that we went through.
We went through about access, you know, a property that needs to have daily moves or
frequent moves or interactions with animals needs good access.
So this template shows you the template for where that access is going.
It's basically going along the convex landforms, the ridges.
So if you look at the plan there, this plan was relatively easy.
That's why I said it was a keyloin wet dream.
It took no time at all.
All I had to do was I just drew lines on the ridges.
That was where I started, right?
That divided up the landscape.
That showed me where the access lanes were going to go.
That then, those access lanes are now the conduits for the water reticulation.
So we've got a two-inch ring made.
So we're going to put a dam over there, a dam over there, which will harvest the water
off this roof.
We'll have a road which runs around the edge of this roof that's our gutter.
It will divert the water into these two ponds off this ridge.
That water will then be pumped up to the highest point on the property where we'll have a 200
odd thousand litre tank.
That will provide the gravity of water that will be able to reticulate down through this
ridge-based system via a network of a ring of two-inch pipe, off which will come with
a two-inch and a half pipe, not all poly pipe.
At every 50 metres along that pipe, there'll be a plug-in, a bayonet fitting, so you can
access water at any point every 50 metres.
Plug and play.
Can't be simpler.
All right?
All under pressure.
So we'll be able to shrink and swell our grazing cells according to the yields that we have.
How many sheep we have, how many cattle we might have, how many chickens we might have,
how much grass there is today, how many animals we can we feed off that square metre per day,
you know, all of that sting.
So we're allowing ourselves by this to have an extremely flexible grazing system, all
with gravity-based water supply of the water that hasn't been pumped up here using enormous
energy, the water that's fallen out of the sky and just trickled in.
The other thing that we've done is that whole layout now becomes our fencing layout, right?
You guys have just learnt how easy my job is when you come to properties like this.
It's very, very easy, and that's the great gift of P.A. Yeoman's Keyline System was
that his first, sorry, his third book was called Water for Every Farm, and he made the
claim, and I think it's pretty true, that once you learn the Keyline System, any farmer
can design and operate their own farm, because I believe everybody should be a designer,
and with the tools that Costa alluded to today and all of the great mapping that we have
everywhere these days, and a little bit of education, everybody should be able to design
their own farm so that it marches it forward and that it can have a much more regenerative
future.
I think I've probably taken up enough time, and you probably want to listen to a bloke
from Virginia instead of me, so take a good look at the plan that I've got, and you'll
see, now that I've sort of unraveled some of the illogic to some of you perhaps, the
logic to it, you'll see that we are putting trees through this landscape and all of that,
so we are returning the savanna, we're going to have water reticulation, and we're going
to have a lot of flexibility in terms of options into the future.
We're not cutting off our hand to spot our face, and we're not putting all of our eggs
into one basket, so I think it's a pretty solid plan for this wonderful couple's future,
and I really like to acknowledge Michelle and Phil for the leadership that they've displayed,
and really enjoy seeing this manifested in this wonderful event with all of you lovely
people today, so thank you very much.
