Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  Our ‘new’ house was 6 kilometres up the road from my childhood farm, which was starting to flush with new growth and where lambs were arriving, without me there to check them. I kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead. What a symbolic day for new beginnings, I told myself, but as I stood looking at the paddocks I’d just blindly bought, I wondered where to start. The house, thanks to a bunch of friends and my good ol’ Uncle Colin, was about to undergo a revamp. It wasn’t long before it was having its mottled brown carpet pulled up and the pink and yellow walls were enjoying a whitewash from kind friends. The life-battered dwelling was more than a little tired, and mirrored the land surrounding it. The 20 acres we found ourselves on so unexpectedly was suffering from corby grub attack on the overgrazed hillsides, ferns were running rampant over bare sandy soils in some sections, and on the creek flats there was an area that had been cropped for potatoes that lay barren, compacted and bare. Steeper banks seemed only to grow wattles. I had no money for fencing, livestock, improvement to the stock water systems, re-sowing pastures or machinery. Heck, I didn’t even know if I could pay a mortgage! All I had were two horses, a pony and faith that, with time, all would be well.

  First, I focused on the beauty of the land. The treed hillsides, the preciousness of a lone daffodil in the paddock and the bird song of mountains. The cheeky currawongs, strutting in their glossy black suits, and tiny blue wrens showing off to their taupe girlfriends. I didn’t know it at the time, but that pleasant orchestra of nature would later be shattered by the sounds that drifted up from a valley that was cluttered with neighbours. If there weren’t gunshots at two in the morning, or creepy local married men knocking on my door for no apparent reason, there was the daily screech of some banshee in the distance roaring expletives at her kids from over yonder.

  Where had I landed?

  Steeled with the knowledge that thanks to Colin Seis I had all the tools and the willpower to keep going as a woman who could find her compass on this land, I vowed I would leave the property in a better state than I found it. I began to foster the notion within myself that I, like the land, deserved nurturing and care. If I could bring the land alive, I could somehow heal myself along with it.

  Along with Colin Seis’ wisdom, I’d been studying YouTube clips about restoring grassland using grazing animals as described by South African-born ecologist and farmer Allan Savory. I had also been to several lectures by Col’s mate, holistic farm manage­ment expert Graeme Hand, who had been trained by Savory. Dressed as neatly and handsomely as a farmer’s clothing catalogue model, Graeme arrived at our new little property to teach a group of us in the valley about grazing pressure and what to look for in terms of plant growth and decomposing leaf litter, and when to move stock off a paddock to rest the ground. Graeme even taught me to ‘poo score’, judging the health of the animal via their manure. To put my new knowledge in practice I nervously splurged and bought myself a solar electric fencing unit, whilst my cousin Claire and Uncle Colin gave me some tread-in white posts and a roll of electric fencing tape to get me going. Because I didn’t have sheep or cattle anymore, the only grazing trial animals on hand were the horses. Using them behind moveable fencing meant I could help all those different sections of the topography – the wattled hills, the ferny slopes, the patchy pastures – to recover.

  Slowly, over time, I began to restore the land function and ecology on our property, which the kids and I dubbed ‘The Heavenly Hill’, but who was I kidding? I was talking fiction and I knew it. Heavenly Hill? This new place, although picturesque, was far from heavenly to me. I grieved for my old farm with an ache and felt in some kind of living hell no matter the mindfulness or the meditations. Here I was practising the old adage of ‘fake it til you make it’, and by giving the place that name I hoped I would find heavenly love there for myself and the kindness of family again. It was, on some lonely nights when the kids went to visit their dad, hell to be there, coming to terms with what I’d lost, but I was determined to make that strange place a happy home for my children. I monitored paddocks, taking photos, moving fences, assessing my horses’ health and walking the land daily after putting my babes on the school bus. My social life was wrapped up in the informally gathered and stupidly named Levendale ‘Arsture Poppers’ – a group of locals willing to trial what we were learning. We began to gain traction, with more people coming to look at what we were doing on our small farms.

  One of our group, Pip Wagner, modified a direct-drill seeding machine to Col’s specifications so that we could trial pasture cropping. I paid Pip in beer currency to drill an acre of the tired spud-cropped land on the creek flat with oats. Colin had taught us that oats, an annual plant, kickstart soil function by unlocking sugars and nutrients in the soil and encouraging mycorrhizal fungi. It’s this fungi that has a special relationship between the nutrients in the soil and the availability of those nutrients to the plants, running long tendrils of life support for plants under the ground in healthy soil. When you see it on slides it’s as pretty as lace. I’d never been taught about it in college and was surprised to find out from Colin how crucial it is not only for plant health, but also that it is killed by superphosphate. The fungi’s demise from these manmade fertilisers is the reason our soils crash after a time and, like drug addicts, the plants go on to need higher and higher doses of false fertiliser to prop themselves up. No wonder farmers are slowly going broke! I couldn’t afford fertiliser so my land was going cold turkey, and even if I could’ve paid for it I wouldn’t have applied it. I knew enough now that Mother Nature, if given the right conditions, fixes herself, relatively cost-free.

  The day before the first oat sowing at my place Pip left the machine on my creek flat overnight. As a joke, the girls from our ‘grass routes group’ gathered and, giggling, painted his seed box a bright pink. We finished off our machinery masterpiece by placing a giant sticker on the back stating ‘Pip’s Deep Soil Rooter’. When we drew back the tarp to reveal it to Pip he had to be administered wine to cope with his vandalised, scandalised machinery. It was one of the best moments in my post-divorce life – seeing us all gathered for a common cause. The pink paint wasn’t just a joke to us. By creating such eye-catching farmware we were getting everyone’s attention in the district. It got people talking and asking questions about ‘the pink thing’ and how the modified direct drill helped restore soils with minimum disturbance and, unlike ploughing, could help cut costs for farmers, as they didn’t have to go over the ground several times, chewing up fuel by ploughing. Also, by maintaining the microbiology in the soil, they were making their land more productive. Word spread about Colin’s methods, and a blushing Pip found himself carting his ‘pink plonker’ on the back of the truck right through Hobart Town to trial direct-drilled pasture south of Hobart. We named it the ‘Deep Soil Rooter’ because our soil problems are deep-rooted in Australian culture and, as Col puts it, as a society we’re ‘rooted’ or ‘stuffed’. Pasture cropping is one answer to reversing that problem.

  I could see how the application of Graeme and Col’s principles was making my place come to life ecologically, and that in turn would set it up for some kind of enterprise in the future, when I had more time, and earned more money. I could also see how I could’ve applied the principles to my former commercially run operation. What was applicable on 20 acres could be so on 2000 acres and in turn on 200 000 acres. All it took to begin was for a farmer to be curious enough to lock up one of the worst-performing paddocks to see what happened. To watch what grew there. To observe Mother Nature. Then to turn all that growth that Mother Nature gave into manure and mulch, and then give the ground time to be rested again. Of course, it’s not that simple, but it’s a starting point: one paddock on one farm to give you a sense of farming with the seven-point compass of above, below and within.

  I now ran the country with Col’s mantra: 100 per cent plant ground cover 100 per cent of the time. Whether it was with three horses or 3000 sheep, the same principle applies. I put my energies
into reviving the native grass species by using controlled grazing, and if I spied kangaroo grass seeding, golden and claw-like on the sides of the roads, I’d pull over and gather up great handfuls to scatter later over my ground. After just two years of those methods, I had more grass than the horses could eat and the diversity of species was on the rise, grub attack was non-existent and we seemed to have more variety of insects and birds. We had encouraged young gum saplings to come back, and amidst the trees delicate orchids bloomed, sheltered by silver tussocks. Colin had taught me that for the health of not only the livestock but also the ecology, we needed to get our pastures functioning like the way our grasslands used to function before white man’s arrival. Plant diversity is the key to that. Come springtime two years on, with the place flourishing with all manner of plants, I needed to borrow steers from Janice to help me cycle the grass back into the soil. Our Heavenly Hill was singing as if a choir of angels were upon it.

  It was no wonder then, when the kids and I were due for a road trip and I saw some cheap flights, we decided to head to Colin’s place in Gulgong. We flew to Sydney, hired a car, and with an eight-year-old in charge of Google Maps on my phone, made our way from Sydney airport to the Ten Dollar Town Motel in Gulgong. The next day, we headed to his property, Winona, where Colin farms regeneratively with his son Nick – meaning they build top soil, not degrade it, on their granite soil farm on the Central Tablelands. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life to see the 2000 acres of Winona. We could tell from our drive to the place that it had been a poor season in the district. But this state of affairs only set us up to see that Winona was truly an oasis in a farming desert of overgrazing and tired soils. Seeing is believing, and walking that soil I felt the life. My kids sank down to their knees and sat in wonder in the long grasses, spending their time plucking stems of grasses and watching insects whilst Col and I talked. The kids sensed there was a kind of alchemy on the place . . . one they’d not experienced in the paddocks on their original farm.

  Colin’s property was selected and set up by his great-grandfather from Prussia, who started growing wheat and merinos in 1868. Nowadays Colin and Nick run 4000 head of 18 micron merinos and crop about 500 acres of wheat, oats and rye. An addition to their business is the sale of native grass seed to people keen to kickstart the profitable, ecologically healthy system Col is enjoying today using the plants that this continent developed Herself over thousands of years. When the seasons are good they delve into cattle trading, and on top of that, run one of the largest kelpie studs in Australia. On our farm tour, my children were even more thrilled to find there were puppies to rumble with.

  As we stood in a paddock now studied by the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, and backed by over a decade’s worth of data collected by soil scientist Christine Jones, Colin explained, ‘We have at least 200 species that grow in the summer and the winter. There are forbs and herbs as well.’ Col said on most farms many of Australia’s native warm-season grasses have been lost because they’ve been selectively grazed out over the years. The old-style summer roadside grasses can be transported back onto our properties easily by simply grazing the roads, then letting the animals manure onto the farming ground on the other side of the fence! Now wherever we drive, we three train our eyes to the roadsides to see what the country ought to look like. There’s grass gold reserves to be found there.

  Part of the beauty of Colin’s farm and its story is the direct comparison to conventional farming systems right next door on his brother’s property.

  ‘My brother farms the same way I used to, and the way my father used to, so it’s an interesting comparison,’ Col said. I remembered the images in his lecture that he had flashed on the screen. The photos showed adjacent paddocks in summer. Colin’s filled with thigh-high grasses. The other paddock, his brother’s, flat stretch of weeds. There were soil profiles too, cored and cut sharply out of the ground with spades from those paddocks. Colin’s soil was active and flourishing for a depth of over half a metre; his brother’s topsoil only revealing life in the first 5 centimetres. The differing results of plant growth after rainfall were striking.

  Colin explained that most of our farms were dominated by annual weeds because over the years farmers had let the stock graze out all the good native grasses, and yet pre-white man, Aboriginals managed diverse grasslands.

  ‘Only the unpalatable, less nutritious native pastures are left and that’s what’s given native grasses a bad name with farmers. They think they aren’t nutritious or palatable for stock. Farming regeneratively also looks messy. Some people can’t cope with the look of it. They like order.’

  Col said another advantage of running farms this way is to inhibit the savageness of bushfire.

  ‘In midsummer these grasses are green,’ Colin said. ‘They are warm-season species that grow right through the hot months. There is 200 per cent more moisture in the soil and that soil is cooler than over the fence on my brother’s.’

  To summarise the incredible success story of Winona, the Seis family has achieved the following:

  Reduced their fertiliser inputs by 70 per cent

  No manmade fertiliser has been used on the pasture for thirty years

  There is improved ecological function thanks to the creation of a healthy microclimate

  Compatible enterprises are vertically stacked so they grow more food and fibre on the same amount of land

  No insecticide has been used for twenty years, yet they don’t suffer from insect or fungal attack

  There are 600 per cent more insects and 125 per cent increased diversity in the insect species compared to conventional farms in the district

  No perennial grasses were sown, yet sixty perennial species or more have come back naturally, proving there is plenty of grass seed in the soil

  Carbon has increased by 200 per cent since they first tested the soil

  There is 200 per cent more soil moisture

  Trace elements have increased by 172 per cent because plants have been allowed to drive the nutrient cycling within the soil by having longer root systems

  They are saving over $80 000 per year in input costs

  There are lower vet costs and animal health inputs in the form of drenches, vaccinations, etc., as the stock are so healthy

  Their annual income is higher, running double the number of stock than Col’s brother

  Col’s crop yields are similar to his brother’s, but he is also harvesting native grass seed from the same paddock he’d harvested a grain crop from

  There is a massive reduction in working hours – less time needed on tractors

  An estimated 2000 farmers are now using Col’s technique of pasture cropping in Australia, along with further worldwide adoption of the technique, the more Colin travels to other countries

  It is now a practice adopted all over the world.

  Colin’s take-home tips for farmers are:

  Never, ever plough

  Keep perennial plants alive

  Manage weeds with thick leaf litter and grazing livestock well – 100 per cent ground cover 100 per cent of the time

  Crop so your oats and wheat are emerging from the dormant pastures

  Graze up to the point of sowing and make sure there are perennial grasses left.

  Col explained his method was low-risk cropping because if rain did fail to come and the wheat, barley or oat crop didn’t emerge, there was still a banquet of perennial pastures waiting to appear, instead of bare ploughed ground that was susceptible to wind and rain erosion.

  ‘All we’ve done is run it closer to how Mother Nature had it designed in the first place,’ Col said.

  I left Colin’s farm with a song in my heart. It was the start of a friendship and a mentorship that has utterly changed the way I see and manage and love land. My son constantly searches YouTube clips of Colin and even at the age of eleven is now wanting to grow up so he ‘can have a farm and run it like Colin Seis’.

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bsp; Col is not one to stand still on his mission, nor his trial-and-error study of farming, and recently when I caught up with him he told me he is now trialling multi-species pasture cropping using a mix of forage brassica, oats, field peas, vetch and even vegetables sown into native grassland. He’s added photos of the trials into his now globally travelled talk, showing crops so high they swamp farm bikes with kelpies perched upon them.

  Not surprisingly Colin went on to win the 2014 Bob Hawke Landcare award. During his acceptance speech, this time wearing a suit and standing next to the former prime minister, Col said plainly, ‘We have a planet to fix. This planet is totally stuffed. If we as a species are going to survive on this planet, then we better fix it, and quickly.’

  Whilst outside there were soils to nurture on the Heavenly Hill, on the inside there were other kinds of major restoration works to be done. Like leaking roofs, no insulation and no matter how much wood I threw on that bloody wood heater, I just couldn’t get it to burn properly. It was broken. I recall the first week in the house when I stood shivering amidst the tang of paint fumes trying to visualise what the rooms could look like with furniture. All my things, including my grandmother’s hand-crocheted rugs, rolling pins, mixing bowls, jugs and furniture, along with my artwork and my books, were still in place at the old farmhouse.