27 The Reset Transition Part 1
Where the Wheatbelt meets the Rangeland, out of Perenjori, WA
Welcome to The Reset: words to help us restructure our world from the inside out. Transition Part 1 talks about one couple’s transition from conventional to biological farming practices and a bold new regenerative venture brewing on a farm out of Perenjori. We can’t just hope for change – let’s start piloting the ship - or at least occupy enough tugs to push the thing in a good direction.
WHY CHANGE?
In 2015 Phil decided to set up a trial plot on his farm in Perenjori to look into the value of biological farming . He did it for two reasons: Bev, his wife thought it was worth a look. He thought it might save him some money in inputs.
They got a bit of a grant and used the money to enlist a mob from Bunbury, HiTech Ag to help them set up a plot. The trial was to help determine if microbes would help in fertiliser, especially phosphorous, uptake. Phosphorus and nitrogen are major components of fertilisers and one of the biggest expenses and the biggest wastes of money on a cropping farm like the Logues. As inputs they are inefficient, as trials have shown that less than 50% of phosphates and nitrogen added to paddocks are taken up by plants and the rest wash downstream and play havoc with other ecosystems.
Would microbial action release the phosphorous banks as he had been told was the case? The scientists and agronomists hooked into the latest info on microbial farming advise that plants, work with microbes living around their roots by bartering sugars in exchange for nitrogen in a useable form. The theory is that Plants doing it for themselves, eliminates the need to spread nitrogen-based fertilisers on paddocks at the start of the growing season.
HORT VS BROADACRE CROPPING
I had no idea, until Phil pointed it out, that the horticultural people were usually years ahead of broadacre farmers in terms of thinking outside the conventional chemical regime. The vintners and avocado farmers have many years of experimentation with microbes, reduction of chemicals, using beneficial insects to control pests, building carbon sponge under their belt.
It makes sense, they are working with diverse crops and can afford to experiment with the latest solutions developed for growers because they work on a much smaller scale. This Bunbury mob already had some runs on the board with their microbial solutions – they were experienced at fixing non-wetting soils by microbial means and convinced Phil’s trial would work…..It seems information is a bit siloed in the Ag field. Phil reckons farmers are shocking at communicating outside their networks ….the horticulturalists don’t talk to farmers and the farmers talk only to each other. Just the way it is 10.15-10.30min (Phil: if you are just looking in the same pond…)
HOW PHIL GETS IT, THE TRUE PACE OF CHANGE
There was a bit of a ripple of interest across the Ag world about ‘microbial farming’ back in 2015 – but everyone was learning. Not many people knew much. Now we are sitting in an explosion of information about the microbiome of the soil. Phil and Bev got help in how to design the trial from Stuart McAlpine, a farmer in Buntine, who was an early adopter and fed them good info and contacts. They also knew of the work being done by Ian and Di Haggerty in Wyalkatchem. They were not alone, but neither were they in a crowd. It was a bit of a radical step to take.
Phil selected 45 out of 2000 hectare to set up a trial. The paddock was close to the farmhouse so it was easy to monitor. Two microbial rows set up side by side with three conventionally treated rows, creating plenty of buffer zone between them to ensure that the microbes didn’t contaminate the conventional rows. Phil was given a few strict instructions by HiTech Ag. He was directed to avoid adding ureas and glyphosate on the conventional strips – additives known to destroy biological life.
Because it was all small scale, the whole exercise was a lot more hand- on than he was used to. He was mucking around with a few hundred kilos of grain and fiddling around with small scale seed coating–harder than applying his usual regime of chemicals over 2000 ha. With the added work of having to wash down his equipment to avoid contamination as he moved between the biological and conventional rows. In Phil’s words it was a pain in the arse.
HOW PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR MINDS
You would think talking to him now – a born-again Regenerative farmer – that the ah-ha moments came thick and fast from this point. It doesn’t seem to work like that. When you are getting out of one way of thinking and acting and moving into another way of thinking and acting, lots of little shifts seem to be the way of it. It is not a simple thing to change your mind.
THE TRIAL AHHA
They set up the trial in May with good opening rain and then in July it stopped raining for 6 weeks. This led to one of Phil’s first small eureka moments. The plants in his strips went green – into stress mode was how Phil named it - and started to bolt into ear, too early while the microbial strips hunkered down and waited out the dry spell. When it came to flowering time, the conventional strip ripened all over the place while the biological strip came through, going into ear all at the same time. This was a bit of a surprise.
Phil was still sceptical. He got a bit sick of listening to the HiTech Ag people – of course they would be saying what they were saying, they had a product to sell and a method to prove. He decided to do his own investigations. He went to the inter rows of the strips and methodically marked out spots where he could do his own excavations with a spade – checking out the feeder roots of the plants and how they responded in the biological versus the chemical treatment rows.
THE TRIAL AHHA 2
He started digging neat little holes and sifting the roots out and by the time he had crossed the paddock covering 8 of the 15 rows he had one pocket overflowing from feeder roots from the plants treated with microbes and another pocket that didn’t hold enough roots to fill a cigarette paper. This gave him pause. If he wanted to put a percentage on it this represented a 500% increase in root capacity in one season. An increase in root capacity means increasing capacity to grow a healthy and resiliant plant. The more feeder roots the more exudates, the more exudates the more photosynthesis, the more photosynthesis, the more of everything. Abundance! This was a bit of a change maker.
THE TRIAL AHHA 3 SOIL HAS ARISEN!
The other thing that made him decide to go for it and place the whole farm under biological treatment was the soil in his veggie patch. Phil had introduced the residue from the mixing pot of microbes that was left over from the main trial site into one of his raised beds that had been created with layers of soil and straw up to about 75 mm from the top. Within 6 weeks the soil was overflowing out of the ring and Phil was pretty convinced they were onto something..
I tried to work out what this meant. Overflowing? Phil helped me put words to it - flocculation, the soil had a lot more oxygen in it and held more water, the microbes had attracted the earthworms who were operating near the surface – so the dirt turned into soil and literally rose out of the ground! We were into hallelujah territory – especially as we were having this conversation on Easter Sunday.
The whole crazy, hidden world of the microbiome was coming alive for Phil – and the little jolts of new information he was receiving were backed up by looking at soil microbes doing their thing under a microscope - part of the service offered by HiTech Ag to help their clients get a new picture of underground eco-services at play
THE WET SEASON
The next season 2016 was a wet one. Phil put all his hectares under the microbiome regime but it wasn’t till the following season 2017, which was a dry seeding, when Phil realised he had inadvertently saved big money. When he got to the end of seeding and was at the point where he usually had to go and buy a truck load of fuel, he realised he had a fair bit left in the tank. He estimated a 20% saving in fuel, simply by having soil that was softer, easier to work.
Before, he reckoned, the soil was so compacted that he could change a tyre on his seeder by jacking the machine up in the paddock. Farmer humour, huh? I laughed, but I think he was dinkum….
Something else Phil noticed. 39 mins At the end of summer, one of the tasks he’d tackle would be to go around and pull out the paddy melons before they took hold in the paddocks. If you didn’t dig them up early, the long tough strands could get tangled in the seeder bar tines and make sowing a nightmare. This year he noticed the melons were a lot easier to dig up. He also clocked that the rocky outcrops of gravel in his paddocks that you couldn’t normally get the seeder in were now workable – the ‘rocks disappeared’- meaning the flocculation created by the microbial action caused the soil to rise and swallowed the rocks. Phil was able to incorporate bigger areas into his cropping zones.
HOW WE LEARN NEW THINGS
Phil wasn’t told to look for these benefits as a side effect of microbial action – or maybe he was, but he reckoned he was on such a steep learning curve that he missed a lot of information.
Besides, it doesn’t make sense until it does if you know what I mean. In Phil’s case, fuel saving, more friable soil, bigger amounts of soil, meant a lot of small and big things about putting in a crop changed – in this case - for the better- and he noticed them gradually as he went about the daily business of farming.
This speaks to the way Phil learnt, with the doing, the handling of materials. To feel things were changing and in ways he did not expect, meant he starting to get intrigued and interested in what was happening, and confident about doing things differently.
Happy sheep at the Butler’s farm
NEW CHAPTER
A few seasons in and the Logues were swinging into the new paradigm – but in 2019 they made a decision to sell the farm. Phil was crook with cancer, but reckons that the main reason he wanted to sell was all the accumulated stress, financial, seasonal.…but even before the farm was sold, by the start of 2019, he had signed up to work with the Butlers and cohort Clint Hansen on Gimlet Ridge farm just down the road - and things really started to get interesting.
