Drought Special #3: Fighting A Drought: Levers for the Public Sector

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 of our online course.

In episode three of the drought special, we’re in Australia to learn about the role of the public sector in preparing a country for drought, and the policies, incentives and strategies that can be put in place to help prevent and protect against it. We look at the current Australian system, soil health, incentives for compost production, farm management practices, and the need to change our systems in order to better reward and support our land managers – the stewards of the earth. Joining us are former Governor General of Australia and current Advocate for Soil Health, Major General Michael Jeffery, and co-founder of Ylad Living Soils Rhonda Daly.

Thank you to Kellogg Garden products for making this episode possible.

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When it comes to drought, it seems that up until now, the drought relief packages were based on Exceptional Circumstances programs and included mostly financial support for farmers already in dire circumstances, with very little attention given to actual prevention of drought or preparing for drought before hand. However, there are some changes occurring now with the National Drought Program Reform that is starting in July, which recognises that drought no longer fits in the exceptional circumstances category, and will focus more on drought preparedness through providing training programs for land managers on risk assessment and financial planning and so on. But General Jeffery and Rhonda Daly, you both agree that a lot more has to be done. So General Jeffery, maybe you can tell us what you think is necessary for the public sector to do in order to actually prepare for drought and minimise the effects of drought on the Australian landscape?

General Jeffery: Well I think the first thing to do is recognise that at the present time, Australia doesn’t have a real national policy in terms of how it wants to look after the Australian landscape as a totality; that is, its river systems, its flood plains, its wetlands, its riparian zones; agriculture areas, grazing areas, mining areas and so on. And I think until we get a policy that spells out the need to have, perhaps as a light on the hill, to restore and maintain an Australian landscape that is fit for purpose – that is fit for all the things I just mentioned – we’re all going to be stuck doing itty, bitty things (and some of them quite important and quite good), but until we get an over-arching aim of what we want to do, with total state and local people all singing from the same sheet of music, I think we will be struggling, particularly when it comes to drought.

It’s getting that policy agreed to restore and maintain an Australian landscape fit for purpose; it has been knocked around a bit. And you can’t blame people, that’s the way people were taught and trained at the time, but –

Rhonda Daly: Don’t you think also that because they’re using water as a commodity – as an economic commodity – and so we’ve got this false economy coming in where we think we’re a rich country, but we’re actually deteriorating the landscape really badly. Short-term it appears that we’re not doing so much damage because economically we’re doing so well, but ultimately, the wheels are going to fall off that analogy for sure.

So Rhonda you’re saying that people involved have a very myopic view of the situation and focus only on the short term economic results, rather than the bigger picture, which I think is definitely the case in many other countries as well. And General Jeffery, you’re saying that we need to get all levels of public sector – local, national and state, to come together and agree on a national policy for restoring and maintaining the landscape. How would you propose we start?

GJ: Well part of the issue has got to be that, if we want to restore and maintain this landscape so that it is fit for various purposes, you’ve got to ask yourself, “What are the three key ingredients that will enable us to do that?” And it’s really about the integrated management of your soil, your water (that is, the hydrology), and the biodiversity – the plants and so on that you’re growing, whether crops or grasses, or what have you. So, good farming practice and land management practice, mining practice and everything else, depends on the stakeholders having a very clear understanding of the need for that integration, and understanding the art and science of doing it properly. And that’s where good farming practices and land management practices come into play.

My next question here was to ask you if you think soil is the most important factor for healing the landscape and therefore protecting against drought, but what you’re saying is that all three aspects, soil, water and vegetation, are all important?

GJ: Yes, I think we’ve got to talk about landscape rather than soil. Although I’m the National Soil Advocate, I think that’s a misnomer to a degree because it gets everybody focused on just looking at soil, when we should be looking at water and biodiversity. And Rhonda raised a very good point specifically on the water, where I think our focus in this country for many years has been in the wrong direction. We’ve always looked at how much water we’ve got in our rivers and streams and dams, and we then issued licenses, and so on, to users of that water. But the total amount of water falling on our landscape every year, if you take it as a hundred drops: only ten drops end up in the rivers, two drops end up in the dams, and another two drops end up as run-off off the roads and roofs – that’s only fourteen percent.

But that’s what we all look at – we focus on that because that’s what we can see. Where we’re missing is the other eighty-six percent that falls on the landscape, of which only about thirty-six actually gets into the soil where you want it, and the other fifty percent evaporates into the atmosphere because it can’t infiltrate.

And holding water in soils is a very important of drought management as well, which we’ve mentioned quite a few times in previous episodes. Rhonda, would you agree with that?

RD: I would agree. I would agree that there’s a huge amount of land that, as you say, needs hydrating – the wetlands and… But you know, truly and really I think that it’s quite sad that I don’t know whether they see that as the most important thing that they have to do at the moment. I think so much energy is going in other places. I truly don’t believe they know the workings of our environment and landscape, and what is the best way of getting it back – and spending the dollars to get it back into a healthy condition again.

GJ: I think that you really need political decisions at the senior level of federal and state to ensure a proper implementation of an appropriate process. So, I think it gets back again to this lack of an over-arching policy where we need to look after the landscape, and then the various ingredients that’ll make it work, and we discussed two or three of them earlier on.

Indeed. And what you’re saying is that it really is important for senior levels in government to take an active role in this, because there are big decisions to be made, and they need to steer the ship. But in terms of getting the research right, there are already wheels in motion, because just recently the Australian Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry recently launched the National Soil Research, Development and Extension Strategy, which aims to secure Australia’s soil for profitable industries and healthy landscapes, and among its many goals, it aims to “improve communication and sharing of soil knowledge”, and “to adopt a national approach to building future skills and capacities”. SO this is definitely a step in the right direction and perhaps it will achieve some of what you are calling for?

GJ: Yes, I think that is a good step in the right direction, and as the National Soil Advocate, we were able to bring together an expert advisory panel of four of the nation’s top land management scientists, backed by another twenty or so scientists who support them, and we were able to input into that strategy, which was really about doing four things: quantifying our soil asset in respect to data and mapping, and what are our soil types, and how healthy is it. And then, how do we go about securing our soil by identifying and evaluating best practice by looking at soil structure improvement, soil biology, carbon and so on. And the third bit was to look at understanding our soils, which is the technical level: the training of our ag scientists, soil carbon sampling, understanding the hydrology of our soils, understanding the soil biology and so on. Then there was soil at the interface, which was really looking at the search on environmental impacts: understanding water capture and storage in soil. So I think that the RD&E (the Research Development and Extension policy) that was launched by the minister a couple of weeks ago is very much a step in the right direction and I’m pleased that we were able to have at least a little bit of an input into it.

That’s a pretty comprehensive strategy focusing on soils, and I daresay one of the first of its kind. And it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the future. But in the past, has soil and soil health has featured in Australian drought policy in any big way before now, or has it been side-lined?

RD: From y perspective I would think that in all of the drought policies that they’re putting into place, soil health is definitely featured, and not only soil health but the management practices as well. So, yes they are incorporating and recognising that soil health is a major player in ensuring that we hold more water in our landscape for plants in these drier times. So, I think they’re recognising that, but there just seems such a huge part, and chunk, that still needs converting. Because, I would say that there’s really only maybe two or three percent of Australian farmers who are actually really practicing regeneration of the landscape, and the rest is going as business as usual. And how do we get the business as usual people to understand the importance of their soil, not just for today’s farming and their productivity and profitability, but for future generations to come?

So, I think Australia’s got a really short term view of their soil health, and we tend to – and that’s because of economic restraints – but we tend to look at just the now. “What do we do now to make us a profit this year that will keep us on the farm next year?” And I think economics, with one in seven farmers owing more than half a million dollars, plays a huge role in farmers up taking these different methods of rebuilding our landscapes back to being healthy again. It’s very much on just paying the bills.

GJ: One of our policy drives in restoring and maintaining this landscape fit for purpose is to reward farmers fairly not just for their product, which is another subject in itself, but also as primary carers of the agricultural landscape, because they look after about sixty percent of the continent. And I believe that we need to reward farmers for looking after the landscape on behalf of twenty-two million urban Australians. Now as to what sort of thing you might do to do that, it can be varied: it might be designating part of the new land army that the Government is going to establish to plant trees on the ridges where a farmer wants it, or to get a cheaper bank loan if he’s going to fix his riparian zone, or a whole range of measures that are not hand-outs, but are provided with a definite outcome in view, which relates to restoring and maintaining that landscape so that it’s in the best possible condition. And I think if we’re clever we’ll be able to do that, and in part overcome the problem that Rhonda’s just raised, that so many of our farmers are in very, very heavy debt.

Right, which definitely won’t help. And on that note, would you say, General Jeffery, that if the new carbon sequestration methodology gets approved, that this would encourage farmers to change their practices? And for our audience, this new methodology is part of the Carbon Farming Initiative, which is a Federal Government initiative to enable people in the land sector to generate revenue through the reduction of carbon emissions by using approved methodologies. So, would this be a potential help for them?

GJ: Yes, I think that if we’ve got a climate change problem – and I believe we have – that’s going to exacerbate our ability to produce more food, and the only way we can help to adjust to that is by sequestering carbon into the soils. The big issue for Australia is going to be in the complexity of the legislation – all the criteria upon which farmers can gain access to that money. And I think we really have to have measuring systems for carbon that are set to business standards, not to scientific standards, so your means of measuring don’t have to be quite so accurate when you’re talking about commercial operations, and therefore can be a bit simpler in terms of a farmer then being able to access what could be a very important source of revenue; and also a very, very important source of helping to adjust to climate change, and perhaps to control it to a degree.

And touching on what you said before, about support payments not being hand-outs: I wonder about citizens in general, particularly urban dwellers, are they sympathetic towards farmers and their situation, or is there work to be done there to get them on board?

GJ: Yes, well another of our policy drivers, and I think it may almost be the most important, is to reconnect urban Australia with its rural roots. That is, reconnect twenty-two and a half million people living in cities and towns with a hundred and thirty thousand farmers and perhaps a hundred thousand miners, or something like that. Now, unless we do that we’re going to find an even greater gap and lack of understanding between the two. And of course, you’ll never get the political support that’s needed to look after our farmers and landscapes properly unless you’ve got voter support. So we have to have that reconnection.

And to do that I think there are several ways. The first is that we’ve got to get to the young people, and I would do this by setting up, for example, a school garden in every school in the country. Something that can  show a six year old, and then a ten year old, and then a thirteen year old, just exactly what the soil does, and how it’s composed, and how photosynthesis and transpiration works; and how you produce healthy food from healthy soil that leads to healthier animals and healthier people. So I think that is one simple way in which we can get urban Australia over time connected; and hopefully the kids will take these messages home to mum and dad, and that would help us get through to the adults at the same time.

But getting the adults on side, I think we’re going to have to use a little bit of stick and a little bit of carrot. The stick is going to be the global food imperative, because in my view we’re going to be pushing it, and I think we’re going to see a lot of social disruption and probably conflict impacting on hundreds of millions of people – and Australia will not be isolated from that. So what we have to say to our own people is that there are going to be big, big problems overseas, and whilst we have some problems in how we’re looking after our landscape here, we’ve also got the answers. And if we’re clever enough and fast enough, we’ll get those answers implemented pretty quickly. And not only will it ensure our own food-water security, but we’ll also be able to export some more food – but even more importantly, export knowledge, because even if we double food export, we’d only feed a hundred million, but if we exported knowledge we might be able to feed a billion.

I’d really like to stress the school garden idea myself as one of the best ways to get the urban population interested in nature. There are also things like community gardens and urban farms that can really help forge a connection. School compost schemes and education can play a huge part too, and I’d like to speak more about compost now, because we’ve heard a lot in previous episodes about the benefits of compost for soil health and drought protection. And Rhonda, you have a wealth of experience in the industry, and as a compost producer yourself, can you tell me what type of incentives exist for you that encourage compost production and use?

RD: That’s a really good question, and I’ve had to search my mind. On a smaller level, the council is starting to introduce green bins to collect compostable waste, and there’s recycling bins and things like that. But from a primary producer’s perspective, I don’t really know of too many incentives or initiatives where people will come – unless there’s a trial being done by Landcare or CSIRO, where they want to get the compost – for them to get into using compost or other biological fertilisers that are a little bit softer on the land and create healthier plants at the same time.

AORA is an industry body – the Australian Organics Recycling Association, which used to be the old Compost Australia – they are promoting it as much as they can, but I do feel as though there’s got to be more policy in there that is going to give farmers the incentive – and possibly there’s going to be a dollar incentive. However, I do believe that there’s going to be people who want to do it because they know intuitively that that’s what they need to do while they’re here on earth. However, the ones who still haven’t reached that calling yet, that maybe the Soil Carbon Methodology, or policies, will see them change over to something new.

So there may need to be financial incentives for some farmers to get them to start composting. And often compost producers will tell us about roadblocks or regulations that actually hinder their ability to run their businesses. Can you tell me about the situation regarding this where you are?

RD: Yeah, sure. It appears that our government supports recycling organic waste – so, reducing landfill, rebuilding soils and… However, the cost of complying with many of these regulations make it not worthwhile for a lot of companies to pursue. And I actually phoned Paul Coffey from AORA  today and asked him what’s going on, because he’s right on the ground level: and the EPA are at present trying to impose a new regulation that is going to put a huge financial burden on compost operations, where they have to have a bank guarantee, and it has to be supplied to the EPA saying that if the operation for some reason goes insolvent, then the money [is used] to cover the clean up of the site. Inevitably this is one situation where this happened. It’s going to cost some operations as much as one-point-five million dollars to have a bank guarantee sitting there, and, as Paul was saying, it will close down many, many operations. And the thing that they’re forgetting to see is that levies are paid to the EPA that could be used for these clean-ups.

So, this is just one of those regulations made in their ivory tower, they’re not really in touch with what’s out there, and it could cost the industry very, very dearly because less people will be wanting to go into composting and recycling these seventeen million tonnes of organic waste that we have.

I guess it just comes back again to having a clear and coordinated strategy so these things won’t happen.

RD: Yes. Well, it’s fortunate that we do have AORA there, and Paul spends a lot of time doing policies, and going to the EPA and working it out for members such as myself. So, definitely, these bodies are very, very important for the ordinary person like myself, because they’re there to ensure we don’t get so many restrictions and conditions on us that it makes it basically impossible do composting.

It’s definitely is an issue I’ve heard before, which once again seems to show that more coordination across different interests could really help. And what I’d like to focus on now is farmers and land management strategies. Because one of the key ways to make change happen is to demonstrate how it can be done, and General Jeffery, you’re Chairman of the non-profit organisation Soils For Life, which is doing great work to support farmers in changing to better practices and advocate for a change in how land is managed generally. And you have been researching case studies of farms that are using sustainable practices in order to spread the word, and the case studies are available online. But through your work with Soils for Life, could you see ways in which incentives and policies could encourage farm managers to change their practices and adopt more drought-resisting practices?

GJ: Well, thanks for those comments on Soils For Life, and of course, Bill and Rhonda are a very important component of the nineteen case studies. We just did nineteen initially because that’s what we were able to raise the money for, and we wanted to actually prove the concept, and well I think we’ve done that, and now we want to roll-out another forty or fifty – and then hopefully hundreds and then some in clusters. I suspect the encouragement to do that will be in showing those who are looking to make a change that, first of all, it’s economically viable. They’re not going to commit unless they can see a dollar in it. And to get that dollar I think we certainly have to do things in terms of how we’re looking at food in terms of pricing, and how we’re looking at rewarding farmers in how they’re rewarding the land.

But, maybe we’ve also got to look at a new definition of productivity, because so often, I’ll think you’ll find the bank saying to a farmer, “Well, to meet your debt obligation, you’re going to have to lift your productivity [muffled] by five percent next year, or whatever. And therefore the farmer then either has to put in a bit more superphosphate, or clear a bit more land, or put a bit more land under crop when he probably hasn’t even got it. And so, false pressure is put on him to lift his productivity, and the same might be true of pressures that may be imposed or implied by the two big chain stores that buy sixty or seventy percent of the produce.

So perhaps we’ve got to look at productivity again nationally in a different way. And if a farmer operating to ninety percent of what he saw as the traditional productivity, which was also degrading his landscape, but ninety percent productivity by his old measure keeps him in permanently good health and good shape, it is far better to look at a system that relates that sort of equation than a farmer whose been striving to do one hundred and two or one hundred and three percent – which he might do for twelve months or two years, and then his soils collapse on him and he goes broke, and the bank has to foreclose, and doesn’t get anything out of it either. Perhaps you see where I’m coming from – that we have to look at productivity in a slightly different way?

Yes, I think I get you, that the notion of productivity should also look at if the land is better managed and can sustain at the same level of productivity for a long period of time, rather than purely looking at the percentage of crop yield. But then, how would you envision we tackle situation with productivity, or protect our farmers from bank pressures and supermarket pressures and the likes?

GJ: Well again, I think it gets back to the policy, and about the rewards.  You see, unless we have these policy parameters in place, we’re going to have the same arguments – they’ll just continue. And the same problems will continue. So you’ve really got to get the aim right for what you want to do: you’ve got to get the soil -water strategic assets declared as such and managed as such; you’ve got to get farmers properly rewarded (and we’ve been through that); you’ve got to get urban Australia really understanding the importance of soil, water and biodiversity, and therefore the importance of farmers, so that if, for example, we might have to pay another half a cent for a kilo of carrots, or another two cents for a litre of milk to ensure that a farmer is properly rewarded for his product, then we pay it gladly. And if there are people that are disadvantaged, then there’s a welfare net to deal with that. But we cannot have farmers being knocked over with unfair prices simply because companies are competing to reduce, reduce, reduce; which is fair enough in principle, but why should the poor old farmer have to deal with that?

And then, we’ve got to refocus the science, so that the science properly supports the farmer in terms of measuring soil fertility, carbon sequestration…if we get all these things in place, then I think we will solve the problem very quickly. But until we do, along with our soils program, which is the practical and proven application on the ground, we won’t maximise the benefit.

I think that sums it up very nicely. And then, final question to both of you: how long do you think it will take for this coordinated approach and solid policy to come about and transform the landscape? Is there much more to be done?

GJ: I think in terms of what I’m trying to do and what Rhonda’s trying to do, I think we’re looking at about a ten to fifteen year programme. There is no magic light switch – you can’t just transform the whole of the agricultural society overnight, because you’re dealing with a hundred and thirty thousand very independent people with their own ideas, et cetera. But the big thing is that we do have the answers, and I think the global imperative…in terms of the opportunities that it provides for our farmers for, perhaps the first time in many, many years, to become sustainably profitable and environmentally sound is going to be there for us to take advantage of – if we can get the proper policy, and fixing the paddock policies in place.

RD: I totally agree with what Michael just said. And in particular, influential people like General Jeffery, who has so many doors he can open – we need people like that to open many more doors, and in time there will be more doors that will open, and people will be coming to us, and far more farmers will be wanting to change.

Soil Crisis #1: A Need for Economic & Political Change

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

Episode eighteen: in this part one of a two part special, we speak with zero waste pioneer and industrial economist Robin Murray about the importance of soil as a basis for human economy, and the great chasm between what science tells us about soil’s role and the existing inadequate policies for soil management that has lead to a soil crisis. We will discuss the ways in which our current economic and political models of mass production have severed the link between communities and the soil, how politicians and policy makers are reacting, and how a new circular system might integrate soil management better.

Thank you to YLAD Living Soils for making this episode possible.

YLAD Living Soils is an Australian owned company formed to supply sustainable biological, organic and humus compost fertility products and programs that support the natural balance of the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the soil, lessening the reliance on conventional chemical fertilser inputs. Find more on their website.

Photo by Maurice Chédel / CC BY

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We’ve had a bad track record, at least in the west, with taking care of our soils, because even though our entire existence is completely locked into the soil, the link between soil and human economy is very rarely discussed. As an economist, could you give us some background into the history of our relationship with the soil and explain to us this link?

Robin Murray: Humankind has always had very close relations with the soil, but one of its problems is, as it develops, the tendency has been for a rupture to grow between them. So, one of the great divisions – we always talk about class divisions – well one of the huge divisions of human history is between cities and the country. If you take the great empires, one thesis is that empires have to feed themselves, and therefore they draw on their immediate environments in order to feed their central cities. But the tendency has been for them to deplete the areas around them so that gradually the quality of the soil decreases; and so they have to expand the empire in order to get to new places. So there’s a kind of diminishing returns that sets in and is one of the forces for them to go further and further afield in order to get both the food, but also the raw materials, and so on, necessary for it. And after a bit, to actually keep control of such a vast empire means larger armies and therefore they have to be fed, and it’s a cycle, which suddenly explodes. They get weakened, and a new empire starts up again. Or it just breaks open – as was the case in Europe after the end of the Roman Empire. It just broke up into smaller areas that had a different relation to the soil.

There are two exceptions to this pattern: one is China, and the second is Egypt. In the case of Egypt, why that was not affected in the same way is that their human waste was fed back and replenished the soil around them, mainly through the impacts of the floods, and the way the Nile flooded everything. And in China it was much more explicit: the human waste was gathered and has always, traditionally, been then used for fertilisation. And of course, in the early modern era here the same was true: in Britain, Cheshire and Hertfordshire became very fertile areas. And this was because of night soil, which was taken from the cities to the countryside.

And you could say that the WC was one of the big forces to rupture that connection between the human waste and soil fertility. So you’ve got the rupture growing so that now, as we all know, many people in the towns don’t know what a chicken looks like, or where milk comes from. And this is a terrible, terrible rupture. And at the moment, it’s not just the WC that stands between the humans of the town and the countryside; it is also supermarkets and these long chains of food distribution, which are also cutting it down. And so the question is, how to reconnect the two? Because they are connected – they are connected. We may not be aware of it, but we are part of the cycle. And if we deplete the soil because we take the nutrients from it without returning them to that place, we then either lose them, destroy them, put them in the wrong place, whatever… If we destroy the cycle between them – the cycle within which humans live – then, just like the Roman Empire, we will collapse from within.

In the past, we have tended to see the link as very much one where the earth is a source to be used – to be extracted from. Some people call this “natural capital”, and that we’ve been running down our natural capital because we haven’t been thinking how to maintain it. And in that sense, I think it’s been a bit-piece in the human economic drama. Whereas I think what is now being recognised is that they are very much more interconnected. The human economy – the contemporary economy – is going through enormous changes, and it’s moving from the twentieth century period of mass production to a much more complex, information-centred form of production and distribution.

Some people have called this, and I myself have called this, Post-Fordism. Fordism was the mass production, but we’ve now gone way beyond Ford. I don’t think I would call it “Google-ism” either, but it’s a quite different model. And this has great significance for our relationship with materials and with the soil; so that instead of looking at things relatively simply as linear flows, we are looking at them with much greater complexity. And as we see things more complexly, we see that, actually, the soil and earth fits into more complex systems, and cannot just be treated as an input, which is then producing an output.

I do think, as you say, that there is a change going on and people are beginning to realise the importance of managing the soil in a sustainable way.

RM: Yes, and as you may know I worked a lot in fair trade here, and one of the things I’ve learned – which has been a really profound experience – is that we have a nut company, which is called Liberation Nuts, and it’s owned by the nut farmers. And the ones who do cashews are from Kerala in India, and they’ve almost become our educators, because they come from a Gandhian tradition, and the Gandhian tradition is very much about connecting the human beings and the soil. They send us reading, and one of them is by, sometimes people call him Ghandi’s economist, which is a man called Kumarappa. And he said we have to deeply respect the soil and what it produces, and how we think about these two things. That whole Gandhian principle of changing yourself and then changing what is around you, and making sure that your technology is under your control and not controlling you – that was a voice that was drowned out by the period of mass production, in my view.

Now I think we’ve actually come to the other way, which I think is the Gandhian approaches, which our Indian colleagues follow. A striking example of that is with the Amish in North America. If you go to an Amish farm, there are no tractors and everything is done organically, and what is so striking is that this pre-modern form that the Amish have: regularly the productivity of their soil came out the highest in North America.

So these practices, but when married with modern information and communication technology – that’s the point, it’s not just to keep it like that – this is a very powerful recipe for thinking in a different way about how to produce the food for ten billion people. And I think you might say that the next revolution – the next agricultural, green revolution – is not going to be about seeds and plants and GM crops and so on, it is to be about the soil. And if we think of the soil as the object for revolution, through all these different means, then I think we’ve got a light in front of us to which we can direct our energy.

Do you feel that influencers, such as policy makers and politicians, realise the importance of soil when they approach waste management practices and agricultural policies?

RM: No. The answer to that from the British perspective and my experience here is that we’re right at the foot of Everest on this one. I’ve been involved for, what, twenty years on the issue of waste. It was very difficult to get waste pushed up the agenda, to get people to think about waste; politicians and indeed the press, and so on. Very difficult. When I started in the mid-nineties, I think our recycling rate was five percent, and it just was not on the radar. Also, to be an official in the local government in the waste department: this was slightly like being in the fire brigade; it was the kind of Siberia, in terms of the hierarchy. And so, how to get people aware of, in this case the negative aspects of waste – landfill, incineration and so on. These all had extremely negative sides, let alone the positive.

So, it took five years for us in this country to move to a point where it became a national issue, and it became a national issue very much because of the negative sides of the issues around – particularly about incineration. So always, and I think it’s been true of the environmental movement more generally, but very often (like with Rachel Carson), it is the negative effects which then get people involved. And we have to then think, “Okay, how could it be different?”

So the first way it happens is always local, because it is the local people who then realise that this is actually affecting them. And that is the basis, then, for saying there has to be some other alternative, and out of that, then, becomes an interest; but the next interest is in some form of recycling. But the way in which both the traditional offices, and to some extent the politicians, have then thought, is they thought “okay, well how do we prevent this from getting into landfill or, indeed, incinerators?” and they then have these targets for recycling – but actually (it’s a little bit like supply-push), they don’t really think “what is this going to be used for?” they just want to keep it out of their residual waste statistics; usually because there’s an increasing bit of a punishment for them in financial terms.

The idea that, actually, in relation to organic waste, that it is actually precious, and that this is a resource which you must produce with quality as if you are a supplier; that you’re actually responsible for the quality of your output…We want everything that one rescues from the waste to maintain not just it’s original quality, but all the energy and labour that’s gone into it – like rubber tires have been very well used for making basketball courts; glass has been used as a very good filtering mechanism – that’s an upcycling. And in my experience of much of the waste industry, the waste politics, and the waste management by public officials – this still (in the older generation) has yet to penetrate. The younger ones – this is who we found are the potential agents for change – they young ones, who are part of the new generation, some of them see it much more ecologically. They see themselves as, kind of like farmers of waste, as stewards of waste – and not of “waste” but they are what we might call “nutrient managers”, in relation to the organics side.

But still, you’ve got the silos of waste management, the silos of agriculture; very little do they meet, very little do they meet. And in Britain there has been more connection on the paper side, than there has been on the soil side. Soil and biowaste is still very much in the back seat here, and not even the Co2 implications of composting has been adequately taken on board – they do not become part of the discussion. So, my answer to you on that one is: there is still some way to go.

In order to affect change and influence policy makers and politicians, how do we act? Do we focus on local or national campaigns and debates?

RM: Well, I think that the way in which these big changes – because this is a big industrial change, certainly on the waste side, and possibly with agriculture there are certain similarities, certainly with the big industrial farms – when you’re changing, it always changes at the margins. This is where it happens first, because the big forces of the old system are not as strong. And so you get it coming up from the base, and I think especially in Europe and North America it has been the community movement that has, since the mid-seventies, really led the way in this. And then what happens is that the first impact tends to come at the local level. And local politics has been much more about waste politics than the national level, because it’s immediate and tends to be under municipal, provincial control. But once this happens, we then have a basis for moving it up to the national level.
It’s much easier in places, which have proportional representation, because, then groups (either green groups or specific groups around waste issues) can then get a representation politically. And this is why Germany, for example, has been one of the leaders in terms of establishing very much more satisfactory types of recycling or nutrient management – if you like, a new circular economy. I think this is because they have, not only proportional representation, but they have very strong Lambda, so that there’s considerable decentralisation. So, some of these Lambda, reflecting the work of the movements, then put these things into practice. And the results can then be seen, and they begin to join up, and then they are a force at the national level, which has to content politically with the interests of the old systems.

That’s what’s happened on the energy side, and it is amazing now that that is cross party. It started with the Greens, then the Social Democrats, and then the Christian Democrats took it on, and took the lead because they see the advantage, in this case, of the energy system for all sorts of interests who they represent, because it’s a distributed system. So local villagers and local farmers, and so on, all have an interest in that new system. The same thing is needed on the waste side: we have to re-integrate it and distribute the interest in this new system.

As you said at the beginning, these are big industrial changes we need to make in how we run things, waste management wise, or agriculturally. We’re essentially talking about a paradigm shift from our current economy to a more circular one – and do you think this new distributed economy will be able to integrate soil health and management better?

RM: Well, in principle I think it should. Amongst the features of the new economy, one is what we economists call the movement from supply-push to demand-pull; that instead of producing lots of stuff and then trying to persuade people to buy it, you’re starting actually from the people and thinking how do you supply all the different things that different people want. So, you’ve gone beyond the mass. Now, the moment that you introduce the circular, you realise that we can’t just stop at human demand because you’ve got to think of it as part of a cycle. And if we look at our demands on the production process like that: i.e. not pushing out, but thinking “right, how do we pull it round in a sustainable way?” we then get very different questions. And certainly when it comes to waste, we’re not asking not how to get rid of the waste, but how to ensure that it goes round, how do we pull it round in a way that is sustainable and enriching. That’s one difference.

The second one is that information technology has allowed us to manage very much more complex systems – that is one of its great features. And what has happened is, instead of trying to control everything from the centre, we’ve got the development of what is referred to as “distributed systems”. The German renewable energy economy is a wonderful example, how instead of having a power station, you have multiple power stations – people’s homes become a power station, the farmer’s part of a power station. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of power stations, which are then aggregated through smart grids and various other mechanisms, so that they produce as much, if not more, than a single power station. This is a completely different model.

Now, traditionally, farming and agriculture has been a distributed system. I grew up on a small hill farm, and the valley was full of small hill farmers. What has happened, particularly on the more fertile areas, is that farms have become larger and larger as the twentieth century mass production model is then applied to agriculture. But I think we are moving now into the possibility of a much more distributed system of agriculture and food growing, and soil care – that is what is possible. It’s not going to happen, it is a possibility, which would in that sense be similar to the energy systems developing in Germany, as against the UK.

And a third very interesting modern feature is that the so-called consumer is becoming part of production; we’re becoming prosumers. Well, we know about this with food, we actually have to cook our own food (or at least, we did have). But in more and more areas, whether it be health and how we look after our health: many of the modern issues, like chronic disease, like in diabetes ninety-eight and a half percent of all treatment is done by the person who has got diabetes or their family. The same is true in education; the same is true in transport. So now people are having to design systems so that we’re all actively involved. By the way, the computer of course is a wonderful example; computers are the equivalent of the textile mills of the nineteenth century, but in this case we’ve all got one. So, it’s a highly distributed system, and once you get people involved, then you have to think, “Right, what can they contribute? How should they contribute? How do they play a part in this increasingly complex system?” It’s a very exciting area. So, when we come to food and to soil: how do we ensure that the grievous divide between the city and the country does not become the chasm that is threatened, but is actually re-integrated so that we all play a part in this particular process?

We’ll get into detail about the ways we can organise our ecosystems and the strategies for change in part two, but to round off this part of the discussion, can you give me some examples of how people can play a part in this system, and the opportunities you see the paradigm being changed?

RM: Well, I think part of the food movement has been about this. So, the movement for urban agriculture is gathering and is stronger in some placed than others, but, the development of gardens on roofs – is it in North Korea, which is particularly strong on this? But Nicaragua is another example of where this has happened. But it’s happening now more and more, and San Francisco is strong on this. We have strong movements, and a strong tradition, of allotments here. So I think gardening, even though it may no be producing food, actually brings people in touch with the fact that you cannot treat soil as if it’s a machine; that you have to do this delicately. So, everyone is learning about this.

I think on the food side there are city farms and a big city farm movement, and the community garden movement here is growing. So I think there are very interesting ways in which that is happening. And then there are all sorts of ways in which farms are being opened up to those in the city – both to go to stay there and work there, or at least to visit. So I think that’s one of the big areas for reconnection.

Vineyard Special #2: Using Composted Mulch For True Cost Benefits

In this second part of the two-part special on vineyards, we speak with CEO and vineyard manager of Food and Beverages Australia Limited (FABAL), Ashley Keegan about the costs, risks and benefits of using composted green organic mulch on vineyards. We go into detail about sourcing a good quality product, cost-effective strategies for applying the mulch, the incredible increase in yield they experienced, as well as the water saving capacity of the mulch, and much more.

Thank you to YLAD Living Soils for making this episode possible.

YLAD Living Soils is an Australian owned company formed to supply sustainable biological, organic and humus compost fertility products and programs that support the natural balance of the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the soil, lessening the reliance on conventional chemical fertilser inputs. Find more on their website.

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Ashley, you’re the CEO of FABAL (Food and Beverage Australia Limited), and FABAL is a commercial farming company that manages agricultural businesses across Australia. Can you tell me more about FABAL?

Ashley Keegan: We’re a large agribusiness management company based in Adelaide, South Australia. We operate a number of viticultural enterprises, but also other horticultural operations as well. It’s pretty much spread across the country, with a focus on viticulture in South Australia.

You manage agribusinesses. Do you manage them solely for clients or do you own some yourself?

AK: We own our own, and also manage for others. So, if you’re a company that owns an asset, or you might be an individual, but we also do that work as well. But, we ultimately own a large percentage of what we do ourselves. We also do some consulting work for the industry on an external basis as well.

How many hectares of vineyards do you manage at the moment?

AK: We have about sixteen hundred hectares under management at the moment.

Sixteen hundred hectares is nearly 4 thousand acres, so that’s quite a lot. What are your key performance indicators; what do you take into account when you’re managing and improving the vineyards?

AK: Interesting question. I’m an agronomist by training, and a viticulturalist, but my managers call me the accountant now, because we have to measure the bottom lines of anything that we do. And again, I guess I look at it a bit more broadly in terms of return on investment, whether it be purely from a financial point of view, or a return on investment of our time, or our technology – any of the inputs that we put into our operations. We do extensive internal and external benchmarking from a KPI perspective, but my philosophy is to try and be in the top five percent in anything that we do. Again, when you start to benchmark yourself across the sector, ultimately you go to financial metrics pretty quickly to be able to do that in an objective manner.

Financial success is of course important to you, but in terms of return on investment you take a broader view and include things like labour, time and technology. Our topic today is the costs, risks and benefits of using composted mulch on vineyards. Can you tell me what exactly you use on your vineyards?

AK: Effectively, we’ve done several different trial works with a lot of different products. The products that we’ve mainly settled on now are the composted green organic mulches. So it’s a green organic waste composted through the Australian Standard 4454. We can have them specifically to different aggregate sizes, and different fines profiles, depending on what we’re trying to do with the product.

Where do you source the product?

AK: Our compost comes from commercial compost suppliers, and in our city there’s two or three main suppliers that do that. The majority of the material that we use comes from a feedstock that is kerbside collected. So, I’m not sure of what happens in other countries, but in Australia you have a two hundred and forty litre green wheelie bin that the home gardener can put their lawn clippings in, their pruning in, and in some circumstances can also put food stuff into the stream. Those bins are collected, taking it off to a processing facility, where they’re composted. That process then will generally do a few things: create a blend and a particle size profile that is what I’ve ordered up. So, that’s where we get our product from.

Regarding the specifications you ask for – do you make specifications for each particular site, or is there just a general blend that you use for all vineyards?

AK: That’s a really good question, and it’s not specifically with our site. I do fiddle with the specifications when I’m trying to ask the product to do something a bit different. If I’m looking for more of a mulch versus a soil conditioner or a fertiliser, I will manipulate the percentage of fines in the product. If I’m looking for a more mulch, water-saving product, then there’s a coarser fragment in there. If I’m looking for, sort of a multi-vitamin for my vines, then I tend to get a blend with a high fraction of fines in it that break down very rapidly and give the vines almost a hit that’s equivalent to green organic fertiliser hit.

Can you give a bit of context to the operation: when did you start using composted mulch, and why?

AK: We started, I’d say, doing that in a substantial way back in 2003, and 2003 in Australia was the start of quite a dry period that spanned over seven years, particularly in the south-eastern areas of South Australia. We went into, you know, on our history it’s recorded as a one-in-one-thousand year drought. So, rather than necessarily just hurl more water at a vineyard, we started looking at the options for investing in some composted green organic mulch, and doing some trial work with that.

We were pretty fortunate that there’d been a fair bit of work done in Australia – Katie Webster, John Buckerfield had done a fair bit of work with the products that we had available to us, so that there was some good, objective, empirical data for us to make some of the decisions that we had to make at a practical, commercial level. So, we weren’t having to start at a zero-base there. I was able to make some of those decisions – reasonably big decisions – and in 2003 we undertook a significant exercise in mulch: over six hundred hectares of vineyard in one year, and thirty-three thousand cubic metres of composted green organic mulch. Probably one of the largest single exercises ever undertaken in the country. We dove in the deep end!

For our audience, that study is the CSIRO Report “Compost as Mulch for Vineyards” by John Buckerfield and Katie Webster, which found that in certain circumstances, using composted mulch can increase yield by up to 35% and mid-summer soil moisture by 30%. But even still with the research, there were of course costs and risks involved in starting a new practice in the vineyards. Can you maybe explain those a little bit? I’m sure you were very cautious even still?

AK: Yeah, we were, certainly, and from a point of view…we mitigated the risks, for want of a better term, based on research. There are a few risks associated with it from the point of view of the type of application, the density, the application ratio – you need to be a bit careful with that. The research was pretty strong on water saving, and that helped facilitate a commercial payback. At the same time, it was pretty simple to do a nutrient analysis of the product, calculate that into our normal fertiliser programmes, and take that out of the three-year breakdown period, and do some economic benefit of that. So, yeah there was a risk, but what I’d call the agri-risks of that were pretty low, pretty controllable from our perspective.

Apart from risks, there are definitely substantial costs with starting to use composted mulch – can you tell me what the costs were?

AK: Because of the volume that we embarked on that project, we had a purpose built spreader made to be able to spread that particular product, and that was a reasonable investment, but in the context of the overall spend it made sense for us to do that rather than use a contractor. But, the costs involved were commercial at the time, and it was relevant to the market at the time; the market was pretty buoyant, we were getting paid reasonable prices for our product, and the economics stacked up. But just to put it in context for you: the compost itself was around about, just in rough terminology – but around about two-thousand dollars a hectare in material, but it cost you around four-hundred and fifty to five-hundred dollars to actually apply it to the paddock. So you’re looking at around about a two-and-a-half thousand dollar expenditure.

And that’s in Australian dollars, which would be roughly 2300 US dollars, and 1700 euro.

AK: Yeah. And just to put some context around that’s in the background spend of about six-and-a-half thousand dollars per hectare of normal operating expense. So in a single year we loaded thirty percent on top of our annual operating expense to do the exercise; but again, the research was showing that you would get three years worth of benefit out of it – and again, like all good accountants, you just spread that over that period as well.

So in one year you added 30% extra to your annual operating expenses to do it, but like you said the research showed that it lasts 3 years, so spread over three years, it adds just 10% to the operating expenses annually. Those costs were predicted costs, but were there any costs, or risks, that popped up during the operations that you hadn’t accounted for?

AK: Yeah, I’ve spoken about our experience on a number of occasions in our industry level, but I had one of those crucible moments when I was interstate on one of our other properties and I received a phone call from one of the managers from one of the sites that were spraying this material to inform me they’d identified some contaminants in the product. And this kerbside collected material does have some contaminant background in it, whether it be glass or stone, or anything that goes into your green wheelie bin.

But imagine our surprise when we started identifying syringes in the product; and that ground our operation to a hold, as we had to embark on a whole series of risk assessments. And our understanding as to what happened with that is, a long story short, and a lot of effort short, was that obviously the food stream had been contaminated at some point in time with syringe containers, and had been through the composting process. And we ended up – on our six hundred hectares – having to rake the entire area, and after going through that process we identified over four hundred new syringes in the material that had to be extracted out of that material.

So, it’s probably a bit unusual that you see me sitting here still being a card-carrying supporter of compost after grinding our business to a halt and creating an amazing logistics and practical [impact] on our business that we still deal with today. But what we had to do was understand very clearly that those contaminants represented a negligible risk that we had to put in procedures to manage around that – including identifying those risks to visitors to our properties, and our customers. So, we got together as a business and we looked at those risks and fundamentally we decided as a group that the benefits we were targeting and the support that we had for the product still mandated that we were comfortable to move forward with that.

We worked with the industry pretty hard to make sure that didn’t happen to any other group, and the industry responded pretty well. But I think coming out of the back of that, and the message that I recount to people, looking at that kerbside collected feedstock, is that you need to be careful about the fact that…really, the syringes were acute and emotive, but what they represented to me was just risk, and that if syringes can find themselves in your feedstock stream, then there are probably no rules about that, and as a community – as a supply chain – we really need to work hard on making sure that the public who are putting material into their green wheelie bins, understand the implications and the ramifications of the decisions that they make on their front lawn.

Yes, and we’ve spoken a lot about education in the past, and the importance of connecting people with the process so that they understand where their organic materials go and what happens with them. For example, when speaking with Gerry Gillespie of City to Soil, he told us about their extremely low contamination rates, and he attributes that simply to making people understand what happens with their organic materials.

We go into detail about this in Lesson 4 of our online course on Compostory.org, and we go through the whole process of how to set up an education and communications strategy when you’re implementing a new kerbside system – so anyone who is interested can check that out.

But as a business like yourself, what can you do to help control the contamination rate?

AK: I think that if I was talking to – well I guess we are potentially talking to people considering using it – you really need to do your homework with your suppliers, you need to do the homework on the product. And I’m not sure of the standards in other countries, but there’s an Australian standard for composted green organic, and it’s a basic standard but it’s a good Australian, or international, standard as to what actual process it has to go through. That’s a really good first start. It’s not everything, and frankly it’s the base hurdle that the product should jump over, and that helps manage some of the agri-risks, but it also demonstrates that this is actually operating in a sustainable, professional manner.

And then you really need to go around and get your hands dirty and have a look at the product, look at the process; and understand that if you’re just buying a couple of bags, it’s a return on your time, really, but if you’re looking at embedding it into your production systems, then it’s imperative that you go and have a look at not only the process, but I’d argue [you need to] understand very clearly where the supply is coming from. And ten or eleven years down the track, we’re quite discerning about feedstocks going into our composted green organic mulches. We still use kerbside materials, but we also use very specific streams, and we also have a supply base that will create blends from specific streams for me as well.

My experience with the industry is that it’s pretty proactive in that context. Every day the technology improves for sifting and sorting and managing contamination in the kerbside products, but nothing beats stopping it getting in there. And I think that as a community, as an industry, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the home gardener understand the sheer responsibility that they have. Because it dramatically adds to the cost; it dramatically impacts on the decision-making of blokes like me, and if we could remove those variables – if we had a magic wand that could remove those variables, then look out, because the product is a very powerful product.

Going back a bit, contamination was the biggest risk you encountered, but for costs – what were the biggest costs that you experienced, perhaps transportation of the product was the biggest cost?

AK: Definitely the distance to the producer is really important. It doesn’t weigh a lot, so the bulk density of the product generally, you know, you can only jam so much in a truck. So, there’s a large volume for weight that you’re transporting. So, I guess this is where some of the other products have gone to [muffled] structure and try to get a bulk density increase, but unfortunately you lose some of the benefit of that loose, open-aired structure that you’re looking for with the mulch.

So, certainly transport is a big factor. It’s probably dangerous for me to talk about percentages of that, because it’s so variable depending upon how far you are from… But it can range from ten percent of the product cost, to forty percent of the product cost.

Let’s talk about the strategy for using the composted green organic mulch on your vineyards: I know you’re keen to get the best value out of the product, so how do you apply the composted mulch to achieve this?

AK: We started with a very blanket approach, non sophisticated; start at one corner of the paddock and go to the other corner, and that was as sophisticated as our strategy got, because we were looking for that water-saving, fertiliser input benefit across the whole board. Then we found, almost by accident – we use remote sensor satellite imagery on our vineyards to look at biomass – and what we found by accident when looking at some of those images – after we’d done the mulching work where we’d put in some trial works – was we were having some profound impacts where we were taking low biomass, low vigour areas and really dramatically shifting those profiles.

And it got us thinking about how we can maximise the benefit of that, and it dovetailed into the fact that, as the product is reasonably expensive, you want to put it where it’s going to give you maximum value. And we started to do some trial work on that, where we looked at taking it into the weaker sections of our paddocks, applying it to those, and then looking for a response out of that. So, just to give you a bit of a background as to that in viticulture especially: vineyards are very linear. They’re built on trellises and they’re very linear, and no matter how accurate you were with your source surveys and your selection of the paddock, you end up having high vigour areas, or stronger areas, and some weaker patches on shallower soils.

And managing that vigour variance…that’s viticulture 101. And we do that generically be managing our fertiliser and trying to trim, or managing our irrigation as best as we can, but you end up trying to average that out against the whole block. And what we started to do was some experimental work where we just went into the weak sections and apply it, and then task the satellite again to have it look at another image to see if we could even out the vigour. It was really quite astounding, the responses that we were having on that – and I guess that satellite imagery allowed us to objectively validate that as well.

At this point you started to look at the cost benefit of the mulch – so what were your findings?

AK: What we found was, if I explain to you: you might have a ten hectare paddock that might be contracted to a certain customer and they might say you can deliver a hundred tonnes off that block. If that block is delivering you a hundred tonne, that’s great and everybody’s happy. But in reality, what happens in most paddocks is that half that paddock might be delivering you twelve tonne to the hectare, and the other half of the paddock might be giving you eight tonne to the hectare. That’s really crude, but you’ve got sections that are weak and harder than other sections. And if at the end of the day the equation equals what your customer wants, then everybody’s happy.

But if you’ve got a situation where you’re under performing because the vineyard is not delivering to its capacity, intrinsically what you try to do to meet that contractual opportunity is you try to drive the vineyard a bit harder. And that exacerbates this variability, if you’ve got a problem, it sort of becomes a spiralling cycle at that point. One of the great things we found with the mulch was – when we started to put GPS sensors on our harvesters, and we tracked and found this new variation that was happening in our paddocks, and we lined them up with our biomass images from the satellite’s on the canopy densities – that the correlations were pretty good.

So, we figured that if we can make the weaker sections of our paddocks work a bit harder, then we don’t have to drive the whole paddock up just to meet those obligations and meet those opportunities. And that’s where we really started to look at good, positive returns on investment. We did some work that we published a bit of, that showed the capacity to take areas, increase those in yield by twenty percent, or thereabouts. And depending on your price profiles – at that particular time it was a single year payback for us with a three-year delivery of that result. So, besides the commercial repo, it actually improved our product. It created a more even vineyard block, so our customers are happy; we’re happy because we’re meeting the targets, and we’ve actually minimised our requirement to spend money on the mulch as well. So we’re just putting it where we’re getting maximum return on it.

You experienced a single-year payback with a three-year result, that’s really excellent, though I suppose that’s particular to your experience?

AK: Yeah, the key point that I’d like to make, or I think is really important, is if I was to run that metric again today in a different price metric, different yield parameters…you have to be very careful, it’s going to be very specific to your site and the market you’re playing with. If you’re growing a very high quality product and where a tonne to the hectare makes a big difference because of the price point, then it amplifies the impacts. If you’re in a different quality spectrum then…you need to do the numbers yourself on that. But really, the key return on investment is if you’ve got latent potential, or under performing potential, and you can capitalise on that by returning that area to a better performing area. And therefore there’s a market for that fruit, there’s an opportunity to sell it at a certain price point.

The thing that jumps out to me is the 20% increase in yield. How was the quality of the grapes themselves? Because more does not mean better quality, necessarily.

AK: This is the other point: you’ve got to be really careful with that, because if you’ve got a vine that’s operating at a certain potential and you just make more vigorous to grow more tonnes, well there’s a threshold in viticulture where that could potentially detract from the quality of the grape. And that, again, to me is the advantage of targeting the weak areas that are under performing, and potentially haven’t got enough leaf over the top and have maybe too-exposed fruit: you can create a situation where you can grow a more healthy canopy on that vine and get better protection for the fruit, and at the very least, improve the quality of those under performing areas.

You mentioned water saving benefits and we talked about the study – but how much water did you save then in the end?

AK: We went into the whole exercise with a view that we were potentially going to save thirty percent of our water, but it was a particularly dry year – again, we were heading into the drought – so we almost abandoned the need for that. We almost ignored the water saving component of it; we wanted to maintain the biomass. So what we found was our ability, with the mulch on-board, to create a more healthy canopy than we otherwise would have at the same water level. The research that Katie Webster and John Buckingfield did – that’s really quite categorical in that they were looking at around a thirty percent water saving. And I’ve no concerns about that, that in the right applications you can deliver that. We personally now use the products in more of a remedial sense, and spatially remedially. So our whole aim is to take a block and be able to just apply a normal water level, rather than have to apply more water to compensate for the weak area of the block. So, we can fix the weak area and then just water the entire area normally.

Is there anything else that viticulturalists need to keep in mind in order to achieve success using composted mulch?

AK: I’m a huge fan, absolutely huge fan, of trialling everything. It costs virtually nothing to go and put mulch on a few rows and see what happens. And just record it; put a control in place, put a treatment in place, do that in three different varieties in three different soil types, and you’ll learn for yourself. And that’s ultimately how we started and ultimately what gave us the confidence to go really broad-acre on some of this strategy. But it started with two rows of vines and…You know, wiggle a finger and stick it in the air and see what happens! You know, there’s a bit more science behind it, because you can measure it and do the analytics that you need to do, but….

At the same time, I’d say it’s not for every site. If you’re on a high-vigour site or a wet site, you need to be very, very cautious about it, and you’d need to really have a look and a hard think about the applications for that. And my overriding comment with these products is just to know the source and know the quality of the product. And don’t be afraid to ask; don’t be afraid to have the analysis done, and look at the analysis and make sure you’ve done a little bit of background work on them.

I have one more question before we go. I wonder if you’ve ever considered using cover crops on your vineyards?

AK: It’s interesting, we did, and we compared cover crops. We looked at the biomass that we can generate with a cover crop, and the reality is we just can’t grow, internally, enough cover crop to make a material difference. A really interesting thing we did with cover crops on one of our properties was – almost using the same theory that we did with the satellite images – we’d grow cover crops in all of the vineyard block, and we use a forage harvester (which is a machine that cuts and collects the cover crop) to take it out of the paddock and compost it, and then bring it back in and spread it on the weaker parts of the block again. So, we’re actually using a cover crop to potentially de-vigour the high vigour areas, and at the same time taking the nutrients from there and transplanting them – with the compost process in between. We found that to be a really good way to draw down on a high vigour area by planting a hungry cover crop, and yet put that benefit back into the same paddock where it helps you even it out.

Fascinating, a really interesting way to use cover crops to control the vigour of the vineyard. And unfortunately Ashley, that’s all we have time for. Thanks for coming on the show today.

AK: Thanks!