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

EPISODE SUMMARY

While we will continue to make new episodes, there are times when we feel the urge to highlight a past episode – because the topic it covers becomes news and the show shares some great insights, or because it is content that our newer listeners might have missed out on. Since last year was the International Year of Soils, we will be republishing a few of our best episodes about soil and soil health to get a fresh perspective in light of all the progress that has been made on the issue.

Today’s retro episode is all about policy, and the Australian experience.

Our guests are former Governor General of Australia and Advocate for Soil Health, Major General Michael Jeffery, and co-founder of Ylad Living Soils Rhonda Daly. In this episode we discover the crucial elements needed to build a comprehensive policy framework that will protect not only our soils but our landscapes. 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. We then link this back to the current recommendations made in the FAO’s report Status of the World’s Soil Resources.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

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LINKS:

Episode 2: Drought Special #3: Fighting A Drought: Levers for the Public Sector.

Status of the World’s Soil Resources 2015, Technical Summary. FAO Report.

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FEATURED EVENT

International Compost Awareness Week Australia. May 2nd – 8th. New South Wales, Australia. Organised by the Centre for Organic Research & Education (CORE).

International Composting Awareness Week Australia (ICAW), is a week of activities, events and publicity to improve awareness of the importance of compost, a valuable organic resource and to promote compost use, knowledge and products. We can compost to help scrap carbon pollution by avoiding landfilling organic materials and helping to build healthier soils.

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Photo by suburbanbloke / CC BY

Transcript:

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.

TRAILER – Water & Carbon: 3 New Answers to the Water Crisis in California and Beyond

Our editorial team is currently producing a 6-episode series of The Organic Stream talk show, dedicated to spreading strategic insights to influencing bodies and support drought relief efforts in California and other regions of the world facing a water crisis.

Until today, the focus of the water crisis in California has been on conventional strategies and short term actions, instead of outlining solutions and creating a debate that ties to the broader picture of water, waste, carbon and energy management.

The Organic Stream team traveled the length of California to collect insights from the field and work with key players from the agricultural sector, compost industry, scientific community and public sector in crafting a new narrative. A narrative that ties together several of the challenges the state is facing with food production, water management, waste management and climate change to provide clues on how an integrated approach to resource management can dramatically change the game for the better and for the benefit of all.

The show will blend expert interviews, storytelling, narrated content,  soundscapes and music. Each episode is approximately 30 minutes.

 

 

Horticulture Special #1: Compost’s Transformative Effect On Olive Orchard

EPISODE SUMMARY

We’re kicking off the year with a focus on the use of compost in horticulture – how compost use affects soil composition and soil health, and the plants or crops grown in it.

This week, we’re talking to Graham Brookman of The Food Forest organic farm in Gawler, South Australia about how compost has helped transform his poor quality soil and sensitive olive crops and greatly impacted his business for the better. We’ll be discussing how exactly compost works to improve the soil, and the olive crops especially, and we’ll also be exploring the cost factors involved, sourcing compost, the challenges he faced at the beginning, and how long it took to see changes in the soil and crops.

 

MADE POSSIBLE BY BIOBIN® 

 

FEATURED EVENTS

COMPOST2015: Organics On The Rise – The USCC’s 23rd Annual Conference and Tradeshow. January 20-23, 2015.

The world’s largest organics recycling conference and tradeshow. COMPOST2015 is organised by the US Composting Council, and takes place in Austin city, TX. The event is dedicated to sharing knowledge about everything: from how to run a compost facility to the challenges of collecting green waste and food scraps. Those who attend the sessions and pre-conference classes can earn continuing education credits as well as cutting edge techniques in the industry.

Visit www.compostingcouncil.org/compost2015 for details.

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

 

Photo by Aracuano. Some right reserved.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

The Food Forest – Soil and Olives

 

Q: Can you tell me a bit about the Food Forest and your olive orchard especially?

Graham Brookman: The Food Forest is a small farm, of about twenty hectares, and of that about seven hectares are irrigated, which is important because we have an annual rainfall of only about forty-four hundred mills (millilitres). We have about one hundred and sixty different varieties of food that we produce, and in addition to the raw foods, we do a lot of value adding; so we would not only produce grapes, but the wine from the grapes, and the vinegar from the wine, and so on. So we tend to have a value-adding stream, which then creates its own by-products, and those by-products go back into the input of the system to keep it going. So we need the least possible non-renewable inputs from the outside.

So, olives are a particularly interesting crop in our environment. They’re very sensitive to the amount of rain that you get, and if they don’t get enough water they will sulk and they won’t give you a crop. And if they get adequate water, then they’ll feel really good and generous and give you good crop. So, we’re sitting on the knife-edge with a crop like olives, and the management of water in the soil is completely critical. So it’s a very interesting crop to watch when you’re thinking about how good your soil is, and how you can maximise your yield, given a particular rainfall.

Q: Can you share with us the situation you had with your soil before you started applying compost – I know it was quite poor quality and a bit of a challenge for you.

GB: The soil is naturally quite low in carbon. It’s an alluvial soil, so it’s largely fine clay silt brought down from the hills and down from the Barossa Valley, and that’s dumped into this old riverbed. So the whole of our farm is actually in a riverbed, and if the river gets angry we actually go under. So we’re acutely aware of where our soils have come from, and the upshot of that is that we have naturally around about 0.7 of a percent carbon in our soil, which is very low: a decent agricultural soil in Australia is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5. So we started right down at the bottom end.

It was a very unforgiving soil that had the capacity to chemically concrete, virtually, in the summertime – so it was like farming on clay bricks. And so our first and major challenge was to unlock the soil from this concreting – and that was mainly done using calcium, so a calcium rich fertiliser. We used gypsum to chase the sodium ions off the colloids so that the soil would become a little bit more crumbly. And from there it’s just been a steady building of carbon that has led to the vast improvement of our soil.

 

How Compost Became A Solution: Location, Contamination & Organic Certification

 

Q: When did you decide to use compost, and why?

GB: Well we had been thinking about it for a long time, but we were bullied into going into a competition – the South Australian Premier’s Food Award – and the sponsor of the award was a guy called Peter Wadewitz from Peat Soils. And, you know, that was sort of by-the-by as far as we were concerned; we were just focused on trying to win the award at that stage.

But along the way, and particularly after we’d won the award, we’d got to know Peter very well, and it was only through talking to him that I realised how cheap compost is. It’s much cheaper than chemical fertiliser, and it gives you all of the added micronutrients, and it gives you carbon. So you’d have to be absolutely crazy not to use it in our situation. We are very close to the source – that is the city of Adelaide, which has got a million people producing organic waste, so the hauling distance is short, therefore the price is good. We also had a good contractor who does spreading locally at very competitive rates, and he worked with us to devise a way of throwing the compost into the actual olive rows – right next to the roots of the olive tree, rather than in the inter-row.

So firstly we could get the compost cheaply, and secondly, we could put the compost where it was needed. So altogether it was pretty easy to decide that that was the way to go!

Q: One of the biggest factors in the affordability of compost for farmers is the proximity to a source of compost. I’m sure you agree?

GB: It is. The cost of transport can be an absolute killer. So if you’re within fifty kilometres of one of the actual manufacturing points for compost, then you’re within a competitive range. But once you start going one hundred, two hundred or three hundred kilometres away, it starts to get pretty much undoable. So we’re just very lucky, and it’s my belief that we need to create cyclical systems where the city – which consumes the bulk of the food (and many other non-renewable items) and produces this magnificent waste stream that mostly goes out to sea – that could all be going straight into the farming system, which is just out on the periphery of the city, taking advantage of the waste water and the waste nutrient stream.

Q: A big concern for those using compost is the contamination rate of the compost. Did you do any research into the compost quality, or did you have any concerns about the contamination rate yourself?

GB: Well, we’re organic growers, so it has to be certified organic, and that was taken care of by the organic certification. So we didn’t have to worry much about it.

Q: As organic farmers, you’re able to use the compost made from non-organic materials from the city because of the change in certification, correct?

GB: Yes. There was a particular day at which one of the certifiers said, “Okay, we’re going to take the view that non-certified organic inputs, i.e. once composted and well done, can be regarded as organic”. That was a major breakthrough as far as I was concerned because up until that time we couldn’t use it because it wasn’t certified organic, and that was a mind-shift by the certifiers. So, that was a very important point.

Q: There are different types of compost to chose from and it can be tailored to suit your specific needs as well – so for your soils and for your orchards, what kind of compost were you looking for?

GB: As a farmer what I was looking for in compost was a high nitrogen level, because nitrogen is the element that drives plant growth most, and in most organic fertilisers there’s a dearth of nitrogen. So looking at the different producers, one stood out as having relatively higher nitrogen levels – still not huge, only about between 1.5 and 3 percent in terms of difference – but it makes a hell of a difference to the plants. It’s like you’ve got a rocket under the plant. So I was looking for high nitrogen, and I think that we can mainly thank the resource of animal manure for that. They had access to quite large amounts of animal manure, which went into that particular compost, and that was very important.

 

Compost Benefits: Water Retention, Increased Yields, Carbon Build-Up

 

Q: How often do you apply the compost?

GB: Back when we were poor we could only put it on once every two years, and we sort of hit on a rate of about twenty-two cubic metres per hectare – and that’s applied in bands under the trees. And then we got a bit richer and we do it every year now. And that’s much better because we could see in the second year of that cycle that our yields were less, so we need to keep topping it up. The soil is working hard and it needs to be fed, that’s for sure.

Q: What is important to keep in mind when growing olives, and how does the compost affect the olive tree growth, and crops?

GB: As I mentioned, olives are really capable of sulking. So it’s very hard to kill an olive; they will just stay alive under really bad circumstances, but in terms of giving you a decent yield, you really need to look after them if they’re going to look after you. So they do need reasonable amounts of fertiliser, and reasonable amounts of water. And what we didn’t have was any way of storing extra moisture in our soil when it was low carbon. Now we have three times the amount of carbon in our soil, having used compost for twenty-five years. So we have a much higher reservoir of water, which is actually carried within the organic carbon in our soil, and that makes all the difference.

Not only does compost give you ultimately more carbon, it gives you the capacity to hold more nutrients and hold more water in the soil, and for olives that just is enough to make the difference in our environment. We crossed a bridge about fifteen years ago where the olives suddenly decided that they quite liked being here, and instead of miserable little olives and very poor crops, we started to see some really good crops and it just gets better and better.

We haven’t had to use any other fertilisers, really, since we moved to compost. We had to fix up some stuff in the beginning, when we were low in magnesium, calcium and boron. But once we had those essential things fixed up, we have simply used compost every year, and it’s given us all of the nutrients and the carbon. So it has been quite miraculous. I feel a bit slack really, as a farmer, not having the do all of the recipes and looking at different fertilisers every year!

Q: I can imagine! You touch on some of the benefits here that you’ve experienced with compost, and I want to focus on that aspect now to give people a clearer idea of just how big an impact it’s had for you, particularly at the beginning. According to the case study done by Compost For Soils on their website, Even when you were only applying the compost every second year, production started growing steadily and yields had risen by fifty percent within a four year period – which of course has led to an increase in staff.

Soil organic carbon was as low as .7% and you have now got triple the amount of carbon, which then in turn has a huge impact on the water-holding capacity of your soils – with an increase of moisture infiltration and water holding capacity of up to one hundred percent.  So now you’ve got healthy and happy olive trees, thanks in the most part to compost…

GB: Yeah, it’s amazing really…

Q: How exactly has the compost benefitted the olive plants and the yields they produce the way that it has?

GB: One of the main things with compost is that you reduce the stress levels in your plants. So here, if we hit a real heat wave; temperatures can go up to forty-six, forty-seven degrees Celsius (116 degrees Fahrenheit) and that puts the plants into stress to the point that they start producing some quite nasty chemicals – you know, some off-tastes: a lot of tannic kind of tastes – and the compost works in a number of ways to combat that.

One is actually how it keeps the soil temperature lower. So, putting the compost on fairly thick as we do, it’s not only acting as compost, it’s also acting as mulch. So if you had open, unshaded soil, the temperature might be seventy degrees centigrade or higher; well you wouldn’t want to experience that. Or, you can go under a layer of mulch in the same place, and if it’s a decent layer then you’re down around twenty-five or twenty-eight degrees absolute maximum. So it is absolutely staggering what a difference a bit of mulch makes.

So that’s one effect. And then you’ve got the continued capacity of compost to deliver water to the plants on those hot days. You just get that continual availability of moisture. So I think they’re the two key things that compost will do that conventional fertilisers won’t.

Q: So it’s crucial to supply the plant with a continual supply or water, and the mulch layer is quite critical then for success when it comes to olive growing in hot climates…

GB: Well yes, and as I was saying with the olives; if you don’t keep the water up, then they just won’t give you a yield. It’s as simple as that. We practice what’s called deficit irrigation where you don’t give the crop all of the water it could possible use, you give it a percentage of that. It’s like feeding children too much: if you feed them too much they get too fat and develop various diseases, but if you just keep them a bit leaner and a bit meaner and…but if you starve them they die!

So you’ve got to find that sweet point where you provide them with enough nutrients and water so they give you that yield, and that’s a very particular point. And we all aim for that here because we don’t have unlimited water: every little bit of water is very critical and compost helps us to find that sweet point.

Q: And of course with such limited water, it’s important that your irrigation applications are effective too…

GB: Overall. Of course, if you are irrigating on soil with low carbon, the water will go, ultimately, straight through it. It’s lost to drainage. Whereas if you’ve got a good carbon level in the top meter of soil, you can store bucket loads of extra water, which means that every kilolitre of water that you’re applying is actually being used by the plant instead of losing half of it to drainage, and that’s tremendously important. And then, in terms of utilisation of the water you’ve got in your soil – If you can reduce transpiration and keep your plants together where they haven’t kind of collapsed, then again you’re getting a much more efficient use of the water. So you’re winning in a couple of ways.

Q: That’s right, and I didn’t mention it before, but over that four year period once again, your irrigation applications grew to be twenty-five percent more effective – not only because of the carbon’s capacity to hold water, but because it lowers the temperature of the soil and reduces evaporation as well. But aside from these obvious benefits, what other benefits have you experienced with compost use?

GB: Oh, the soil microflora. If you’ve got a lot of carbonaceous material and just general vegetable material and so forth, you’ll find that you’re developing much healthier microbes. We have a laboratory in South Australia that actually tests the different types of microbes you have in your soil; and so you’ll have bacterial ones and fungal ones, you’ll have pathogenic ones and beneficials…and there isn’t any doubt about compost – it just really fixes a soil up that otherwise has no defence.

For the tree – if there’s a potential bacterial infection or something like that, with the compost you’ll suddenly find that you’ve got all the fungi and so forth that will get stuck into these pathogens and protect your tree. So there’s no question about that. We actually got our soil tested by a doctor Ashley Martin at this laboratory Microbe Labs. And when we first got the results back – you’ve got all of these issues in your soil, like gauges that you would have on the dashboard of your car, and if the speedometer reading, if you like, is right across to the right, it means you’re really good for drought tolerance, and you have another dial which is really good for bacterial-fungal balance, and so on.

And with our soils that have had compost on them for so long, every test that was done by this lab was right across to the right-hand side – fully on. And so it was good to actually see that this trial that was done using the DNA testing of all the microbes in the soil proved exactly what we’d been suspecting all along.

 

Challenges Faced at the Beginning

 

Q: Did you face any challenges at the beginning with sourcing or applying the compost?

GB: Well working out how we could band the compost along the actual tree rows. There was a lot of mucking around. We tried shoots sticking out of the side of the machine, and that was quite clumsy because you had shoot that used to crash into trees every now and then, and so forth. And then this guy from Africa – he was a welder – he designed these baffles that went on the back of the spreader. So the spinner would spin the compost out and it would hit these baffles and then bounce into the right place in the row. That was really good. So once we worked that out, it’s been pretty straightforward.

Q: Were there any challenges you faced specifically with the olive crops?

GB: We did have quite erratic yields with quite a lot of the crops, and we found that the individual climate of a year was critical to success, and I think compost has evened it out quite a bit. So the crop just charges along anyway, even if when you started this whole process a year like that would have just written you off and would have destroyed you. It doesn’t do that anymore because everything’s more resilient, and I think that’s really important. It gives you much more confidence as a farmer, that’s for sure.

Q: How long did it take for the compost to start making an impact on your soils and crops?

GB: The soil improvement came with both calcium sulphate, combined with the compost. And the gypsum, if you get rain, it takes about two or three days and you will notice that a paddock that was like rock now is quite soft. The compost was much slower, and so in terms of noticing a perceptible rise in soil carbon viability and workability with machinery, and that sort of stuff, it took two or three years to get anywhere.

But I think once you get to a certain point, you’re going to actually see the benefit in the year of application. So I would say that nowadays, we get all the money back in the first year, and then more money back in the second, third and fourth years from a given application. So your compost is extremely valuable, because you’re paying off the investment in the year that you actually apply it – and then you’re getting more and more benefit from then on as well.

 

Investing in Compost: Should You Take The Plunge?

 

Q: Why do you think some farmers are slow to use or invest in compost?

GB: Most of them are too far away, that’s the problem for a lot of them. Farmers are very practical people: if they do the sums and they can see that they will make money in their operation by buying compost rather than something else, mostly they’ll take the plunge. They’re very hyper-aware of economics. They’ll change crops from season to season, and be watching world markets…so there’s usually and economic reason; they’re economic rationalists, that’s for sure.

But the other thing is that you can put on a powerful fertiliser through your drippers in twenty minutes. You can’t do that with compost. So fertigation, particularly, is a very fast way of getting nutrients to plants. So I think not being a purist is half of the problem. So I would see a practice emerging that says “We’re going to base the soil health of our operation on compost, and we are going to continue to use sophisticated manufactured chemicals to maintain the exact control that we want in out greenhouses”, or whatever it might be.

But we could probably still use twice as much compost as we are at the moment.

Q: Do you have any words of advice for other farmers, or olive growers out there that are looking into using compost?

GB: The sooner you start applying compost, the sooner your soil structure will change – that’s the main message. You just jump in and start doing it, and I think you’ll find that you never stop. You know, I know a lot of people who have sort of weaned themselves onto compost; so they’ve applied a bit of compost for a couple of years, but they’ve kept a little bit of chemical fertilising going on at the same time, and then they’ve switched right across to compost. And so if you’re scared you can do that. It’s sort of like organics – you can do half your property and then you can do the rest when you’re convinced that you’re making more money.

So, particularly for farmers that have got a bit of land close to the city, they’ll find that they can increase their crops and maybe increase yield two or three times, become more profitable, and be doing the right thing for the planet. It doesn’t get better than that!

 

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.

Whether you’re starting a garden from scratch, sprucing up your planting beds, or mulching your favorite fruit tree…we have a natural and organic premium garden soil, potting soil, mulch, or fertilizer to help your project reach its best potential. Kellogg Garden products have been dedicated to meeting the needs of gardeners for over 85 years, and we continue to provide products you can trust! Visit their website here.

Photo by suburbanbloke / CC BY

(more…)

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.

Drought Special #2: A Mulching Guide for Farms and Gardens

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

In this fourteenth episode, we’re speaking to agronomist and soil culture expert Bob Shaffer, and soil scientist and professor at UC Berkeley, Stephen Andrews about drought-proofing your farm or garden using mulch. The experts discuss best practices for choosing and applying mulch for water retention, the most suitable irrigation systems, the cost factor in drought-proof and area, and much more.

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

Whether you’re starting a garden from scratch, sprucing up your planting beds, or mulching your favorite fruit tree…we have a natural and organic premium garden soil, potting soil, mulch, or fertilizer to help your project reach its best potential. Kellogg Garden products have been dedicated to meeting the needs of gardeners for over 85 years, and we continue to provide products you can trust! Visit our website here.

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EM: Hi Bob and Stephen, thanks for coming on the show. Now to start us off, I think it’s important that we distinguish between compost and mulch – for those out there that might not know the difference exactly. Stephen – can you please tell me what that difference is?

SA: Mulch is defined as a ground cover, so anything that’s covering the surface of the soil. And we don’t think of mulch as something that we actually incorporate into the soil, which we do with compost, so it’s important to recognise that compost is a soil amendment, and that mulch is a ground cover.

EM: Right, okay, so that’s the difference between compost and mulch – but is it true that you can also use compost as a kind of mulch as well?

SA: Yes, compost can be a form of mulch; it can be used as a ground cover. But often, and my recommendation would be (at least from the home gardener perspective), that you use compost and mulch together as a unit – as part of a system of protecting the soil. And that you would apply compost first, and then, to protect the properties of that compost, the living biology of that compost, you would want to apply mulch on top of that. And that would insulate the compost so it’s able to do its best work in contact with the soil.

EM: Mh hm

BS: Yes, very well put. And let me just say that, although I agree entirely that mulches and composts are different, however: mulches from woody materials or grassy materials, do become broken down in particle size, come in intimate contact with the sand, silt and the clay in soil, and become humus and/or soil organic matter over a longer period of time. So mulches, actually, are very effective at increasing the soil organic matter, or what can be called also the humus content of soils, even though they break down very slowly.

EM: Right so it acts a bit like a compost as well. And Bob, a lot of farmers in California are getting ready for the summer and are thinking of ways to combat the drought. Can you tell me what the key considerations would be when choosing a mulch to protect against drought – what should farmers know when choosing a mulch?

BS: Well, with drought in mind, or with wanting to have more water infiltrate into the soil – be held in the soil; one of the things that I do on farms is raise cover crops.

EM: Right – and just to jump in there – I just want to clarify for those who don’t know: a cover crop is a type of plant grown to suppress weeds, help build and improve soil, and control diseases and pests. They’re also sometimes called “green manure” and “living mulches.”

BS: Yes, and often times cover crops aren’t looked at as a form of mulch, or a source of mulch, but for me on farms, especially on larger acreages, it really is the practical and economical way to get mulch. Now, I’ll say this: with cover crops, I can choose the species that I want, I can plant them; and then manage the residues above ground, the green tissue, to where it’s a little older, and where it has a little more lignin. And then, when I mow this material and lay it on the soil surface, it has a longer half-life because it’s been lignified; and then, maybe most importantly, sort of secretly or quietly going on, is the decomposition of the roots.

So, the roots add to the humus level, the development in soil, the mulch laying on top and slowly breaking down…and between those two – both the roots decomposing and the mulch on top – we get a significant development of structure, water holding, water infiltration, and healthier roots to reach out to the water and utilise the water – by simply using a cover crop technique.

EM: Interesting, so cover crops are definitely a possibility. And perhaps you can list a few other mulches that are ideal for water retention on farms? Will your choice depend on the type of soil you’re working with, or?

BS: Well, it somewhat depends on the soil. I mean, certainly when we have a sandy soil, or light textured soil, mulches are even more desirable. However, mulches apply to all soils. Now, as far as accessing enough material on a farm situation, where we’re talking about maybe…even small acreages; it takes a lot of mulch to cover that three or four inches deep. Sometimes a farm will have access to larger amounts of woodchip, or some type of material that’s appropriate for mulches, but typically I grow the mulch onsite.

EM:  Okay, and is it only water retention that matters when it comes to mulching to fight drought – or are there any other considerations?

BS: Well, to me, again, if I can get more humus developed in soil – and that humus has the ability to hold a very, very large percentage of water…and recalling also that once the water is absorbed by humus, it’s released back to the plant much more easily than the water that is held by clay in the soil. So, my drive on farms for a number of reasons – including water retention and water infiltration into the ground, and then water retention…and released to the plant – is to increase the humus levels in soils.

EM: Amazing. So, yeah, there’s a lot of talk about the importance of humus going on now. And Stephen, let’s talk about gardens now. What would you say is important for gardeners to keep in mind when choosing a mulch?

SA: Yeah, where cover crops are an excellent application for farming in the residential and landscape setting, that’s probably not as practical because people would look at it as kind of weedy, or that sort of thing. So, using an organic form of mulch, such as recycled wood material, for example, or straw, cardboard, newspaper…these are all forms of mulch material that can be used in a residential setting. And I particularly prefer the sheet mulching technique, which is not only good for maintaining moisture within the soil, but also it’s great for weed prevention; it’s great for keeping the temperature moderated within the soil, and also it aids in the decomposition process to increase that soil organic matter content, which is so important. A one percent increase in soil organic matter content quadruples the water holding capacity of the soil.

So, sheet mulching is a very effective technique, and it’s kind of like making lasagne. You’d apply a one to two inch layer of compost, lay down some newspaper, straw or cardboard in a double overlapping layer; apply another couple of inches of compost on top of that, and then at least three inches of recycled wood mulch to protect that whole lasagne package that you’d created. And you can actually plant directly into that.

EM: Mh hm, okay…

SA: Now, three inches of mulch is particularly important, because we really want to maintain that moisture content within the compost, and the decomposing cardboard or straw, or whatever it is. A lot of people don’t recognise it, but mulch itself – while it acts like a great sponge, and can hold a tremendous volume of water – it also can lose a lot of water to evapotranspiration.

EM: That’s actually an important point I wanted to bring up. For those of you who don’t know, evapotranspiration is when something, in this case mulch, loses water through transpiration and evaporation. So, how should you combat this?

SA: So, knowing what size material to use is very important, and there was a very good study done by the University of California Cooperative Extension several years ago that looked this. And it was actually found that yard waste – or what we call green waste – mulch is a very good source for home gardeners. It holds a tremendous amount of water, and it does a very good job at slowly decomposing and adding organic matter, or humus Bob was mentioning, back to the soil.

So, sheet mulching and using something like green waste, or yard waste, is a very good way to go…or recycled woodchips. And those woodchips should be somewhere between the two and three inch size range, in order to optimise the moisture holding capacity, and also the…we need at least three inches.

EM: Right, so three is the key. Is it the same for farms, Bob?

BS: Yeah, more or less. Three or four inches have been shown through many trials to be an effective layer for mulch.

EM: Great, and I’d like to talk a little bit and talk about that study you mentioned, Stephen. We know from that study that some mulches, such as yard waste applied 3 inches thick, can hold up to 2.51 inches per foot of water – which is pretty substantial. And it warned that sometimes mulches can soak up the rainwater and sprinkler water and it lose that water before it gets a chance to reach the soil underneath. What were the reasons for this happening – I presume it has to do with the amount of mulch applied?

SA: Well, that’s…yeah. It had to do with the size of mulch, the kind of mulch…yeah, it was kind of a complicated set of things, but the size and type were the two key variables there that were related to the moisture loss.

EM: Mh-hm.

BS: Yes, this is actually an important topic, because either on the smaller level – or on the larger level – mulches can interfere with light rains or light irrigations. I’ve put mulch on macadamia and on avocado trees, and a lot of times, in a dry farm system where they get light rains and the trees have trained their roots up into the upper layers of soil, when we go in and mulch rapidly – come in and just put three or four inches of mulch down – it seriously can set back the vigour of these trees, because they don’t get those light rains anymore.

Now, over a longer period of time, the system will balance out, the tree size will change, and the root structures will change and the mulch will become effective. So, one of the things that I do if I’m going to go to mulch is, I’m going to question…mulch a new area…I’m going to question what is my irrigation capacity, if any? What is my rainfall pattern? And try to keep from stressing the crop by providing more irrigation to the crop if I need to in the interim period while there is transition and adjustment to the new mulches.

EM: Okay, but I presume that adding extra moisture would be tough to do during the drought, no?

BS: Ah, it’s all doable. It’s all doable. And once again, in some instances, and in particular on some farms, taking a transition instead of a sudden change, tow, three inches of mulch, may be a good idea – depending on the circumstances.

EM: Right. So, what type of irrigation would be best suited for this type of situation, then?

SA: What I think people should be thinking about is drip irrigation and going with some form of sub-surface, rather than having a sprinkler type of system. And that’s the kind of irrigation that they were looking at in that study that looked at loss of moisture from mulch. So, I think folks should be looking at drip – so that the drip is actually below the mulch level and it’s making contact directly with the soil; that folks are making sure that they are monitoring their drip system and they’re adjusting it as the plant material grows; that they’re adjusting the flow rates based on the size and the developmental stage of the plant material; and, to the greatest extent possible, that they get that moisture into the soil versus getting it into the air through a sprinkler, where a lot of it is being lost.

EM: Alright, excellent, so a drip irrigation system is definitely the right choice, especially for drought. But going back to the mulch itself now: is there any types of mulch you would advise against using?

SA: Well, here in California, with drought we’re also concerned about fire. And it is possible for mulches to be quite flammable. Things like gorilla hair, for example, would not be a recommended form of mulch to use. I prefer recycled woodchip material that’s come from pallets or from construction projects, where the wood is clean, and then it’s been shredded up. Bark chips, for example, redwood bark chips would not be preferred – they tend to be easily floated away…. There was just a recent fire in Massachusetts, actually, at a wedding reception where someone threw away a cigarette into the mulch and it actually ignited and caught the vinyl siding of a building.

So, there are these situations where that happens, and there was, when we think about mulch in a residential setting, and in California where we have urban wild land fire, selecting the right kind of mulch, and how close it’s being used to a building, is important to keep in mind.

EM: Right…

BS: Also, I would say that with mulches, I’ve seen red cedar, or other highly aromatic type woods, if used fresh as chip around shallow rooted plants – I’ve seen them damage shallow rooted plants if it is a very aromatic type of mulch material. Also, I guess I would be cautious about mulches that came from plants that were chopped or chipped off of likely contaminated soils – this would be around some highways, or just some situations where a lot of herbicide or pesticide is used, and then we don’t like to take the mulch chopped from that area.

SA: Yeah, I would whole-heartedly agree with that. You need to know the source of the mulch. You need to know your mulch provider. And you should never be afraid to ask questions about what went into the mulch, the mulching process, whether it was treated with any kind of material. And this is particularly true in a residential setting if you’re using coloured mulches – you want to know what the provider used as the colouring agent.

EM: Okay, great. Brilliant tips, very useful to know. And let’s focus now on the strategy: would there be certain areas to priorities over others, or certain plants to protect first? Bob, say, in farms?

BS: Well, I would say that mulches are probably most appropriate where there is projected to be a lot of water loss from the soil, either because of low soil organic matter levels, or a lighter textured soil, or a certain drainage or exposure. Always when we’re talking about using onsite grown mulch, if that’s in conjunction with an actively growing crop, we want to make sure that we’ve picked the cover crop that we’re going to chop over to mulch carefully, as we don’t want the cover crop competing with the crop.

In terms of where we would apply mulches first, like I say, I think on lighter textured soils, on exposures where it’s particularly hot, or on slopes where we’re subject to losing soil – soil erosion, sheeting off the surface…so mulches are very effective at lowering the potential for erosion.

EM: Great, and Stephen, do you want answer from a gardens and landscaping point of view?

SA: If you want to take a strategic approach, I would look for those areas that are most weed-infested, or the areas that you’ve got little planting in at the moment, and focus on starting the mulch those first, and then being able to move in with California native plants or drought tolerant plants into those areas; making sure that you’ve got the appropriate amount of mulch, that three inches that’s going to help to keep the weeds under control and keep that moisture in the ground. And it is very effective on any kind of a slop situation for controlling erosion.

So, my strategic approach would be: think sheet mulching; think about it applying to the areas that you’re not heavily landscaped, or underutilising, or that you’re going to transition with plant material; then go to using plant material that is drought tolerant – particularly using California native plants, or wherever you are, the native plants that are particular to your watershed. And that would be the approach I would recommend.

EM: And, how much, or how often, should you mulch, and would it be good to blend the mulches, or?

SA: Well, from the residential perspective, really you don’t have to change the mulch up all that much. Once you apply it, if it’s particularly within that two-and-a-half to three-inch size range, that’s going to slowly decompose over time. If you’re wanting to freshen up the colour of it, or over time it’s going to oxidise in the sun and you want to be able to brighten that up, you can do a little top-dressing of an additional inch or so a year – that’s about what will get processed over the course of a year.

If you’re going to be adding compost as part of that process, you need to peel the mulch back, apply the compost, and then return the mulch back on top of that. It’s very important that home gardeners remember not to incorporate mulch directly into the soil; that compost is what we want to be incorporating into the soil, or leaving on the soil surface. But, woodchips – those kinds of things – should not be incorporated directly into the soil, so that we don’t cause a nitrogen drag situation.

BS: Well yes, those are great points, and I think the incorporation of mulch into the soil is a problem often times that I run into, either on farms or in gardens. One way or another, people can think that it’s better off to incorporate these materials, and they’re too woody. And, as Stephen pointed out, we can start to tie up nitrogen by incorporating too much woody, high carbon stuff too quickly.

EM: That’s an interesting point about the nitrogen – that it could possibly get tied up. Would you recommend replacing the nitrogen in the soil in that case, via fertilizers, say?

SA: Well, from a residential perspective, during drought conditions you never want to fertilise. Fertiliser stimulates new growth. New growth requires additional water, and in a drought condition when we don’t have that available water, that’s going to put the plants under tremendous stress, which will then invite pests…and so we just create this downward kind of spiral within the garden.

So, I would let the compost feed the soil, not the plants. Focus on making sure that the biology in the soil is getting what it needs. It is perfectly capable of moving all the nutrients around, the water around, and making sure the plants get what they need. And as part of that, I recommend that folks have their soil tested to know what they actually have in the ground. The idea of applying fertilisers every two weeks is great marketing, it’s great brainwashing, but it’s not good soil biology – good soil ecology. So, test your soil, know what you already have, and then don’t be fertilising during a drought: be applying compost and let the soil biology do the work of sustaining your plants through the drought conditions.

EM: Right.

BA: Those are great points and good comments. Now, plants, of course, to be most protected, they have their own mechanisms against – protecting against – water loss, and protecting against drought stress. Plants need to have, particularly, potassium and zinc, in addition to all the rest of the essential minerals. But potassium and zinc have a lot to do with how the plant circulates its fluids, and how it protects itself against drought stress, and so….

Yes, testing the soil, but also testing plant tissues is something we do where there’s crops in particular, because we’re raising crops for food, so we’re very interested in making sure that the crops have good access to minerals. Not over-fertilising is important, and by testing the soil, and then also testing the plant, we can determine what is missing, what is going to be provided by compost…. And, for example, compost will increase the K level – the potassium levels – and the phosphate levels; typically compost does not increase, or mulches do not increase the calcium levels in plants. And again, the calcium, along with boron and copper, help to make the plant harder and more resistant to pests, and also have a healthier root system that can be larger and healthier and pick up more water in the soil.

So, certainly anytime that we’re talking about farm, or garden, we want to make sure that we’re asking our questions sort of through the filter of all three primary cultural practices, which is: organic matter management – that includes compost, cover crops and mulches; mineral management, or what I would call, more accurately, mineral balancing in soil; and then also, tillage management. We look at the whole soil ecology, and ask ourselves: what will the compost and mulches provide? What is my soil sample, my tissue sample, showing? And what minerals might I need to replace to increase the plant’s ability to resist drought, and to make the root system so that it’s particularly large and healthy, and able to uptake water effectively, and to have microbiology on the roots that increase the plant’s ability to uptake water very strongly?

EM: That’s very interesting, very cool. So people should definitely test their soils first of all.

BS: Definitely.

SA: Absolutely.

EM: And finally, lets talk about the cost-factor: Bob, could you tell me roughly how much it would cost to drought-proof an acre of land, say?

BS: This is a great question. However, we have to know where we start. I work on some soils that have five percent soil organic matter in Northern California; I work on some soils that have one half of one percent. And those two soils could have different textures, meaning the amount of sand, silt and clay. Particularly clay in a soil will cause the soil – a lot of soil – to hold more water. So it’s a hard question to answer arbitrarily. On the average, I would say you’re going to spend, maybe less than one hundred dollars per acre for a cover crop; it’s going to cost me thirty-five dollars an acre to mow that cover crop; it’s going to cost me a little bit for seed – or the seed that was a hundred dollars per acre; there could be a little other costs in there possibly for assundries.

EM: Right okay, so under 100 dollars for the cover crop itself, 35 dollars to mow the cover crop, and possibly a little bit more for assundries – so on average it’s roughly a hundred and thirty dollars per acre to use a cover crop. And Stephen, finally, what’s the rough cost estimate for a home garden?

SA: Yeah, so for the home gardener, it’s generally, I would say, between thirty-nine cents and seventy-nine cents a square foot. Again, it depends on where you’re starting from. And that thirty-nine to seventy-nine cents per square foot is for three inches of a recycled wood mulch being applied. And the largest cost component in that square footage is the transportation cost. So, if you can find a local source of great recycled wood mulch, or yard waste material that can be transported, you know, for very little, then that cost is going to drop significantly. But the largest single component in the cost for the mulch is the actual transportation of it from one place to another.

But three inches is what you’d want to shoot for, and generally speaking in California it’s somewhere between thirty-nine and seventy-nine cents per square foot. Now, if you were to multiply it out for an acre, it looks like an astronomical amount of money, but remember we’re talking about residential garden, home landscape situation, so…thirty-nine to seventy-nine cents is about what it would cost.

EM: Alright, that’s great. And, well, we covered the basics now and unfortunately that’s all we have time for today, so thanks Bob and Stephen for coming on the show.

BS: Certainly

SA: You’re very welcome.

EM: Alright goodbye now!

SA: Bye!

BS: Okay, bye now, take care.

Drought Special: Communicating Compost’s Magic in Our Cities

This episode corresponds to Lesson 3 and Lesson 4 of our online course.

Episode thirteen is part one of a three-part special on the drought currently experienced in California, and the value of compost for saving water. In this episode we’re talking to Robert Reed on how cities can prepare for drought through awareness campaigns that highlight the water-saving benefits of compost use.

Thank you to Recology for making this episode possible.

Recology is an employee-owned company operating in California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington coordinating dozens of recycling programs to recover a variety of materials. In San Francisco, they are part of the program Zero Waste by 2020 and are very involved with compost production and distribution. Visit their website here.

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EM: So Robert, I know that there’s a lot of talk about California right now, which is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record at the moment. The Governor declared it a state of emergency, and has signed a 687 million dollar drought-relief package into law. Farms are suffering, and people are being urged to reduce their water usage by up to 20%. So, it’s going to be a tough summer and people are doing all they can at the moment to help save water. What are you doing over at Recology to help the effort?

RR: Well, we’re trying to help people understand and know that compost saves water, and that by participating in our curbside compost collection program, people can help California save water. Compost by weight is fifty percent humus, and humus is a natural sponge. And farmers understand this, and they’ve purchased a whole lot of compost from us in the last six months, to put it on their farms in an effort to retain more rainwater.

And, at Recology we’re trying to help people understand the ability of compost to help capture and retain water. In the city, the traditional reasons to participate in the curbside compost collection program are to keep materials out of landfills, and return nutrients to farms. And almost everybody understands the first one; everybody gets that composting is a good thing to keep material out of landfills, and to have less landfilling going on.

I would estimate that about half of the people in San Francisco are connected and understand the second motivation, which is to return nutrients to farms. And now, we’re trying the emphasis a third reason to compost all of their food scraps, all of their plant cuttings, and this third reason is to help save water, and to help California – the state that we love – do better in terms of mitigating the drought.

EM: Yeah, excellent. And I presume getting people to understand that last one is a little more difficult, then?

RR: Well, for people in the city, it’s a new idea and so, when you have a new idea, you need to get it out there a lot, you know. You need to get it on the internet, you need to write about it, you need to do TV reports about it…you need to put it in your newsletter on your website…. It just helps of people hear it multiple times from different sources.

We’ve worked a lot with some agronomists to help get the wording right, get the research correct, so that we can frame the message correctly and accurately, and then help communicate this, about how compost helps save water. And we’ve written an article, and we’re going to publish it as the lead story in our customer newsletter next week. We also shot a photograph that shows some hands holding a little young plant – green with water on its leaves, and of course the compost in the picture is very wet, and very heavy with water. So we have an iconic image that helps people…they can look at it and they immediately understand this point, that compost and the humus in compost is a natural sponge. Pictures are very powerful, and so this image is important, and we want to present this image in as many places as possible – and the message.

Mh-hm, right. And as part of your outreach campaign, too, you host an annual compost giveaway in various locations around the city for people just to come and collect compost, is that right?

RR: Yes, and it’s absolutely a joyous community event and it’s a bring your own bucket event, so people will bring two five-gallon buckets, and we’ll fill them with compost that they helped make, and they take it home and put it on their gardens, and on their outdoor plants. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that you can do when your city has a compost collection program. You know, not only can you keep materials out of landfills; not only can you send nutrients back to farms; not only can you help the region and the state that you live in save water – but you can also help create a compost that then comes back to your city, that residents can get through a compost giveaway; they can use in their own gardens; and that can come back to community gardens in your community; and can come back to urban farms in your community.

EM: Yeah, exactly. But now I’d like to get down to business and talk a little bit more about campaign strategies – can you tell us what you think makes for successful awareness campaign and public outreach strategy?

RR: Well, you have to go straight to it and say, you know, “compost to help save water”. And people kind of subliminally understand these things; it’s a very old understanding for people. All of us have gotten our fingers into the soft soil in a garden at some point in our life. And so, when we present a picture that shows compost that’s heavy with water and it’s very dark, it rekindles this subliminal memory in people.

And so, it’s our feeling that people need to see this picture and hear this message. They need to see it in print, they need to see it online…one of the points here is that the outreach and education around composting and recycling is competing with a lot of other information that’s in your community, that’s on the news.

There’s just all kinds of information out there that’s competing for people’s attention. And so, composting has to be part of that discussion. Composting has to be part of the game, so how do you make all this good information; this positive information about composting…how do you get in the game?

EM: Mh-hm, right.

RR: And one of the things is what you mentioned, is that the leaders in the community need to be talking about it, and concerned about it. And they need to attend the compost giveaway; they need to talk to the media about it; they need to hold a news conference about it periodically, or pen an article or an op-ed that gets published in the city’s newspaper. So, you need to do creative things. And one of the things we just did at Recology is we came up with a playful recycling quiz, and we posted it on our website.

EM: Yeah, I saw that actually, I thought it was very funny.

RR: Yeah, well okay, I’m glad you enjoyed it. You know, we…it’s a series of nine multiple questions – what goes in the blue bin, what goes in the green bin. And of course the first answer is something completely ridiculous, and then the second option is something frustrating or annoying. And then of course the third answer is the correct answer, and it’s something you might not have known that you could compost – like soiled paper.

EM: Yeah, and I particularly like how you actually explained in your newsletter about the soiled paper – that it’s great for compost. And that you call the short paper fibers that organisms love to consume – y you called them carbon candy. I think that’s a great way of framing it.

RR: Yeah, and those are the kinds of stories that we need to tell, and we need to particularly tell them to younger people. The Union of Concerned Scientists did an analysis – they looked at all the message about recycling and about composting: should the outreach dollars be spent on radio ads, or TV ads, or bus shelters, you know. And they measured for the first time in the history of America; really, they did a very complete measurement of what is the most effective way to communicate about recycling and composting. And the answer…what they discovered was that the best thing to do was to communicate to students and to younger people.

They reported that we all know that kids learn to recycle at school and then go home and teach their parents. What this research proved was that parents are actually listening to the kids. So when the child goes home and says, “Mom, we compost at school, dad we compost at school – why don’t we compost here in our kitchen at home?” Then the parents are listening and the family will then get a kitchen compost pail and start composting more of their food scraps and their plants at home, and increase their participation in the composting program.

EM: That’s very interesting.

RR: Yeah, it’s very interesting. So, we’re trying to tell the story of carbon candy to kids. We’re making presentations every week to students in classrooms in San Francisco. One of the reasons, you know, that we did the playful recycle-compost quiz is to do something entertaining, and we’re going to let all the schools know about it. And that’s what we’re doing in California.

The farmers are joining us. The farmers have come to San Francisco and held news conferences, and asked people to be more attentive to put all their food scraps and plant cuttings – and soiled paper – in the green bins, so that we as a community can make more compost and we can get it onto farms, and add life to the soils – return life to the soils to help protect our topsoils. This is very interesting: farmers coming into the city, holding news conferences; asking people in the city to do right by the environment, to compost more of their food scraps.

EM: Very good. And for the last question, now, I’d just like to get your thoughts on the drought and how it looks for the future of California?

RR: Well, there’s many articles that are suggesting that California will not have as much rainfall in the future as it has historically. So, we have a history of dealing with dry periods; we’re going to have to remember what has worked for us historically. And, if you want to know the answers to environmental questions; what should we do to help protect the environment, what can we do to do more recycling, more composting…often the answers are in the history.

Look back: what did your grandparents do? What did your great-great grandparents do? They composted! Okay. They had an area where they would put their food scraps – they made compost. And we need to remember that as a community, and we need to do more of that. And we’re going to need to do more of that in the future.

EM: Wise words. But unfortunately that’s all we have time for now today, Robert.

RR: Alright.

EM: Thanks for coming on the show.

RR: Thank you.

EM: Alright, best of luck now.

 

In Focus: The City To Soil Composting Process

This episode corresponds to Lesson 6 of our online course.

In this twelfth episode, we speak with Organics Recovery Specialist Gerry Gillespie about the City to Soil organics collection program, and their unique composting process using minimal machinery or manpower; ideal for remote locations and small farms.

Thank you to Polytex for making this episode possible. 

At the cutting edge of the Poly Textile fabrication industry, Polytex is a reliable supplier of quality products, servicing a wide range of customers from industry, agriculture, construction, commercial spaces, and mining in Australia and overseas. Polytex designs, manufactures and services the right product at a competitive price. You can deal confidently with Polytex. For more information, visit www.polytex.net.au.

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EM: So Gerry, would you mind just giving us a little background information on City to Soil and give us some background information on how it all got started?

GG: We commenced using City to Soil as a program in 2003/4 in a little town called Queanbeyan, which is next to our national capital. What we were trying to do at the time was demonstrate that we could collect clean, source separated organic waste, turn it into a high quality compost, and get it into agriculture for much cheaper than we could put it into landfill.

And we demonstrated that we could actually do that. We could collect it, process it, carry it two hundred kilometers, and put it at a farm gate for about fifty dollars a tonne, including profit when the disposal fee to landfill was seventy-five dollars a tonne.

The thing that really surprised us was the very, very low levels of contamination. The entire focus right through the City to Soil program has been on the idea that this material is going into agriculture to produce food, so it must be clean. And we’ve found that that message absolutely resonates with people.

EM: Mh-hm.

GG: Anyway, after the first very successful trial, we were given a two million dollar grant to run the program in four areas of New South Wales – four council areas. One of those areas is four and a half hours away from where we are here. If you use the normal method of composting, it would have meant that we would have been loading machinery onto trucks and carrying it from one place to another – we would have used up our two million dollars in a very short space of time. So it was clearly necessary to find a new way of composting.

EM: Yeah – and what was that new way of composting, then, that you developed.

GG: So we really…we developed this process of covering the material and using an inoculant, and it’s been very, very successful. It’s more or less, if you look back at the history of composting, it’s a combination of what the Japanese community call “Bokashi”, which uses effective microorganisms. These inoculants speed up the process, but more importantly they change the biological nature of the compost pile.

These sorts of processes have been used – there’s a very good description if anybody has the old book by Sir Albert Howard called “An Agricultural Testament”, pages forty-eight and forty-nine are almost this process absolutely described, so it’s very much like the original biodynamic composting process as well.

EM: Okay, and maybe you can give us a talk through the actual process? How do you go about it?

GG: So, the composting process that we use for City to Soil, is basically that we’ve asked people to give us clean, source separated product because we’re putting it back into the soil to grow their food. And people really seem to understand that, because our contamination rates are very, very low. We bring the material into the composting site, and we spread it out on the ground. We take out any obvious contamination – and there are things you miss in that first step. And we don’t shred: that’s very, very important. The argument is because we collect our food waste and the garden waste in one two-hundred-and- forty liter wheel bin, all of that material, pretty well most of it will be no longer than you arm and no thicker than your thumb. So most of that material will break down without shredding. If you do shred in that first stage and there’s a bottle that you’ve missed, what happens is you end up with glass, or plastic, all the way through your compost.

EM: Mh-hm.

GG: And then we get it very, very wet; so somewhere between forty percent and sixty percent moisture. Then we inoculate it with the inoculants that we’ve prepared previously. Then we push it up into a pile, we put a cover over the compost pile, and we put an indentation. And what normally happens then is that green waste in that circumstance will go up to about seventy degrees Celsius, so it gets very hot. That heat drives the moisture out of the pile, onto the inside of the cover, if you’ve got a cover on, and all the water runs off because it’s a slope. If you have an indentation in the top, then what it causes is: the two sides of the compost pile will push the water up toward the top, but most of it will drip into the bit that’s indented and fall back into the pile. That actually means that in most instances – not all, but in most instances we don’t have to apply any more water after that first stage. Although sometimes we put more water on in the middle stage, about six weeks into the process.

But then, after the compost goes through the seventy degrees Celsius, the family population – that’s the first stage, aerobic stage of composting, is totally an oxidation process. Once it gets to that peak, all those families change, and they collapse back into the pile and the process becomes fermentative. So it’s a fermentation process, much the same way as you’d make…as a farmer might make silage, or the Germans might make sour kraut, it uses lactobacillus as the principal biological agent. But those biological processes can change quite dramatically in the compost pile.

So then we just leave it for another six weeks. We leave it for six weeks in the first stage, we take the cover off and check the moisture and everything is breaking down quite well, and we may put a bit more inoculant on or we may put more moisture on, and we put the covers back on. We sometimes turn it at that stage, put the covers back on and then leave it for another six weeks – or another twelve weeks if possible, because in that secondary stage the humus in the pile is actually building quite dramatically. We’ve found with our compost process…at the end of this process we’ve had thirty to fourty percent more compost than you’d normally have if you have a totally aerobic process.

EM: Amazing.

GG: In this compost process, what we’re trying to do is make something. Most waste management processes are trying to reduce something – they’re trying to get rid of something. Which is how the oxidation process in compost is quite often looked at from a waste manager’s perspective. What we’re doing is: we are not trying to solve a problem; we are trying to develop an opportunity. It’s a totally different focus; we’re trying to make something beneficial out of something, and we want to return it back to the soil to give an even bigger impact biologically into the soil.

Interestingly, the council in Armidale, one of the five councils where we’re using the process now (they’ve been using our inoculants strictly now for about eight or nine months): the Environment Protection Authority has just given them an extended license to process fifty thousand tonnes a year on their site -which is large for a regional center in Australia – but they’ve made it a condition of the license that they have to use our process. Which I think is wonderful.

EM: Yeah, it really is. It’s a testament to the success of the process then.

GG: Absolutely, yeah.

EM: And so let me go back a bit now and ask you a few more details – can you tell me what kind of covers you use for the compost?

GG: The thing that we found to be best of all is what in Australia we call grain covers. They’re very heavy-duty, – they’re generally used to cover large outdoor piles of rice and wheat in Australia – they’re very durable which means that we can have the same cover for a long time without it deteriorating because of the ultraviolet light. So, it’s important to get something of good value. If you’re going to invest in something, you’re better off spending a couple of hundred dollars on something, because it’ll last years. Sure, you can go out and buy plastic, or you can go and buy a cheap cover, but, you know, it’s gone in six months. So yes, we try to rely on quality.

EM: Mh-hm. And they’re not breathable covers, are they?

GG: No, they’re solid, yeah. They’re actually, you don’t let any air – they entire idea is to contain the microbial processes. You’re trying to create a circumstance where they’ve got a food supply, and they’ve got enormous family members there together. While the food supply and the family members and the right conditions are there with moisture, then they’ll breed up. And in breeding up, they’re creating more humus, they’re pulling more things in from the atmosphere, and they’re creating beneficial outcomes.

EM: Excellent, and how much machinery, then, would it take to run a program like this?

GG: Very, very, little. Our entire objective in designing the process was to have something that really used minimal machinery. I’ve tried to get farmers to use the process because the only thing they need is their tractor. And most tractors have a bucket on the front so they can move manure and things around their farm. So the only things you need, basically, are the tractor and some supply of organic material, and just a simple cover. So, not a complex process.

And the inoculants: if you look up lactobacillus on the internet, you’ll find the start of those processes. Or even better still, go to your locate effective microorganism supplier and buy some of their product.

EM: And you can make the inoculant yourself?

GG: Yeah, I…we made it in a hotel room in Egypt. So, basically the process is: half a cup of rice in a small jar – a honey jar – with water. And you leave that sit for three or four days. It pulls the lactobacillus in from the atmosphere. With a loose-fitting lid: the lid has to be on, you don’t want little animals getting in there because they carry other types of biology, but the air contains the lactobacillus.

So, rice in water, for four days in a dark cupboard. And then you take that water, pour it off into two litres of normal milk – or skimmed, I’ve used skimmed milk, tinned milk, powdered milk, all sorts of treated milk. After about another four days, all the solids in that milk will form a cheese on top, which is about two centimetres thick, or an inch thick, on top. You take off the cheese and feed it to the chickens, or the dogs. Animals love it. It’s beautiful; it’s quite edible stuff, actually.

And then the serum, which is underneath: you dilute that one hundred percent with rainwater, because you don’t want any chlorine in there. If you do use tap water, let it sit for an hour. But dilute it one hundred percent with water, add a cup of molasses, and that’s the basic product. It will stay in that form for about three years without – and quite stable.

And then we take that product, and we extend it again. We turn it into a more extensive product; it can be used as a fertiliser or a compost inoculant or…. The secret to the whole thing, to my mind, is introducing a process that enables the biology to be as diverse as possible. The more diverse the biology in the compost heap, the better outcome you’re going to get in the longer run.

EM: Mh-hm. And the quality of your compost, then, is quite good?

GG: Brilliant! It matches the best of any compost I’ve ever seen anywhere. We have local people here – there’s a company called Ylad, west of us, who sell their compost for about one-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars a tonne, whereas commercial compost in this area, in bulk, would normally sell for about forty dollars a tonne.

The end objective of what we do is to have a product that is biologically active, has high levels of humus, and it uses the compost material simply as a substrate – as a vehicle to carry the biology back out into agriculture.

EM: Excellent, and so because of the nutrient value, you can sell it at a very high price. And can you tell us a little bit about the feedstock now. I know that this process can operate with variable feedstocks – so what kind of materials can you use?

GG: There are a whole lot of different feedstocks that we’ve used in the process so far. Normally in a composting process you have to have a ratio of about twenty-to-one carbon to nitrogen, up to about sixty-to-one carbon to nitrogen.

Using this process, we’ve composted Australian native sawdust, which has a carbon to nitrogen ratio of about one-hundred-fifty-to-one, on its own. Now, the reason for this, and the reason why variability of feedstocks does not matter all that much, is that this process pulls its nitrogen base from the atmosphere.

So after it goes through the first phase, or while it’s going through the first phase, the aerobic composting will normally blow off a lot of nitrogen, but the fermentative stage seems to build a whole lot of things back into the process. So yes, the mix of the materials is not really all that crucial. We’ve done it with pure food in New Town in Wales in 2007 and it worked perfectly, or we’ve done it with Australian native sawdust at the other extreme.

EM: That’s really good – it’s a really good advantage. And now Gerry, can you tell us in what contexts would this process be ideal for, do you think?

GG: Well, in terms of using the process, I think the biggest advantage is that it’s excellent for remote locations. We’ve never, ever said that this process is so unique, you know, it’s better than any other compost process in the world. Composting processes have been around since the dawn of time, and nature is very good at doing it in all sorts of different ways. But what we’ve tried to do is come up with a process that can be used in remote locations, or by farmers, to get a very, very good product.

The process is not that different to biodynamic composting, except biodynamic composting is not generally covered. And this is absolutely simple. If you’re a farmer and you don’t have time – you can set up the compost pile, put the cover on, and just go away for six months.

EM: That’s incredible, so it really requires very little. And the odour issues either, isn’t there not?

GG: Not at all. No odour…no shredding, no turning, no odour.

EM: That’s amazing.

GG: Yeah.

EM: And we know that in order to make good quality compost, you need a very clean source of organics – and you mentioned before that you’d had great success with the City to Soil program – can you give us an idea as to why that is?

GG: The thing, I suppose, that’s really unique about – well, I don’t “suppose”. It is. The thing that’s absolutely really unique about City to Soil is the community engagement process. I think people have got to a stage with recycling programs where they see that when they’re putting their newspaper into bin, or their aluminium (or aluminum, as the Americans would say) into a recycling bin, they’re giving that material away. They pay for the service to have the material collected, and in most instances it goes off to some re-processor somewhere, so they’re giving Rupert Murdoch his newspaper back at a discount price. Or they’re giving aluminium away to Comalco or one of these larger companies. Where…if you put organic material into a bin and it’s being made into compost and it’s going back into soil to produce food – the people see that it’s a very real connection.

I think that what we’ve done inadvertently, and in some ways intentionally – we obviously expected to get very clean material from it – what we’ve done is we’ve hit a button in people that really resonates with them.

We’re operating now in five council areas with City to Soil, and our contamination rate seems to get lower and lower, not worse and worse. Most contamination rates around the world in organics recycling, people think they’re doing really well if they only have five percent contamination. Our contamination has never gone above point-four of one percent. The lowest council – we just started at a place called Palerang. Their contamination level is currently running at point-zero-six of one percent.

So, in a small town of about four hundred people, we collected one-and-a-half tonnes of material and the total contamination were two soft drink cans and one plastic pot. That’s absolutely nothing.

EM: That is really incredible. And for our final question now, because we’re running out of time: can you tell us how you get such low contamination rates? What do you do?

GG: What we collect is garden waste and food scraps together. Now, that’s unusual, but in Australia, our circumstances are relatively unusual. We have four hundred and fifty-five million hectares of land under agriculture. Seventy-five percent of that land has got less than one percent organic material in it, so our soils are very low in organic material.

We have about forty-five million tonnes of waste a year, and about sixty percent of that is organic. So it’s an absolute no-brainer that the thing we should be clean product, and getting it back into our soils.

So to make that as easy as possible for people, we use a two hundred and forty liter wheel bin – a cart for the Americans – into which…we give people a compostable bag which sits on their kitchen bench. Because the compostable bag breathes, it allows water to go out of it, and allows the material to lose a lot of its moisture, but it won’t smell. People then tie up that bag and they put that in with their green waste in a two hundred and forty liter wheel bin.

The difference with our bags, is that when we give a household a roll of one hundred and fifty bags, they all have a number on them. So we can, theoretically, if we’ve registered the number against the street address of the house that we gave it to – we know where that bag came from. But we don’t use it negatively; what we generally do is we’ll wait until we get bags back at the composting site, we’ll pull two of those bags out of the compost pile and if there is no metal, glass or plastic in those bags when we open them, that household wins a one hundred dollar hamper of fruit and vegetables.

We’re trying to make people think about where their food comes from. But, more importantly the fundamental thing about City to Soil is trying to connect the urban population back to the rural population. And that whole link is to try to get people to think about the farmer as their food supplier. Because regardless of a farmer’s religious, political or social beliefs, you need to have a relationship with them because they’re growing your food. And they need security and you need security of supply.

So food is very, very important to us. We say to people all the time: if you eat, you’re involved, you know? It’s a process you can’t avoid. And so…and we think this message can transfer quite comfortably into any language, because it’s a very simple message. It’s just simply saying: clean material goes into your food supply.

EM: Amazing, that’s a great message. Well, congratulations on the success of the program, and Gerry, that’s all we have time for today so…

GG: Alright.

EM: Thanks a million for coming on the show.

GG: Okay, talk to you soon!

Madagascar: Soil Fertility on a Shoestring Budget

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

In this seventh episode, we talk to Master Composter Peter Ash about how he successfully  tackled deforestation and soil erosion in a small village in Madagascar, with hardly any funds or manpower. Peter demonstrates how understanding natural systems and using nature to our advantage can dramatically improve the health of the environment.

Thank you to BiobiN for making this episode possible.

BiobiN® is a mobile, on-site organic/wet material management solution that starts the composting process and effectively manages odour from putrescible waste. BiobiN® can be used in a variety of outlets, including food manufacturing, restaurants, shopping centres, supermarkets…it’s endless. Whereever organic or wet materials are generated, BiobiN® is THE solution

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TRANSCRIPT:

EM: So Peter you just came back from a two-month trip to Madagascar. How did that come about?

PA: I was hired a year ago when I was in France and I was teaching some gardening and composting classes, and…. So anyway, I was approached by this Frenchman and he told me about…that he has this, not much financial backing but a small NGO in France and they were doing work in Madagascar; in kind of the north-west area of Madagascar, the dryer side of the island, in a fairly remote area. Very poor: no running water, no electricity. And they’d basically built a small village where they had a school for little children. And then they also had some high-school students that were coming from further away, and they were trying to gain some food security, and they were just having a lot of difficulty.

EM: Right, and they sent you there to help them out. What were the main troubles they were having?

PA: So, what I’d discovered was: first of all, that side of the island had been deforested probably two hundred years or more ago. The cattle are a very import part of their diet, and a very important part of their culture, and so what they were doing was that they were burning the range right before the rainy season to burn off all the weedy vines, and the small weedy palm trees…. They’re burning it all off to create new grasses for the cattle. Well anyway, so I get there and I see this deforestation, I see this slash-and-burn, and terrible soil erosion – so I immediately saw, okay, we got to deal with erosion control, we got to deal with soil fertility, and we need to capture the water.

EM: Right. And regarding food: you told me that they were trying to grow rice, and I imagine that was quite a problem?

PA: Yeah, the property – there was no really low-level land for rice farming. Rice farming has to be done – when you’re dry farming it you need to have flat land and you need to be down in the low valleys, in the natural run-off areas, and we didn’t have any terrain like that at this village. We were on kind of a sandstone bluff, and then it would drop down to what would turn into a streambed when it rained, and then we had another hill going up the other side. So – and very few trees – a few palm trees here and there, a few mango trees here and there…you know, mostly everything had been burned off in the past.

EM: Right, and how were they for water generally then?

PA: Basically, when I got to the village they had two wells – hand-dug wells – and it was, they were very shallow. And they had planted some trees, maybe a year at the most earlier, and they were having to hand-water the trees to keep them alive during the dry season. And in one day of watering, they could take the well all the way to the bottom.

EM: That’s quite a dire situation.

PA: Yeah…

EM: Can you list, then, the key things you decided to do to help?

PA: Right…I knew we had to do some earthworks to capture the water, and replanting trees to help hold water in the soil, digging berms and swales to help hold the water and recharge the water table…and then soil fertility.

EM: Right, and there were some big challenges when it came to improving soil fertility, wasn’t there?

PA: Yeah, so I’ll tell you what – here’s what happened was…it turned out that the students that were there – the high-school students that I was supposed to be teaching compost to – were mainly not available. Initially we did make a couple compost piles and…but it was too labour intensive. So, what we found was we had…we had about twenty-head of cattle and a couple goats. Some were owned by the village itself but most of them were owned by neighbours, but they were penned on our property.

And, you know, one taboo I discovered was that we could do no, like, compost toilets or humanure composting. That was completely taboo, but to work with the cow dung and the cattle manure – that was not a problem. And they didn’t know anything about using it. And so here was this cattle pen – quite a bit of manure had built-up in it, and I discovered that we had a nearby sawmill that had mountains of wood shavings and sawdust that was a waste, and they didn’t know what to do with it. So we could get that for free, just by sending some men in an ox-cart over and…. And then there was another nearby village where they grew a lot of sugarcane and they had some low ground and some flat ground, and so there was all this sugarcane waste.

So what we decided was that: due to lack of labour and equipment, that we would just spread the woodchips and saw dust and the sugarcane waste in the cattle pen, and then allow the cattle to just trod on it for a month or so – three weeks to a month – and then we just scrape it all out and use it as mulch. And we could turn it into the soil for kitchen gardens…and so on. And so, we let that be one of the major key components for our soil fertility program, rather than manually making compost and having to turn it, and adding more water and so on.

And then, on top of using the cattle to make compost for us, a lot of people have pigs as well and most of the animals just run free and the range is open-range for everyone to use. But then, we built what we call a pig tractor, which is like a portable pigpen. So we had the pig tractor with just three little piglets in it. Of course, the pigs are being fed, but we also just threw a lot of organic material inside  – the same wood shavings and the sugarcane mulch, and then weeds from the garden, we’d just throw it in there – if they pigs didn’t eat it, no problem: they would just basically compost it for us.

And then, when we first built the pig tractor – right next to it, just about the same size, we planted some cover crop. So as soon as the cover crop began to flower…all these nitrogen-fixing plants have, you know, captured atmospheric nitrogen, fixed it on their root systems. So as soon as it flowers, that’s basically when the plant stops growing and starts fruiting. And that’s when it uses that nitrogen. So if you cut it at that point, then all the nitrogen – these little nodules that are fixed in the soil on its root system – remain in the soil. So then what we did was we just moved the pig tractor over and set it on top of that cover crop and the pigs just devoured it in no time. But then, they’d left all that nitrogen in the soil already.

EM: Amazing, that’s a very effective way of getting around the problem of not being able to compost!

PA: Yes, indeed it is. And then, you know, as far as the reforestation: we looked around and we searched out local trees and seedlings…like, they have some moringa, which you can plant just from a cutting, and then there was a couple other trees – some of the acacia, that the leaf can be used as fodder. And, you know, of course the acacia will also provide shade and it’s a nitrogen-fixing tree – the same as the moringa. So, we planted trees on the swales, on the berms, using the swales to capture the water to water them.

So a lot of what we did around our tree plantings was…some woodier plants and trees which were more or less weeds to us – they weren’t fodder for animals, they weren’t nitrogen-fixers, they weren’t food for humans – so those trees, we didn’t cut them down completely but we coppiced them heavily so that we could chop off the branches, lay it out as mulch on the ground, and then allow the tree to grow back out so we could come back and coppice again. And as the trees that we planted grew up larger, we kept creating a larger mulched area around the tree to hold water, to create soil, to create the environment for the microbiology to be active….

And then we started our own nursery from seeds. And I’d brought a bunch of seeds with me, various seeds of fruit trees and nitrogen-fixing trees that would work in Madagascar. And then, because we had access to bamboo – some big stems, you know: bamboo that was several inches wide at the base – and so we cut tubes that were, you know, open at both ends and we used that. We put good soil inside, and then we planted tree seeds in those, so when the seeds spouted, then the roots could only drop straight down, it couldn’t spread out. And then as soon as the seed was up about four inches or so, then we took the whole bamboo tube and we planted the seedling in the tube, in the berms. So that as the swale would soak up water, you know, the root would just drop right down through the bottom of the bamboo and get a really good, deep start. And so before I left, we planted probable sixty – sixty or eighty trees that we’d started in these bamboo tubes. Basically, we had to use just what nature was offering us. Like, we couldn’t even buy, like, plastic pots, we couldn’t even buy, like, a plastic tube, you know, to start a seed in. So the bamboo worked great like that, you know, in a years time or two years time, you know, with most of the bamboo in the soil, it’s going to rot and just be fungal food for the root system, which is great.

EM: Right, so it’s all about using nature to your advantage then?

PA: Yeah, absolutely you know, and we’re really looking at, you know…. Any permaculture design is going to begin with just getting a good assessment, you know, and talking with the people – asking them what do they want. You know, “what is it that you want?” you know? And they needed more food, they needed more fresh water, and so that’s what we concentrated on.

And then, you know, anything you plant – if you can get some compost into the soil, if you can get any kind of organic material into the soil…because we know that in natural systems, plants don’t need fertiliser, they don’t need pesticides if the system is healthy. And with a basic understanding of how plants function, and, you know, the relationship of the microbiology in the soil…when we have a basic understanding of that, we realise that early-successional plants have a very highly bacterial-dominated soil food-web because early-successional plants are annual plants – they’re soft, green tissue plants. And what decomposes soft green tissue is bacteria.

And then when we get to the end of plant-succession, when we get to old growth forests and, you know, hundreds of year old trees or thousands of year old trees – we see that we have a very fungal dominated soil food-web. And so, if you’re growing trees, then you need more fungi in the soil, and if you’re growing perennial plants – you know, shrubs and things – then you need that balance of bacteria and fungi.

And so, that’s what we were trying to teach our local farmers and the villagers there, was that: around our trees we got to get a lot of woody material and mulch, and just keep mulching. Nature mulches herself, you know, she’s dropping leaves, she’s dropping fruit…. Man, you know, when we understand that – we can build compost piles and make humus in a very short period of time. But actively composting was something we just didn’t have the equipment and the manpower for – so just, laying on layer upon layer upon layer of mulch…

EM: Yeah, and it’s absolutely amazing what you got done there in such a short time.

PA: You know, I was actually really amazed by how much we accomplished in a two-month period with myself and a couple volunteers and then, on average, ten labourors. You know, we established a tree nursery, we dug some key berms and swales, and then only then, you know, when the heavy rains came consistently and the swales remained full, that then when they reached a high level, they could run off slowly into the natural drainage system.

What we didn’t have time for on my first trip was to really work the stream bed itself with constructing gabions to slow water down and not just run right off to the rivers, and then out to the ocean. So, we feel that, you know, we should be able to have that stream running year-round in seven years, with proper earthworks.

EM: That’s incredible. And how did the locals react to all of this?

PA: Well, I think they were very excited. Especially I think some of the older men were very excited about what they were learning, and what we were doing because in two month’s time you can start to see the changes. And, you know, when they saw that “my gosh, we’re holding some water here. This water would have just run away but now it’s still sitting here two days after that last rain!” You know…

EM: Yeah, yeah. Well it must be very exciting to see it all working out.

PA: Yeah, yeah. So, I’m looking forward to going back, you know, maybe at the end of the rainy season, or like halfway through into the dry season to see what more we can do with just mulching and….

EM: Great stuff Peter, you’ll have to keep us informed about how you’re getting on!

PA: Certainly.