Soil is the beginning of everything.
Without a good soil we don't grow very
many plants at all and without the
plants animals and ourselves we don't
exist. So it's critical that all of our
health and well-being pretty much comes
out of the soil.
As we're killing soil and we're artificially
propping it up with chemicals either to as artificial
fertilizer, weedicides, pesticides.
We're losing the fertility of our soil,
we're losing the carbon within our soils
we're losing the biology within our
soils and the combination of all of
these losses is it's something we can't go on doing.
We're on the tipping point of plummeting fertility in this country.
If we do damage to the soil we're in
effect doing damage to ourselves the
food we're eating today is not as
nutritious so we're not getting exactly
what we need to be as healthy as we should.
Well the whole economy rests on soil.
It doesn't matter whether it's an
industrial economy or not we are only
what we stand on. So we have to protect
that soil and people who don't are just
spending their children's capital.
When farmers invest in in chemicals I think
it's a bit like and borrowing from the
bank at some point you have to put the
interest back. Well that's happening now
with soils because over time the
addition of those chemicals can deaden the soil. They don't have the life they
used to have to fix the microbial
activity in the fungi activity in the
soil. That means the investment coming
back from the soil is less than it used
to be but I think those people in who
are into regenerative farming at the
moment are most surprised to find that
their ecosystem their soils for example
are actually responding by
non-interference that they're actually
producing more from that arrangement
that structure within their farming routine.
We've made some mistakes
farming in agriculture we've followed
European methods when in retrospect we
shouldn't of. Australia has the oldest
soils in the world its landscapes are
very different from Europe its soil
profiles are very different and we need
to farm an Australian Way we need to
listen to our our indigenous elders on
how they may have farmed previously and
we need to really work on collaborating
together and continually educating
ourselves on really what is the best
methodology that is going to save our
landscapes, save our soils, help with
carbon sequestration and basically save the planet.
The microbiology of soil is very exciting it's a frontier that we
really need to push very hard because we
know nothing about the biology of soil
basically it's it's a travesty really of
justice that we can put someone on the
moon or and almost on Mars but we know
nothing about the microbes in the soil
we we probably know about 4% they
believe. It promises so much.
I think humus which is one of the components of organic carbon in the soil is the
beginning and the end of all life. So all
life starts with humus and all life ends up
back as humus.
So carbon is this it's this central
thing that we've got that drives life.
With the time scale that this is working
on means that almost anyone that's
running a farm today can see the
benefits and see the outcomes in their
lifetimes it can work very quickly
if we do the right things.
