I think to succeed in agriculture you need to be driven by ambition. The vision of Wilmot Cattle Company
is to restore the ecological function of our landscape in a profitable way.
We know that a grass-fed beef product is the healthiest beef that you can eat
but we also know that diversity in our whole ecosystem is critical.
There's a symbiotic relationship between soil plants and animals and our role is to enable that
such that the biology in our soil is active and functioning and healthy, pastures are very diverse
and that we maintain as much diversity across our landscape as we can because animals need that
diversity in their diet. The psychology of animals is paramount to their performance and for them to
perform the role that we ask them to undertake, they have to be in a healthy frame of mind.
We then know that the product that we're putting
on the table in front of a consumer is the healthiest product that they can eat.
Wilmot Cattle Company is comprised of three properties; Wilmot outside Ebor where we are today,
a breeding operation at Woodburn between Uralla and Walcha and a third property that we
recently acquired called Morocco down at Gunnedah. Really what we do here is reverting back to how
mother nature managed this landscape. Animals roamed in large mobs to protect themselves from
predators and they moved across the landscape, grazing for very short periods of time and they
would naturally come back to where the feed was the freshest and that's all we're trying to mimic.
We like to run the cattle at a high density rate. Let the grass come back. We usually give about 60
days rest before we come back to that paddock again.
We're managing grass, that's what I like the most about it and then we're using cattle to utilise the grass.
It's not just looking after cattle but it's looking after the environment, being aware of our kind of footprint on everything.
So within the tree lane here is a functioning ecosystem, we've got a mix of plants
there's great species diversity, there's really good ground cover and if I take and stick a soil probe
in the ground here I can basically push it all the way in. If I step over the fence on the
same farm on to some of this country that's been farmed for a long time now, I can't even
get that in the ground here. And this is the story of Australian soils, this is what we've done
in agriculture in Australia chasing higher production and higher profits.
The exciting thing is that we can undo this. The major first step is ground cover. Right through
the drought our focus was all on looking after our country. Our cattle could be sold, they could
go on a truck, we could get rid of them, as long as we looked after our country and this is the result.
I mean there's so much ground cover here now and so much species diversity, there's nowhere you could
look here and see any bare ground. There's some paspalum, there's phalaris, there's cock's foot,
that's a brain grass, prairie grass. We don't sit down at night and just have a big chunk of steak
on the plate you know, as nice as that would be, we know we need meat and potatoes and carrots and
broccoli and animals need the same thing, they need diversity and that's what they get from all these
little forbs like that and the plantains and the chicories and that little crow's foot .
The last thing we want to do is a monoculture, the biggest thing we want is diversity. So we want
to see here in the soil is a good soft soil, good aggregation, plenty of air amongst the soil, plenty
of worms, plenty of fungi and all the signs that suggest our biology is working within the soil.
And you can smell it, healthy soil smells good and it's air in our soil that helps us build carbon in
our soil. You know we get so much infiltration of rainfall here because there's so much air
through there. Early 2020 we cleaned a few dams out, we were at the lowest rolling
rainfall we'd ever been at. It started raining in late January and it took 16 inches of rain
before those dams started to fill. When you get that sort of rainfall and it's all going in
it's very encouraging and it suggests that what we're doing is is certainly working. When we've
got abundance there's opportunity, we don't have a healthy functioning soil, we don't have grass,
we don't have cattle, we don't make any money. We're seeing some extraordinary gains in our
soil organic carbon here at Wilmot, that soil organic carbon will stay in our soil for eternity.
At a very macro level, this is our contribution to climate change, this is our contribution to taking
carbon out of the atmosphere, reducing emissions and putting it in our soil for perpetuity.
The thing I really am the most proud of is the people within our business, they
understand the fundamentals of our business, they understand what drives profitability,
they understand what improves ecological health and they're just as passionate about it as me.
There's definitely hard times but the culture that's been created here it's a safe environment.
You can say what you think and it's going to be respected and I like that.
Everything's open, it's on the table. If you're willing to learn they're willing to help you.
We don't ever profess to have all the answers or to know everything, this is a constant learning
journey but what we do know we want to share with others for their betterment and also for
the betterment of our industry and fundamentally for the betterment of our world. We know that if
more of our industry can uptake regenerative agricultural principles, we'll put more carbon
in our soils across Australia and across the world and we will contribute to reversing climate change.
One of the things that I find extremely rewarding is when Tristan and Harry and Poppy and I go out
in the paddock and Harry starts picking all the different species of grass that he can find.
If I can maintain the harmony within this business that I've seen in so many other businesses managed in
this fashion, the greatest reward will be for Harry to want to be a part of the business.
For us to be holistic and for us to really regenerate the landscape on a broader scale,
we've got to empower others, not just ourselves.