I think a spiritual journey goes on hand-in-hand with an environmental one.
Which I guess has got me personally to an understanding that life is about service.
You know we're blessed to have this farm
and so how do we use this for the greater good?
It's a traditional sheep and cattle farm, it's 610 hectares or 1500 acres and has
been farmed you know traditionally with sheep and cattle since about the 1850's.
It's back about fifteen years ago when we had our first child that you
started thinking about the future, you start thinking about the food that you're
giving your children and that sort of lead us on a journey to find a more
sustainable regenerative way of looking after our property and also looking
after the future. That journey has led us to learn about organic agriculture
biodynamics, biological agriculture and have made some pretty big changes on the
farm over the last ten years.
Back in 2008 we approached Air New Zealand with
an idea for people to be able to use air points to donate to an environmental
tree planting project and we were just at the right place at the right time and very
fortunate to get some funding from the Air New Zealand environment trust and
over a three-year period we planted 85,000 trees and the majority of those
are New Zealand native trees which are now flourishing and really transforming
the landscape and we've also planted you know a lot of nut trees and fruit trees
where we can just to create that abundance and vibrancy in the farm and
one of the catch cries for the farm is diversity diversity diversity
and as much as possible we're creating that diversity.
We've got the cattle going around, we have hens following along behind the cattle,
there's pigs on the farm too - and we're milking a few dairy cows and all that is
really about using a perennial crop like grass, pasture with you know forage from
trees and that around as well without relying on so much of the annual grains
and all the energy that's involved in producing them one of the biggest
One of the biggest changes that we've made has been reducing our sheep numbers and getting
more cattle onto the farm and that's because we're moving to a system of holistic grazing.
So holistic grazing is a management technique that's been
devised by a Zimbabwean man Allan Savory and he was observing the large herds of
buffalo and Africa and it could be bison in America
and just you know massive herds of ruminant animals and these animals were
constantly on the move because there's generally some lions or
something just just on their back and wanting to pick off any of the weak ones
and so our system that we've adapted the holistic grazing from the
Allan Savory thing is we like to have large mobs of cattle and
we're shifting them daily and so they're constantly on the move.
but instead of lions keeping them bunched together we have electric fences and
each day they're going on to fresh grass and it's long grass and so they're not
eating at all some of us getting trampled in with the dung and urine and
that and with the grass being trampled it creates a mulch on the surface and
I guess it's like kind of making a compost right in situ on the land and with a
healthy soil biology that will break down and form humus in the soil.
Conventionally farmers it's all about keeping the grass short and in a vegetative
state so it's growing vigorously. Through that whole process you're
actually degrading the soil and just topping it up with fertilizer inputs and
that system and relies on bringing in particularly phosphate fertilizers
largely from North Africa and a whole system that requires digging up that
fertilizer and trucking it and then shipping it and then trucking it and then
processing it and then flying it onto hills, it's a system that's not going to
work in a future with less fossil fuels.
Other farmers might be looking at us and saying you're just wasting all that grass because it gets dry and
stalky and what have you but you know my reply is that waste as a human
concept, nature doesn't do waste and so we are using that pasture as part of
our fertilizer program because that's what's getting put down on the soil and
broken down and going back into building soil.
When the grass is grazed under the
holistic long grazing system it gets cut off short by the animal and
it also sheds it's roots at that time and so that's how you're increasing the carbon
into the soil and I guess one of the most exciting things and drivers of what
we're doing is the potential that that has for helping with climate change
issues and you know the potential for getting carbon from the atmosphere down
into the soil is an absolute must despite you know so many websites
and environmental groups saying how damaging cattle are and the
way they are farmed conventionally it's absolutely right, through feedlot
systems and all that cropping and energy involved with bringing their food
and then the issues with their wastes and manure it is a big issue.
Under this system they are sequestering more carbon and are part
of a natural cycle that is actually beneficial you know although I
Although I don't obviously have all the answers, one observation is that there are
no vegetarian eco systems and so animals are part of nature and so it is a
whole lot more balance that we need to put into our food system and
cattle can be part of that.
I totally accept that if for whatever spiritual reasons or whatever people
choose not to eat animals, respect their decision to do that but for me
there is no life without death and it's how we look after the animals.
All life is sacred to us and so we honor these animals by giving them a fantastic
life looking after them the best we can and then I guess at the end of the day to
justify killing one of these beautiful creatures we have to
good life and do the right thing to to honor that animal.
We're not concentrating on optimizing our production or profitability our
focus is to optimize life and I think the profitability will come as a consequence of that.
New Zealand being probably one of the youngest
countries on the planet as far as when humans came to be here, I just
sort of would love to see what this place was like a thousand years ago
which is such a brief period in ecological time and in time we've sort
of stripped most of the native vegetation and done a whole lot of
damage and we've gone about as far as we can down that road and so now it's time
for us to try and find the balance and restore those ecosystems but find a
place for humans living harmoniously within it.
Ultimately it's all about trying to restore paradise.
You know nitrogen-fixing trees and you know shade shelter all that stuff.
Is that a bumblebee?
Excuse me.
We like nature.
Hey there guys thanks for wathcing.
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