So I’m Bruce Maynard, and I'm a fourth generation farmer living at our property Willydah
which is halfway between Narromine and Trangie in central New South Wales.
Our farm is a mixed farming operation with livestock and cropping.
Products here are winter cereals, cattle and meat sheep.
The intensity of rainfall events seems to be increasing,
but the length of time between those has widened.
The millennium drought,
over that period of time, it was pretty close to the average rainfall
but it was a dreadful ten years production wise of plant growth
over that time because of large times between rainfall events.
Summers have got hotter, periods of extreme temperatures
and storm intensity has increased a lot,
even to the extent of us getting hit by a massive storm
a couple of years ago, which had embedded tornadoes in it
and pretty much took out most of our agricultural infrastructure.
The changes that we've seen have kept on prompting us to try and develop
and work systems that are fundamentally different from conventional.
If these factors and trends continue to go as they are, I don't feel that existing
and conventional systems will produce
a good result under those circumstances.
It will just continue to get harder and harder.
We should design fundamentally things that
run in concert with landscape and natural functions
rather than try and keep on jamming our square peg into a round hole.
Essentially, it always comes down to diversity and landscape function.
So some of the things we've changed over time is we changed our grazing management
and then out of that change, as we saw much more diversity
appear at the grassland level on our property here over the 30 year period,
we developed no kill cropping, which keeps that diversity
while still growing crops.
So the no kill cropping system is
sowing into complex grasslands and using five principles.
The first principle is sowing dry when the topsoil is dry.
Second principle needs to be placed into soil using straight running disc machinery.
So we're not tilling the soil and we're not disturbing the soil.
The third principle is no chemicals or pesticides. Four is no fertiliser.
And the fifth and final principle is that we need to have effective
grazing management here so nutrients get returned
back for further plant growth.
The inputs are ultralow so the production cost
usually sits at about 10% of what a conventional crop would cost.
Plus as well the risk factor is taken out largely
because we are not eliminating our underlying grassland there
means that you can still have have livestock production in the times
that regular cropping would not have anything growing there at all.
Our grain yield will only be in the order of something like a quarter
to one third of conventional, but that's just the grain yield.
The biomass yield compared to conventional is much superior,
more like a third extra because you have plants available
throughout the year that will actually grow in response to any rainfall
and temperature that allows them to do it versus conventional.
So no kill is an interesting example of how we can actually expand the amount
of grain grown through the world but still retain grasslands.
So if we retain a fully functional grassland with a lot of perennial plants
in it and a lot of longevity and also wide diversity of plants,
what we have then is the ultimate opportunity
to actually really store carbon for longer periods of time.
Also then we turned our attention to reinstating shrubs
and tree layers within the landscape.
How we place our trees and shrubs and that sort of thing determines
not only their interception of wind flows, but also their shading effect.
So over the 30 year period, we've planted over
350,000 shrubs on the property here and over 200,000 trees.
Along our path I developed up stress free stockmanship
and then I co-developed the self herding behavioural enhancement of animals.
So if the animals aren't stressed then their distribution across
our paddocks is more even and they're more experimental
with the range of plants that they are sampling as well.
The biggest, obvious or measurable change in
production was our stocking rate more than tripled over a period of time.
In terms of what we saw of a change in the benefit of diversity.
We started to get many more grazing days per paddock.
It's a wonderful fit that we can help our businesses
while still getting a much better landscape result if we engage
in the behavioural part of the way animals interact in our systems.
The systems here has led to a greater resilience
and the recovery out of the most severe episode
that our four generations have ever encountered,
climatically was truly stunning.
Our property here is only a small speck in the whole bigger side of things.
What's important that we can help others with is examples of
applications of systems and approaches to things
that then other people can apply in their own circumstances.
There's every pressure on us nowadays to have more complicated businesses
that simplify the nature of our surrounds.
We need to reverse that.
We need to have more diverse surrounds and simpler businesses.