Peter Andrews | The Godfather of Landscape Rehydration & Natural Sequence Farming

05/10/21 • 129 min

The Regenerative Journey with Charlie Arnott

Peter Andrews is one of Australia's landscape geniuses, who has been battling to change the stats quo attitude of government, farmers and land managers to hydrology and restoring landscape function for 40 years. Charlie sat with Peter at his farm in the central Tablelands of NSW while he recounted his formative years of desert life, how that informed his lifelong passion to restore the oldest continent in the world, and highlights that the healing of this land is totally within our reach if we reinstate a few simple principles of land management that had kept this landscape the most productive in the world.

Episode Takeaways:

There is a predictable natural sequence within the landscape we just have to recreate and nurture it | Peter’s property at Bungonia was bought to be a demonstration site, this region of NSW was a very over exploited area given its location between Sydney and Canberra | Plants are specialists at bringing various components and elements into a landscape | We don’t recreate the old landscape, we recreate the processes and function of the landscape | The landscape evolved due to plants managing water | Frequent fire, flood and drought are symptoms of a dysfunctional landscape | Peter grew up at Broken Hill where his experiences of desert storms and floods started him on his journey to rehydrate the landscape of Australia | Pioneering plants are essential to repair the landscapes | The current agricultural system that replies on the removal of specific plants is costing our farmers businesses and the landscapes health | Peter’s experience with sheep health in those early years identified the importance of nutrition and how a functioning landscape provides a broad range of plants to provide this nutrition | Over-stocked properties and poor understanding of hydrology has caused the degradation of the landscape | Early experiments on the family property at Broken Hill included ripping along the high water mark of food plains | The Australian landscape had a higher percentage of pines and palms than is currently there | We are generally left with fire recovery desert plants, mostly eucalypts | Water much more influential in the atmosphere than carbon | Hot air produced inland from a lack of transpiring vegetation and moving towards, and being absorbed by, the area over the moist ocean creates damaging weather events | Capillary action and gravity are the fundamental phenomena NSF relies upon to work | Fire flood and drought are opportunities to change the pattern and create plant succession | The Peter’s horses performance were results of the management of his land, where a fundamental principle was to let all plants grow | Willows are suckers in the landscape wounds that are creeks and rivers | Peter was able to double the aquatic life in riparian zones in 2 years using willows to heal them | 95mm dew can be accumulated in a year where ground cover is maintained | Restoring deciduous green trees in flow lines reduces fire risk | The eucalypts in the landscape before human management were huge, towering above the canopy and had the role of reducing the escape of moisture from the area | The best management post any fire is to spread seeds of deciduous shrub and tree species | It all gets back to human and environmental health and this is Peter’s motivation.

Episode Links:

Tarwyn Park Training

Australian Story ‘ Land Regeneration -Peter Andrews’ - 2017

TALS Institute - Peter’s ‘The Australian Landscape Science’ Institute

Dr. Jan Pokorny - Scientist

Episode Takeaways:

Episode Links:

Tarwyn Park Training

Australian Story ‘ Land Regeneration -Peter Andrews’ - 2017

TALS Institute - Peter’s ‘The Australian Landscape Science’ Institute

Dr. Jan Pokorny - Scientist

Previous Episode

Stuart Andrews | Natural Sequence Farming Royalty & Landscape Function Facilitator

Charlie caught up with Stuart Andrews, the son of the founder of Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) Peters Andrews, the day after Stuart had completed a 4 day NSF training workshops at Charlie's farm Hanaminno. Stuart is an incredibly open and honest man, and he left few stones unturned in taking Charlie thought the fascinating and often turbulent life as the son of Peter Andrews, the legacy Peter has left, and the continuation of his fathers life work.

Episode Takeaways:

Stuart believes that we can never bring our landscape back to how it was, but we can rebuild the function it once had | Stuart describes the current Australian landscape like a dishevelled dinosaur skeleton, that we need to piece back together to restore landscape function | Peter’s teaching style was challenging | Stuart was growing up on their farm Tarwyn Park under Peter’s management, whilst Peter was still figuring out the principles of Natural Sequence Farming | Stuart left school at 15, and it’s not so much that he hated school but he loved the farm more | Tarwyn Park was a thoroughbred stud running large herds of horses, a very different management style to conventional studs | With Peter’s focus on understanding, experimenting and developing the NSF principles, and not on the horse business, meeting the financial needs of the farm was challenging when Stuart was in his late teens | The horses were his test case, using these sensitive creatures in the landscape to test his theories | The bank repossessed the farm in 1994 for 6 weeks before Peter managed to secure a Research and Development grant which secured the property again from the bank for another couple of years | The bank came knocking on the door again in 1998 and Stuart sort finance to take over the properties and the debt. Peter refused to hand over property, however he finally did release the property and the horse business to Stuart | Stuart agreed with Peter that he could continue to do NSF work on Tarwyn Park | A visit from the then deputy Prime Minister John Anderson validated on a public & national stage the work Peter had been doing | In 2010 coal miners started to take interest in the Bylong Valley area and for 3 years the Andrews family battled with the miners, then eventually chose to sell - as the threat of being surrounded by the mine was greater than any desire to stay, fight and then put up with that situation | There have been many benefits to landscape of miners 'locking up' the country in the Bylong Valley they bought | In 2012 Stuart ran his first NSF training program | His family now live on one of their farms on SE Queensland - Forage Farms, and produce meat chickens, eggs and pork, inspired by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm | Stuart believes we have created a massive drainage system in our landscape, and we must break this paradigm of how to manage water effectively if we are to restore its function and our farms

Episode Links:

Tarwyn Park Training

Forage Farms - Stuart Andrew’s farm enterprise, Sunshine Coast, Queensland

RCS - Holistic Agribusiness education providers

Australian Story ‘ Land Regeneration -Peter Andrews’ - 2017

Low Stress Stock Handling - Grahame Rees

Polyface Farm - Joel Salatin

Next Episode

Dave Westbrook | The Farm Business Coach Giving Life Lessons to Help Farmers Achieve Their Goals

Charlie caught up with Dave Westbrook at Hanaminno for this interview which tracks Dave's journey from cropping farm boy, through to owning his own grazing farm and business, family succession challenges, development of his farm management skills through the Farm Owners Academy, and subsequent training as a farm business coach. Dave has a compelling and enlightening story to tell and does so in a very open and values based way.

Episode Takeaways:

There has always been a big pull towards the Australian nature and landscape for Dave | He grew up on a cropping farm on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia | His father helped him buy a farm on Kangaroo Island (KI) where his wife Becky had grown up and he no experience with livestock | There was a honeymoon period of 2 years until Dave started to really research and set goals and started to hit his KPI's | 'Quirky cooking' cooking resource helped Dave and Becky address their daughter's eczema skin condition with the GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome) diet | The results of using food and looking at health differently was a catalyst for Dave looking at managing his farm more regeneratively - if we can heal the body can we heal land? Dave and Becky joined up as clients to the Farm Owners Academy (FOA) in 2015 and have been in the Platinum program for 3 years | Greg Johnsson of FOA had been advising Dave on Kangaroo Island prior to joining FOA | FOA is a values focused training program and Dave was able to identify his true values through the program and set a new course in life and farming with these values as the guiding principles | Life is often about finding the balance between time and money, and we spend our lives on the ladders of life, of either the ladder of purpose or ladder of ego | Dave was on the ladder of ego for many years feeling he had to prove himself to his father, himself and his community | Men potentially spend more time on the ego ladder | Dave uses the analogy of shooting an arrow to explain the catalyst for progress is often pain. There is pain in pulling back the arrow however this has to be experienced to move the arrow (life) forward | Dave is now a coach with FOA | Dave lost ownership of his farm on KI back to his father and essentially was made an employee of the business | Personal development and FOA were essential in guiding Dave through this period | He now helps farmers through his coaching with their accountability and achieving their goals. Anger is a symptom of fear | Journaling and affirmations are a big part of Dave’s life and for his clients | 'Look good, feel good, play good' is one of Dave's mantras | Win your morning, elevate your life | 20:20:20 - spend the first hour of your day split into 20 minutes sections - 20 workout, 20 meditations and/or journaling and/or affirmations | 20 education, listen to a podcast, read a book | The happy hormone serotonin is released from gut when working out | Robin Sharman's areas of life to focus on - heart set, health set, mind set and soul set | Women are more proactive in change | Farmers who go off on a spiritual journey are the happiest they have been - their lives flow. More time, more money, their families' are happy. Wayne Dye - “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” | It’s exciting to know that there are 1000’s of years of knowledge for us to learn | When I slowed down, everything sped up - a hard paradigm to break through | Always live above the line | We don’t own our kids | Children need 2 things in life - love & chores!

Episode Links :

Dave Westbook AKA @adventurefarmer

Evie and the Bushfire - Becky Westbrook (children's book)

Farm Owners Academy (FOA)

Profitable Farmer - FOA podcast

Quirky Cooking - Jo Whitton

GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome)

Robin Sharmar - leadership expert