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THE REGENERATIVE HOUR: A natural farmer’s big vision for Australia

Jan 15 · 60 minutes

The UN is preparing to declare 2021-2030 The Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Adrian Drew is part of a group of farmers and land owners who think Australia should take a leading role in making that happen. What to call the equivalent of a modern-thinking ‘urban farmer’ or permaculturalist, who works with growing food on a big piece of land on the countryside, but in a very different style than how the conventional farmers do it? I suggest we introduce the expression the natural farmer. My definition of a ‘natural farmer’ would be that it is a farmer who is focused on observing, understanding, following and making good use of the way nature works – the interaction between plants, microorganisms, animals, the landscape and the weather – rather than being directed by the way the agricultural and industrial economy works. In The Renerative Hour today, I visit one of Australia’s natural farmers: Adrian Drew. He is part of a growing group of intelligent farmers and ‘landscape mechanics’ who share the vision that by 2030, Australia’s catchment and watershed systems can be drought-proofed and restored by using Peter Andrew‘s Natural Sequence Farming methods and the Australian Landscape Science Approach. After working with this topic over 40 years, Peter Andrews has become a bit of a national icon. In books, articles, tv documentaries and numerous conference speeches and presentations he explains to the Australian farmers how a transformation of the way water flows through the landscape can help enable them to restore soil fertility by using all plants – understanding their function and part they play in landscape process at any point in time – so they can grow food without the use of fertilisers or pesticides, artificial irrigation or drainage. Peter Andrews’ basic idea is to be working together with all plants and with the community to achieve maximum productivity and biodiversity in the shortest amount of time, storing water and fertility where it has greatest potential for use in the landscape, and working with the unlimited maximum of water flow in the landscape, while at the same time storing carbon in the soil as a result of plant production and growing more plants to reinstate water cycles and a more moderate, farming-friendly climate. Adrian Drew: “The shift is coming”“The shift is coming“As our summer get hotter and drier each year, it could be argued, as Adrian Drew does it well in this podcast, that this shift in the landscape is needed, moving from a drainage paradigm to a water storage paradigm in the farming sector and land management generally. However, it will first of all require a major shift in mindset and mentality among Australia’s 200,000 farmers – and that is probably the most difficult obstacle to deal with and overcome, if this 10-year vision is going to be successfully implemented. “We are in luck, though,” says Drew: “The shift is coming. ...

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