If we had viewed our experiences here at The Oasis in terms of failure, we would have given up and never grown a thing. By taking the perspective of using these experiences as feedback we curiously tried more ways to restore our soil naturally so we could successfully grow a garden, an abundance of food and pastures for our livestock that have improved the carrying capacity by 4 times what it was when we came here 18 years ago.

My Uncle tells an interesting story about farming with my Grandfather in the 1980s when scientists researching insecticide resistance in the cotton industry around Narrabri visited our family’s farm near Delungra in northern NSW every summer to collect heliothis caterpillars from sunflower crops. The heliothis on Grandpa and Uncle Paul’s sunflowers weren’t resistant to insecticides like the ones found in the cotton because there was no need to use insecticides to control them, every year the starlings would come in and eat the caterpillars. Why spray them when nature provided pest control for free?

In 2019 Angus & I travelled to Montana to attend a Land Listening event. It was here, immersed in this vast landscape where I came to realise how disconnected I had become from the land at our home The Oasis. We had been impacted by a bushfire six months previously and at the time of our trip the land was brown, parched and apocalyptic in the grips of what became the worst drought in recorded history here.

When we don’t define what success looks like for us how will we know when we have succeeded? It is vital that we have a vision of what success looks like for us or we can end up creating success on someone else’s terms other than our own.

When we predominantly design in an unstructured way, we can end up creating systems that are unproductive and may unintentionally create environmental degradation. We may spend a lot of money and not achieve our goals to create regenerative outcomes. Instead of randomly designing and creating we can choose to use an intentional design process.

When we step off the industrial farming input treadmill towards a more regenerative farming system the biggest financial risk we face lies in our financial management skills and how we use these as we navigate the transition process.

For our business to be regenerative it must be building our own internal human capacity rather than destroying it with stress and overwhelm. With all these factors outside of our control at play how we manage our stress and navigate periods of overwhelm plays a crucial role in regenerating agriculture. Regenerating agriculture starts and ends with regenerating ourselves.

Let it grow areas are a place where we learn from nature and gain confidence working with nature, rather than against it. A place where we observe nature’s successional processes at work in our landscape and under our management. Letting it grow connects us with natural cycles and the role of “weeds” or as I like to call them, indicator plants.

When we step off the high input, industrial farming treadmill and take a regenerative path that restores nature’s capital and creates conditions for all of life to thrive we inadvertently bump headfirst into our impatience.

If we aren’t experimenting, we aren’t learning. If we aren’t learning, we aren’t growing. If we aren’t growing, we cease to improve and move forwards towards regeneration.

So many of us have adopted the belief that success can only come from struggle, sacrifice, exhaustion, long hours and hard work. What if there could be another way? What if this could be easier?

When we are operating from a belief that there is not enough we get caught on a treadmill of constantly seeking and consuming more. More land. More money. More time. More yield. More livestock. More work to do. More fertiliser. More inputs. More consumption. More knowledge. More education. More books. More courses. More experts to tells us what to do. A never ending desire for more, no matter what it is you are consuming becomes more-on farming.

These reflections on how we can best help those impacted by natural disasters have been inspired by our own personal experience of being impacted by natural disaster in the form of fire in February 2019.

there are plenty of reasons to take a long term view and put in place strategies that will successfully reduce your reliance on nitrogen fertilisers that will also create a more resilient, regenerative and profitable farming system

There is a simple process for powerfully reinventing yourself and freeing yourself of outdated beliefs that no longer serve you to move from surviving to thriving.

To effectively change from conventional agriculture to a more regenerative style of farming requires us to reinvent how we think about ourselves, and our connection to the land we have stewardship over.

There are many paths we can take to reach an outcome or destination, not only one right way.

There are large variations in the types of approach coaches use and the outcomes you can expect. This article explains what coaching can offer your business and how to find the right coach for you. We will also explore what coaching means to us and what you can expect if you choose to work with us.

Believing we don’t know enough keeps us procrastinating, stuck in a loop of searching for and consuming endless information. It also leads us towards guru worshipping others we see as experts who we believe know more than we do and who have all the answers. When we focus outside of ourselves for answers the many options available can lead to paralysis by analysis or we can end up following someone else’s path instead of forging our own.

Integration of the feminine is the next step for agriculture and a role I see being fulfilled by the regenerative agriculture movement with many women and men being drawn to a regenerative path. This next step is about agriculture valuing, respecting and using both masculine and feminine energy in an integrated way.