Realising the answers are not all outside of ourselves opens the door to the path less travelled, the journey inward.

Watching the life force drain out of the rural communities and the landscapes around me has fuelled my curiosity about how we can bring a new vision of agriculture to life.

One of the most common ways I see people limit their progress towards achieving their regenerative agriculture goals is through the belief that they must achieve results quickly. I am not saying that regenerative outcomes always happen slowly. How fast you will see results is always an “it depends” answer.

Reinventing our relationship with time.

What if time management is not a solution, and it is part of our problem?

Sitting on the fence of indecision happens when we are stuck in our heads and ignoring our other decision-making capacities.

We readily focus our attention on aspects of the system we can most easily see and tend to ignore the unseen aspects. Yet the most powerful aspects of complex systems are the least visible. When you think that there are billions of micro-organisms in just one teaspoon of healthy soil and we are only just beginning to learn about their invisible, crucial role in ecosystem and human health, what else are we not seeing?

Coaching conversations nurture our inner landscape so that the seeds of potential within us can germinate and grow. Removing internal barriers and accessing new perspectives so we can bring our vision to life in our lives, relationships and landscapes and BE the change we wish to see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Concerns about farm profitability can be a barrier for those contemplating the transition to a more resilient, regenerative farming system. This is understandable as there are plenty of challenges to navigate in agriculture beyond our control as land managers without creating more ourselves. Grow your confidence for taking the next steps by addressing these key components of a profitable transition to a regenerative system.

Declining soil and ecosystem health are at the core of the reason so many farming families are leaving the land. The ease of blaming the declining profitability of farming on external factors over which we have no control such as droughts, markets, rising costs of inputs, governments etc has made this easy to disguise. By continually addressing the symptoms rather than the cause of these issues, the impact of unintended consequences of agricultural practices have continued to compound. Declining soil carbon reserves, soil compaction, algal blooms in water bodies, biodiversity decline, broken water cycles, high suicide rates in farmers and declining farm profits across the world are just a few of these consequences. Our agricultural ecosystems are presently crumbling under these pressures.

Life is change, growth is optional. We can choose to see the challenges life presents us as a disaster, or as an opportunity to learn and grow. Acceptance of what is allows you regroup and move forward more effectively than being stuck in resistance to what is. Fire destroyed 15 years of infrastructure development and the results of our landscape remediation. It also left us with a blank canvas to be transformed again based on 15 years more experience. Nature is resilient, and so are we.

If your business is making a financial profit but your soil health and ecosystem functions are declining you are extracting (mining). If you are making a financial profit at the expense of human wellbeing you are exploiting. If you are tolerating an agricultural business that is not making a financial profit because it is a “lifestyle” you are eroding the financial capital in your business assets to survive and this cannot be claimed to be regenerative.

Are you feeling called to transform the way you farm to create a vibrantly healthy farm business and life? If so, these 10 keys can help support your mindset on your farming journey. These keys have evolved from our own farming journeys which have spanned over 30 years each working in agriculture as farmers and also in coaching and extension roles with farmers.