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Farming Together

The Farming Together Team

NEW SEASON OUT NOW!

In this season, Pippa Jones - a farmer, extension officer, and Nuffield Scholar - is chatting with farmers who are putting science-backed information into practice and testing ways to reduce emissions and strengthening their farm businesses.

Across six episodes, you’ll hear from farmers who are trying out research-informed tools, ideas and technologies. We delve into what sparked each journey, what’s been challenging, what’s paid off, and what farmers would do differently next time.

Together these stories show how research is driving real world change across Australian agriculture and horticulture.

This season is brought to you by the Land and Primary Industries Network of the NSW Decarbonisation Innovation Hub.

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  • 23 episodes
  • fortnightly
  • Avg 32 min
  • English

Episodes 23

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  • S1 · E8
    Oct 29, 2019 · 35 min

    Regenerating soils and communities with Helen and Mike McCosker

    Kerry talks with Helen and Mike McCosker about the important of regenerating not only soil, but also communities. The McCosker family run Angus on a 3000 acre mixed farming enterprise at Wallangra, north of Inverell. Helen is a CPA with senior management experience working in the large corporate space. A passion for the arts and music. Mike is a fourth generation farmer with extensive experience in carbon farming and teaching farmers about soil health and regenerative agriculture. He was one of the founding member of the first Landcare group in Australia established in 1982. Together Helen and Mike, along with Kelly Jones, founded Carbon8: a farmer-led initiative that is responding to the current impact of droughts, floods and desertification by supporting our farmers to increase the carbon in their soil and help them transition to regenerative agriculture. In this episode of Ground Cover we explore: How a chemical poisoning event was a catalyst for transformation The importance of bringing communities together in times of hardship Building a whole systems approach in both our landscapes, and in our towns The power of art and music to regenerate community

  • S1 · E7
    Oct 22, 2019 · 33 min

    The five landscape functions in practice with livestock producer Tim Wright

    Today on Ground Cover, our host Kerry Cochrane, explores the five landscape functions and how they play out on Tim Wright's property. Tim is a livestock producer, and holistic management farmer, from Armidale on the Northern Tablelands of NSW. The Wrights are a pioneering family of the New England, Tim bucked the traditional farming approach of his ancestors to go where many were not brave enough to go. A holistic farmer in the true sense, who questioned traditional practices, and ventured into regenerating landscapes with gusto. Declining terms of trade were a catalyst for change. And Tim turned to Stan Parsons and Allan Savory's methods for inspiration. In this episode we explore: breaking down the five landscape functions into practice ethics and ecology as a marketing tool the importance of the social aspects of farming the leader-follower system of grazing and the role livestock play in healthy landscape function More about Tim Wright: In the 1990s Australian agriculture was marked by excessively high production costs and falling profits. Tim realised they needed to find a better way to manage their farm. Guided by their own principles for 'Working with Nature', they were motivated to fully adopt and Holistic Management approach for the operations of their property 'Lana', via Uralla in NSW. Lana is a 3,400 hectare property, across eight farmlets of mostly native pastures - under apple box, stringy bark and red gum. Lana's system of numerous internal fences and watering points is designed to allow stock to graze intently for two to four days, before being moved on. Tim introduced the principles and practices of holistic management, including establishing small paddocks, rotational grazing of their sheep and cattle, and a leader-follow system of grazing, with sheep following cattle. Soil organic matter content and fertility have improved, leading to increases in pasture availability and quality, and improving production even in time of reduced rainfall.

  • S1 · E6
    Oct 15, 2019 · 24 min

    Out of the ashes with multi species pasture cropping expert Col Seis

    Today, Kerry chats with Colin Seis; a mixed farmer from the Gulgong area of New South Wales. Col has come from a traditional cropping and grazing family and experienced an ecological crash back in the 1970s. This set them up to be quite vulnerable to the bushfires that came afterwards. In those fires, Col lost everything and was badly burned. He had rebuild everything from the ground up. And he started to think about the future survival of himself, his family and his farm. So his focus quickly changed to low input agriculture and focussed on what he could do differently to remain resilient in the future. This is a real story of the phoenix rising... how one farming family faced adversity and came out of the ashes with new innovative methods for our future farming generations In this episode we explore: the innovative land management technique; multi species pasture cropping low and no input agriculture holistic grazing management and the importance of plant and species diversity More about Col: Colin Seis and Daryl Cluff pioneered 'pasture cropping' in 1993 and since that time. Col ha find tuned and improved the technique on his farm, Winona. Due to this it is now possible to frow many different types of winter and summer sown crops, without destoing the perennial pasture base. The practice has now spread to all states of Australia and in a growing number of countries worldwide. Pasture Cropping is an innovative land management technique that enables annual crops to be grown opportunistically into dormant perennial pastures or pastures whose competitive capacity have temporarily been suppressed by grazing, and/or selective herbicides to enable the successful growth of annual crops. Col has seen the need for fast tracking improvement in degraded soil and grassland as well as producing crops for human consumption or stock feed. Since 2010 he has been developing 'multi species pasture cropping' with the aim of producing better quality forage and improving soil health even more than single species pasture cropping.

Showing 21–23 of 23 episodes