Farmers Helping Farmers

VicNoTill board member Michael Gooden visits Jim Alexander on the Cootamundra farm where he lives with his wife Em and two young daughters to talk about his switch from commercial scale broadacre agronomy on the Liverpool Plains to permaculture to regenerative agriculture.

Jim has made a major shift in the way he approaches

Being among like-minded people for the past several years as a VicNoTill member has also been an eye-opener for Jim in how leading broadacre farmers are managing to make significant changes to the way they farm, while remaining profitable.

He says the farmers helping farmers approach highlights how important it is that people don’t follow an ideology at their own expense.

VicNoTill members can read more about Jim's experiences and insights in the latest issue of the member magazine ⁠From The Ground Up.⁠

This is a conversation for farmers not to be missed! Allan Parker OAM was a crowd favourite at VicNoTill's conference Transition23 and captured the attention of the whole room within 10 seconds of starting his presentation.

VicNoTill board member Michael Gooden catches up with Allan in Wagga Wagga during his 2024 Regional Brain Reset Tour to talk about succession planning, improving negotiation between family members when making farm decisions, transitioning to a more regenerative farming system without compromising the profitability of the business and a whole lot more.

Allan introduces himself as an eccentric Micro-Behavioural Neuroscientist, International Negotiator, and Educator. Outside his work life he has been a professional golfer and has run 16 marathons and 11 ultra marathons (including 24 hours twice). He wrote Australia’s first degree in negotiation in 2012 and was the recipient of an Order of Australia Medal for his contribution to business and dispute resolution in 2019.

From the boardrooms of the biggest corporate organisations in the world to the kitchen tables on rural and remote farming properties, Allan Parker’s approach to negotiation is the same. The author of The Negotiator’s Toolkit, the bestseller Switch on Your Brain; and co-author of Beyond Yes – Negotiating and Networking says there is great wisdom in Charlie Arnott’s saying ‘the paddock between our ears is what we’ve got to get sorted out first’.

“Negotiation, whether informal chat on the phone or chat in hallway or something bigger and more serious, we are involved in negotiating the whole time. Everything you think inside your head turns up in your verbal conversation in some form or another," Allan says.

When Victorian cattle farmer Callum Lawson went to a holistic grazing course, it turned the way he approached farming on its head. He came home from the first day feeling baffled about the way he was farming.

What they were presenting about regenerative and holistic grazing concepts felt like common sense. This started him on a path of discovery, and the more research he did the more fascinated he became. Callum started growing multi-species crops in 2017 and flipped his farming system around to solve problems rather than treat symptoms.

When he started farming more regeneratively he loved watching things grow and seeing the real difference in how healthy the crops and animals became.

Callum says it’s easy to get caught up in regenerative agriculture, which can be both good and bad. He says it’s important farmers remain profitable otherwise they won’t be there to do it again next year. Feeling good is important but if it’s not making money, there’s not much point doing it.

Callum joined the VicNoTill board in 2023. After a tour around the property Callum manages at Avenal in Victoria's Highlands region, Michael Gooden sat down to chat with him about how his farming system has evolved.

Young farmer Jake Chandler has always had a deep connection with all things agricultural, and has experienced the landscape from many perspectives. The son of an Ag teacher, he worked as a jackaroo in the Northern Territory before studying environmental science at university then moved into a corporate career in the mining industry.

After falling in love with and marrying Gemma Wilkinson from Young, he left the mining industry to return to the Wilkinson's family farm. Adjusting to the farming lifestyle after intense corporate life was a challenge so he worked in retail ag where he developed a strong local network before getting his hands dirty on the farm. Jake works with Gemma's parents to run their mixed enterprise farm of sheep, cattle and cropping.

After completing a Grazing for Profit course, he was inspired to break his paradigm and show that farming environmentally can be profitable as well. Jake is passionate about making changes that maximise environmental value, keeps their business profitable and puts family first.

VicNoTill board member Michael Gooden stands in for podcast host Dan Fox to find out more from this young Australian farmer, who will leave you feeling energised about the future of agriculture.

The road to regeneration with NSW farm manager and Sober in the Country Bush Tribe Member Matt Tonkin looks at how important it is for farmers to be profitable, not only in the financial sense but also from personal and landscape perspectives.

When Matt's life on the land hit rock bottom he realised he needed to make big changes. Instead of a farming system that relied on chemicals and synthetic inputs he chose to start thinking about one that promoted life, took a more natural approach and had the long-term health of the ecosystem at its heart.

His decision to explore regenerative farming systems also provided a life-altering jolt on how he was managing his own health and wellbeing.

Farmers Helping Farmers guest host Michael Gooden walked around the paddocks of the farm Matt manages in the NSW Riverina district before catching up for this deeply personal conversation. They cover a lot of different topics, including how easy it is for farmers to get so wrapped up their financial health that they lose their own health along the way.

Matt was a special guest speaker at VicNoTill's 2023 annual conference, Tran$ition23.

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Join our host Dan Fox in Part 2 of an indepth conversation with Phil Peterson about rebuilding soil carbon on farms.

Dan has talked numerous times with Phil in the paddock, and wanted to capture some of these conversations in a podcast. He spoke to him earlier in the year but still had so many questions that he has recorded a follow up.

If you haven’t listened to Part 1, we suggest you go back to Episode 6 of Farmers Helping Farmers first.  In Part 2 Phil discusses the importance of sap tests for identifying your risk to plant disease, how to rebuild your soil structure, the importance of context when you’re making farming system changes, and what some of Loam Bio’s paddock trials of simplifying the seed dressing process are finding.

Phil has been at the grassroots of agriculture for many years, asking questions about the environment and how farmers can improve both the yield and quality of the crops and pastures they grow.

This has led to a role with Loam Bio, which researches how farmers can build more carbon in their soils and improve their bottom line.

The worms at NutriSoil are treated like royalty, because they are the key to sustainability, healthy soils, plant, human and planet health.

Nakala Maddock is the chief executive officer of the Baranduda-based business and is helping Nutrisoil take worm farming to all new heights. Nakala, also the host of the Biological Farming Roundtable Podcast, stepped out from behind the hosting microphone for this interview with Dan Fox during VicNoTill's annual conference in July 2023.

A farm chemical accident for Graham Maddock in the mid-1980s triggered a rethink of chemical and fertiliser applications and set in motion the establishment of Nutrisoil.

In this Farmers Helping Farmers podcast episode, Nakala gives a wonderful insight into the Maddock family's lifelong journey to learn how plants and soil function naturally, and how they're developing their biological stimulant products.

Our host Dan Fox catches up with Col Bowey from CB Farming Systems, who was one of the guest speakers at VicNoTill's 2023 conference. Col also led a soil pit discussion and spent the week visiting NSW farms.

Col says success in farming always comes down to having a good ‘farming system’ in place. In 2008 he founded CB Farming Systems and dedicated himself to learning as much as he could from soil scientists and other farmers. He helps farmers build systems that understand healthy soils are at the heart of farm and ecosystem health, while also understanding they need to be productive and profitable.

Col’s interest and drive to know more and understand more about the links between soil health, landscape and personal health has introduced him to some of the most successful farmers in the country.

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UK arable farmer of the year and Green Farm Collective founding member Tim Parton spent a week in Australia as part of VicNoTill's annual conference TRAN$ITION23. As well as inspiring over 100 farmers in the conference room, Tim hung out in soil pits and dug into soils with a shovel to gain a deeper understanding of regenerative farming systems in the Australian context. Dan Fox sat down in the podcast studio with Tim to discover what new ideas his visit had sparked. VicNoTill was also keen to find out how Tim is changing the narrative about farmers being the heroes when it comes to sequestering carbon and feeding the world.

In this episode of Farmers Helping Farmers our host Dan Fox catches up with vice president Tom Briggs. As a third generation farmer in Victoria, Australia, Tom was never a big fan of school; especially the reading and research assignments that were required. But since discovering the practice of regenerative agriculture there isn’t enough reading, research reports and information available to consume.

Tom has been known to say on many occasions, “I eat, sleep, breathe this stuff and consume every bit I can get.”

Tom is candid in this conversation about the things that have gone right and the things that have gone wrong as he's worked with his father to introduce new ideas into their mixed broadacre cropping and livestock system. They take a positive and open-minded approach to challenges so they can keep moving towards the goal of better soil health and better farming.