lenn Morris, joins me to discuss the importance of soil in building resilience, improving the lands ability to absorb and store water, and improve the nutrient value of the land. Glenn is an organic beef farmer in Northern New South Wales who has studied agricultural science. Glenn has seen first hand the vulnerability of our land and the way sustainable agriculture cannot only regenerate it, but help it thrive.

Selected Links from the Episode

Glenn Morris Website

Unstress episode with Allan Savory on holistic management 

Unstress episode with Dr Charles Massey on regenerative agriculture

Unstress episode with Joel Salatin on sustainable farming

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Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to “Unstress”. I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich. We hear the expression food is medicine. We also hear about the importance of the gut the second brain where 70% of our immune system resides how important our relationship is with our microbiome. We also hear about climate change. It's a huge question, political question, economic, environmental. And of course, in the eastern half of Australia, we are going through what some are calling the worst droughts in living memory.

There's, of course, a connection between all of this and it's very basic. We need healthy foods to be healthy and we need healthy soil to grow that healthy food in, not just for today but for the future as well. When it comes to soil it turns out that how we manage it how well we understand it, is critically important. Farmers are in charge of all of that. Often being advised by industry and regulatory bodies and academic institutions which in turn are all influenced by industry or a lot are. Sound familiar? Well, our health care could be said to be suffering from the same problems.

My guest today is organic farmer Glenn Morris whose organic beef farm is in the northern New South Wales area around Inverell. Like many farmers, Glenn studied agricultural science and observed what the various practices were doing and noted that there was a vulnerability inherent in our land and in how it was being managed. He decided to go back and study more by doing a master's in sustainable agriculture, in particular, the importance of the soil in building resilience, improving the lands ability to absorb and store water and improve the nutrient value of the land. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Glenn Morris.

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Welcome to the show Glenn.

Glenn Morris: Thank You.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Glenn you are a farmer in northern New South Wales and I was wondering if you could just share with our listener many of whom may not be out on the farm, living in the city and give us a bit of a backstory about where you are now and how you got there?

Glenn Morris: Basically, I'm living on a farm in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. We're just off the top of the range sort of heading west so we're about 40 kilometres just coming down the slopes basically it's a nice little in-between climate if you like from the real cold of the mountains and not quite as hot as the plains so quite a nice spot to live normally.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Is that where you grew up?

Glenn Morris: No, actually, Ron Osborn on a property down near Goulbourn but did at different circumstances as far as what have you, I ended up growing up in the city and then basically decided when I got to about 20 that I wanted to get back to farming and I've made a career out of farming ever since. I have just been working my way up.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: But your farm is not an ordinary farm. Well, I wish it was but tell us a little bit about what distinguishes your farm now?

Glenn Morris: It's sort of interesting, basically as I say I just sort of made a career out of farming. I was trained conventionally. I went to conventional Agriculture College and then the all the time that I was sort of learning new techniques and that I had this sort of I supp...