Are we thinking about trees on farms all wrong? with Michael Taylor

0:02Hello, and welcome to Ag Tech So What, brought to you by Tenacious Ventures. I'm Sarah Nolette. For decades, farmers have been told that they may have to choose between production and trees. But Michael Taylor's family has been testing that assumption for generations. It was about seven weeks before we knew what they were shipping out, what quality they were being graded at, and what we were going to get paid. And we thought, this is nuts. Like, why would any farmer plant trees? For timber, if that's the situation, like you can sell one sheep or 10 ,000 sheep, you know, what price are you going to get?

0:38Planting trees may have seemed crazy at times for Michael, a sixth generation farmer on the New England tablelands of New South Wales, but it's paid off in the long term. The tailors started planting trees for practical reasons, providing shelter and protection for livestock. Over time, those trees have become part of a much bigger experiment in agroforestry, biodiversity, natural capital and farm resilience. I found Michael's story so interesting because it shows what can happen when you take a long-term view, keep learning, and allow the original purpose of an innovation to evolve over time.

1:09So let's meet Michael. My family came to the area back in 1839 to Anwen country, which was very attractive to graziers at the time. and it wasn't many years before, maybe four or five years before, that the first white people had been through this area surveying it. It obviously caught the attention of a lot of people wanting to graze and they came up here and it was beautiful grassy box woodlands and open valleys and wooded ridges. So we bought the property off a squatter and they'd only been here a few years. The original run was about 27 ,000 acres and we've only got just over 1 ,800 acres now.

1:52There's six Taylor families still here. We've all got between 1 ,500 and sort of 3 ,000 acres, but we're all still here. And there's a lot of families just around us that are very similar, very old families. It was funny. I went away to university, someone of three. I've got two sisters. We were all given the opportunity to come back to the farm. We all did some time working on the farm after school, so we knew what it was about, what it meant to be, you know, because, yes, you grow up here, but you don't understand some of the decision-making. You just get to hold the do jobs. And you naturally pick up a few skills along the way.

2:35It was funny. I was actually just watching some old video last night of my dad's early tree planting machine, and I saw my sisters and I running along helping plant trees as kids. It would have been about eight or nine. And I do remember not long after coming back to the farm, I came back here in 2004. I'd had nearly 10 years down in Melbourne, studied civil engineering down there. After having my time working on the farm, I started learning a hell of a lot more than I realised. Farming made engineering were really easy. and people go, oh, you're an engineer. And yeah, no, farming is way harder.

3:16Why is it way harder for you? I think it's because you're just juggling so many different aspects. There's so many different specialties across even a really basic farming business. Even if you're just running cattle, you've got all the aspects to that business, the animal health, the feed, the infrastructure, the animal welfare, the social, the marketing, the finance. There's all this stuff and you can't, I guess it's like with anybody running a small business, except it's, you know, small business on a big scale. And often you don't always have the luxury of bringing in specialists because their margins are often tight and you may be in a remote area, you just can't get people or there may just not be the people that match.

4:02Whereas if you're small business in town, you're closer to a bigger population and services and everything and electricity and water all laid on and taken care of. But when you're out in the country, you're, you know, oh, you're drinking water and you stock water and everything. You're managing all of that. And it's funny, I do have a friend who was running a farm just south of Paris and he said, yeah, it's not like in Australia. If I have a pump problem, call the pump man. If I have a fencing problem, call the fencing guy. Right, right. Yeah, big difference. Yes. So, you know, that comes with scale, but it's just the complexity and then you add in technology and all those things.

4:39If you were to get contractors to do absolutely everything, it would be really hard to be making much money. Yeah. Yeah. Look, if you've got a super high input system maybe where you're really pushing things along, then, yes, you're going to naturally have higher requirements for inputs of labour. But for a small family farm where 750 hectares, just over 1800 acres it's only you know one and a half to two people full time yeah to run this whole place tell me um michael how the farms changed over i mean it quite cool to have it in the family for so many generations and you mentioned the land size and sort of aggregation of different blocks but in terms of like enterprise mix and what you guys are growing and doing how has that changed?

5:23It's always been sheep and cattle. Cattle have come and born. I guess we ended up specializing in wool. We've seen a lot of people go out of wool over the last decade or more, probably longer. We're now at the lowest levels of wool in over 100 years. But around us here, there is a lot of still wool growing properties. And they have been since the beginning. when you grow up in this area until you don't fully realize that a lot of the things we do up here in the New England are a bit weird, a little bit picky when it comes to wool production. What do you mean by that? Like the types of genetics you guys have?

6:03Yeah, surrounded by studs. A lot of the well-known merino studs are in this area. Going back to when I came back on the farm, I questioned everything. I also questioned why sheep and why do we do it that way and why not more cattle why not pigs why not poultry it kept coming back to to actually no sheep are really growing sheep in this area works really well for the climate for the pastures and the nutrition that we get we're ultra fine so we're sort of a sub 15 micron flock again very you know niche part of the wool industry and fiber strength is really important and you can only get good fiber strength through good constant even you know plane of nutrition throughout the year.

6:44One of the exciting parts of wool is that you harvest the wool at that 12 months and you see in that fiber, you see everything that you've done throughout the year. And we compare ultrafine to wine quite often, not cheap cask wine, but really good wine because the wool represents the genetics, the management, the soil, and we achieve very high fiber strengths up here. So there's a lot of other areas where farmers are growing ultrafine, but they really struggled to get the strength, the high strengths that we do in our fibers up here, which is really important. And we've found out more recently that we've planted too many trees that, you know, no one wants to put solar panels here all winter.

7:24I see too many trees. Yeah. That's not a problem that many farms are having right now. So back to the history of the landscape, I guess, you know, originally the government were paying farming families to clear country. And that's how it was because trees were seen as competing with the grass and the stock, et cetera. But again, that grassy box woodland was actually a really ideal landscape. And a lot of farmers did maintain some of that. But it wasn't until the 40s, 50s when we discovered these fertilizers that would push our production levels to levels that we'd never been able to achieve before.

8:01And my dad talks about the planes flying over. And you could see the green strips, you know, where the planes had been flying over. And my grandfather was very proud because the Taylors were the second family in the country after the Niversons just next door to start spreading fertilizer from the air. They thought that was really innovative and they thought they were able to suddenly grow all this extra grass. And why wouldn't you think that's a good thing? You know, farmers all over the world, that's what they love doing is growing stuff, whatever way they're doing it. So, yeah, they thought that was a good thing.

8:34They didn't realise though that in a very short time they were damaging the ecosystem to a point where it reached tipping points and suddenly the trees were starting to die of their own accord. There was no need to be clearing them. They were just dying out of the landscape. But yeah, through to the 80s, we lost probably 25, 30 % of our tree cover. It was massive. And a lot of the New England tablelands proper still sits at less than 5 % tree cover. and we have massive amounts of research now showing that between 15 and 40 percent 50 percent tree cover depending on your climate and your soils etc about 30 percent tree cover for here is where you're actually going to optimize pasture growth the amount of for pasture that's not any kind of like revenue from the trees or anything like that no no no no and it purely comes down to irradiance.

9:29So all farmers know this is what drives their systems. A funny little story, during the 2019 drought, I had a friend, you know, the New England tablelands looked like it had been nuked. I was there. I remember being there. Don't worry about someone putting a nuclear bomb down here. It looked like it had been nuked. It was apocalyptic. And I had a friend who was talking about, he'd been observing that under his kid's trampoline, it was still green grass. And he was like, how can I get that effect on my whole pasture? Plant a tree. So the trampoline effect. Yeah, so the trampoline's letting, you know, there's a certain amount of light getting through and moisture.

10:12He's still getting light and moisture through. He's got green grass and even on the lawn surrounding the trampoline. So he's like, why? You know, I don't have sheep grazing on the grass there. Why is it so different? So it purely comes down to managing the amount of light. And yes, there's different pasture species that do better in full light or partial light or in full shade. So that's normal. But there's also the aspect of loss of moisture from evaporation. It doesn't matter what pasture species you have if you don't have the moisture for those grasses to grow. and then you've got to lay it on top of that wind protection, keeping your leaf litter on the ground.

10:56So a lot of farmers, I think, understood trying to maintain ground cover. But when it was that dry, like it was so dry, everything was just turning to dust and then you'd get a big wind. And they're like, I did everything right. Like I maintained my ground cover, I had the leaf litter there and everything and then the wind blew it away. I'm like, in amongst the trees here, it's 10 kilometres an hour less wind. And it makes a big difference in those extreme circumstances. My friend who observed the trampoline effect realized that by maintaining more ground cover, they were getting that shading effect just from the dry matter down at ground level.

11:35So it just comes down to light. I mean, it sounds easy when you say it, but obviously the investment to plant the trees themselves and then, you know, the perception. But you were saying that even your great-grandfather, I think, was starting to replant. at that time when it probably was far less of a conversation than it even is now. So that's sort of part of the family history then. You know, he was already starting to see the effect of the loss of the shelter. And for them, though, it was more about at lambing time. You know, they were losing animals. When you had extreme weather, cold, wet fronts go through, you were losing stock, especially off shears.

12:13Lambs are cheering. And again, there's all the research that was done at places like the Chiswick Farm just south of Armidale here and back in the 40s and 50s, showing the effect of having taller, clumpy grass makes quite a big effect on lamp survival rates because the lamps can get down and get shelter on those when the conditions get really bad. But, you know, trees are just the next level. And so my grandfather, at that stage, the Forestry Commission had a nursery down here at Welka and they'd started planting pine forests. so my grandfather was already able to start sourcing some pines but it was actually before that it was the orchardists over at Kentucky that were planting pines around all their orchards for shelter.

12:57Interesting and so you saw that and said oh I saw that and I saw that again in South America two years ago during my Nuffield travels. I was down in Chibud, the Chibud province in Argentina which is well known for ranch land grazing for sheep mostly because the cattle struggle, they have a very low rainfall. But the Chibut River Valley is super intensive horticulture and orchards. They plant poplars around all their crops. It's because of the wind. The wind is nuts. It's hard to imagine the wind. I was there during a windstorm and it was phenomenal. They've got their high value irrigated horticulture crops.

13:35So they're protecting them from the wind. So Only a couple of days before I left, I realized I'd been trying to get my head around how the hell they got all the timber for all their fencing. We'd driven across from Chile and you see thousands of kilometers of fence, timber fence, timber droppers. And it didn't take me long to figure out there was poplar. Poplar is actually a hardwood, even though it's a physically soft wood. It's a hardwood. So it's generally more durable. and in those super dry environments that those timber poplar fences work really well. Where were they getting the poplar from?

14:11Well, it turns out they were getting the poplar from all the poplars that had been planted around all these horticultural plots. And there was a sawmill who was bringing timber in the few weeks before I'd been visiting agroforestry operations in Misiones, which is, you know, two metres of rainfall and tropical. But they're bringing timber from way up north in Argentina. and they bring it all the way down to Trelew, which is the port there, and they can dry the timber. They can season it really well. They're growing a lot of eucalypt. They're seasoning it. They're structurally testing it, certifying it, and they're sending it to Europe.

14:46A lot of it was going to Germany as structural timber. So they've got the dry climate direct to Europe. But then because they had this sawmelling experience, they were able to utilise this local resource. But, yeah, it was just fascinating. and to see how very similar to what happened here. You know, the orchards were planting pines around their orchards and then suddenly my grandfather was like, oh, that'd have been, you know, great shelter. I can see how quickly those pines are growing, move on one generation. Forestry had come a long way. My father, you know, recognized that a 10 cent seedling out of the forest nursery was a lot cheaper than a$2 or$3 native seedling and not many people were collecting native seeds at that point.

15:30So some years they were planting 15 ,000, 20 ,000 trees a year. So talking about cost of establishing trees, a 10-cent seedling made sense. Yeah. And they were able to machine plant the seedlings. And before you knew it, my father had developed a couple of self-propelled tree planting machines. And a lot of graziers across the New England were hiring my parents to go out and plant trees. and there was the child labor, myself and my sisters, trudging along behind. That's awesome. Give me like the visual picture of the tree planting machine that he would have used or that you guys would have been the child laborer for.

16:09Is it like a tow behind on a tractor or what kind of form factor am I thinking here? The actual planting mechanism was based on what the forestry services were using already. They had tractors or bulldozers. Which has a funny name, right? I don't know whether there's a special name. There's like a thing that you hold that you like when you put the tree in and it's called No, no, no. You're thinking of the handheld tree. Yeah, but that's got a funny name, right? Yeah. So the Potiputki is just a tube planter, manual planter. And they were developed in Europe and Scandinavia, quite likely. The Potiputki was the original.

16:43It was developed by Lannan Transplants in Finland, but there's a whole bunch of others. We're getting ahead in the story here, Sarah. Okay. But I'll come back to that. The self-propelled tree planters were based on the toe behind three-point linkage planters that fitted behind a bulldozer or a tractor. But they're a ripper and the ripper has a chute behind it and the seedling is dropped into that chute. And then you've got two press wheels running along behind at an angle, pressing the soil in around the tree. And with those planters, you could do over a thousand trees an hour quite easily. obviously a lot quicker than you could do with a hand planter but that was a really cheap and efficient way of putting in pines and even when I came back to the farm in 2004 I think about 2006 or seven or six or seven it was my first opportunity to put in my own plot I picked out a site which was you know gravelly side of a hill that you know it wasn't very high value in terms of pasture but had the right aspect for growing pines so we'll stick in two hectares there and I think we we put in 3 ,000 trees in four hours and at the end of it my dad said ah you'll get up to speed one day so he was like oh I thought I was going pretty well yeah but my dad was just constantly thinking about how can we do this cheaper more efficiently get it in get it done we're just putting these trees in to get some shade shelter for our livestock.

18:15I was going to say the driver for your grandfather and your dad was really around the pasture and the sheep operation. It just happened that my dad was buying these trees from the forestry service. He was also seeing that they're managing their trees for timber into the future. In the meantime, we had for many years, the rotary was coming and taking all our thinnings for Christmas trees and things like that. And there was just all these side things just started appearing and I think 1992, you know, was the first carbon study done on the place here and that was Southern Cross University and they were doing those carbon studies in our pine plantations.

18:52Who would have known in 1992 that, but you know, the whole tree planting thing, as I said, suddenly my parents were planting trees on a lot of properties in the area. 1990 came along, Landcare formed. It was this first time that you started to have conservationists and farmers talking to each other and getting a whole heap of money from the government to figure out problems on their farms, you know, whether it was lack of shelter, whether it was erosion, whether it was rising salts, all these things that farmers saw were impacting their production. And it was as simple as that. It's impacting our production.

19:30What are we going to do about it? And they didn't fully realize all these things are linked. So growing trees and then, And, you know, we're growing trees and all of a sudden we've got researchers that are counting spiders in our pine plantations versus spiders in the native vegetation next door. But with the support of the Landcare Group and a lot of the early pioneers in this region, they decided to run a little field day. They'd fenced out a 10-hectare area and prepared all the ground and they had about 100 exhibitors from all over the country to talk about seed collecting, growing trees, managing trees.

20:08But you also had all the conservation-related stuff too. There were people there talking about, you know, food for koalas and insects and soils, et cetera. But, yeah, at lunchtime we'd had over 6 ,000 people through the gate. Wow. For that field day. Wow. Yeah, it chokes me up a little bit to think about it. But it was before the internet, so the only way people could get out and learn about stuff was. But yeah, there was a real hunger at that time. I was going to ask what the perception or the kind of social impact for your grandfather versus your father versus you of tree planting, because sort of different eras, like the ethos and vibe around tree planting was pretty different, I imagine.

20:46And so the kind of social consequences, positive or negative, I imagine were different. A little bit like the excitement and the interest in planting trees back then. It was new and it was different. And it was this opportunity to solve a problem. Pines were growing quite quickly. The seasons weren't too bad. But obviously we've seen over the years things have changed as those trees have grown up and suddenly trees that were planted next to fences have obviously a big problem. Trees that were never thinned naturally died during the drought. Trees that weren't pruned were never going to be any good for timber.

21:22Trees that were planted in the wrong spot. There's just all those things that you can't always know overnight. Especially if you were planting them for one purpose and then you wanted them for another, whether it was the spacing to harvest it mechanically or whatever. That's right. You know, my grandfather went from a period when the environment, the ecosystem was in a state that was still regenerating. So they were cutting down trees as fast as they could and they were growing again. He would have been the crazy one in the town then for planting them when everyone was still cutting them down or not really.

21:50Definitely. But planting trees is addictive. So I'm not surprised they didn't stop because once they started, But I guess my parents and my grandparents had the advantage of coming from families that did have big gardens. They had big veggie gardens. They had gardens for, you know, aesthetics. So they naturally, they were aware of trees, how they grow and how big they get. It's different when you do it out on the farm next to a fence that you're trying to manage for livestock or something. But they could see that longer timeline. but it all happened a lot quicker than they ever imagined. You know, those little pine trees that they planted, seedlings that were 20 centimetres tall and now 25, 30 metres tall and 800, 900 mils in diameter, they're just giants and that's all happened in their life and they just never, you know, they'd seen elms and oaks and all these English, European varieties planted to grow a bit slower and they just thought, oh, this will be a generational thing.

22:53but oh it's great we're getting good amount of shelter after you know five ten years easily so we solved our problem and then it was like oh god there's all these other things we've had to learn that any forester maybe any experienced forester could probably have warned us of but they don't know about planting trees for livestock so right about three years ago it was when forico had just for the first time released their natural capital account and that was significant you know worldwide and there was some really good presentations but the whole forestry australia conference there was so much talk about livestock in forests and it was it was fascinating because they were facing all the same problems that we were coming from the other way they're like yeah but the stock gets sick and we can't muster them in the forests yeah and on the other side you had the conservationists you You know, the bird people coming in and going, oh, this is just a monocrop forest.

23:50And then all of a sudden they're counting, you know, numbers of threatened species in these forests. And they're going, oh, hang on a minute. This is a bit more complicated than we imagined. Because the data shows that even if it is just pine trees or whatever, there's a benefit to the species. Nature is opportunistic. We simplify it way too much. We think we're in control, but no. So nature's out there to have a good go if it can, wherever it is. You see that over and over. We're not in as much control as we think. And so for you, I'm curious, I guess, two things. For now, when you think of the ROI of the agroforestry, the tree part of it, how do you balance better pasture with some of what the data around national capital accounting has shown, either for nature or value of the property or the timber as a revenue stream?

24:40How has that, the business case, so to speak, evolved? Yeah, look, I think the best thing out of the natural capital accounting has been, it's been able to demonstrate some of what farmers feel and observe. But yeah, it's been able to demonstrate that in tangible figures, and it's been able to put some of that into production-ready data. But it's also highlighted all the mistakes we've made as well. But if we can make those mistakes so others don't have to make those mistakes, well, that's a nice feeling. it's it's hard to put a value on that but it does make it easier to help others out obviously we're having a timber business here we're very isolated we're a long way from large populations we're a long way from ports we're a long way from processing so we've had to understand how to make that work for us and that is processing the timber on the property a small scale selling it at full retail prices and we're doing really well out of that like you know we've had to reduce our numbers a lot just this last summer.

25:42But if you're cutting a couple of grams worth of timber a day, that's good cash flow. That keeps things going. When you say a couple of grams worth of timber, do you mean a couple like dollars wise, not thousands of trees? Dollars. Dollars. Okay. I was mentioning the scale of that. And so just give me a sense of like how many trees are you cutting per day? Just give me a sense of what kind of scale when you say small scale processing. I'll do a calculation. So that would only be about maybe 10 or 15. pine trees. Wow. So that's not too bad. You guys doing it yourself or you have to employ someone to do that?

26:13The timber processing stuff came about probably, yeah, it was mid-90s. So about 15 years after they'd started planting, trees had got to a point where dad was going, actually, there's a, you know, we could do something here. More than just selling, you know, Christmas trees. They'd gone beyond that. They were able to start thinning pine trees out. We were looking towards what the Kiwis were doing in terms of management. They'd produced, you know, manuals on managing radiated pine and all sorts of things. So we were learning from them. Not fully understanding that a lot of the foresters knew that the best place to plant the pines were as higher rainfall areas, whereas we were 700 mil rainfall and that was right on the limit.

26:59so we were thinning probably at the wrong times we were pruning a bit hard and things like that but we were able to start harvesting rounds and my father found an old peeler so we were peeling those to make posts that progressed obviously through to and my father had again done a lot of the research and he actually went and did the milling course down in victoria and came back and he handed me the manual and told me a few things and the rest was up to me but we bought a sawmill in 2004. We bought a Mahoey mill, a small affordable mill out of New Zealand, but we mounted it as a permanent mill in our old hay shed because we never cut hay anymore.

27:40And we weren't having to cut the trees a long way. So it made it possible we had an old tipper that we were able to drag logs in. And then jump forward to 2022, we actually did our first commercial log harvest. So So a lot of the trees that got to a size were like, okay, we've got enough trees here that we can give this a go. And at the time it was too wet in a lot of the state forests that we were actually able to get harvesting crews, but we didn't realise that we were going to have to cut fences everywhere because all their machines are massive. Massive, yeah. But we shifted a huge amount of logs, not knowing really what the outcome was going to be, but we realised very quickly that they're shipping out a lot of logs.

28:22it was about seven weeks before we knew what they were shipping out, what quality they were being graded at and what we were going to get paid. And we thought, this is nuts. Like why would any farmer plant trees for timber if that's the situation? Like you can sell one sheep or 10 ,000 sheep, you know, what price are you going to get? You can nearly work out, you can sell it privately, you can sell it through the yards, you can sell it online and you can probably work out what the farmer that buys them is going to make as well. And the quality standards are really clear. You know your fat score.

29:01You know how much wool is on them, et cetera, et cetera. You've got to wait. But, yeah, it highlighted a whole bunch of stuff. We very quickly put a stop to the logs going off the farm because we also realized that a 4.2-meter log, 200-mil log, was being downgraded to a pulp log, and we were getting 12 cents or something for that whole log. And because the cost of the transport for a pulp grade log was eating away at that$8 a ton at the mill door and we were getting about 50 cents a ton. Yeah, well, it was 10 cents to plant it like without labor. So over how many years? It's not good. We realized we could take that same log, we could turn it into a hundred by hundred square piece of timber and it was a 26 ,000 % value add.

29:49There you go. It was a bit of a no-brainer. So we're now just milling on order. We've got a treatment plant now our way down Tamworth. So all the pines getting treated down there. Local builders will come and buy timber for construction and whatever if it doesn't need to be certified a certain grade. We went through the whole visual grading course and everything and when we set up the mill in 2004, we did a couple of years. we were shipping out truckloads to Brisbane. But again, a lot of the money that we were making was going out in transport costs. So again, we realised selling locally was the best way.

30:25And at the moment, we can't keep up with the orders. We can't get ahead to have stock at all because the orders just can't keep coming in. I mean, we're still primarily a grazing property. That's our sheep and cattle, sheep and wool. They're our primary enterprises. but we do have a guy that's doing it two or three days a week on the mill. Yeah. I'm just managing to keep up the logs to him. But when everything else goes a bit quiet, like during the 2019 drought, again, it's those extreme periods where the trees really stand out. We had income. If we'd been planting natives, every winter everybody's still buying firewood, So plywood resources are always sought after.

31:12We're still learning a lot. Well, I'm curious for the wool operation and kind of thinking about that premium, like the downstream supply chain and the sustainability, both story and actual data. Like, is there value there? Obviously, you guys have realized it in the resilience of the operation and the multiple revenue streams. But in terms of the supply chain for any of your offtake, are any of the downstream players interested in either the story or the data or anything like that? Oh, definitely. Yeah. I wouldn't say that there's value there yet. I would say that, you know, when we get RWS certification, it's really easy for us because they can see what we've done to the land.

31:49We've got those natural capital accounts. So in terms of, you know, getting certifications that are bringing a premium in the market, it's really easy, but a lot of farmers can meet those even without the excessive amount of tree planning all the extra enterprises. But it does mean, you know, we do make quite a bit of income now with tour groups coming through, with research projects. So, you know, we're charging reasonable money for tour buses to come through and groups, whether it's school students, whether I've had in the last six months I've had a couple of groups of mixed, mainly American tourists.

32:28So these are just tourists. a big group of Polish farmers. I've had a Nuffield group through here as well. I hosted another university group just last week. Yeah. And then there's ongoing research projects. And the economics of the research projects, more like someone's effectively subsidizing the cost of the data collection for you guys. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Now we're starting to see nature markets emerging. We're seeing carbon markets. We are part of an insetting project with Walmart. It's early days on that. We're yet to see actually any money, but they've got clothing brands that are committed and committed financially as well.

33:05We're yet to see how they match up properties and projects with wool supply. On an individual scale, we've taken a batch of wool overseas to market as a single origin wool, and that's ongoing as well. I've got the natural capital accounts there. It's really easy to tell people that story about what we've done to the land and how we look after our sheep in that situation. So it does make it really easy in terms of what it means financially. At the moment, it's the timber, it's the research information that we're getting that's being subsidized. It's some of the talking and consulting that I'm doing.

33:43Speaking about what we've done and explaining people all the mistakes we've made, I've been involved with peer group mentoring as well. So there's been income from that helping other farmers move forwards. But yeah, it's harder to quantify the direct stuff. Yes, during the 2019 drought, I didn't feed at all, but that wasn't just the trees. It was the change in how I was managing my sheep numbers. It was because in 2013, we nearly ran out of water during that drought. I thought that was a really bad drought. And then we had 2019. That was way worse. but I managed to graze through that drought without feeding stock.

34:23Wow. Like given how that land was, like I just, I can't, it's hard to emphasize if you hadn't been to that area at that time. I remember going, I was on a board in the area at the time and we were staying at one of the local like hotels or motels and just a lot where the hotel was, the property was like brown, like nothing and there was like a rose bush, like one rose bush and we're like, oh, how did you, like we asked because there was just nothing with any color and the woman who ran the place was taking the table water from the restaurant guests that we didn't finish drinking it, aggregating it, and was like going to save this one plant.

34:55Like that's how bad. And there were timers in the shower. Exactly. No, we were the same. You know, save the shower water just to keep that one fig tree alive. Yeah, something. Yeah, yeah. Everything else can die, but we're just going to keep that one tree alive. But it was, look, it was for such a dire situation to be able to show myself that those native pasture species that we've managed to maintain are incredible. under those conditions that, you know, we'd get a millimetre or a half a mill of rain and everybody was like, well, that was no good. But that half a mill or a mill landing on a native plant that's still alive, it produces a green shoot.

35:32Yes, it might only be a few centimetres long, but that's water, you know, that's green shoot and the sheep will find it guaranteed. Under pressure, they'll eat those plants into the ground. So we cut back our sheep numbers a lot and I still question whether maybe we cut the numbers back too much. But at the same time, we didn't have to feed at all. Feed was expensive. And I know that, again, 2013, I was here feeding. Yes, I had a little bit of help, but it really does your head in. And it wasn't just about the money. It was about my mental well-being. Totally. Just the constant need to do it and the worry about the animals.

36:11And to, you know, again, during 2019, to be able to go into a forest and there's green grass and you're able to cut a tree down, cut it up, sell it. That was amazing. Yeah, it was hard work and the margins went incredible, but timber prices have nearly tripled. Yeah, I was going to say natural fibers are up. You're riding a couple good toe-ins there. I'm curious, when people talk about regenerative agriculture or region farming, there's a conversation that's like, just change the practices. And so many of the stories I hear, because you can make more money and then you have less costs and you're a less risky system.

36:47But I mean, your experience was like, I guess there's this sense of like, it makes business sense. And so why aren't these idiot farmers just doing it? And obviously that's not the case. It's interesting about your story is like, it was a bunch of small changes over decades, but there was also an ethos of it. When I think about someone hearing this story and saying like, well, how do I get from where I am now to something like that? Like it just, and then there's the Christmas trees and then the daggers and then this. I imagine it could feel really inaccessible. Do you think it's something about your family and your ethos and it has to be incremental?

37:20I think it's funny. I spotted another farmer on the internet the other day. He's like, all right, I'm at this point where I've got part of my farm that I run regeneratively, part of my farm that I run conventionally. And he's like, I'm wondering whether I make the switch. and it's not a switch you know you can't just flick yeah it on and off yes yes you can you can switch it off yes okay there is one way you can do you can switch it off you can nuke it you can cut everything down but you can't just switch it on you know and trees don't lie like you can't just put in a 30 meter tree with a 800 mil diameter you can't just whack it in right you You can't just suddenly grow billions of microbes in the soil overnight.

38:13Nature doesn't work like that. So when we were labeled regenerative in Charlie Massey's book, and I don't have any issues with that, but it was funny that suddenly we were just farmers that were planting trees. Suddenly we were regenerative. And then I think at Evoke Ag a couple of years ago, I saw a presentation from Bloomberg. He listed all the big food companies and all their definitions of what regenerative agriculture means. They've all got these definitions and all the practices they should do. And there was only one practice that they all agreed on, and that was planting multi-species crops or pastures.

38:51And I was thinking, oh, that's the only thing I don't do. Anyway, but it was just fascinating. People were so hung up on this. definition of what it means or doesn't mean or and you see the catch cries from both sides ah you know regenerative agriculture is going to save the world ah regenerative agriculture will never feed the world etc it goes on and on nature's far more nuanced than that you know and my my best advice was it's changing the farm between your ears that's the one thing i can't disagree with. It's changing the way you think about the environment and it's thinking about everything you do.

39:36And it's a bit like engineering, you know, there's new technology and ways of doing things, but all the physics, it's all the same. All the chemistry is the same. We understand all of that. There's so much information we can draw on now. Don't think of your farm as a reductionist system. It's a complex system and you're working in nature. Doesn't matter whether you're using chemicals or not, you're still working in nature. A lot of really progressive farmers now would definitely not say that they're regenerative, but they're bringing in insects to eat the other insects. They're managing shelter around their crops for ecosystem services.

40:16They're looking at their soils. It's just a progression to becoming more efficient in what you're doing. It just happens that we're working in nature. And if you can leverage nature to do stuff for free, not for free, it's for free, but if you can leverage it in a way that you're utilizing the free sunshine and the water, then yes, well, why wouldn't you? Yes, indeed. And thanks again to Michael Taylor for such a fascinating discussion, which has left me mulling over quite a few things. Michael's observation that farming is harder in the engineering gets to the heart of one of ag's biggest innovation challenges.

40:52A farm is not a collection of separate problems waiting for separate solutions. Animals, pasture, soil, weather, infrastructure, labor, markets, and technology all interact. That means the most useful innovations may not always be those that optimize a single metric, but those that help farmers understand the relationships between different parts of the system. As Michael puts it, farming requires us to look more closely at everything we're doing and ask whether there might be a different way. The opportunity for ag tech is to help farmers navigate complexity, not pretend it doesn't exist. Another insight that stayed with me is around value.

41:27We often try to calculate the ROI up front, but one of the lessons here for Michael could be that the ROI isn't always fixed. For him, the value of the trees evolved from providing shelter for livestock to then creating opportunities around timber, biodiversity, and natural capital, even another revenue stream. As we heard, things went wrong. Trees ended up in the wrong places or weren't thinned at the right times. But over time, the real impacts emerged, making learning over time and adaptation just as important for farmers as getting the initial technology or intervention right. That does present a challenge for ag tech vendors, though, who might be trying to communicate an ROI up front.

42:02So something to be aware of. And finally, Michael's discussion around natural capital accounting raises an important question about the role of data in ag. He says one of its greatest benefits has been the ability to demonstrate intangible figures some of the things farmers already observe and feel in their landscapes. On one hand, that's a powerful way to think about ag tech. Tech doesn't necessarily need to replace farmer knowledge. It can help validate it, quantify it, and turn observations into information that can support better decisions. But on the other hand, what's the data and the software that's enabling it actually worth?

42:33And is there a viable business model there for vendors? So far, we've seen that that's pretty tough. And ultimately, Michael's experience shows the limits of reducing nature to overly simple categories. Data can reveal more about a system, but only if we're prepared to recognize its complexity, and sometimes the unexpected relationships that emerge within it. So that's it for another episode of AgTech So What? Thank you for listening, and a reminder to please, please make sure you hit follow so you never miss an episode. For more of our writing on the role of natural capital, data, and building farm biodiversity, please visit our website, tenacious.ventures.

43:06And there are more resources linked in the show notes. I'm Sarah Nolette. I'll catch you next time.