GROUNDED Live - 2026: Phil Mulvey - Understanding Landscape Hydration

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this session, soil scientist Phil Mulvey takes a fresh look at water, challenging us to think beyond rainfall and dams to the way entire landscapes store, move and cycle moisture. Exploring the connections between soil, vegetation and hydrology, Phil explains how improving landscape function can help farms become more resilient in a drying climate. 

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

G'day there, I'm Matthew Evans, and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tents live on the day. It's unedited, and I hope you enjoy it. Understanding water involves understanding that it doesn't just exist on the ground or coming from the sky, but it happens across landscapes. How do you actually hydrate whole landscapes and how do we affect the rain that falls on their property? Now, Phil Mulvey amazing soil scientist, super big brain bloke, he's gonna unpick understanding landscape hydration from the ground up.

SPEAKER_05 0:49

So up next here in the Yamigum Tent, we have Phil Mulvey. Phil has a bio that reads, probably like number one other working in this space, from co-founding a range of organizations. I think you've got three on the go at the moment, maybe a few more. A Spanna Crew highlights across construction, writing a book. Phil's also a YouTube star, and he has represented Australia in sailing. Probably not all the agricultural stuff that you're used to. So Phil's widespread interest and commitments have now led him all to the ground of the stage here with us today. Phil specializes in soil and water chemistry with over 25 years' experience in soil sciences, hydro uh hydrology, uh, water resource assessment, contamination studies, geological mapping, and aquify modeling. Today, Phil and I are just going to have a bit of a yarn and understand this kind of broad theme of understanding landscape hydration. Please welcome Phil. So, Phil, we just had a quick yarn before we started, just about your background and your interest and how you got into this whole world of agriculture. Um, what led you to soil sciences and hydrology?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Um well, I looked at your CV, Josh, and looked at some of your stuff. Um, thanks for the invitation uh and thanks for the intro. I really appreciate it. Um, I was a towy at Mudgy, and those who are farm farmers would know what a towny means. It means we were part, or our parents were part of what serviced agriculture. Um and so I grew up very aware of agriculture, but I grew up a lot more, and I was only there to the age of 11. I was focused on geology, and mudgy is an old gold mining town. And in and it wasn't known for grapes then. It had Craigmore, it was the only winery when I was there. Uh, and it wasn't a foodie town, though it had a dairy that shut, it had the brewery that shut Mudgy Mud. Those of you old enough, not many older than me here, but that had the uh mudgy mud there. Um so it had services that were local. Um, you could buy from the Roth sisters from their truck um groceries um that were grown uh on the edge of the Kudigong Flats. So that's what I grew up with, but I wasn't interested in agriculture greatly. I was interested in mining and rocks and landscape and how it all worked. And in Mudgy at the time, or over towards um Hill Ends and Hargraves, um, was World War I veterans that during the depression had the only option to actually make money was to mine and fossick in the old workings. And so the 60s, when I was there, and into the 70s, when I came back as a teenager, they taught me about landscape. I was still on the land. And unlike today, parents had no trouble with an eight-year-old walking three or four miles out of town to talk to an old timer and then walk back, um, which would be not considered socially uh acceptable at any level today. Um, but they taught me something that I had no idea what it was about because it was sublimable. They taught me to recognize where gold occurred, to recognize where water flowed out, to recognize trees that depended on water. They weren't aboriginal, but they were long time living on the land. And because they had to read the land to find gold, they taught me. So I started a geology degree at the time of the great geology collapse back in the mid-70s. And my father convinced me there was no future in geology to go and do ag science. So I swapped across to ag and realized the only way, and I did animal husbandry and I sat the animal physiology exam four times. Now that wasn't a hint that I didn't enjoy it. That's a if anyone fails an exam three times and gets a concessional pass, you know you're in the wrong subject. Um so I read the light and I swapped across to soil science. And I did very well in soil science, and I figured that I can go and do that and then do mine rehab, which was the first thesis in mine rehab in Australia. So I applied my soils to rehab. And because it's rehab an artificial medium, biology matters, and it matters hugely. So the next 10 years I worked in rehab of mines, contaminated sites, landfills, and for two or three years of that first period, I went to Orange Field Day to try and convince farmers how to reduce their fertilizer costs. I went for three years, and not once did I get a farmer stop at my stand. So that made me realize that farmers weren't interested in soil science. Yeah, well. So I didn't actually address farmers again, and somehow along the track, I ended up with a lot of people working for us, a lot of ag scientists, a lot of soil scientists, because the only means in those days for soil scientists outside academia was basically to work with our company. Um, so we ended up with more soil scientists and CSIRO. And at some point in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a huge drought in the Monaro. We had three or four sons of farmers working for us, and they said, Mom and dad want you to come and talk to the farmers. We've got a photograph of one of our young soil scientists from that day instructing Charles Massey on how to understand soil. So that was my road back, but it comes from an entirely different perspective than ag systems. Um what I did was I stupidly bought a conservation ag consultancy, and Allison, my wife to this day said, you know, that's going to be a bad investment. She was right. Um, because we were on the extreme side of conservation ag. Uh, we're in the field that didn't exist yet, which was called regen ag. Um, so we sat there. So for a number of years, I worked in association with that business with the others, trying to understand ag systems. So that's sort of my journey. Um, our company funded four or five PhDs at Sydney University. We funded a number all over the place, but these were on carbon measurement, and the outcome of that became the soil carbon method. So I'm not a farmer, I'm a pain in the ass scientist who always wants to understand why.

SPEAKER_05 7:57

Phil. So that work in land degradation. Uh can you tell us about what nuance that now provides to you when you think back into the agricultural industry? What's that? What are those pain points or those buttons that you like pressing and prodding to try and find out the why? Where does that kind of stem back to, I guess, to your career and where your thinking is now as a result of that?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Um intriguingly enough, well, let's start with soil. Soil contains two medium and three matters. So it's air and water are the mediums, and the matters are mineral matter, organic matter, and living matter. And no matter matters more than any other matter. And in soil science, you end up doing one of the matters, so you don't see the link between the soil's three matters the parent material, the grass, the trees, the animals, and the climate. You don't readily see that a weed is a colonizer. And the only reason that weed exists is your soil stressed. And the reason it continues to exist is it continues to be stressed. So when we work with degraded land, we work with the physics first, because if plants get burnt because of the albedo, because it's too white, or the soil's too hard for seas to emerge, you just don't get cover. So physics matters. You'll hear a bit more later why I think physics matters elsewhere. But the next thing that matters even more is the connection between soil organic matter and living matter. Because contaminated sites and tailings dams, they're just mineral matter. And they cement, they hard set, the chemistry is a big issue, but you can't concentrate in the chemistry until you get some organic matter and living matter into the system and then work that to work the chemistry. So working with acid mine waste, it's not chemistry first, it's physics and biology, then chemistry. So that means if you're going to build a biome, you start with the builders, and the soil builders are fungi. I'll just repeat that soil builders are fungi. But there's a weird thing about fungi. I have three daughters and I have untold granddaughters, and I've noticed from when I was a very young um lad, right through now, is that girls never go to the toilet alone. They've always got to chat or talk about what's going on or something. Um, even the young granddaughters at three or four, it seems to be a social thing. Guys spend forever in the toilet. Girls send in and out, but they want to chat. Fungi are the same, fungi and bacteria. Fungi cannot live alone. And that's what people don't understand. Fungi have to be fed, they actually have to be fed sugars. And if you look at all the associations you look at, think of the earliest occupation of the earth, that's to say, terrestrial earth, um, was an organism called lichen. And that resulted in a huge acceleration of weathering of our surface about 800 million years ago, which then resulted in uh complex organisms. But that association was fungi and algae. So when you look at primary degraders, so these are your wood rot fungies that break down, for instance, um uh lignin, cellulose, hemicellulose, they have to work with bacteria. So the primary wood degraders are your shiitake mushrooms and uh your oyster mushrooms, um, they're the white wood rot degraders. Um they need to be fed during the process with bacteria. So bacteria feed them, they then crack um the straw down to provide the next step for the secondary degraders, which are your pool mushrooms. They also have a role that they take the oxidized break to take it the next step down, so that the bacteria can then convert that to sugar. And there's five or six bacteria, two or three fungi involved in this process. On top of that, when we're operating in um acid mine drainage, we also need a type of fungi that cracks um phosphate out of rock. Because we don't want to put fertilizer out because we'll just wash straight out because we have got nothing to hold it. So that's where we started with. We start with fungi. Um, so that's sort of the involvement of when I came back to agriculture. Uh, and interesting enough, when I did my final year, I did so I'd done already three years of micro. I um I did a specialist micro course no longer taught called Microbiology of the Root Environment, which was uh 20 hours of lectures and prank. Um, unfortunately, that's not taught anymore. Um, but just for those that are interested, if you decide to go to the toilet, which I'm sure someday, sometime today you will, you will cross a uh road trail that's deeply cracked. So we're sitting here on a smectite soil, and I'll talk about that later. Out of those cracks is pouring vast numbers of crickets. So just stop and look and go, crickets are pouring out of there. Now, is that a seasonal basis, or is that showing a cricket invasion, or is the sheer disturbance of our surface here resulting in the crickets migrating to the cracks to get out? So that's what's observing land's a bit about, but um the basis that I came from from degraded land is to bring those aspects across. And and fungi, uh, I've got a couple of patents on fungi in cleaning up tars and pesticides and so on that we've done right around the world. Um, so using those magic enzymes out of uh fungi designed to assist bacteria and plants is where we came from. So we we didn't come with um guardrails on our thinking from an ag perspective. We came from an aspect where we had to think broadly to solve problems and anything that was observed, we didn't wait for publication. If we saw it worked, we just kept using it.

SPEAKER_05 15:04

Yeah, great. Thank you. Can you you did this for me a little bit just before, but can you take the crowd on the journey? We're walking in the field with your eyes. What are we seeing? What are you looking for? What's the kind of narrative that's forming in your mind as to what you're trying to read the landscape to be?

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Um, as we're driving in today, my wife is keep your eyes on the rope. So that's what I hear. Um, so I came in this morning from uh Winchelsing. So you you cross basalt plains. So they're lava basalt plains, they were partly treed, they weren't fully treed. They're known as the Western Plains of Melbourne. Um, they had all kinds of unique species that are mostly missing. Um, they were occupied straight away from year 1828 onwards with sheep. Um and during that period, the early fences that were put in on the slopes coming down had to be replaced in within 20 to 30 years, so somewhere around the 1850s to 1860s, because they're already covered by colluvium. They were already covered by soil erosion by 1860. What we're sitting on here is first alluvial terrace. It never used to be dark chocolate, it never used to be smectite. This is white man's damage, what we're sitting on now. Um, so it's swept off um the basalt, it's been eroded, it's come down. If you go up to the first alluvial terrace up the top, or the upper alluvial terrace, you'll see it doesn't have this dark swelling soil. If you go down into the creek, just past the um the little sheep yard there that's put in for a sheep talk, and you step down into the creek, you'll step down to two levels of erosion. The first level would have been pre-1950s, the second is most recent. You'll come to a brown silt. You can you can't feel a silt, but you can hear it. You can't hear a clay, but you can feel it. So if you pick up the silt and you rub it in your hands and then you put it to your ear, you can hear it's a brown silt. That's from the original bedrock of this area, which is uh sedimentary part metacediment, so it's marine deposited. Um, it's somewhat dispersive, it's been sorted in the river, and that would have been the old alluvium prior to 1800 or so, before this erosion happened. Um, so you're dealing with a series of erosion events over geological, well, over recent time that don't necessarily represent um the parent material and the soil development that would have otherwise occurred. Um and so this was a fairly unique flat in that it's the it would have been quite fertile as a result, but it's been bought back. Um, but it used to be flooded frequently and the river's cut down. There's no base flow in there at the moment, which um that would mean that the this alluvium is not flooded um and the river levels aren't kept up high. So you've you've had two levels of erosion occur, and the family's now in the in the process of bringing it back. So this is an unusual landscape um that you see, but it's typical of most farms in that you'll have three or four major different soil types, which we have major differences of soil type here, uh, and they all have different management strategies that are needed, but they tell you a story of landscape management.

SPEAKER_05 18:58

Great, thank you. And one of the things I have uh missed in your bio, but you're you're also a songwriter. Can you tell us the landscape health song and enlighten us about some of the lessons we did?

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Okay. Um you don't want to hear me sing. No, no, no, no, you don't want to hear me sing. Um, the landscape health song is just a way for people to understand you're dealing with a system. So who's here in a choir or plays a musical instrument? Anyone? Okay, there's a number of you. That's great. So let's look at the if the musical instrument you play is not in tune, you know it, and the whole audience knows it. In Goat's Head Soup, in uh I've forgotten uh what particular song it was, when they were recording that the uh stones broke a string, and you could hear you can hear it in the song. So if an instrument's not working, if the bass drum is is um got a hole in it, if the snare is not attached properly, then you can hear this off sound. Um so each instrument has to be working to its best. Now, those of you in a choir would know what it's like called rounds, where you've got people coming in on a beat singing the previous verse or the chorus, and it sounds fantastic, providing you come in on a beat. Um so if you've got, and generally in a pop song, the drummer keeps the beat. If the drummer can't keep a steady beat, then the rest of the band don't know what to do. So you've actually got to be have a perfect instrument and in tune, but you've got to have everything else on beat and everything else working together. The landscape's like that. If you're going to fix water in the lower landscape, what does that mean for infiltration in the upper landscape? So the fundamental task as landscape managers is to hold water at source, is to infiltrate every drop of rain, not have any runoff. If you go into a heavy forest, there's no runoff unless it's burnt. If you go into a pasture that's been subject to five or six years of multi in excess of 20 species, multi species, um, and that's had crash grazing, you'll find you get almost no runoff, no matter what the slope. So the first thing is to uh try and maximize infiltration. The next thing is if you maximize infiltration and you remove some trees, there's a thing called mid slope. You've got to Manage the mid slope. And the mid slope has a different response depending on the inflection point. So you know, everyone might remember back when in arithmetic you were taught convex and concave. So when you go from one to the other, that's your mid slope. When you bottom out on your concave at the center of the concave, that's your mid-slope. So you've got a several mid-slope points where the level of groundwater, if it rises, it will produce a non-strata-based spring, which basically means boggy ground during the summer. And if it drops, it gets hard. So the solution there is not to run banks to put water in, it's actually to run vegetation to take the water down. So a definition of degradation in your paddock is seeing junkus. Because junkus needs water wet feet for three months of the year. Then if you're eroding the top part of the curve of the slope as you come down, where you may need to inject water with a structure, you have things called floaters. Everyone have rock floaters? Do you have floaters in your paddock? Okay. I hate to say this, but a floater is a definition of degradation. Because rocks don't float, but soil is eroded. Um I learned this from landfills. You go, Phil, what's landfills got to do with slopes? Because everyone knows that steel rises in landfills, and when you pay rugby on landfills, you're always getting injured by being tackled onto the steel bit sticking up. Well, actual fact the ground's settled. And the fixtures in the waste have come up through the settlement. So floaters are no different. Floaters represent degraded lands because it's been eroded around those floaters. So the aspect of mid-slope has got different series of managements depending on whether you're convex, concave, and whether you've got a saturation or erosion point or whether you want an infiltration point. Then you come down to the alluvium. If you saturate your alluvium, and there's some simple science here. Um people understand what pores are. Air's essential, and you need 10% air-filled porosity to keep plants alive. But the issue is when you're looking in this grounds and the sand base that's going to exist that down lower, you're dealing with in soft ground, alluvial ground, unconsolidated ground, you're dealing with a porosity that's somewhere between um 25 and 35 percent. So that's alluvium. Now, sand and clay will have different aspects of the size of the pores, but it's important to understand that. When you go to weathered rock, you've got between 1 and 5 percent. When you get down to fresh rock, you're less than 0.01%. Insized rivers stop at fresh rock. So that means all that storage in your landscape, that's 30% porosity, you're now down to trying to store 0.01%. So if you lift your water table back up by the level of the where the creek sits at its base flow, you resaturate the alluvium. If you resaturate your alluvium, there's a thing called suction, and plants apply suction to soil to get the water out. If you lift your groundwater, you've actually now lifted the opportunity for plants now to go right throughout the dry season by feeding off that water that's now higher. And guess what? There is over a thousand times more water because you've come from a porosity of less than 0.01 to a porosity of 30 percent. That is substantive. So the landscape song has got another stage to it because when plants work um in collaborative cooperation, trees can sense a thing called quorum sensing. They sense that there's enough diversity of plants to change the porosity, so it's worthwhile the trees while to spend energy to drop the boundary layer, which is where clouds form, and to increase the size of raindrops. So it's not that you get more rain, uh, so you get more rainfall per se, you get more rain at lower intensity over a long longer period of time than your neighbors. And so what trees do is they release terpenes. Everyone's seen eucalypts, the blue mountains, that's terpenes being released by eucalypts. Various trees do it. Pines aren't so good at it, though they do release terpenes when chopped and bought down. They don't tend to release them in our type of climate. Eucalypts, tea trees, casharinas, they release terpenes. They'll only spend the energy doing it knowing they're going to get the water back. They're only going to do that when the when the soil is aggregated by the biome and the diversity of plants required to do that. This is the last bit of the landscape health song. I have left animals out, they're part of getting the right stimulation on the plants. So climate is last, alluvium is second, mid slope, sorry, alluvium's third, mid slope's second, and aggregating your soil is first. That's the landscape health song. If you can get each working individually, then get them to work collectively, it's amazing what your landscape can do.

SPEAKER_05 28:42

So then, Phil, in terms of the landscape health song, can you share how these flow into the four things that you talk about to rehydrate your landscape?

SPEAKER_01 28:53

There's three things at play: there's infiltration, there is the efficiency of your aggregation, and there's your depth of aggregation. So there is the efficacy of your sponge and the thickness of your sponge, and there's infiltration. They're all connected with aggregation. But if you don't have the right infiltration, you'll get 95% runoff on a 150-mil rainfall event in eight hours. Most people think that will produce runoff. It will for two reasons. The first is even if you have good aggregation and your sponge is not thick, you fill up the poor space available. The second thing is the aggregation depth. So most farms operate with a horizon. Who knows what an A horizon is? Right. Please use the word A horizon, not topsoil. Topsoil limits your thinking, doesn't it? It puts barriers. Topsoil's six inches. A horizon can be feet, well, meters even. So when you talk a topsoil, you go, Oh, that's my growing zone. Yes and no. That's the modern growing zone. It's not the old growing zone. So let's look at the growing zone in most people's topsoil, not my horizon, but let's let's talk about briefly that. It's about 100 mil. And say if you've got poor aggregation, you've got a heavy clay B horizon at about 100 mil, then you can store in that 100 mil 150 tons of water per hectare, enough for about two to three weeks before permanent wilting point. So you need rain every two to three weeks. Now, if you develop, and we won't talk about how now, but if you develop down to 800 mil to one meter, but at 800 mil, and you improve the efficacy of the sponge, the aggregation of the sponge, plus the depth of the sponge, so you improve the mesopause created by the association of fungi, bacteria, and root. If you do that and you've got 0.8 meters depth of a horizon, that's 0.8, so it's eight times um deeper than the first example, but we've tripled our efficacy. You have 3,500 tons of water per hectare, and you can last a year and a half without rain. And we have farmers that have done that right now. Because we're in the middle of Southern Australia in the last year and a half of a significant drought because we've lost our winter rain. I wrote a book about that. That's the stuff I just talked about, then I haven't written about yet, but I've written a book about why we've lost our winter rain. Um, so that's the understanding of what that can do to water on your farm. And water and carbon and living matter and plants are just completely connected. It's part of the one system. That's why it's a landscape health song.

SPEAKER_05 32:34

And then, Phil, from the landscape health song to the four things to rehydrate, landscapes, management principles obviously come next. Can you talk to me about what you're seeing farmers do to kind of get to those better stories and having those more significant changes?

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Um so this swings us round to um landscape management that builds. Some people call it regenerative, some call it restorative. Um and it's just worth thinking about. And at this point, I'd like to pay my respect to elders, past and present, who believe in the nurture and repair of land because there's only one civilization, and we can use the words we can people want to argue civilization, we can break down there's only one people in the world that have managed a landscape longer than a couple of thousand years without major degradation. The Aboriginals did have major degradation, make no bones about it. They totally altered our landscape. But within a short period of time of 10,000 years, they worked out how to manage the landscape going forward. We've taken less than 10,000. We took barely a hundred years to totally stuff this landscape, so we've got to work out how we're gonna manage it going forward. So I stand on the knowledge of many scientists and many observers and Aboriginal practitioners in making these comments. So I just want to be clear is that there's a whole lot of experts that have gone before. I'm not an expert, I'm a systems guy. Um to fix the landscape, it's a matter. The first step, and surprising enough, um uh uh Stuart Andrews and Tim Thompson, I filmed on Friday about how to transition. And the first step starts like this. Start. Um and you start up here, but the real first step is to walk during a rainstorm in your paddock and just watch where water flows, what it does. Go to the spots that seems to be running off and not flowing, and use your snake killer, that thing called a shovel, to actually do what it's designed for and to dig a swath of soil out, and then to see how far you can dig at that point down. And then take that swath of soil where the roots are and just look at the connections between the root and the soil. And if um particles are hanging to the roots, aggregated, um, that's great. If particle, if you've got to break, snap the particle to have a look at it, that's called a clod. There's aggregates and clods. Clods are held together by salts and mineral um uh precipitates. Aggregates are held together by organic matter, and the two are very, very different. As a kid, I used to have a clod fight. By god it hurt when you got hit by a clod in Mudgy. It was a rough town Mudgy. Um and but when I get hit by an aggregate, it doesn't hurt at all because you can barely throw an aggregate. Um so clods are quite different aggregates. Clods are what you see behind a plough more often than not. It's either dust or a clod, that's it. Um so turn the soil over. Smell it. Just smell it. If it smells nothing, that means you have nothing, really. If it smells earthy, that's biology giving it that smell. If it smells sweet and earthy, be thankful and keep doing whatever you're doing and find ways of improving. If it smells um rank, it's waterlogged, and if you squeeze it, you'll get water out in your hand. So this is called um an inventory. If you do that in six months' time and twelve months' time and two years' time, that's actually measurement. It's an observation that you're making, and if you are making it and not comparing to everyone else, and you make it with time and you record it, the error of who's doing it is taken out. So that means you have constant error, and what you're seeing is measurement. So the first step is to understand your land and to undertake some personal, not delegated off, personal measurement. Don't wait on soil science or agronomists to go and do the data. We all know what crap soil is. You don't need testing to tell you that soil's crap. You don't need testing to say what brilliant soil is either. So everyone sits somewhere in between. Don't outsource it. Walk it, feel it, smell it, attend some courses, see how it infiltrates. Doing infiltration tests are easy. Buy the innocule soil pH kit, which is just a color indicator. You can buy it out of Melbourne. It's designed for Australian conditions. The only thing you need science really for is soil pH. Everything else you can do yourself. If you're really good, you can actually taste, and there were quite a few soil scientists I know who do this, can actually taste acid soils and alkaline soils, but I don't recommend it because acid is um a sour, bitter taste on your tongue. Um, so just get started by walking, feeling, watching. Where does water run out after rain? Where does water run out after six months of no rain? Um, why does water sit here? Why does it not sit there? That's the first step. Because that let helps you think about how you're going to manage your landscape down the track. Everyone can do that first step. You don't need an expert to do that, you don't need a consultant because it's you who know your property better than anyone else. But you've got to walk it during the variability. You could get off the bike, the quad, get off the horse, and just walk it and try and feel why. That's step one. Step two and three and four is you know, go and listen to people like Sue, um, Nicole, go and listen to people who are great educators and great trainers. Um, go and do some some courses um to teach to teach yourself to observe. Go and do the courses that are focused on not teaching you how to use a microscope for eight or nine weeks. Do the course that says this is what the microscope tells you. This is how it interacts as your system. Do the course that gives you the tools to do it yourself. Um, beyond that, it gets more like a hard sell from me, so I will stop at that point.

SPEAKER_05 40:01

All right. Question time. Does anyone have any questions? Yep. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Jeff from Warnerbull Coscare Land Care Network. Um, I was interested in um when you were talking about planting of a lot of trees creates its own weather cycle, which I guess you could call the small weather cycle with the you know larger raindrops. Have you ever ever seen an instance where um at farm scale or or larger scale where that small weather cycle has been created in total contrast to the global weather cycle, which is the stuff we see on TV news?

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Um that's a Dorothy Dick question, so I really appreciate that. Thank you. Um this is my book called Cli uh Groundbreaking. Um, it's uh Soil Security and Climate Change and everything about the small water cycle and what a farm can do about it, it's written in this book. So please go up. There's quite a few of them over there, and then uh this is the answer. Go forth and buy. So thank you very much. Did I put you up for that question? Did I put you up for that question? Right, good, thank you. Um my daughter pushed me to write that um on the basis that she said, Dad, the stop ranting and raving about climate change being all wrong. Yeah, it's happening, but the reason why it's happening, the world, you know, you've got to stand up and say some reason why. And from 2000 and from the late 1990s to the mid-2015s or so, the mid-teens, anyone who said there was another form, a type of climate change going on had their heads bitten off. And most geologists, some quite a few hydrologists, some soil scientists all sit in that particular field knowing that landscape has a huge impact, and how we manage landscape has a huge impact on our climate. I used to think it wasn't at global scale, it was just at local scale. Um, and I'll come back to small water cycle in a sec, but a guy called Roger Pelke has demonstrated that what's happening in with um burning in Malaysia, Indonesia is actually affecting rainfall in the US. So I'll just start with something very, very basic for you just to think on for a sec. If Australia was to completely reduce our emissions back to 1996 or even 2009, we would have less than a half percent impact on global emissions, less than half. Now, let's talk about the continental land mass of Australia represents 40% of the non-ice-covered landscape of the southern hemisphere. We are surrounded by three major oceans. What we do on our land will totally impact those oceans and the climate of the southern hemisphere. So I'll just put that in perspective again. Forty percent of the land mass of the southern hemisphere is managed by us. So if we want to impact climate change for the world, how we manage our land is far more important than worrying about piss-ant little emissions from cows that are absolutely wrong in the first place. So what we do in our land is actually has a major impact. The small water cycle exists within the big side water cycle. The small water cycle is the rain that's come from local precipitation. It needs a number of things to occur. It needs Great aggregation. It needs tree cover. So you've got good evaporatranspiration, but you need tree cover to stimulate the clouds. You also need tree cover to create turbulence in the landscape because turbulence drops the boundary layer and allows for raindrops to get to the point that they can drop. You need no sulfate dust in your landscape. So all the ploughing on our old soils throws sulfate. Sulfate stops raindrop aggregation. So there's things that we can do on our landscape in the small water cycle. We have one, a number of farms we're working here in Victoria. One of them is 40 hectares. They're observing, after four years of regen activity, significant change in their rainfall pattern and their dews. Dew is part of a small water cycle. On the large water cycle, just briefly on the small water cycle, roughly 40 to 90 percent, and that's in the Amazon, but 40 to 90 percent of the waterfall you get is the small water cycle. In Australia, it's typically 40 to 50. In the more wetter zones, it can be higher than that. Um there was a Russian lady, uh Anastasia um Mikulovosky. Um that's a guess. I probably just insulted her. Um she did some modeling back in 2005, published a paper in 2007 that said coastal formed rain of the large water cycle cannot move further inland than about 900 kilometres. It needs a thing called the biotic pump to roll it all in. So the rain that parts of New South Wales and Victoria have got from Broome depended on the inland getting rain last year and being greener so that it can roll the water down into New South Wales. Parts of New South Wales missed out because they weren't on that rolling loop and they were true too dry for the small water cycle. Hot Australia, 40% of the southern hemisphere, keeps the Southerlies down low. So they don't come up as frequently as they used to. Anyone who's over 55 would recall the winter rain we used to get was light and long, not heavy and short. The southerlies were slow. The landscape is so hot now that the winds are pushed across quickly or the highs park themselves. When the highs park themselves over Australia, you get East Coast lows that flood the East Coast some some years, but you also get the fact that the southerly stayed down low. They hit Tasmania, they don't hit the rest of us like they used to. Try and tell me that climate change is based in CO2 in Australia, and I just laugh. Because what we do in our land totally impacts not just us, but Africa and Southern America. Anyway, I'll get off my hobby horse.

SPEAKER_04 47:27

Um I was just wondering if you could give me a little bit more clarification on you know reading I don't know, Mark Shepherd and hearing about um uh yeomans and all that and um natural sequence farming. They talk about the key point, is that you know, convex to concave spot. Um my simplistic understanding is that's a good spot to put a swale or a contour. Um it's sort of a little bit anarchid to me. I guess it may be the easiest part to intercept the momentum of overflowing water, but I'm like, wouldn't you put a swale higher up the landscape ideally? Um I don't know, could you elaborate on those sort of patterns a bit more?

SPEAKER_01 48:23

Um thanks for that. Um across Australia, there's been many practitioners um since the 30s, but Yeoman's was of the 50s, um, and it was a type of practice that looked at the fact that we're we're getting too much runoff, and it was trying to address it by infiltration. The science of aggregation was not well known then. Um we were only taught mineral matter at that point. Organic matter became a much bigger thing in the 80s, and living matter really wasn't off. Um in fact, glomelin wasn't discovered until about 1998. So the fact that you've got these organic glues produced by interface, quite a few fungi, but interface of microbes that that produce this aggregation was something that is not known. Evolution biology didn't exist till the 60s. So understanding the fact that grasses, trees, and mammals, flowering trees, co-evolved, and they all moved out from Guandanaland because the rest of the world was absolutely destroyed by heat from the meteorite and by dust. So everything comes as weeds out of 66 million years ago out of Guandanaland and moved north. So it's all co-evolved. So evolutionary biology means that those things will work together, and we've stopped them working together. So the science of the 50s and the observations of farmers was the 50s represented the knowledge of the 50s, just the same as biodynamics represents the knowledge of the late 20s, which was a lot organic. It was before mineral knowledge fully got taken off. It was also before splitting of the atom and a lot of modern understanding of elements, which it biodynamics has some unusual science perspectives that I'm not I don't support. But nevertheless, their system's brilliant because the system works. So you come forward to the build of knowledge. So, yes, controlling the mid-slope, the knowledge we had in the 50s and the knowledge in the 80s and 90s was we had we want to control infiltration. We Australia did not have incise rivers or creeks before white man arrived. We actually had them proud of the landscape. And you can read all the the um explorers' diaries for that. That's pretty straightforward. So we were looking for solutions, and we started with um erosion, erosion problems to address that. In fact, there's two things that cause erosion: one is the physicality associated with particle size, and the other is the chemical nature of the soil. So you come forward to a point where, in the short term, if you have earth-moving equipment and you're interested in doing it, you can control runoff by spreading it across the slope and infiltrating it. Um, and you can have infiltration areas to do so. I'm an advocate of that contextually based. Um, not many people have the opportunity to go and pay for hearth heavy earth-moving equipment, etc. So I'm an advocate of roughage by timber, tree fall, um disturbance that paddocks along along contour. It just absolutely contour planting, um, but changing your um pasture and your crop, so your multi-crop and and multi-pasture to get aggregation. The function of the berms is to infiltrate water and slower and slow the water run rate. Um, once the paddock's been fully restored, the berm cease to have a function because you don't get runoff. Because you're focusing on aggregation to get it. So it's a step of the journey. And it could well be the first step depending on your resources and how fast you want to go. So everything's got to be contextually based. That's why I'm saying you are the ones who've got to go and have a look. Um, so the inflection points does vary, and where to move it across a slope will vary depending on outcrops and other things you're dealing with. Um but understand that the knowledge base we work with creates the solutions we create at both a scientific and a practical level. So the solutions of the 50s were focused on the knowledge and problems of the 50s, the same as the solutions of the 1920s was based on that knowledge and those problems. We have better knowledge, and we are we've lost so much knowledge from the traditional owners, but we now are looking at why and where they burn. And it was a soil scientist who was first to point out that the Aboriginals did things with intention. Um his name will come to me in a sec. Um uh Keith Hellier. Keith Hellier gave a lecture in the mid-1980s to New South Wales Soil Science Branch on the Aboriginals intentionally burns over millennia, the piliga, because the piliger has a reverse profile to the soil arid soil type. Is that it is alkaline soils at the surface and acid at the base. It has no organic matter, and it's mineralogically so imperished that it can't do anything. So they used biochar, they burnt low temperature grasses mostly and small bushes, uh, and created a char that fungi then oxidized, so it became a charged char, and that char then was able to store the nutrients out of the ash that the fire created. A hot fire destroys all your nitrogen. So if you're gonna have a corroborey uh in three years' time and you want to feed all the tribes coming in from the area, you'll eat you need lots of acacias, and you need uh certain corridors for um uh hunting kangaroos, you will have a really hot fire because you burn off all your nitrogens and your acacia's the first to get going. So they had a fire regime that's well beyond what's taught or known now. Um, and Keith Hellier was the first to point out that it takes at least a thousand years to totally change the soil profile of a whole region. So very interesting. That's why it's alkaline. Because when you burn something, you are create creating oxides and hydroxides, which are alkaline, and so it changed the soil, which made nutrients available, but what they wanted was the char to be able to hold have a water holding capacity and something to hang organic matter off and to have nutrients.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

I actually live, you mentioned in Winchelsea, and um there sometimes feels like there's a sense of lifelessness. And I was wondering just like the practicality of how do you try to encourage an environment that's so rich in fungi? Like, is there certain practices that you would recommend? Um, and are there certain types of um living roots that encourage it? Um, just some options in regard to that.

SPEAKER_01 56:22

Okay, um, that's an excellent question. Um soil key demonstration will be on later today. I'll I'll be there um for a technical discussion around the soil key. Um there is a guy called Hamish Hunt up in Kilmore of the Hunt family. Um they're on 400 to 450 mil rainfall on basalt plains, and they have made the change. The fungi is so rich that I can break floaters on my leg. There's actually a photo of me in a video doing that um on Tim Thompson's channel. Um, so let me just go over briefly so you understand because um a lot of the dairy and the cattle industry have focused on uh the C to N ratio in pasture. So the C to N ratio in pasture that's carbon to nitrogen um is ideal at about 15. In fact, manure comes out at 15. That's the traditional teaching, that's ideal. Um vetch, a lovely green vetch and a lovely green clover would sit about eight. Um, it's just too low, and that's why you get these problems associated with stock on very green material. The problem is primary degraders need this. They need a C to N ratio that's out past eighty. They need dry matter to start with. And when I went through uni, we were taught that organic matter comes from only two sources. It comes from the litter, which is that, and it comes from necromass, which is dead roots, and dead living matter. Photosynthate just didn't exist. It wasn't taught at all. Um, so photosynthate was something that we knew nothing about then. It seemed that plants wasted this energy putting something down to roots, we had no idea what it was. 30% of sunlight's converted to what's excreted from the root to stimulate the microbes, but they only excrete sugars of a variety, they don't really secrete complex carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates aren't usually um or they're fully mineralized by microbes, but you want a situation where about five percent is humified, and for that you need primary um fungal degraders, not secondary, which comes out of um degraded compost. So if you get in compost, it's great for a short-term hit, but if you keep using it over five to eight years, and there's a dairy farmer out near Warnerville who has done so, his um property started to fall apart after five or six years of constant uh reliance on compost, and he then moved to a different system. So you need a system that has um a lot of straw material in it. So what is straw? Straw is normally the stalk associated with the grain, or it's dead um uh living matter that's standing. So your the there's types of grasses known as C3 grasses, which tend to be very um cold efficient and not overly water efficient. And there's types of grasses called C4s, which are more tropical, your corns, your sorghums, um they tend to be more water efficient, and they produce a lot more um material that's greater than a C to N ratio of 80, because they're shading, they're growing material that dies and then shades the growing point. So they've evolved to shade the growing point and produce much more um coarse litter material. Um so having a rye clover mix on a dairy farm is actually a disaster. It leads to animal problems in the long term, but it also leads to a soil that becomes absolutely boggy during the winter because you're not feeding the biome something that's out at the you know greater than C to N of 80. It's like us just eating ice cream all the time. Not very good for us. So we need a mixture of pasture. People think uh the pasture's designed to feed the animal. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Accidentally, the pastures we put in should feed the animal. The pastures we're designed is to build aggregation, to have deep-rooted um that could crack clay barriers, to have deep-rooted ones that bring water up for the shallow-rooted ones for them to feed the deep-rooted ones. So it's called collaborative cooperation and pasture. Um, so my suggestion is to have a chat to um uh Niels Olson and um go and have a chat to Andrew Whiting out near Warnerball, uh, Andrew and Linda, or go and have a chat to uh the hunts, Hamish Hunt up at um uh at Kilmore, and they uh all those three uh the latter two, both Hamish and the Whites, uh the Whites are on half basalt, half sand, and but they're much more rainfall than than you would be. And the hunts are on much less, but they're also on basalt, and you will see superb profile development in a in a swelling basaltic clay with almost no floaters at the surface anymore. He's got great ideas for how to get rid of floaters um and how to build soil up. Um, so both those groups uh are worth going through your local um land care or um uh CRM uh community to try and get in touch with those farmers. It's it's not my permission to give their details out, so I apologize for that.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:16

All right, so there's some flies here if you want to see some more of Phil. Also available is a copy of Phil's book at the bookshop. So make sure you head over there. Phil will be heading over that way very soon so he can scribble on all those for you. They'll be worth double at the end of the today by the minute. A big thank you to Phil.