GROUNDED Live - 2026: Vince Heffernan - Building a Functional Ecosystem on a Profitable Sheep Farm

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 presentation, Vince Heffernan shares his journey to restore natural landscape function while running a profitable sheep enterprise. From bringing endangered fish back to local waterways to rebuilding healthy soils and productive pastures, Vince demonstrates how ecological restoration and commercial farming can work hand in hand. 

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_04 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. This is the audio that we capture the speakers in the tent live on the day unedited. And I hope you enjoy it. And what he's trying to do is restore the landscape. He's brought back in danger to the free. He's restored landscape. He's looking after the livestock under his soil. The soil organisms to look after the livestock above the soil is cheap. Anyway, his story is building a functional ecosystem on a profitable sheep.

SPEAKER_08 0:54

One of the things that I think is really important for us to be communicating at the moment that is that the regenerative stuff we do in landscape and for water and for biodiversity isn't just hobby farmer business or backyard business. This is large-scale commercial, viable, and making us more viable and more profitable. And we have here Vince Heffernan, he's a sixth generation sheep farmer. His property is called Moorlands, and it's on the Lochland River in southern New South Wales. Vince studied ecological agriculture and he's had a heavy involvement in land care. And he's setting out to repair the functional ecosystem on his property. He now runs a biodynamic demeter certified direct market Texel Lamb operation. And in 2024, he won a National Delicious Produce Award. So please join me in welcoming Vince Heffernan to the state.

SPEAKER_03 2:03

Hello. Greetings. Um I I want to it it's a bit uh it's a bit self-indulgent because I get to talk about my farm and my sort of journey in looking after that farm. But uh I think there's some really important messages that cross over a lot of boundaries. So we we will get to that, but I I suppose if we're talking about my farm, I have to start at the beginning. And so it's important to acknowledge that the land that we're on, uh the Kulajan people speak Garabanosh people, and uh pay my respects to their elders past and present. I'm on Pajong country. Now the Pajong are a part of the Nunaval speaking nation, and um I I'm on the river, and my country runs east from the river. So the river's obviously a low point in the landscape, and so it rises up quite quickly to the top of the Great Dividing Range. So if you think I'm about sort of 550, 600 metres at the river, and probably 700, 750 metres at the back of the farm, uh that's I think gets about 7 Ks away. It's it's about 3,000 acres. So this this country is Pajong country, on the opposite side of the river is Warajari country, um, the Wallabalula people, and that that that's really important because it was a sort of a friction point between two two nations. The Pajong weren't super well loved, but based on everybody I've spoken to, I'm talking about indigenous people as well as non-indigenous people, but it it's where I've grown up. And uh you mentioned sixth generations, so my great great-great-grandfather Pat uh got one of those free tickets out from Ireland. Uh, very lucky, get a free ticket out back in the 1830s and um up closer, right? Yep. And so uh he's been we weren't the first people on the on the land. The land was actually went to someone from the rum corps, was flipped about a week later to uh uh a local farming family, and then that uh great-great great grandfather bought it off off them. Clearly, someone I never knew or or met. Uh, but it was it was downhill from there in terms of the the ecological uh value of that land. It wasn't well looked after. And that's not to say that he he and his ancestors didn't want to make it uh, sorry, his his descendants didn't want to look after the country, but it was just that the paradigm through which they saw the world and the way that they saw farming was that the farm and agriculture and the humans were the center of the universe and everything sort of happened around the humans. Whereas the previous uh managers of that land, the the Pajong people, had uh had seen the ecosystem at the center of all decision making, and they saw themselves as part of that ecosystem. And it's a very different mindset, and it's a bit hard to get your head around it, but if if you can, then it's uh then it's important. And so I just want to go right back to the beginning. And we're we're lucky we're close to Canberra, it's about an hour and a half to the house. And there's a big lake if you've ever driven from Canberra to Sydney called Lake George, uh, a natural forming lake that fills up and goes down, fills up and goes down. And they've done core samples in this where they drill down and they go down about 200 meters of silt. 200 meters of silt. So this is going back over many millions of years. And one of the benefits of this is that they can do this uh paleoarchaeology where they look at the pollen and they can determine what species of plants were in that in that area. So we know it was incredibly diverse up until 200 years ago, and now it's a lot narrower. We also can see the moment when people, humans, first arrived in that country, uh uh somewhere sort of, you know, I know I'm I'm just going to, I'm not I'm not quoting all the studies on this, but uh you're talking 60,000 years ago, started to see charcoal, started to see a different composition, floristic composition. So, what I was interested in when I I um I'll come to my journey a little bit later, but one of the things I was interested in was trying to get that ecosystem operating again, because it wasn't operating when I took over the farm. Yeah, things had become greatly reduced in terms of complexity of uh of what was happening, and the property had been run for maximum profit and maximum productivity. And uh I think you know, and and I'm going to sort of go right to the end here, and I think that what we can do, and what I feel like we've done at at home, is we've been able to show that you can it's not an either or. It's not you can either and a lot of people have this view that you can either be a really good farmer with good sheep and you know, good profitability and good productivity, or you can look after the land. But I think that you can do both. And um it's it's a bit bold to make that suggestion that you can do both, but I I feel like we've probably proven that to a certain extent. So I really want to sort of follow how how we got there. Uh so I grew up on the farm. I went off to boarding school uh because we're in a sort of a remotish sort of spot, not close to a high school. And uh all I wanted to do when I left school was go back and work on the farm, which I did, but um I butted heads with my father, not on some, you know, uh grand uh grand philosophical basis, moreover, fight over a pair of pliers and stupid stuff. And so needless to say, he owned the farm, he owned the house, and he owned the business, so I left. And uh I was off the farm for 17 years. We got along fine when we weren't living and working together, but um he was um he was uh about 40 when I was born, so he was uh, you know, by the time I returned after about 17 years, I was in my late 30s and he was in his um in his mid to late 70s at that stage. And um I was uh I'd had a bit of success off the farm, so I was able to sort of buy him out in the sense of being him being able to then go away and and uh live the last decade or more of his life in good style with mum. And um they were very pragmatic people, and I I often try and think, how can I tell a story about them being pragmatic? And most of the stories start to sound like they're eccentric, and uh and that's that's maybe a reflection on my DNA. And I I don't know whether I should tell them, but I'll tell you this one story about mum. So the she's a pragmatic person. So mum had been playing golf since the mid-60s, so when I was born, you know, I was born in '64. So she'd been playing golf that time. And in little towns like Gunning and Crookhall, where they there are a nine-hole course or you know, with two sets of teeth, but they were basic sort of courses. And it was a chance for her to get off the farm and meet up with a few of her mates. She used to get frustrated because one of the things that had evolved in our area was a bird called the Raven. Uh, we used to call them crows, but um they're what we know as ravens. And they've really evolved to be opportunistic. So there's a lot of birds who lay their eggs on the ground. Um, and I'm thinking of things like everyone's seen plovers, but there's there's uh a whole host of other birds that lay their eggs on the ground. And the the crows are a bit clever. If they see an egg on the ground, they'll come in, they'll swoop, they'll pick it up, and they'll go like buggery, which is a technical term I know, but they they go very fast because I've got to get away from the bird that's gonna chase them and try and make them ditch that egg. And on a golf course, what happens is they suddenly see this nice little very round egg and they scoop down and they grab the egg and they they go, and they're very disappointed when they get to a gum tree, some five Ks away. Um mum used to used to it used to frustrate her that she'd hit a nice drive, you know, not very long, but down the middle, and then a bird would come in and take the ball, and you know, she'd end up with a two-stroke penalty and whatever, and lose the ball, what's more. So being the practical person that she did, she was there playing one Tuesday, and she was telling me the story. And she said, and so sure enough, I hit this beautiful ball, and next thing I can see out of the corner of my eye this crow going. And she said, So I reached into my bag and I pulled out the 22 and I went bang. And she said, I was never going to hit it, but I certainly scared it, you know, it took off, uh, as did the guy who was mowing the fairways. And uh and I said to Mum, I said, Mum, you know, this is we're talking in the early 80s, and I said, You you you're not a licensed shooter, and uh, what's worse, the rifle's not, you know, this was pre-Port Arthur days. The rifle wasn't in any way registered firearm. And I said, You just can't take a gun like that in the town and start firing. And and she said, Oh, it's all right. I was playing with the with the with the police sergeant's wife. So uh, and I suppose that was a reflection of the New South Wales police force in the um in the 1970s, where uh dad would place his bets with the local SP bookmaker and settle up on his way into mass on a Sunday morning, and uh and the police sergeant would always have five bucks on the winner of the last race and give him a bit of a heads up when the the squad was in town to check on gaming. So um anyway, different times. But mum was a very practical person, and I and I want you to sort of keep that in mind when I'm talking, because I think that's the approach that we all have to take. We have to find ways to make things happen, and I'm not encouraging people to take firearms on the golf course, it's just unless you're at Mar-a-Lago. But hey, um so we we know that the indigenous people had been on this land since 60,000 years ago. We have really good evidence of that. Uh, we're lucky that we're close to Canberra. So Canberra, a little over a hundred years ago, was made the federal capital territory because neither Sydney nor Melbourne could agree on being the capital of Australia. So they picked somewhere that was more than 200 miles from either place, and Canberra was chosen as that site, and they set it up as the FCT, the Federal Capital Territory, nowadays known as the ACT. Uh, and all the land was converted to free hold title. And the landholders were told that we may well resume that land at any point in time to build a suburb, to build a parliament house, or to build anything. And so most of the farmers took a very low-impact attitude to farming from then on. There was no super put out, there was no cropping done, there was no, because they knew the next day that land could be taken off them. And so, with that hanging over their head, they took a very different approach. And as a result, the last remnants of the vegetation that used to be from Queensland all the way down to Victoria, this belt of country that is about 3.4 million hectares, about eight and a half million acres for people who think in acres. So this vast bit of country that goes from the top of the range out onto the slopes and is characterized by one ecosystem type. And it varies a little bit, but it's called boxgum grassy woodland. And it's different to where we are here, but boxgum grassy woodland is not a forest, it's a uh it's an area where the shade, if you think of the shade of a tree, will cover about 20% of the paddock or the landscape. So it's lots of trees and shrubs, but it's a grassy aspect. And it was maintained by the indigenous people that way through through uh through grazing. And when you don't continue to use those slow trickle burns, it reverts to uh a forest. And I've witnessed that. I've been up to um Cape York and I've seen where the the every year from from whenever the the local people, the Taipan people have been burning, and there is this grassy woodland, this very open woodland. In spots where they can't burn for whatever reason, it reverts to uh a forest. And so, with that knowledge, when I go back home and I start to see patches of dry sclerophyll forest, you look closely at them and you realize those trees are only 100 or 150 years old. So they're only really the product of indigenous people moving out of the landscape and no longer being there. So they're not old systems, they're new systems that are created because the indigenous people are no longer uh there. The indigenous people, for just to give you a bit of a heads up, in 1821 there was a Norwegian or Scandinavian certainly explorer came through and camped at a place that you'd call Gunning today on the Lochland River, and he said there was about 600 Pajong people at the camp with him on that day. Uh they did a um a census in 1832, so 11 years later, and there was 27 indigenous people there. So 600 to 27. So the the loss of life was very dramatic early on. Much of it was disease. Uh, there are early early records in um the newspaper talking about how cholera and typhoid went down creeks and local families, the Murphy's might have died, you know, six six people and another couple further downstream, and a large number of natives is the way they described it. So it was a real loss, and and of course, all of that knowledge was lost at the same time. And um and things have never been the same since in that sense. But it impacted what happened with that landscape. And of course, sheep came along, sheep were set stocked, and the floristics changed dramatically. Uh we had trees grow where there'd never been trees grow before, and the creeks changed, so everything changed, and a lot of the species were lost in those areas. And we're living with that legacy today because it's not just where we are, but right across our nation, there's dramatic numbers of uh of species that are lost. So I I want to read this to you simply because it's uh it's it's indicative of of how serious this problem is. Biodiversity loss is is up there with climate change, in my humble opinion, uh as our our biggest concern. Uh bear with me while I work my magic here on my notes. There we go. So 63 species of freshwater fish, 63 species are listed as threatened, and a further 35 uh require listing. Um so that's about a third of all freshwater fish in Australia. Um there's by comparison, there's only 10 bat species that are listed as endangered, but there's 35 that are at risk, and that's out of 83 species, so it's half of the bat species are either endangered or at risk. Um reptile populations have declined 94% since 1985, uh, and there's 70 species listed as threatened. 49 species are frogs, uh, that's 20% of the total frog species, and a decline in population of 97%. Now you have to understand there's a thing called Kitrid fungus. Uh, have you heard of kitrid fungus? Hands up, anyone who's heard of kitrid fungus. So it's coming from South Africa, as you probably know. Those who don't know, there's a thing called a three-clawed frog, C-L-A-W-E-D. And it was sort of like uh, how would you describe it, as like a lab rat. Uh so if your mother, if you're my age or your grandmother was pregnant and wanted to know if she was pregnant, they didn't have a um a paddle pop stick that you could do a wee on and find out in those days. Instead, you'd go in and they'd take a blood sample, they'd inject it into the frog, and if the frog started to ovulate, then she was pregnant. If it didn't ovulate, she wasn't pregnant. So these were like lab rats that were brought in. They came in from South Africa, they brought the disease in and they decimated Australian frogs. So just one more time, 97% of our population of our frogs is gone, and a lot of species in that. Uh, there's a hundred extinctions within our mammal populations, and there's still 78 listed as threatened. And we're, of course, famous for our mastupials, about 250 species of mastupials, and over 40% of those are at risk of extinction. And even just plants, there's 1,402 listed as threatened, and this is often seen as a very conservative figure. And um, and you I want you to put that in the context that 90% of our native plant species are found nowhere else in the world. So our natural system is not in good shape. So I I want to, if you've got that in your mind, and then you know how things were 200 years ago, as someone who was coming onto the land, I wanted to try and make a difference. I wanted to try and fix things that were broken, and it became very obvious to me that that there were ways that we could do that. So I'm just going to go back a little bit before when I took over the farm, which was uh a bit under 30 years ago, because Matthew Evans is involved in this. Is Matthew here? No, he's not. But anyway, so Matthew, and there's a guy who's running around taking photos on a camera. His name's Alan Benson. And I knew Matthew and Alan in Canberra, and they were chefs. One worked uh at Matthew worked in a little restaurant. Uh Alan had previously been at the Savoy and was headhunted from England. He grew up in Manchester and came to Australia to work at the Hyatt in Canberra, this flat pub that was opening in the mid-80s. And they both wanted to get out of being chefs, and uh Matthew took up writing, and Alan took up being a photographer, and they've both done pretty bloody well for themselves in their little chosen fields. So Alan's off to New York, I think tomorrow or the day after to go and take photos, and you know, uh, is a is a stellar photographer. And all of his, all the photos on my website were taken by Alan. So if you go to morelandslam.com.au, and I'll mention that 15 times before now and the end of this, because we deliver Australia-wide with our lamb, and um you can see photos that Alan's taken. So these two guys, I met them in Canberra, and uh it's a long story as to how we met, but they they were teaching me to cook, or Alan in particular, along with a range of other people. And the thing that really struck me was that some produce, as I started to learn to cook, some produce, some vegetables and fruit and meat was better than other vegetables and fruit and meat. From a cooking perspective, it had flavor, it was different in texture, had different keeping qualities, had different aromas, you know. And so I really wanted to explore that. In particular, there was a biodynamic butcher in Canberra that had a cue out their front door on a Saturday morning. I'd never heard of a butcher with a cue out their front door. I thought this was must be made up. And so I went and saw it one Saturday morning. I thought this is bizarre. And so I started to look into biodynamics. And if I'm honest, I I'd tell you that I thought biodynamics sounded like freaked out hippie shit. You know, it was this putting this stuff in a cow horn and burying it in the ground and Digging it up. And I guess I was the number one skeptic, which is a bit rich considering I'm now one of the number one advocates for biodynamics, but uh I wanted to discover more, so I went and did a training course, which was three weekends, six days, uh, and that taught me enough to make me more curious. And then I found that there was a um a university degree called uh a Bachelor of Ecological Agriculture run by University of Sydney out of the Orange campus, a regional campus, and it had one of the 24 units was on biodynamics. And I thought, right, so I having had two gap decades since I left school, I enrolled in university. And uh of course I didn't realize that I was the oldest person in that course by a long way. Most of these kids still had pimples, I think they're so young, they're 18 and 19, and here I was 37, 38, and beyond. But it was it was a life-changing thing for me, not just because I learned more about biodynamics and things like permaculture and organics, but I also learned a lot about ecology. And understanding about ecology is sort of like once you've learned it, you can't unlearn it. Once you've seen it, you can't suddenly ignore it. And uh so at that point in time, I'd already started to go down a very different path in life. I'd we we'd got an allotment in Canberra to grow veggies because our backyard wasn't very big, and um, and the allotment was organic. You couldn't take anything onto that that wasn't so you had to become an organic gardener, and that was a bit of an eye-opener. But the people that were involved there then took me to meet people like Michael Plain and Joyce Wilkie of All Sun Farm at Gundaroo, who are growing organic vegetables and they had a box scheme and they deliver the boxes every week into Canberra. And we're, you know, we're talking 30 something years ago. So it's a it was it was pretty important at that point in time. There's another couple, uh, Sam and Claire, young couple from a place called Wombat, what a beautiful name for a town, and uh that adopted the Joel Salatin method, and they were growing these meat chickens and moving them every day, and they were killing 300 every Tuesday, and they were running those into Canberra, but they also had all of these things stacked on top of that. They had eggs, they had veggies, they had fruit, they had pigs, they had sheep, they had cows, and it just sort of blew my mind as I I saw this. So I'm there and I was trying to rage raise some venture capital for a project that I was undertaking that had nothing to do with agriculture. But every time I sat down to lunch to try and you know convince one of these guys to give me several million dollars, I would just talk about organic chickens to them. And uh and eventually I started to think maybe, maybe, maybe I'm in the wrong business here, you know. And uh at the same time, dad got a bit crooked and I'd been helping on the farm. And so instead of putting the money into that, I put the money to dad and I took over the farm. And I also started going to university, and so and that's about it. But it was it was a really interesting task because when you look at a farm that's sort of been buggered, to use a technical term, it's hard to know where do you start? Where do you start trying to fix things? And so the areas that were most productive from an ecological standpoint were often the creeks were on the Lochland River, but I had 11 kilometers of creek frontage and these dry ephemeral gullies that were quite rich and wet at certain times of the year. So one of the first things that happened was they were all fenced off. So there's some 27 kilometers of permanent fencing uh back when you could buy a steel post for under $5. Um, but even so, most of my superannuation went into fencing to fence these areas off so as they could be rehabilitated. And that meant planting trees on them, but not just trees, but all the other things that were missing from the landscape. So shrubs, um, you know, like challistamens and gravillias and dodonias and masaria, and it's a long, long list, so I won't keep listing them, but and acacias. And I suppose there was about 50,000 acacias planted in total at the farm. Now that was to try and help with biodiversity and repairing the system. But as chance would have it, I found out that sheep don't just like to graze grass, they love to brow leaves. And not only do they love to browse the leaves of acacias, but they love to eat the seeds that grow on those acacias. And the seeds are incredibly they're small, but they're incredibly rich. They're about 30% protein, and barley's 9, 10, 11% or something like that. So these are just these little power packets of of food that come at about Easter time each year because the or sort of earlier than that, uh, at a time when the sheep are struggling a bit, waiting for a bit of an autumn break. So it was, and it added a flavor to the meat, this fact that these sheep could suddenly get all this access to these, a bit like pigs having access to acorns or something else. It was a it was just a it was just a bit of a revelation. And uh so I was very lucky, and we'd ended up going down. We'd had sheep that had wool, but we ended up going down the meat track, and we were growing a breed of sheep called Texel because they've got this really sweet, uh fine textured, sort of almost silky textured meat that's quite nutty in flavour, almost cashew-like richness, richness, and uh and the fat's just gorgeous when you cook it up. And um, we'd had good reviews about the meat, so uh used by a chef in Sydney called Danielle Alvarez. Anyone who's been to Sydney, she had a restaurant in Paddington called Fred's couple of hat restaurant, and um the main restaurant reviewer was a guy called Terry Durak, and he fell in love with what she was doing with our lamb. And um a couple of years ago, we had the they had the the best 50 restaurants in the world that they had that event in Melbourne, and so the person from the New York Times came over here, reviewed, I think, 50 looked, went to 15 restaurants in Melbourne, 15 in Sydney, and then wrote up five of those in total. And one of them was Fred's, so we got this sparkling review of our lamb in the New York Times, which is about as handy as nothing, because we don't sell more than a couple of hundred Ks from home. So, but anyway, and um and then I suppose but but as as you mentioned, we we then went to the the the the crowning glory was the year before last one, uh, through the delicious awards, which are blind, the judge blind. So the chefs don't know what they're tasting, because if they knew it was from me, of course they'd pick it. Of course they would, yeah. But they didn't know it was from me. So uh they're judging blind, and um they've got a panel of the 10, supposedly the 10 best chefs in Australia. People like is it Andrew McConnell? Is that a name that means anything to anyone from here? He's from Melbourne, okay, okay, and so uh Josh Nyland is uh a well-known chef in Sydney. Um Peter Gilmore's got key restaurant in Sydney, so yeah, the the Matt Moran, the sort of people you see on the master chefy sort of things. And so that 10 people chose ours as the best meat in Australia, which is um which is sort of gratifying. And we'd often said we're the best lamb in Australia, but now we had someone else who was saying it other than us, so that was nice. So a lot of that has to do with this this uh dogged determination to keep fixing the ecosystem. But fixing the ecosystem is not just about planting trees, certainly not about planting trees and not planting the shrubs. It's become more and more important to us to plant the shrubs and the other bits as well. We can't afford to keep building fences, so nowadays we have a very different approach. We take an entire paddock out of production and we plant on the contour, and we'll plant um, you know, we're we're planting at that same rate to try and achieve around a 20 to 30 percent shade cover in that paddock. And we're probably putting in one tree for every you know, three, four, or five shrubs, uh, but again, not a real diversity. So there's 26 species of acacia, uh, there's a heap of species of uh uh trees as well. But we have things that'll flower on the longest day of the year, and we have things that'll flower on the shortest day of the year. We have a lot of very rare species in our area. Probably the most famous bird was a regent honey eater that we last saw on the place about 30 odd years ago, uh, but brown tree creepers and a lot of species that if people who are into birds would know. And we're really struck by how you can change um, how you can change your biodiversity. Uh, most recently, I guess we've become known with our work for the with a superb parrot. Superb parrot is not falsely named, it is a bloody good-looking bird. It's a very, very, uh very, very pretty bird. Unfortunately for it, it chose to go and spend its winters up in the Guayder and Nemoy valleys where they grow cotton, and cotton farmers have got a dislike of trees, so they just knock them down. And then it comes down in the summer to try and nest in the cereal-growing country around Cootamundra Holbrook and those areas where the farmers there have taken a similar dislike to trees and knock them down. But we have those birds nesting on our farm. There are it's a bird that's uh in a bit of trouble. And uh a researcher at the ANU by the name of Mac Cobden comes out, climbs trees using tree climbing gear, pulls the birds out of the nest, takes DNA samples and puts trackers on them to see where they fly. So this full-scale operation, Planet Arc heard about it, and uh they approached BirdLife Australia and they said, Oh, well, you need to plant some trees to help this bird. They got Greening Australia involved, and so we we planted, I think then 2023 we planted 7,000 tube stock on the farm. Um, and that's done with help. We're not doing that entirely on our own. But uh it's a it's a vast project to try and rehabilitate land. You can't do it. I I used to beat myself up senselessly. I used to beat myself up because I felt that we weren't making enough progress. We weren't making a big enough difference. Now we we are making a difference, but I wanted the rate of change to be greater. But the reality is it's taken five generations to bugger this country and it's gonna take more than one to fix it up. So we've just got to settle down, knuckle down, grind away, and try and improve things uh as we go. So um what's the take-home message? I think anyone who's in that boxgum grassy woodland, they can grow boxgum grassy woodland type vegetation and see immediate change, really immediate change. In a paddock where in 2020 we planted trees. So that's so this is a paddock as bare as the area in front of us here, and we've gone in, we've planted, and now we've got really rare species in there, but things like diamond firetales, dusky wood swallows, southern whiteface, double barred finches, uh, and uh and um restless flycatchers, just to name it, a hatful. And so you can really turn things around very, very quickly if you put your mind to it. And um I think that there is help out there, and I think that it's uh it's important to understand that we are living through a time of change. So whilst we've done quite a lot of planting, if I did planting tomorrow and I'm going to do some planting later this year, but I've gone to the clean energy regulator to register up front, and they will pay you for the carbon that you sequester in the wood of those trees for the next 25 years. So um, for example, the the project that I did in uh 2023, the 7,000 trees, would probably net me about $15,000 a year-ish every year for the next 25 years. Not because I deserve to get paid money, just because someone wants to recognise the fact that I have actually sequestered some carbon in that process. Uh there's also opportunities for things called nature trading that are emerging now. There's uh corporate entities that are interested in this, and there's going to be some legislation that's going to force people down that road. So I think that we we need to be aware of that. There are opportunities. It's not just grinding away for your own um poverty. There are, as you as you achieve results, you actually get rewarded for it. So I think that's really good, and I think we'll see people come out and be more willing to take these things on. I I I find it and so I just the the there's one word in the title of mine, which is profit. And so I just want to really quickly tap into that because I think it's okay to do this, but you've got to have people if you've got a really good product and we feel like we've got a really, really good product, and we've got a good story, and I can take anyone onto the farm and blow their socks off when they see what we're doing there. Um, I haven't even mentioned fish. We've got involved with saving a little tiny species of fish. And um Laura Dalrymple, who was hosting here at one stage, has written a book called The Ethical Omnivore, available in the uh tent next to us. Uh so help yourself to buying more than one copy of that if you can. And um because we're trying to save that fish, uh we we've got further notoriety. So there's people out there, people being consumers, who appreciate the fact that they can buy something that's a really, really good product to eat, that's a really, really clean product, growing using biodynamics, tapping into the biodiversity, not just above the ground, but below the soil as well, which people have spoken about here as well. So we've got incredible levels of soil fungi species, uh, soil bacteria, protozoa, amoeba, cilius, and flagellates, and nematodes in our soil, and we're seeing incredible things happening as a result of that. Our water infiltration rates going through the, you know, uh uh is 13 times what our neighbors is, according to a researcher. So we're seeing structure change in those soils, and we and that's all because of the soil bugs where we're achieving that biodiversity. So consumers want that and they're willing to pay for it, and they're willing to reward you and encourage you. And a lot of these people are really rusted on, they like our story, they like the backstory. I know that it's not rakish good looks that's selling this lamb, it's the fact that it tastes good and it's a good product, and they know the backstory, and they want to see change in the landscape, and so they pay a bit more, and by paying a bit more and by us sidestepping those duopoly bastards, uh, we're able to get paid pretty good money. We're getting about $15 a kilo for our land, which is a much better return than even at a very high point in the market, other people are getting for their product. Um, so you can do both. You can do both. You can have these incredible outcomes, you can repair what was unthinkable damage, you can save species that are on the brink of extinction, and you can make a buck, and you can afford to come down to places as beautiful as this and go to field it. So I think that's probably that that's my take-home message. So thank you all for for coming and listening.

SPEAKER_08 37:43

Um we've got another microphone in that you don't need to give yours away. You'll need yours, Vince. Right. Okay, so um, we will throw open to questions. I'm gonna go first. How important is the way you market your lamb for the profitability? Or is it enough to improve the landscape?

SPEAKER_03 38:04

So so I think that that that's a good question. And we're not seeing a big downturn in our productivity. So I think that's important. But there are times, as I said, I've locked paddocks up for five years to get trees away. So we're losing production in that period of time. In other cases, we had up to 20% of the farm locked up to rehabilitate the creeks and streams. But now we're getting and we're holistic grazing, so we're we've got really big mobs. I've got a mob of 2,000 news that currently move sort of every day in. We've got about 100 paddocks, which is down. I've actually had about 150, but I've just got sick of keeping the fences up, so I'm down to a hundred paddocks. And um, it is possible, you know, it's it's possible to do these things necessarily without, but I love, I love the dread map. I really enjoy it. Yeah, we've got a website, so people go and order on our website, so I get people from Victoria buying Lamb, get people from Queensland buying Lamb, we get a courier up there. There's a a business called, I think it's HelloFresh. HelloFresh, have you heard of that? Has anyone heard of that? So nothing to do with me, but they use a courier, and because I've got this great courier that does their work, I piggyback on the courier. So for 30 bucks, I can get two boxes sent anywhere in Australia. That's so cheap, you know, particularly with the price of diesel, it's getting very, very cheap. One more time, uh www.morlandsm-l-or l-a-n-d-s, mallands lamb or one word.com.au. So I think it's important, but I I should mention that the reason Laura Dalrymple wrote the story is that we also use that butcher shop, which is feather and bone, to sell our lamb. So they take our lamb, they took it into those restaurants in Sydney where we became, you know, it it added to the it added to the fame of the lamb. Not me, but the the fame of the lamb. And um, you know, so so you you can you can make associations without necessarily having to go out and get up early in the morning and go to a farmer's market and wave at people. But we we sell, you know, I was selling sort of 70 lambs at a farmer's market, so you know if the demand's there, you can tap into it. Um I I don't want to even talk about abattoirs and butchers because it's just we'd be here all night and it's and there's plenty of other questions. Plenty of other people talking about that, and it's and but it's a problem, you know, it's a problem, it's an issue, and it's stuff that we need to think about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 40:27

The next question is from over here. Uh Vince, can you um elaborate a little bit on your biodynamics um component? And do you make your own preps?

SPEAKER_03 40:39

So I'm debitor certified. I met uh Alex Podolinsky 30 odd years ago, and um for those who don't know, Alex is a is a a really interesting man, but he's a man with with his own character traits, how do we put it like that? And uh and I think sometimes the fame of his character traits overcomes some of the great stuff that he's done. But um he he he was uh he really determined the route for demeter biodynamics. Um I've done a lot of work with Elaine, the late Elaine Ingham, I should say, uh sadly. Um so Elaine Ingham is a soil microbiology ecosystem specialist. So she understands how um there's predator layers within a soil, and when one thing eats another, it turns over elements like carbon. So you take those really basic elements at carbon and you turn them into vastly different elements, and you can change your cation exchange capacity. And a lot of what Elaine was doing, which was very data-driven, very science-driven, very reductionist science, was mirroring what we were doing in biodynamics. So I saw her over two years, and in between those two years, she suddenly said, we need to do things with vortexes in the second year. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I've only been doing that for about 50 odd years, so hey. And uh, and she said, Oh, we need to heat the water, you know, and so there are all these things that were happening in biodynamics. And so what I buy my preps from from Demeter, and I'm not sure they're about two bucks an acre or something. Um, I just don't have time on 3,000 acres. Uh, got a big stirring machine, we've got to, you know, go and put the preps out. Uh and sometimes the preps get out once a year, sometimes twice a year. Um, but the the preps are making a big difference. And you know, it's it's interesting we're talking about carbon and we're talking about structure in soil and how microbes are doing that. And we have this wonderful example from the Morning Peninsula, one of the guys who's a second generation biodynamic farmer, a bit older than me, Trevor Hatch, down there. His son Ben bought land next to him. And so Trevor decided to take, he had better water than where Ben was, decided to put a pipe over to Ben's place, and so he got a big, huge tractor, and he was putting something in about a meter down. So it's a bit like the stage down. So he's way down underground, about sort of this far. And uh they're toddling across his farm and I'd cut the fence to go over to this new block that Ben had bought, and they hit the boundary and the tractor stalled because the structure right down a meter in the soil was dramatically better on that that biodynamic land. And so we've known for a long time that you can you can cycle nutrients. We're not using water-soluble fertilizers, but you know, nowadays it's becoming sort of it's become a bit more mainstream to talk about not using water-soluble fertilizers. You know, people don't want to use urea because it sort of buggers things up rather than actually enhances things. And we have people like Elaine Ingham who showed us that if you've got protozoa, protozoa release enough nitrogen into the soil that you don't need a nitrogenous fertilizer because they've got a carbon to ratio ratio of uh five to One and whereas uh bacteria are one-to-one, so for every five bits of bacteria they release, they release four bits of nitrogen back into the soil. So there's vast amounts of nitrogen available if you've got a good soil biology. So if you do those things, and I'm not talking about the fairies at the bottom of the garden type stuff here now or the cosmic forces, but I'm just talking about soil microbiology, and certainly that's what I I can attest to happening with with um biodynamics.

SPEAKER_08 44:31

Thanks, Vince. Uh, our next question is from up the back there. Would you mind telling us your name and where you're coming from as you ask your question?

SPEAKER_09 44:38

G'day, Vince. How are you going? Cool. Um, my name's Luke and my partner Hannah over there. We run the sheep here at the Anne Gurt.

SPEAKER_03 44:45

Right.

SPEAKER_09 44:45

So, question for Vince would be that transition from say conventional sheep management with the drenching and stuff like that, transitioning away from that, which is something we're trying to do here.

SPEAKER_03 45:02

It's a it's such a good question. And I think, you know, in places like the UK, the government uh helps farmers for through the first three years. So they don't say we're gonna help you long term, they just say we we accept that there's this period where you're doing the transition, you're not getting paid what you'll get paid eventually. You're gonna make a lot of mistakes in those couple of years, we're gonna help you, but then you'll get out the other side and away you go. And that's great. We don't have politicians switched on like that here yet. Um I've got a mate I go to the football with whose name's David Pocock, and uh so I'm in his ear every time we sit down and watch the Brumbies go around. So uh uh maybe one day, who knows? Um, but it's difficult. It's difficult because the biggest problem in sheep, in in my experience, is that the genetics have been selected for something other than resilience. So you end up with animals that are not tough enough to handle not having a chemical drench. So the first thing that happens is you just cull, you cull, you're constantly culling the poor doers who don't cope without a chemical drench, and we don't let them die. We take them somewhere and they get a chemical drench on someone else's property and eventually get sold off the market, but we end up with the the ones that are strong left. And once you've got that strong DNA, we know the the science is there that the everyone knows how worms work. Worms attach themselves to the inside of a sheep's uh intestines and they feed and they produce eggs. But sheep have an immune system, and when their immune systems are operating, it cripples the mouth of that worm. It doesn't kill it, but it cripples it such that it can't produce eggs. And through rotational grazing, changing your DNA, and then you have to have some go-to sort of drenches, and I use things like apple cider vinegar and garlic. I make a tea out of wattle, like a wattle tea that I give to the sheep. We know that this research out of ANU about wattle leaves, Google Graham Five Field, ANU, and um acacia, and you'll get that that study up that was done uh at the ANU that shows that they have an anthemetic effect. So you can help without reaching for a fire benzoy or wherever they are today, uh, to fix the problems. It's a it's a great question. It's possible. Got a rotational graze to get them.

SPEAKER_05 47:36

Lovely, Vince.

SPEAKER_08 47:37

Uh, we've got another question on here.

SPEAKER_05 47:40

I just thank you for your interesting talk. Just want to say there's no penalty. My name's Jan Stewart. I grew up here on the farm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:49

Um thank you for letting us in.

SPEAKER_05 47:50

And I play golf a bit. So I just want to say there's no penalty. If a raven or cooker brother picks up your ball, it's considered to be an outside agent. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 48:00

Well, uh, they never knew that at gunning, I don't think. So they they used to take penalties. But um mum ended up with glaucoma in her mid-80s. And I remember talking to her uh, do you know what glaucoma is? You've got like a black spot in the middle of your eye. And um, she was saying to me, Oh, I went into the Country Women's Association thing in gunning. Gunning's 27 kilometres away. And I said, Oh, who drove you? She said, Oh, I just drove myself. And I said, Mum, you've got glaucoma. And she said, Oh, it's okay. Your peripheral vision's still good. She said, You just move your head from side to side like this as you're driving along. Very pragmatic, very practical. Made it all the way into gunning and home again without killing anyone.

SPEAKER_07 48:41

So funny, Vince. Okay, our next question is um out here. Um, thanks, Vince. So I'm uh my name's George. I'm from Gunnar, Northwest New South Wales. Um, I actually used to work for Laura and have had the pleasure of visiting your place. Um, knowing the country you're in and probably what a lot of your neighbours are doing, are they not seeing even your price point and seeing this guy's doing something pretty good here?

SPEAKER_03 49:07

I I I'm I'm I'm I'm an atheist, I think is the most accurate description. But in the Bible, there's a line that says you can't be a Messiah in your own village. I can't quote you the verse, but it's it's it's a quote in the Bible, and it's so true. And there's a guy called David Marsh, who is probably the most switched-on farmer I know. I don't consider myself a switched-on farmer, but David is brilliant. He's here if you get a chance to. I think he's he's been he's talking tomorrow on a panel, so go and see David. But he spoke in every state in Australia. He was named Land Care Person of the Year for New South Wales, land care person of the year for Australia. He he just does amazing stuff. And he never spoke in his hometown. Never ever. And so he spoke in all of these places that fly him to Perth and that flying up into Queensland. So it's very hard. It's so hard. I take photos along one boundary fence, and it just doesn't change, you know, over years and years and years. And sometimes my stocking rate across my entire farm is much higher than my neighbour's, but it still looks different, you know, and you think I can't be explaining that. But you can only you, you know, it's a long way to the coast, and you can't own all the land from one coast to another, so you just manage what you've got and try and do that well.

SPEAKER_08 50:22

Have we got any final questions for Vince, please? Yes. This gorgeous gentleman here looking from microphone. Right.

SPEAKER_02 50:37

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Thanks, Vince, for the uh talk. Yeah, fantastic. Just wanted to get your insights into whether uh you've got any advice to anybody looking to take on some ecological activities without necessarily going to the extent of being biodynamic. Where would you start?

SPEAKER_03 50:59

Yeah, so so one of the joys of biodynamics is the cost cost basis. You know, we're we're organic and we're biodynamic, and our certification, because we're a cocky run organization, uh, our our costs are a lot lower than a lot of the other organizations out there. I think I can say that pretty accurately, can't I? It's and that I'm a bit of a miser and I like the idea of getting a bargain. But you you you you we all chip in, we all work together to make that happen. So if you're not going to be organic, then that that's fine. You don't have to be organic. Um, but I think holistic grazing is just makes so much sense. Um tap into the your RCSs. There's lots of Graham Hand was mentioned there before. There's lots of people who do that sort of work, and that um and that makes an immediate difference to your soil, to what you do. You can buy things to put on the soil uh that uh so it's it's a little bit hard to describe, but on one corner of my farm I have a tree called an Indigofra, and they used to be across all the farm, but now there's just one left. So how long will it take for that tree, if I don't get involved, to ever end up with a tree where I live, which is seven kilometers away at the other end of the farm? It'll take not probably tens of thousands of years, maybe a hundred thousand years or more. Now it's a long time. So what we do is we go and we plant the tree in places. So the same thing's happened in our soil. If you can imagine in the soil, there's all these species, think of Indigo for being a species, all these species of bacteria and fungi. And what we've done is we've reduced that down to probably a third or a half of what was there and what should should be there. So we have to reintroduce those. And that's what the biodynamic preps certainly do. They reintroduce those species, and eventually you get this full suite of microbiology in the soil, and you're able to build structure, you're able to cycle nutrients, you're able to overcome issues with regard to uh with regard to pathogens, disease-causing pathogens. There's a whole host of benefits that comes out of having the full suite of microbiology at present. We've got to stand up and run out of here, I know. So I've got to I'm not gonna cut that short.

SPEAKER_08 53:20

I'll be slicing you when it's time, but you're fine at the moment, Vince. Um do we have any further questions? Yes, over there. Nearly there.

SPEAKER_03 53:38

You're not allowed to do that.

SPEAKER_08 53:39

It's good for you, but it's bad for us, and it's even worse for the audio.

SPEAKER_10 53:43

That's quite okay. It's a grazing management question. So, Vince, you said you ran a mob of 2,000 ewes?

SPEAKER_03 53:48

Well, well, it depends on what's happening, but I I've got a mob of lambs that I could pop in with them, but I'm just a bit lazy. I've got the lambs at one corner of the farm and the user at another, and I'm trying to pull lambs out of those for a whole host of reasons. Mainly I bring them into some country where I've got a little bit more feed right now, not a great season at home, and uh getting them ready to go off to the abattoir. So uh, but ideally you'd have everything together, you know. You so you you lamb down as a and you're moving those I lamb down my singles in very big mobs, you know, 600, 800 sheep in a mob lambing. Yeah, and uh you tell that to people and they sort of they get a bit panicky. But the twins are given a lot more space, and that's for the simple reason that a a you that has twins, she'll put one lamb on the ground, give it a lick, maybe give it a feed, leave it there asleep, and wander off to have the second lamb. Always done just before first light of a morning, predator response towing, you know, and she might be over here and she's down and straining to get the second one out. All the other sheep get up and wee a poo and walk off to get a drink of water. And sheep never walk silently. They never walk silently, they always have to go ba. They talk to each other as they go, always. And the lamb hears a bear and it knows its instinct tells it follow that, follow that. So it gets up and wanders off, and half a kilometer away they get to order. Uh lamb's there bleeding, mum's here, she's got one lamb, all's good. You got too many sheep, that missmothering happens all the time. So it's smaller molds with the twins.

SPEAKER_10 55:24

So you ultrasound and then uh draft them.

SPEAKER_03 55:27

Yep, just uh yeah, I've got a guy who comes out, does the ultrasounds, draft them off. Got to feed them differently. The twins, you can't feed them enough food. Singles, uh my singles are in a Jenny Craig paddock, are very uh you'll probably work out what that means, but it's uh that you don't want them overfed because the babies get too big and you spend every morning pulling babies out of sheep's bums. Yeah, and that becomes just tiresome after a while. I've made lots of mistakes, don't worry.

SPEAKER_08 56:00

Okay, thank you. We'll take one more question because we don't want to end on that note of pointing babies out of sheep's bums. No.

SPEAKER_03 56:07

When uh when I was uh when I was a boy, my dad, can I just have your hand? My dad said, when you go to the pub, you grab a girl by the hand and you go like this and you look at her wrist, and if she hasn't, if she hasn't got a very thin wrist, then you just put her hand down and say it's been lovely meeting, and you walk off. Because it's very hard to uh and I was telling this to a dairy farmer friend, and she said, My dad said, What when you meet a boy, she said you grab their hand and you hold it up, and she said, and if when you hold their hand up it's not very long, you just put it back down again and say it's been very nice meeting you, and you move on. And you we can't end on that either.

SPEAKER_08 56:52

Um we've got one final question over here, please.

SPEAKER_03 57:04

I had a cousin who told me I could uh because you're six generations in an area, there's a lot of people you're related to. And he said you can drink with anyone at the local pub, you just can't sleep with them. So and I don't know if it's like that down here. Maybe it's just where we are.

SPEAKER_00 57:18

Um, Jeff from WA, uh being a farmer, you're a farmer. Most people here are as well. What's what's your next project you're gonna do to improve your ecosystem health?

SPEAKER_03 57:29

Yeah, good question. I've got um I've got the same people from Planet Ark now want to put up nest boxes in remaining trees to increase the number of nesting opportunities for the superb parrot. Uh so I have a very low um belief that nest boxes are a good thing. Uh David Lindenmeyer, anyone know where Tar Cutter is between here and Sydney? Uh they bypass the town, and David Lindenmeyer put up um 300 nest boxes. He's the he's the greatest ecologist in the country, if you ask him. And uh and out of the 300, he had rats in 97% of those blessed neck spots. So I'm always a bit skeptical about nest boxes, but that's one of the things we're we're we're introducing a lot of aquatic plants in our dams and our creeks. So these are the plants that grow below the surface of the water. So things like milfoil, uh, things like potter, uh ribbon grass, and that's absolutely essential for all of those little fish and all the other the tiny little invertebrates that live in the in the water. Um, so we we're doing a lot of work on that, which is the new frontier for us not planting trees, but fixing the waterways.