The Weekly Dirt with Tom from The Mandarin Bend - ‘Farming Matters – For Our Love of the Land’
The Weekly Dirt (written by Tom from The Mandarin Bend)
‘Farming Matters – For Our Love of the Land’
(Beware, slight jargon alert)…
Hola all, Kayc was kind enough last week to cover my butt so I could attend a Regenerative Ag convergence down in my old place of residence (& Kaycee’s home town) Albury. Fortunately for me, I managed to score a free ticket through Young Farmers Connect. Although COVID didn’t make a great deal of changes to our life overall here on the farm in 2020, one thing that really stuck out was how much I missed conferences, convergences, workshops, field days etc. in our line of work. I lust for new knowledge, learning & connection with other growers & educators to not only keep us on the front foot, but to also continually reaffirm why we work pretty darn hard doing what we do & gauge how our movement is tracking in the grand scheme of things.
It was pretty heartening to see how much interest & momentum is building in the Regen Ag space. The Albury Conference ‘Farming Matters – For Our Love of the Land’ saw a full house (with at least another 300 people on the waiting list).
There was a wide scope of pioneer growers & producers who were the early adopters of practices like holistic grazing management, through the spectrum of industry reps diverging from the norm ‘industrial’ food model, & the younger mob like myself still taking their baby steps in the movement. It was an onslaught of all-things farming positive – often not something traditionally portrayed in the media Re rural Australia (i.e. busted-ass farmers suffering from drought, fire, flood, market declines, ‘woe-is-me’ stuff). The crowd was largely enlightened from the changes they’d made, not dismissing that many had been pushed to the edge in their past farming lives.
Some take-homes I managed to wrangle out of the Conference is the development of a new Regenerative Ag verification system called ‘Land to Market’ which unlike the Certified Organic scheme that’s largely failed to measure crucial outcomes on farms like soil health (many Organic farms here & abroad still operate in an industrial manner, they just apply ‘organic’ inputs). The ‘Land to Market’ verification will be more peer-to-peer farmer driven, & focused on whether the farmer is directly building soil organic carbon & therefore overall landscape health & resilience over-time. I think that’s pretty cool – we’ll definitely be looking at heading down this route in future as it more closely aligns with our goals & vision.
Carbon-crediting farmers is also a massively emerging field, largely coming out of Australia (yes, Australia may actually be taking some leadership in one aspect of mitigating, & maybe fixing our wildly changing climate). The first carbon credits sold-off a Regenerative Ag farm were just made recently right here in our region to the massive tech giant, Microsoft. A cattle property in Ebor, Wilmott Cattle Co. sold $500,000 worth of credits – a bloody great outcome from making good management decisions in capturing & storing soil carbon overtime in their holistically-managed grazing enterprise. The finer details of how all the crediting works is still a bit beyond me, but with time, this will be a huge incentive to improve landscape health all over Australia, from the biggest landholder base, us farmers.
So, really great stuff all round, and that’s just scratching the surface. I could go on…
Anyways, in my next installment of The Weekly Dirt, I’ll put together a solid list of all-things Regen Ag (i.e. podcasts, books, docos etc.); positive move-forwards sort off stuff so we’re all on the same page. Because this movement, will truly be our most attainable way of fixing the current crises facing our world. And you’re all participating in the change right here with North Arm Farms. Thanks gang.
Keep in touch with Tom and Kaycee at The Mandarin Bend Farm :
“We are market gardeners at The Mandarin Bend who have a passion for educating, inspiring and feeding people with wholesome, organic produce.
We love growing vegetables and feeding people!
Currently growing a range of vegetables and herbs on a certified organic farm called The Mandarin Bend, which is inland of Bowraville on the Mid North Coast.
Our delicious, seasonal produce is available online at www.themandarinbend.com, Bellingen Growers Market, Gladstone Market and Kempsey Riverside Market”
