Reporting on last Micro Club session:  

Our last Microscope Club Session was held at AREC on 26^th November. Mike Parish kindly donated his time to come and speak on grazing management, soil health and the importance of nutrition in the food we eat.

We were fortunate the date coincided with the Compost Tea Workshop with Paul Taylor from Trust Nature (hosted by local company, www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au). So we gained a few new faces for the night from the workshop participants and had Paul Taylor as guest speaker who talked about Regenerative Agriculture.

Individual blurbs (n/a)

For those new to Micro Club, this section is one we revisit from time to time.

So far we’ve had Rob Lennon, Jane Wilson, Tom Green, Nicki Schmid, Bruce Browne and me give our mini-presentations on the following:

• Where am I now with my soil health?
• Where do I want to be in 3 years with my soil health?
• How do I see the group assisting me with this?

The purpose of this is to help Micro Clubbers to set individual and measurable goals with their soil health (rather than come each month ‘talking the talk’ but not ‘walking the walk’!!) and sharing these with the group for feed back.

If anyone would like to talk to the group about what they’re up to – let me know and I’ll schedule you into the next meeting, or give me a buzz if you want to discuss.

The talks done to date have been posted on the microherders forum –  however, the forum is about to be moved to the Watershed Landcare website, so I’ll let you know when this is up and running again so you can log on and read about what other people are up to with their soil health.

Discussion

Some notes from speaker presentations - Paul Taylor and Mike Parish:

Paul Taylor:

• The concepts and practice of quality compost and quality compost tea are coming to the forefront of agriculture and land management.
• Paul has been working more and more with worked with councils and farming groups.
• He works with a range of combined proven practices collectively called Regenerative Agriculture – such as cell grazing, Permaculture principles and Keyline science combined with compost tea. Bringing consultants and successful farmers from North America and South America to Australia to promote Regenerative Agriculture.
• He sees Regenerative Agriculture being able to not only conserve soils but build tonnes of topsoil per hectare per year using proper management combined with a range of methodologies such as the work of Dr Elaine Ingham (www.soilfoodweb.com.au), Dr Christine Jones (www.amazingcarbon.com.au) , Darren Doherty (www.permaculture.biz), Geoff Lawton (www.permaculture.org.au) and himself with www.trustnature.com.au  
• Paul spoke about responsible Agriculture communities, the power of cooperation between farmers, and the non-sustainable cost of supporting corporations and chemicals companies and the fact that we have the science and knowledge to reduce input cost while we maintain production.
• This 'waste to wealth' system takes local agricultural and municipal waste and turns it into a high value compost that can replace fertilizer and irrigation needs by 30%. 
• Paul talked about one of the main issues with making compost tea, is getting good enough quality compost to start with. Compost is an inoculum, just as we use a spoonful of yoghurt culture to make 100 litres of yoghurt; we use a few litres of compost as an inoculum to make 1000 litres of compost tea. You can't grow what you don't have in the compost, this is thermal aerobic compost. If your compost goes through an anaerobic (smelly) cycle, you have lost important microbes; this compost is not the quality you want for compost tea.
• If you are working with new foods, new recipes or new brewers, you will need to use a Dissolved Oxygen meter (DO meter) to ensure that you O2 levels never drop below 6ppm. If you do, you lose important beneficial organisms, anaerobic bacterial consume beneficial fungi. For more information drop me an email: paul@trustnature.com.au

Mike Parish:

• Perennial grasses are particularly important in drier areas to maintain groundcover – helps catch and retain as much moisture as possible
• Mike Parish did the Grazing for Profit course back in ’93 (a course in holistic land management run by RCS, http://www.rcs.au.com/ - currently subsidized by Farm Ready reimbursements http://www.farmready.gov.au/). At the time he was working at a 10,000ac property at Biraganbil.
• In the ’94 drought, they saved $70,000 by not having to drought feed. This was due to planning pasture reserves (grazing charts) and adjusting stock levels to match carrying capacity of the property.
• Any land degradation can be reversed, any where in Australia – all to do with management.
• Mike showed a picture of an area in Namibia that had 27” (685mm) annual rainfall – the landscape looked like a desert.
• Applications of synthetic nitrogen ‘chew up’ humus in the soil, resulting in degraded soil structure (1kg nitrogen (fertilizer) applied chews up 100 kg humus)
• Mike talked about pH of our bodies and its relationship with a number of diseases. 85% of the population has an acid problem, mainly from not eating enough fruit and vegetables (alkaline foods). A high meat, dairy and grain diet produce an acid residue, which our body has to deal with.
• He also talked about how Omega 3’s and Omega 6’s and their ratios to each other are important. Big problem is we get too much Omega 6 from vegetable oils (e.g. margarine and processed foods) and grain-fed animal products, we need more good Omega 3 oils and eat grass fed animal products.

Microscope samples

We looked at compost tea and a soil sample or two under the microscope.

Due to amount of discussion and time spent listening to Mike and Paul, our usual analysis and discussion of samples went by the wayside!

Homework

Microclubbers should read the attached “Life in the Soil – CSIRO”, and there’s a good poster of soil microbes at http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pitz.pdf

http://www.kachana.com/ Check out this website, I met Chris Henggler at the Soil Foodweb course back in 2006, this website is about his property “Kachana” up in the Kimberley. It’s a little bit out of date but has some interesting info / links.

Details of next session  

Our next microscope club session will be at AREC on Thursday 25^th February, 5.30pm AREC.

I will email more details a week before next session - hope to see you then!

Cheers,

Thea