Reading Landscapes Edition #23

Good morning, and welcome to the 23rd edition of our monthly newsletter, Reading Landscapes.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

Like us to discuss a photo of your landscape? Share it with us here.

In this month's edition, we are looking at a landscape that has been emailed to us. Thanks to Frankie for sharing these issues with us, and we'll have a go at looking at what we can do in situations like this. Obviously, this will always vary depending on context, and it's when you are actually in a landscape and able to see all parts of it that we can make a final decision for what to do.

In this situation, Frankie shared a challenge they are facing on their property: the entry road has begun to wash away after a large rain event. This is a common challenge on the farm roads we build, and there are a few ways of better managing situations like this to benefit both the landscape and your road. And yes, a constructed road is just as much a part of the landscape's water story as anything else - the same principles apply.

The issue we face is the high volume of runoff coming down the road and channelling, which is causing the damage. We need to look at how we can slow that water down and take it back off the road and across the landscape, where its energy can be dispersed, and the water can be put to more productive uses than just running down the track.

The first thing we would look to do is find the source of the water, where is it coming from? The issues along the main section of the track appear to be water coming from higher up in the landscape and running down the road. So, we go to the source, and higher up in the landscape where we can access it, we could build a contour system to slow that water and spread it out across the landscape before it gets to the road.

The next thing we can look at is managing the water that gets onto the track and reducing its energy. To do this, we could look to add whoa-boys, which are low-profile banks you build across the road to slow the flow coming down the track and spread it back onto the landscape on either side of the road.

These whoa-boys could then be connected into their own contour lines to move the water farther away from the road to a better site for spilling it, or even into a main contour line that we take across the whole property.

They are simple little interventions that slow the water down and divert it away from the road.

And then the second issue we face is that the road eventually comes down onto a floodplain, where we have the pipe crossing and more significant damage.

In this part, a different water source is causing the problems, and we need to manage it. If we have the land above the crossing, again, we could look to go up higher in the landscape and slow that water down and spread it closer to the source, where we have the ability to better manage it.

But we will still have water entering this floodplain and reaching our crossing, which will need to be managed. So, for the crossing itself, that would obviously require more significant work to repair, and at the same time, we could redesign how the crossing functions and how water moves through it. In this situation, we would focus on managing the water's energy and using the water itself to dissipate it.

Designing processes like these is a little tricky to explain in words alone in a newsletter. But to get you thinking about how we would do this, we have a section in the Rehydrate Australia that covers a stock crossing. In this landscape, you could design something similar, with the key difference being that it is on a floodplain and will most likely need a crossing designed to handle going underwater during larger events.

I hope this gives people a few ideas about how we would look to manage issues like these. But, like I said at the beginning, it will really come down to context and actually stepping into the landscape to craft a plan. Which is why we are big proponents of education, and understanding how our landscape functions and our role as managers, and why we offer the courses that we do. Once you understand how it works, then you can learn to do the work yourself, or work with our team of landscape leaders who can help you through the process - but understand what they're doing and how to manage it once they're gone, as without that understanding, the challenges can just start all over again.

There's no silver bullet when it comes to fixing land. That's the first thing out of Craig Davison's mouth, and it's exactly how he's approached the country at Weranga.

After three dry years, capped by the driest year on record for the eastern seaboard, Craig went looking for a different way to manage his trading and backgrounding operation near Tara, Queensland. What he found at the Tarwyn Park Training course reshaped everything: if all of Australia was rehydrated, you could farm it on about a third of the rainfall.

Since then, Craig has put in 5.5km of contours across Weranga, stepping down from the top of the property toward the river, slowing the water and letting the country rebuild itself. The result is a landscape that needs half the rainfall to deliver twice the result, and the nutrients that used to wash off the property now stay where they're needed.

👉 Watch Craig's full story: https://youtu.be/et6af2nIA7M

👉 Read the complete case study: https://www.tarwynparktraining.com.au/p/the-davisons-at-weranga

We're excited to announce the launch of the Rehydrate Australia Program, a new initiative from Tarwyn Park Training and Friendly Farms, offering $5,000 in matched funding to help our graduates put what they've learned into practice on the ground.

The program is designed for graduates who are ready to move from learning to doing, applying best-practice regenerative land management, protecting native vegetation, and revegetating with endemic species where it's needed. If you've completed a Tarwyn Park Training course and are working toward strong ground cover and healthier water cycles on your property, this is for you.

Successful applicants will have their proposed earthworks and plantings matched dollar for dollar, up to $5,000, to help turn a plan into action.

We're genuinely excited to support our graduates in getting real, on-the-ground work done. Helping bring these projects to life is exactly the kind of work we love being part of, and we can't wait to see what you propose. Every landscape that starts its restoration journey adds to the movement, and we're looking forward to helping more of you take that next step.

The full application details will be available soon in our graduate community on Circle. If you've completed a course with us but aren't in the community yet, just reach out to us, and we'll get your invite sent through.

Have a plant you’d like to discuss? Share it with us here.

Common Names: Whisky Grass, Broomsedge, Broomsedge bluestem, Beardgrass, Sage grass, Sedge grass, Deceptive bluestem, Smooth bluestem, Yellowsedge bluestem, broomstraw

Scientific Name: Andropogon virginicus

Where in the Succession: Low fertility exploiter

Thanks to Martin for sending in this month's species, Whisky Grass.

Whisky Grass is a warm-season perennial tufted grass species, growing between 0.5 and 1m in height. It can be commonly mistaken in Australia for Kangaroo Grass and Grader Grass.

It is native to eastern North America and further south into Central America, and has now been introduced across many parts of the world. It is quite adaptable to climate, growing from cool temperate winters into humid subtropical conditions with a preference for the coastal regions of New South Wales and Southern QLD.

Whisky Grass is a low-fertility exploiter, displaying all the common attributes of these less desirable grass species.

Where will I find Whisky Grass growing, and why is it growing there?

Whisky Grass is much the same as its' fellow low-fertility exploiters, in that it most often finds itself occupying disturbed landscapes that have provided the conditions for it to start. Some of the common characteristics of these areas include;

🐮 Alter your grazing patterns. Whisky Grass thrives on poor grazing management, where overgrazing of desirable species occurs, opening up the opportunity for Whisky Grass to come in and fill that niche. To overcome this, we need to change how we manage our livestock, focusing on incorporating adequate recovery after grazing as the first step. Then, to manage the sites where Whisky Grass is already dominant, we can use the tool of increasing livestock density to impact its growth. This tool will need to be combined with others further down the list to get the best results overall - because, as we like to say, there is no single silver bullet solution to the challenges that we face.

🌿 Increase plant diversity, particularly legumes. We need to focus on getting our preferred species to come in and outcompete the Whisky Grass. And in landscapes with lower soil fertility, this won't be easy with our grass species; instead, we need to look further down the plant succession and bring in our more palatable accumulator species. Our herbs and legumes will help the landscape fulfil the role the Whisky Grass is trying to achieve, whilst providing adequate nutrition for our livestock to graze on. These species can be added by sowing them directly or by spreading them in the right areas at the right time of year for maximum germination.

⬆️ Increase soil organic matter and fertility. As we've discussed, Whisky Grass prefers growing in lower-quality soils that have become tired over time and can no longer support our higher-order species. If we can come in and assist those landscapes by feeding our soils and improving their quality, we can create the conditions for our preferred species to grow. Some ways that we could go about doing this include bringing in compost, liquid fertilisers like liquid compost or worm extract or even just products like old straw and hay to start a process.

💧 Change our hydrology. The common trend amongst many of our low-fertility exploiters is that they will happily grow in drier conditions with low soil moisture. If we can step in and add structures like contours, we can slow the movement of water across our landscape, storing more of it in the soil where it’s useful and can support our higher-order species' growth.

🚜 Use mechanical intervention. In cases where there is a dominance of Whisky Grass, livestock will be less effective as a tool. We can use machines and slash or mulch areas with Whisky Grass, wait for it to re-shoot, and then bring the livestock to graze the more palatable younger growth. Post-grazing with livestock, we aim to add our more desirable species where they don't face competition from Whisky Grass and to give the plants time to recover before bringing the livestock back.

As you can see, we have a number of options to experiment with, and the best results will often yield from combining many of them into a systematic plan that you implement over time. Being prepared to wait is the most important part, as the results won't happen in the first year. Especially when trying to manage these perennial grasses that are deemed weeds, they are much trickier to remove from a landscape than our annual weeds. But, with management focused on aggrading and improving our landscapes, the results we are after will happen.

🪨 As a Soil Indicator: Low nitrogen, low phosphorus, high magnesium, low organic matter levels, acidic soils. It can tolerate high levels of aluminium and other heavy metals.

🐮 Livestock: Livestock will graze young growth, but it will quickly mature and lose its palatability. Interestingly, one study that used fire as a management tool measured young plants recovering from the fire at 13% protein, which then declined to 6% over time¹. However, this was most likely due to the increase in available nutrients after burning. Therefore, managing young growth with livestock may require supplementary feeding to maintain performance.

💊 Medicinal: There is very little research on Whisky Grass and its medicinal uses. But one 2020 study found that extracts from the plant appear to be effective against several human diseases, including diabetes and cancer². Obviously, this is still very early, but they did find that their flavonoids had significant antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

🍽️ Consumption: No documented cases of it being used for food. But the Cherokee did use the stems for making yellow dye³ and for making brooms⁴, hence the common name Broomsedge

Something we've been working toward for a long time is finally here.

For over a decade, we've been teaching Natural Sequence Farming in person. Now we've built a way for anyone, anywhere, to access the same knowledge - without leaving home.

Learning Landscapes is a fully online, self-paced course that takes you through the complete NSF framework. From reading your landscape, to the 5 Pillars, to a hands-on plan you can start applying on your own land. It works at any scale, from the backyard to the farm. No prior experience needed.

This isn't a passive watch-and-forget experience. It's built around getting you outside, making observations, and putting knowledge into practice - with a live community alongside you the whole way.

If you're ready to start seeing your landscape differently, we'd love to have you along.

A quick list of our favourite things we’ve been watching, reading, listening, and writing.

Glyphosate, Poultry Manure, and Soggy Sauerkraut: Shane shared this interesting study recently, and I think it's a great example of how far our choices can travel through the system. This 2024 study traced a $1,000,000 loss of organic sauerkraut back to soft, mushy cabbage, caused not by poor fermentation but by a mineral deficiency that weakened the cabbage's cell walls. That deficiency was traced back to Glyphosate residue in the poultry manure used as fertiliser - Glyphosate is a chelator, so it binds up minerals and knocks out the microbes that help plants take them up. The good news is the researchers also found a fix: treating the soil with raw sauerkraut juice and its Lactobacillus plantarum, alongside a couple of microbial blends, degraded 80 to 90% of the soil glyphosate within six to seven months, and lifted both yield and quality. It's a reminder of how one choice can move through the entire landscape - but with the right tools, we can undo the damage.

The Dam Plan: A Different Way to Secure Sydney's Water: Our graduate, Adam Long, has put forward an alternative to Sydney's proposed $32 billion wastewater treatment program - restoring the Warragamba catchment itself. By rebuilding natural water cycles across the 9,000 square kilometre catchment, the plan could store thousands of extra gigalitres and secure cleaner, more reliable water for a fraction of the cost. Martin Royds, another of our graduates, has already shown what this looks like on his own land, where restored landscapes steadily released water throughout the last drought while surrounding rivers stopped flowing. With an election coming in March 2027, there's a window to make this a political issue - sign the petition if you'd like to see it happen.

What Your Food Ate: Recommended to us by our graduate Jason, this book has been on my reading list for a while, and it was well worth the wait. It's a deep, well-researched look at how the way we farm shapes the nutritional quality of our food, and in turn, our own health, something most people never think to question. If you want to properly understand the connection between soil, plant, animal, and human health, and why the choices we make in how we farm matter so much, this one's well worth the read.

Iowa's Water and What It's Telling Us: This video starts with a striking anomaly: cancer rates across the US have been gradually falling, yet Iowa's have been rising faster than anywhere in the country. That question led investigators to look at nitrate levels in Iowa's drinking water, which are linked to decades of heavy fertiliser use and large-scale hog production, with one estimate putting the manure generated by Iowa's hogs at the equivalent of 125 million people. It ties in well with what we took from What Your Food Ate, that soil, water, and human health are all one connected system. For me, it's less a story about villains and more a prompt for better questions: how is fertility moving through our landscapes, and where is it ending up? At Tarwyn Park Training, we believe the answer lies in better managing that fertility and water using the 5 Pillars of Natural Sequence Farming, particularly getting our natural filtration systems working properly again, and in rethinking how we farm animals within the landscape rather than apart from it. The more we ask questions about how our food is produced and support those doing it well, the more we shift the whole system in the right direction.