The review phase is one part of the planning process I use and teach as part of farm business coaching and whole farm planning programs. As 2024 draws to a close I thought I would share these five questions that form the basis of my weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly review processes.  

Our 20-year journey of re-establishing trees on land where trees were cleared for tin mining in the early 1900’s has presented plenty of challenges, which have provided abundant opportunities to learn and try methods to improve our success growing trees. 

My personal journey working alongside hundreds of farming businesses navigating processes of change has taught me these key steps for effectively navigating the financial aspects of transition and change. 

14 Questions for Activating our Effectiveness.

How can we claim we are achieving truly regenerative outcomes if we are running ourselves down in the process?

Diversification sounds simple in theory, yet diversification is complex which can bring challenges to overcome to realise the benefits we seek. In regenerative systems diversification is not another input, it’s a way of relating to the whole system.

Realising the answers are not all outside of ourselves opens the door to the path less travelled, the journey inward.

Watching the life force drain out of the rural communities and the landscapes around me has fuelled my curiosity about how we can bring a new vision of agriculture to life.

Context is the heart of our effectiveness. Our capacity to apply principles as appropriate in our context is a foundational skill in achieving regenerative outcomes in all aspects of our life, landscape, and business.

One of the most common ways I see people limit their progress towards achieving their regenerative agriculture goals is through the belief that they must achieve results quickly. I am not saying that regenerative outcomes always happen slowly. How fast you will see results is always an “it depends” answer.

Reinventing our relationship with time.

What if time management is not a solution, and it is part of our problem?

Sitting on the fence of indecision happens when we are stuck in our heads and ignoring our other decision-making capacities.

We readily focus our attention on aspects of the system we can most easily see and tend to ignore the unseen aspects. Yet the most powerful aspects of complex systems are the least visible. When you think that there are billions of micro-organisms in just one teaspoon of healthy soil and we are only just beginning to learn about their invisible, crucial role in ecosystem and human health, what else are we not seeing?

Coaching conversations nurture our inner landscape so that the seeds of potential within us can germinate and grow. Removing internal barriers and accessing new perspectives so we can bring our vision to life in our lives, relationships and landscapes and BE the change we wish to see.

Soil biological inputs work when they are integrated (not separated) into a soil ecosystem where there is a web of diverse, interconnected relationships. Regeneration is firstly and foremost about replacing mechanistic, reductionist methods which rely on prescriptions with a holistic, living systems approach based on principles applied in context.

Every time I walk past the garden bed that is now covered in the frosted remains of last summer’s bountiful abundance of tomatoes, basil, zucchini, beans, corn and cucumbers the word wintering lands in my head, gently reminding me that rest is productive. I feel a sense of renewal as I witness the cycles of nature in our garden. I can sense the RESToration happening under the soil as dandelions start to emerge through the frosted tomato plants.

If we had viewed our experiences here at The Oasis in terms of failure, we would have given up and never grown a thing. By taking the perspective of using these experiences as feedback we curiously tried more ways to restore our soil naturally so we could successfully grow a garden, an abundance of food and pastures for our livestock that have improved the carrying capacity by 4 times what it was when we came here 18 years ago.

My Uncle tells an interesting story about farming with my Grandfather in the 1980s when scientists researching insecticide resistance in the cotton industry around Narrabri visited our family’s farm near Delungra in northern NSW every summer to collect heliothis caterpillars from sunflower crops. The heliothis on Grandpa and Uncle Paul’s sunflowers weren’t resistant to insecticides like the ones found in the cotton because there was no need to use insecticides to control them, every year the starlings would come in and eat the caterpillars. Why spray them when nature provided pest control for free?

In 2019 Angus & I travelled to Montana to attend a Land Listening event. It was here, immersed in this vast landscape where I came to realise how disconnected I had become from the land at our home The Oasis. We had been impacted by a bushfire six months previously and at the time of our trip the land was brown, parched and apocalyptic in the grips of what became the worst drought in recorded history here.

When we don’t define what success looks like for us how will we know when we have succeeded? It is vital that we have a vision of what success looks like for us or we can end up creating success on someone else’s terms other than our own.

When we predominantly design in an unstructured way, we can end up creating systems that are unproductive and may unintentionally create environmental degradation. We may spend a lot of money and not achieve our goals to create regenerative outcomes. Instead of randomly designing and creating we can choose to use an intentional design process.