One question I am repeatedly asked is ‘how do I transition’ (to a healthier farming system)? This can be daunting, especially when asked as an open-ended question.
Humans as a species tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. We might tell ourselves; every farm is different, every paddock is different and every paddock corner is different, deciding to make a change can become too hard before we start.
To complicate things even more, Transition will mean something different to everyone. For some, it may mean reducing their industrial fertiliser usage or chemical footprint (but not deleting them completely), and for others it may mean switching to a fully biological farming system, or it could be anything in between.
While transitioning can seem a complex process to deal with, there is a simple skeleton that can be followed to make it easier. At Re-Gen Farming we like to keep it as simple as possible, and we would like 2023 to be the year for you to start your transition to a profitable, regenerative soil health system. At the end of the day, it all comes down to good soil health principles.
So, let’s go through our simple What? Why? and How? process to see if we can come up with an answer that suits you.
What? What is your Goal. Where are you now and where do you want to end up? If you don’t have a what you are never going to bother to change.
Why? Why do I want to transition? Or why is your goal important to you?
How? If you don’t answer the what and why you are never going to come up with the most important part, the how – mapping out the actual action you need to take to achieve your What.
Firstly, let’s deal with the What?
What are you transitioning from and what are you wanting to transition to?
Do you want to go from a feedlot-style dairy to a grass-fed grazing system or are you a high-input cropper looking to move to a low-input chemical-free system, or are you happy with where you are at and just want better soil health for the future?
Or are you the opposite and are already a low-input operation but cannot seem to make ends meet and want to get things going again? As you can see there are many what’s, you just need to work out yours.
Now let’s look at the Why?
The Why is just as important as the What. The Why is the thing which will drive you to succeed in your goals, it is the thing that will keep pushing you forward and stopping you from reverting back to old habits when things get tough. Your why needs to be a belief or a passion, it can’t be a fleeting thought, as it will be harder to commit.
I have had the privilege of talking to many farmers and asking them about their why and a lot of the time it is because they didn’t have a choice, they were forced into change because of financial pressure. Please take my advice, before you are forced into it be proactive and make the transition, so finances are not your why.
From my experience when people are forced into transitioning due to financial reasons, they manage to dig themselves out of the hole with good decision-making and improve their soil health. But quite often they step straight back onto the merry-go-round because they didn’t have the right why for them.
Don’t get me wrong, financial reasons are a good why, but not if it is your only why, and there are plenty of others. Some people transition because of a life event; it could be a health scare from dealing with too many chemicals, it could be the stress of carrying huge amounts of debt (which has skyrocketed in the past couple of decades and stretching the mental health of many farmers). Then there are those who want to transition because they know something is not quite right with their current production system; they have observed a decline in their soil health and their animal health has deteriorated or each year they need to add more inputs to get the same results as they were getting in the past.
There are many other different reasons why people change, but I think the most powerful why is when it achieves three things:
- to regenerate farming soils,
- to regenerate farming families and
- to regenerate farming communities.
No matter what your why, it just needs to be genuine why for you.
Our next Blog will cover the How of transitioning. In the meantime, if you want help with your What and Why, please reach out to Re-Gen Farming through our inbox or call Luke on 0427 138 100.
