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Syntropic Agroforestry - Tom Bjorksten
86 Plays3 years ago
Tom Bjorksten from Misty Creek Agroforestry in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales is pushing the boundaries of carbon sequestration and exploring uncharted territory in the Australian agriculture industry. Join Tom and Host Mykal Hoare in conversation about his young Syntropic Agroforestry, his tree range meat chickens and the future in Community Supported Agriculture.
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Episode Links:
www.mistycreekagroforestry.com.au
Misty Creek Agroforestry Instagram
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Mykal's Links:
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Transcript
Introduction and Support Appeal
00:00:03
Speaker
Growing Media is a proudly independent podcast produced by me, Michael Hall, with zero corporate or network interference in our content. But this means we are running on the smell of an oily rag over here. So if you like the show and would like to make a small contribution, you could head over to our Patreon. You can find the link in our show notes.
00:00:28
Speaker
The producers of growing media recognise the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is recorded and pay respects to Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.
Guest Introduction: Tom Bjorksten
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello, my name's Michael Haw and welcome to Growing Media. Today I wanted to introduce you to a farmer who is pushing the boundaries of carbon sequestration and exploring uncharted territory in the Australian agricultural industry. I strongly believe in using natural systems to make our gardens flourish, whether it's your ornamentals or your veggies.
00:01:07
Speaker
But what if we up the ante? Let's start talking about livestock and veggie production all in one space. May seem like madness to a lot of farmers, but to Tom Bjorksten from Misty Creek Agroforestry, it's life.
00:01:24
Speaker
At his young, syntropic agroforestry farm, he positions plants together in space and time to build a living community of cropping foods. Throw in his tree-range meat chickens and it all flourishes together as one ecosystem, without the need for external inputs, organic or otherwise.
Transition to Syntropic Agroforestry
00:01:45
Speaker
Hey, Tom, how you doing? Yeah, good. Thanks, Michael. Nice to be here. Why don't we take it back to the start? How did you get into farming? Tell us about your background, where you grew up and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, sure. So I actually grew up on a fairly large cattle farm in the central west of New South Wales. Nice. Yes, I spent my whole childhood there working on the farm every day after school and weekends and school holidays and you name it.
00:02:14
Speaker
And I always enjoyed the farm life and rural life, but the way my family farmed was a very industrial type of farming, so input-based chemicals, artificial fertilizers.
00:02:30
Speaker
And more than just that, which I didn't really have an awareness that it was bad as such, I just saw that it was a constant fight, that they're always fighting against, you know, too much rain, too little rain, this, that or the other. And that kind of, that fight didn't really appeal to me.
00:02:51
Speaker
I went to university, I studied business, I studied finance, master in economics and yeah, eventually kind of just realised that I hated living in the city and moved out. There's still no intention of starting a farm but I moved up to the northern rivers and
00:03:13
Speaker
my partner Nicole happened to find a flyer for a little permaculture thing and that was when it started. We both of us went on to do a permaculture design course.
00:03:28
Speaker
And then that, doing that permaculture design course, that's when it really hit home for me that I was like, oh, wow, look, you know, this is, there's actually a different way of farming where you don't have to, you don't have to be always be fighting against what nature's throwing at you. You can actually work with it.
00:03:45
Speaker
That's it. So you and Nicole met, did your PDC, your permaculture design course, and then you moved to the Northern Rivers before that. When did the idea to purchase a piece of land up there come to you both?
Land Acquisition and Benefits
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, after the PDC, that was it. We were kind of floating around a bit before that, just figuring out what we wanted. We both had no idea. The only thing we knew was that we didn't want to live in the city. And in the PDC, you learn a lot about designing farms and spaces.
00:04:21
Speaker
just we happen to be in the right time financially and that kind of stuff so yeah it actually happened pretty quickly after the PDC thankfully we found a place yeah just by luck and yeah it's been perfect so far.
00:04:37
Speaker
Now that place is in Bu Yong in the Northern Rivers region. And for our listeners out there who don't know, that's kind of right near Byron Bay, a lovely subtropical climate. That's got to help you. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Look, we...
00:04:52
Speaker
Part of the reason why we were, well, I don't know if lucky is the right word in getting this place is that it's a floodplain, which means that the soil is incredibly rich without us even beginning. A lot of people starting these kind of centropic farms often are working with degraded systems.
00:05:13
Speaker
Um, we've been blessed to, you know, just to be able to grow from the get go. Um, and then I guess, but that was written off by a lot of other people with a more traditional view of farming, you know, that it's, that it's too much of a hindrance or, or a threat or whatever. Well, that's what I was going to say. Like a floodplain is kind of a risky move to go with. Why did you see it as an opportunity rather than something that would scare people off?
00:05:41
Speaker
Well, two parts to it. Yeah, the one I mentioned was that just the quality of the soil, it's this gorgeous, rich chocolate brown. And the other thing is that I knew that we wanted to do agroforestry. So there's always a risk to your annual crops from the flood. But once your trees are settled in, they won't mind the flood at
Understanding Syntropic Agroforestry
00:06:06
Speaker
all. Also, our
00:06:08
Speaker
The whole thing has really good drainage. After speaking to the owners, they said the maximum we could expect from a flood would be 24 hours inundation. A lot of old methods of irrigation were flood irrigation.
00:06:27
Speaker
So yeah, so I haven't been too scared. And look, touch wood, we actually haven't had a flood since we've been here and there hasn't been a flood on this property since 2017. So. Okay. How long have you been there now? Two and a half years. Not bad. Oh, you've done a lot in that time then. We've been busy. Yeah, sure. Let's talk about that agroforestry. What is a syntropic agroforestry?
00:06:51
Speaker
Well, agroforestry is the simplest level combining agriculture with forestry. So you're growing food crops with trees. And then, syntropic agroforestry is you're basically harnessing the successional force of nature. So everywhere, nature has a tendency to become more complex. Around here, eventually, you're going to end up with a rainforest.
00:07:21
Speaker
But we can actually harness this successional drive by choosing the right species and matching how much light they need and also how long they're going to live for to recreate this force of becoming a forest but also speeding it up a lot.
00:07:43
Speaker
And feeding it up a lot with the product of those plants. So I'm assuming that you'll put in plants that aren't necessarily cropping plants, or food production plants, but you'll use certain plants to add nutrients back to the soil. Yeah, so that's the biggest part of it. And why it's so different to most other systems of growing is that it creates everything the system needs on site. So you're not buying in compost, you're not buying in soil amendments, you're not buying in fertilizer.
00:08:13
Speaker
Because if you think about how a natural forest functions, it doesn't need anything. Now, we humans tend to eat fairly demanding plants.
00:08:24
Speaker
as we start these systems, you need a few things to get these demanding crops growing. And what we call them is biomass plants. So we're basically just growing them so we can chop them down and then as they break down, they're feeding the soil. So really it's about working the land for the betterment of the soil and the ecosystem as a whole. And then the harvest is almost a bit of a beneficial
Planting Strategies and Ecosystem Health
00:08:49
Speaker
byproduct of that. Yeah, like it's kind of a way that
00:08:54
Speaker
You can regenerate the land through the process of your growing. So it's not like you have your market garden in one corner of your property and then you like plant a regen area in another block and they're just like completely separate. We're growing market garden vegetables and grains and other sorts of perennial crops and everything.
00:09:16
Speaker
in the area that we're regenerating. So it's kind of, there is, you know, rainforest trees there that it can expect to live for hundreds of years in amongst our vegetables. Fantastic. So that's what I think that's pretty, pretty special aspect of it. So, you know, like, I think people listening might be like, well, you know, how are you going to keep growing veggies? But that's, that's the beauty of it. You harness the forest dynamics and
00:09:44
Speaker
in nature, there's a forest clearing, it might be lightning, it might be fire or whatever, and then your annuals will take over that forest clearing. Okay, so you're kind of allowing light to reach those lower stories within the forest, annually trimming things back, pruning things back, letting them decompose into the soil, feeding that soil, but then also providing light for your crops.
00:10:12
Speaker
That's exactly right, because one of the backbones of a centropic agroforestry system is the eucalypt, which is really misunderstood. But if it's left on its own, it will not create good conditions for the crops you want to grow underneath it. But if we prune it at the right times of the year,
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, it does all those things. It can provide shade in the really hot months of summer. Then we can let through lots of light when there's lots of moisture in it and it's not so hot. And all the time, because it's such a powerful plant, it's doing so much photosynthesis. It's pumping the soil full of sugar and just really starting to get that soil alive.
00:11:01
Speaker
I was just thinking about other natives as well. You're Acacias who are legumes who will pump nitrogen back into the soil. Are there other natives that you specifically use on your agroforestry that benefit the soil?
00:11:14
Speaker
Yeah, look, I mean, they all do, really. The eucalyptus is the most important one, more than the nitrogen fixing plants, because when you're starting off what we call an accumulation system, the soil's actually needing more carbon than nitrogen. That's where the eucalyptus comes in. It's a really high carbon plant. It's going to produce you a lot of carbon. The nitrogen will then come later.
00:11:43
Speaker
But then the natives are more, we've got a few bush foods in, and then there is a lot of hardwood timbers, like 25, 30 year harvest, things like spotted gum, red cedar, the thin dirtiers.
00:12:03
Speaker
silky oak, the gravellia, red buster. And what would you be harvesting those for, for timber and firewood or? Yeah, so that'll be, I mean, I like to say that they're our super fund. Yeah. It's not, I mean, it's not
00:12:20
Speaker
it's not like a you know like a really rich super fund but it's that kind of thinking that it's the tree's worth planning for itself in terms of the shade it provides for our crops for our livestock its benefits for the soil by sending that deep roots and accessing minerals you know far down in the soil surface subsurface and then after it's done all those things which is
00:12:48
Speaker
well worth it in itself, then we get the bonus of, okay, maybe we can build a house or a shed or something with their timber one day. That's pretty nice, isn't it? Sort of like a full circle kind of thing, then using that timber back to support the next kind of iteration of the farm. Yeah, that's right. Which by that stage, I imagine will be a full blown rainforest by then. Well, that's the dream. Yeah.
00:13:17
Speaker
Soil testing. Have you had any preliminary soil testing done before you started your centropic farm? I didn't get anything done before we started. I have had one recently that was about, I suppose, a year and a half after we started. I haven't
00:13:36
Speaker
I'm not really big on the soil test and the scientific side of agriculture. I've done training in holistic management.
00:13:51
Speaker
There, we learn a lot about observing the soil. I see a lot more value in that because I can go out myself and observe the soil in quite a systematic way. The soil test, it gives you
00:14:10
Speaker
I guess I say like a dead analysis of your soil, like it tells you what chemicals are in there, but doesn't tell you anything about the life in your soil. And when we're thinking agroforestry, it truly is the life that's in the soil that makes a difference because most
00:14:30
Speaker
Most of the minerals that your plants need are there but they're just locked up because of a lack of biology. So my biggest thing when I'm looking around is I'm looking for life in my soil and then that's the way I can see the progress I'm making. Just the amount of worms, just the amount of
00:14:50
Speaker
you know, all those tiny little guys, as soon as you scratch away a bit of mulch, they're everywhere. You said that your soil was beautiful when you moved in, but have you seen much of a difference in that since you've started your cropping systems? Yeah, absolutely. You could see that the roots only went down about 10 or 15 centimetres. And now we've got these trees that are sending roots, you know, four or five metres down. Great.
00:15:18
Speaker
The difference in the life and just you can see the evidence at the surface of it. You can see the tunnels of the worms and the other soil microorganisms. And it's just, it's so obvious that there's so much more oxygen and that the minerals are cycling at the soil surface.
00:15:37
Speaker
Fantastic. What about yield? You know, does your system create a greater yield or if someone was to kind of start this system, would you expect like a smaller yield of your veggies and stuff like that?
00:15:51
Speaker
That's a really, it depends kind of question, but there's no two syntropic agroforestry farms that are the same. So I can only speak from my experience. And what I've tended to do is to, I really don't use many inputs at all. Like my veggies are also like free range veggies. They kind of, they go in and they either grow or they don't.
00:16:15
Speaker
So my yields I would say are not as high as say like a kind of bio-intensive market garden where you're using a lot of compost and it's quite intensive. But I would say that the profitability is extremely high because we don't use any imports and there's not much labor either for pretty much everything I planted and then I come back and I harvest it.
00:16:45
Speaker
Fantastic. Your syntropic system would be almost an accumulative thing. You know, you would expect better yields year on year, not just like a boom one year.
Integrated Farming Systems and Crop Selection
00:16:55
Speaker
And then, you know, the next year will be the same. You're kind of playing the slow game really, aren't you?
00:17:00
Speaker
Well, that's right. And it's the way that our integrated model works is that the chickens, our tree-range chickens, they're our bread and butter, and that's what pays the bills and keeps us going. And the veggies, to be honest, it's like I'm learning while I'm improving the soil. And now that we're getting into our third growing season, I'm starting to see
00:17:29
Speaker
the real value of just the perennial crops we started, just started, so like for example, first year we bought 25 kilos of ginger and then I think then that turned into 125 kilos and then that turned into 500 kilos and then next year that's gonna turn into hopefully about five tons. And that's just from having the time to build that up
00:17:58
Speaker
Um, and then, you know, five tons of ginger, that, that, that should be a pretty decent crop. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, so what are some of the crops that you're actually growing? So we're, we're focused, we, now we're focusing on a few crops that we know grow really well in this type of agroforestry. So ginger is the one I mentioned before, turmeric, garlic, pineapples, asparagus. Um,
00:18:26
Speaker
And then we do grow a few other bits and bobs with the veggies as the season allows. Zucchini is one really good one that we're planting a lot of at the moment because within our tree rows, it grows really quickly and covers the soil and it does a really amazing job as well as providing a food that we know that we can get a good yield and have no problem selling as well. What have you got in your mid-story?
00:18:56
Speaker
I guess we don't think of it as so much as in the lower and middle and upper story, although we do it in a little way. It's more about the life cycle. We start with our zucchini that will only be in the system for 45 days.
00:19:17
Speaker
But on top of that, we have a banana that will be there for five years. And then next to that, we have a red cedar that'll be there for 30 years. And then next to that, we have a bunya pine that'll be there for 300 years. And they're all growing on top of each other. And eventually, the bunya will end up on top. But for the first 25 years, it might be on the bottom. So even though that's not where it's going to end up, that's where it can happily sit for a very long time.
00:19:44
Speaker
It's a really untested method of agriculture, especially in Australia with our labour costs and our economy. We really are seeing how it's going to work. On one hand, we're looking at a lot of fodder crops for the chickens and the cattle. We usually have beef cattle here as well.
00:20:09
Speaker
But then we're exploring other fruit crops that aren't necessarily available at the local farmers markets that we're trying to sell, which are like some berry crops and kiwis and things like that. Nice. And then we're also looking at pecans and macadamias are another one. And once they start dropping nuts, rather than trying to sell a nut where you just get paid on the quantity and there's no real, I mean, there is, but it's hard to
00:20:39
Speaker
kind of differentiate your quality product where we move towards, say, getting pigs to eat the nuts off the ground and then, you know, you can sell your premium pork then. That's a really interesting idea, isn't it? Yeah. Using those crops to sort of actually build another premium product, which I suppose is exactly what you're doing with your chickens.
00:21:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I think actually going back to your question on yield as well, because say for example, bananas. Bananas are what we call a medium strata, which means they're happy with about 60% shade. Now most bananas are grown in full sun and that's because they will give you a higher yield when they're in full sun. But the plant will be not as healthy and it requires annual fertilization
00:21:31
Speaker
and it might need chemical treatments or what have you because it's not in its happy place. So the thing is, so we might be getting a lower yield than those crops grown in the full sun, but you're getting a healthier plant, which means you don't need to look after it ongoing and you get a higher quality yield from it. It's just the quantity is less.
00:21:57
Speaker
That's the challenge of the system. We're in a system where you're rewarded for your quantity, not your quality for the most part.
00:22:04
Speaker
You're not spending the money on that fertilizer and on the pest sprays that other people do. So though you've got a smaller yield, you probably have a more premium product that you can charge more for and recoup that difference. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I guess the thing is that when the farmers go down to the pub, you don't talk about profit. You say, oh, I've got this 30 kilo bunch of bananas.
00:22:28
Speaker
Yeah. So, or, you know, I got so many tons to the hectare or, or what have you. It's, that's the kind of, that's the language. And then, so then you, you kind of, where everything is pushed is it's always yield, yield, yield and profits like an afterthought. How does the Centropic Agroforest diverge from, you know, the permaculture food forest? Where's the difference there?
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of primary differences and now this is not not all food forests are created the same obviously but in general I think that the yeah the main difference is looking at that successional aspect of it so that you're you're planting at the same time
00:23:15
Speaker
your short-term annuals so you have something that's in there for 45 days, 90 days, 180 days, 360 days, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years and at each stage you're cutting out and kind of and they're all helping each other as well like the plant that lives for 180 days enjoys having that shade for the first 45 days and so on and so forth so it's like a
00:23:41
Speaker
That's where I think it differs, where a lot of food forests are like, okay, I want to have a food forest of all these different fruit trees, and then you just put the fruit trees at their predetermined spacings, and then you have to whip the snip or whatever between them for however many years until that eventuates.
00:24:01
Speaker
And I think the other primary difference is the generation of all its own biomass as well, so all its own mulch and not needing yearly or seasonal fertilizations. Just through the species choice, you don't need to bring anything in to feed that forest.
00:24:24
Speaker
Fantastic. Now, what are some basic techniques that your kind of traditional farmers could take from syntropic agroforestries that they could implement into their existing farms without making a whole big switch? Yeah, so say if you grow one crop, grow two crops. So, you know, for example, there, I guess, going back a bit to this,
00:24:52
Speaker
Part of the thing that makes this tricky is that a lot of the machinery to make
00:25:01
Speaker
To implement these ideas on a larger scale, the machinery doesn't exist, unfortunately. But for example, say if your crop is rice, it's a medium strata as well, so it can tolerate up to, sorry, tolerate is not the right word, it enjoys up to 60% shade.
00:25:24
Speaker
So you could intercrop that between tree rows, which is exactly what we're doing. So say you could have any sort of tree crop in between, it could be mulberry, it could be bananas, it could be stone fruit or whatever, and then you can have
00:25:41
Speaker
rice in the alleys in between and then you know that's like a very simple centropic system but you're still growing two plants that are helping each other and you're getting a diversified yield.
00:25:55
Speaker
Nice. And what about the home gardener? What's a little combination that you've found works really well, you know, for people who don't even have that much space, let's say, just a back corner of their backyard that gets enough sun to sort of build something like this. What's a few little crops that just seem to work together as a system? Well, I guess the classic one is not just actually from the Sintropic Agroforestry, but it's one that we use a lot is corn.
00:26:24
Speaker
and then you have the climbing bends going out the corn and then either zucchini or
00:26:28
Speaker
say watermelon or pumpkin, or even you can still do zucchini and pumpkin as well, actually, because zucchini comes and goes before the pumpkin even really gets going. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's, what do they call that sort of three sisters or something? Or say, for example, in the, well, in our winter, in the subtropical winter, like a really awesome combo is you have radish.
00:26:55
Speaker
And so all these species that I've listed can literally be planted on top of each other too because of the different life cycle and life requirements. So you can start with radish that'll come and go within 30 days. You can sneak a lettuce in there too if it's a seedling. So it'll come and go within, say, 50 days.
00:27:18
Speaker
Then a brassica like broccoli, and then also some celery as well. And then the broccoli will come and go, and then your celery will happily grow in the shade of the broccoli. And then once you cut the broccoli out, the celery will start to come into its own. Fantastic. That sounds good, actually. I might try that. So moving on a little bit.
00:27:42
Speaker
Let's talk the business side of it. How much about what you do is sort of having to educate people about your produce and about your product?
00:27:51
Speaker
There is a big aspect of that. We find it more difficult to, that educational side of it around vegetables and your fresh produce than meat. I think society as a whole, especially around here, we're really at the forefront of realizing that animals have a huge part to play in regenerating our planet.
00:28:20
Speaker
and that actually opting not to eat them is actually, you know, kind of more damaging than not. So we've found the meat side of it a lot easier. I think also people kind of have a softer spot for animals. So they're kind of, they are willing to pay
00:28:42
Speaker
a premium in order for it to ensure that it's had a good life, whereas like a carrot or a broccoli is a little bit more inanimate. We've been lucky in some regards like what, so for example, our main market, the Mullen Bimby Farmer's Market, a good friend and mentor of ours, Andrew Cameron, used to
00:29:05
Speaker
So chickens there farmed in quite a similar way. And he did a lot of hard work there that kind of, that did a lot of that education for us. And so we've found as we've now opened up to new farmer's markets, we're finding that there is a lot of work in people being like, what the hell is the price of this chicken? Like I'm used to paying like six bucks in the supermarket.
00:29:36
Speaker
And you're like, well, okay, well, if you want your chicken to have a happy life, if you want it to regenerate the soil, and if you want it to actually be good for you when you eat it, this is what it costs to produce it.
00:29:53
Speaker
Let's dive deep into that a little bit. What is the main difference between your chicken in terms of sort of taste and texture and all of that between your chicken and, you know, your coals, six bucks a chicken, you know, what's what, how different are we in product?
00:30:12
Speaker
It's not even the same food. I actually didn't really like chicken much before we started farming like this. It's tasteless. The texture is weird. It's not that pleasant. You bury it in whatever else you're cooking it with and it takes on the flavour of that and then it's kind of okay.
00:30:37
Speaker
Ours is just, you know, you put it on the barbecue, a bit of salt and pepper or even if that and it's just so full of flavor and the thing that we get comments on the most is the juiciness and the texture. So it's like, you can really, you can just say that it's the life that they've had that kind of
00:31:00
Speaker
And also the death, the death is really important too. You can do the best job of raising this chicken, but if you don't give them a stress-free death, then you're going to have a poor quality meat as well. Nice. I have a quote here that the best chicken in the Byron Shire, I mean, that's got to feel pretty good to hear. Yeah, look, it is nice. We hear it, you know, week in, week out at the farmer's markets, which it really, you know, when you have
00:31:29
Speaker
there's always down weeks in farming and there's always challenges. I know it sounds a bit cliche, but honestly, going there and seeing every week people saying, it's the best chicken I've ever had. My favorite one is, it's like chicken used to taste when I was a kid. It really kind of, yeah, like,
00:31:55
Speaker
gives you the fire to keep doing what you're doing, to know that people just really genuinely appreciate what you do. Also, if they're coming back and spending that kind of premium price on your meat, you can just tell it immediately from that because if it didn't taste any different, they wouldn't be back, would they?
00:32:13
Speaker
Well, that's right. We've, you know, some of my funniest memories of people, you know, really grumbling over the price and okay, fine. Like just give it to me. And then next week they come back and they're like, that was amazing. I'll give me another one. Give me the biggest one you've got. And you know, now they do it every week. It's, but for some people it's just getting over that initial hurdle and it, and I don't blame them. It's just, you know, you, you used to seeing the price of it and
00:32:43
Speaker
people don't really know what goes into industrial chicken farming but I guarantee you if they saw it most people wouldn't eat it. 100% now okay this actually might be a bit of a silly question but do the chickens take on the flavor profiles of the foods that they're foraging? Not as such but there's been a lot of scientific studies to show that meat, so when an animal has a
00:33:13
Speaker
a wide variety in their diet, that would taste better. So they're getting their feed ration, which they need because they need protein to grow. But because they're foraging on such a wide variety of insects and then different grasses, different weeds, yeah, so they're getting a huge variety of stuff. So that's certainly a big part of it as well.
00:33:39
Speaker
Well, let's start with the life cycle of your chickens from hatching through to, you know, their death and into the markets. What is the life
Chickens in Syntropic Agroforestry
00:33:48
Speaker
cycle of your chickens? So we get them as day olds and then depending on the season because they do grow faster depending on, yeah, the daylight hours and the warmth, be seven or eight weeks or sometimes even nine in the middle of winter, but more typical is eight.
00:34:08
Speaker
Like I said earlier, instead of having your market garden here and your chickens here and then your regen area here, by having it all together, we can run our chickens over many weeks they're in the field. And then after that, in some cases they'll go directly under our trees
00:34:32
Speaker
and where they've been becomes future cropping areas. So we've been trialing, you know, how to best crop after the chicken. So, you know, we're pretty happy with, we feel like we've come across a pretty good system where we can now grow our
00:34:52
Speaker
our veggie crops after the chickens with absolutely no inputs whatsoever. That's pretty exciting because most organic farming, you're heavily reliant on bought in compost, which is your carbon footprint there, soil amendments, which are mined, lime, which is mined, which is, I mean, limes actually, it's pretty low intensive the way it's mined, but yeah.
00:35:21
Speaker
They're all things that if for one reason or another, it wasn't so easy to get everything you need, which kind of we're actually seeing the COVID now, it's pretty much impossible to get anything that's imported. We have a system that can stand alone on itself and we can grow food without basically relying on something external.
00:35:42
Speaker
That's great. With planting the veg straight after, do you let the beds sit for a little bit before you plant veg or do you just go straight in?
00:35:53
Speaker
Um, there's a few, it depends on the area. Um, so sometimes they'll be on an existing pasture and then we'll come and we'll deep rip and we'll rotary home and we'll create a bed. Um, other ones where we're, which we're doing right now, which is looking really good so far as that we had a winter cover crop in of, you know, maybe four or six different species of cover crop.
00:36:21
Speaker
And then they trampled that down and, you know, manure it all over the top of it. And then we're planted directly into that. Nice. We're just a bit of broad forking to, to, or, you know, if it was a much larger bed, we would have deep ripped it because they can, because there's so many chickens, they can leave a bit of compaction behind. So that's the one thing we've found that we, the,
00:36:44
Speaker
We tried a no-till thing after the chickens and it didn't really work. And I think it's because of that compaction. Yeah, right. And I think too chickens, don't they? It's almost like too nitrogenous for some plants. You sort of have to let that kind of decompose down a little bit. Or as you say, if you're tilling, I suppose you're doing that in itself. You're kind of just turning that over a little. Yeah, that's right. I think that that's...
00:37:12
Speaker
From what I can see in my experience here, it's not necessarily the case that chicken manure, we apply it raw all the time or we apply it raw like the chickens do it themselves within our system. I think the key to it is having a healthy biology that can digest it.
00:37:34
Speaker
So I must admit I haven't tried it on short-term veggie crops, but say things like, yeah, like ginger, turmeric, asparagus, they just absolutely love it. Taro, even cassava, things like that. They just, they go absolutely gangbusters. Like I've seen
00:37:57
Speaker
The first time I did it, when I put the chickens in the tree rows, I had this one row that was just going so badly that I didn't really know what was wrong with it. I was like, oh, maybe the soil over here is a bit weird or whatever. So I thought, oh, you know what? As my first experiment, I'll chuck the chickens in here, and if they completely wreck it, who cares? And then within about six weeks after they'd gone, it was the best ginger on the whole patch. It was amazing.
00:38:24
Speaker
Okay, cool, let's do this. Full steam ahead with that one. Yeah, great. How can we support Misty Creek at Grow Forestry? So you're at the Mullumbimby markets? Yep. Yeah, we're at the at the Moolumbar farmers markets as well and
00:38:40
Speaker
We're trying to expand our home delivery service. We're getting a few spanners in the works just with some other logistical things. Sure. But we did start a CSA program, so we just ran out a first ever four deliveries of chickens.
00:39:04
Speaker
where for CSA, for people who don't know, it's called community supported agriculture. Basically, the eaters, they pay upfront for their food for a set amount of deliveries, which we then deliver. That was actually
00:39:22
Speaker
was a real blessing for our business because we, you know, we pay everything upfront, um, the feed for the chickens, the staff wages, all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, eight weeks later we collect it. So especially with COVID that people are getting really used to this home delivery thing, including food. Not everyone can go to the farmer's markets. So we've found it's been really, really popular. We just need to figure out how we can make it work for us.
00:39:49
Speaker
I really hope to see many, many more farms like yours popping up across the country. I think it's really important that we're eating local food that's produced locally. And I just think you're doing really good work. A big thank you to you for coming on the show, Tom. Yeah, cool. Thank you, Michael.
Support and Engagement Options
00:40:12
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining me today team. You can follow all of Tom's adventures at mistycreek.com.au and mistycreek.agroforestry on Instagram. You can follow the pod at Growing Media Oz and I'm Michael Haw, M-Y-K-A-L-H-O-A-R-E on Instagram.
00:40:33
Speaker
If you feel so inclined, you can help support the pod for as little as a dollar an episode on our Patreon. If not, a five star review or mentioning growing media to a couple of your mates will make me even more happy, let's be honest. Of course, all of these links are in the show notes below. Okay, well, hooroo, see you in a fortnight.