Hi, I’m Jim. I’m an engineer, not a doctor or a nutritionist or a dietician. In fact, I have no formal medical training whatsoever.
But I’ve been interested in health and wellness for decades. And the more I learn about it, the more I learn that the medical professions don’t know how to prevent disease, only treat it.
It all started in the 90s when I contracted Glandular Fever. My health was never the same after that. I was fine, but I was never the same.
After that I tried to work out how to stay healthy. But there really wasn’t much reliable information and there was a lot of conflicting advice.
About the year 2000 I came across some work on the necessity of minerals in the human body, and their relationship to health. This made sense to me, and I started taking supplements. They helped, but they weren’t the full picture.
At the same time, we started a backyard garden, and I learned that herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilisers are (quite frankly) awful! I also started figuring out how to make compost, and the importance of mulch. And as I did this the soil in our garden got better, turned from a red colour to a deep dark chocolate colour, and smelled rich and earthy. Our plants were healthier, and over time suffered less insect attack, and weeds slowly became less of a problem.
It was a joy to spend time in that garden.
As we continued our fresh fruit and vegetables got better and better. And our meals got yummier and yummier. And then we moved house…
So, in 2006 we moved to Port Pire, and then a few years later we moved to Darwin. In 2011 we moved to Whyalla and started gardening in earnest. In a year or two we had turned the backyard of our quarter acre block into a fruit and vegetable jungle. But (you guessed it) in 2014 we moved again. This time we got serious about it. We bought a farm!
We saw our farm and fell in love with it. We knew that this was the place for us. Neither of us had any intention of being farmers or living on the land. But hey, this was a decision of the heart, and we’d figure out the rest of it as we went along.
Well, a quarter acre block is one thing. 70 acres is quite another!
So, I started researching in earnest. I knew that I didn’t want to grow crops and pour chemicals all over the place. But what was the alternative? I was determined to find it, and make it work.
I came across the work of great minds and pioneers in Regenerative Agriculture and attended various seminars and workshops. And one thing kept coming up time and time again. Ecosystem health, animal health, plant health and human health all start with the health of the soil.
If you have poor soil health you cannot grow healthy plants, so you need synthetic chemicals to “fix” up the problems. However, the chemicals cause more problems than they solve. And you are stuck on a roundabout of adding more and more chemicals, to fix the problems caused by adding the chemicals in the first place. But stop adding the chemicals, and start adding biodiversity, and things turn around. Just like it did in our backyard garden.
The way became clear to me. Biological systems are healthy and sustainable. Natural systems are self-healing, if you give them the chance.
And then I learned about the role of microbes in natural ecosystems.
I learned that healthy soils must have a complete network of organisms (from viruses, bacteria and archaea to earthworms and beetles) supporting everything that grows in and on the soil. And that includes humans. Without the microbes the rest of the system breaks down and results in diseases and pests. But with everything in place, health and healing is built into the fabric of life.
This changed the way I thought about farming. It changed the way I looked at natural systems. It changed the way I thought about health and wellness.
So now we run a regenerative farm using animals on pasture to help increase biodiversity and heal the soil. We have lots of native plants that are “coming back”, and increasing numbers and species of birds, reptiles, insects and mammals. We don’t use synthetic chemicals, we don’t poison things, we don’t dose our animals with antibiotics, and we love what we do. We focus on growing things, not poisoning things, and we love the results we are seeing.