Out of the ashes with multi species pasture cropping expert Col Seis

Ground Cover

Today, Kerry chats with Colin Seis; a mixed farmer from the Gulgong area of New South Wales. Col has come from a traditional cropping and grazing family and experienced an ecological crash back in the 1970s. This set them up to be quite vulnerable to the bushfires that came afterwards.

In those fires, Col lost everything and was badly burned. He had rebuild everything from the ground up. And he started to think about the future survival of himself, his family and his farm. So his focus quickly changed to low input agriculture and focussed on what he could do differently to remain resilient in the future.

This is a real story of the phoenix rising... how one farming family faced adversity and came out of the ashes with new innovative methods for our future farming generations

In this episode we explore:

• the innovative land management technique; multi species pasture cropping
• low and no input agriculture
• holistic grazing management
• and the importance of plant and species diversity

More about Col:

Colin Seis and Daryl Cluff pioneered 'pasture cropping' in 1993 and since that time. Col ha find tuned and improved the technique on his farm, Winona. Due to this it is now possible to frow many different types of winter and summer sown crops, without destoing the perennial pasture base. The practice has now spread to all states of Australia and in a growing number of countries worldwide.

Pasture Cropping is an innovative land management technique that enables annual crops to be grown opportunistically into dormant perennial pastures or pastures whose competitive capacity have temporarily been suppressed by grazing, and/or selective herbicides to enable the successful growth of annual crops.

Col has seen the need for fast tracking improvement in degraded soil and grassland as well as producing crops for human consumption or stock feed. Since 2010 he has been developing 'multi species pasture cropping' with the aim of producing better quality forage and improving soil health even more than single species pasture cropping.