Kate Field is a co-founder of Leap Farm, a 300-acre award-winning family farm in Tasmania. Together with her husband, Kate implements regenerative farming techniques to produce their signature cheese and to raise goats and cattle. Kate is also the host and producer of “The Curious Farmer” podcast in which she explores the topic of regenerative agriculture. How did Kate and her husband come to own their independent farm? What changes to the land have they observed since taking an ecological approach to farming? Let's find out.
Kate Field is a co-founder of Leap Farm, a 300-acre award-winning family farm in Tasmania. Together with her husband, Kate implements regenerative farming techniques to produce their signature cheese and to raise goats and cattle.
Kate is also the host and producer of “The Curious Farmer” podcast in which she explores the topic of regenerative agriculture.
How did Kate and her husband come to own their independent farm?
What changes to the land have they observed since taking an ecological approach to farming?
Let's find out.
LINKS
Thank you for listening.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues and consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (Click on “Listen on Apple Podcasts.”). Your review brings attention to the significant contributions independent environmental education professionals make to the field and society.
Talaterra Podcast
Episode 61 - Kate Field, Regenerative Farming
Tania Marien:
Welcome to Talaterra, a podcast about freelance educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. Who are these educators? What do they do? Join me and let's find out together. This is your host, Tania Marien. Hello, and welcome to a new season for the Talaterra podcast. What's new is that this podcast will now be published every two weeks. This change is being made so that Talaterra's other initiatives can continue to be developed and implemented, and so that these other initiatives and this podcast can continue to complement each other.
Tania Marien:
I'm excited to kick off this new season with a conversation with Kate Field. Kate Field is a regenerative farmer. And she's also a curious farmer. Kate is on a quest to discover how to grow, shop and eat food while keeping the planet healthy. As she explores the field of regenerative farming, she takes people along on her journey through her podcast called, what else, The Curious Farmer. Kate is also the Co-founder of Leap Farm, a 300 acre family farm she manages with her husband Iain in Tasmania. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Kate Field. Your ecological approach to farming, the choices that you make to improve your land and keep the planet healthy suggests to me that you have your own long-standing relationship with nature. What is your earliest memory of enjoying nature?
Kate Field:
I don't think anyone has ever asked me that question previously. I don't think I have a specific memory of enjoying nature, per se. I have cultivated or had cultivated in me, I guess, a love of gardening and being outside and being amongst plants and soil. To the point when I was a small kid, I'd wake up at six or so in the morning, and the rest of the household would be asleep, and I would get up, make myself some breakfast, and I'd go out into the garden. Because that's all I wanted to do on Saturdays and Sundays when I wasn't at school, was be in the garden.
Kate Field:
That was a love that, obviously, filtered through my parents or my mother and also my grandfather, who was a really pivotal role in my life. He had an amazing veggie patch. And when we'd traveled to where he lived, the first thing we'd do is rush out to the back of the veggie patch and dig up the carrots and eat them. Sometimes we'd wash the dirt off, sometimes we wouldn't. So I've always been in touch with the outdoors, even on our suburban block growing up just outside of Melbourne.
Tania Marien:
When did you realize nature was important to you?
Kate Field:
I've always felt happiest outside, at the beach, on other people's farms in rural areas. It's always felt like home. When I was a child, I grew up as I said in Melbourne. It's a city. When I was there, it was about three, three and a half million. I think it's closer to four and a half million people. That's Australia's second biggest city. I didn't enjoy living there. Fabulous place with lots of culture and fashion and food, fabulous art galleries, access to orchestras, ballet, drama, so much that you can do, but it never felt quite like it was my place. I wasn't happy there in my teens.
Kate Field:
I managed to get to Tasmania for university studies. And the moment that I first got into Hobart and was moving from the airport into the city, there's a big sweeping bend where you see Mount Wellington that sits above Hobart. And I saw that and I just felt, I've come home. I am immediately felt like I'd found my place in the world. Hobart at that stage had about 150,000 people in it. So it was much more like a large regional town. And it very much had that feel about it. It was really fun to be in Hobart in the mid-90s when I first came here. It's quite a different town now. It's a little bigger. Not much bigger, but so much has changed in the 25 years since I first came here.
Tania Marien:
What did you study at university?
Kate Field:
I studied medicine, actually. So that was a six-year degree when I did it. And in my final year of medical school, I was playing University sport. And I was playing on the women's side. It was preseason training, and I saw this dishy bloke who could catch the ball, and we were playing rugby union at the time. I'd not met him before and I thought this is a bit odd. I hadn't seen this bloke before. I hadn't met him. So I asked one of the girls on my team, "Who's that blonde bloke over there?" That's Iain. He's a [pom 00:06:15]. He's so arrogant. And I went, "All right. Okay." And I got to meet him and I've found him the most incredibly fascinating person that I've ever spoken to.
Kate Field:
I think very quickly fell madly in love. And eventually both of us disentangled ourselves from failing, flopping around relationships. And when we finally got ourselves sorted, we actually got together. And that was in my final year of medical school. He was doing a PhD at University at the time. And as a result of that relationship, I thought I won't head back to Melbourne because I'd been pretty set on a highly professional career, and I decided instead to stick around Tassie. I'm really glad I did because add on years down the track, we're married, we've got two kids and then we've got a farm and we're pretty happy. So good decision at the time that led me on a very different journey from the one I had carved out in my own brain.
Tania Marien:
In addition to being a farmer, you are also an emergency physician?
Kate Field:
Yes.
Tania Marien:
When I first learned that you also had a farm and that you were an emergency physician, it seems like your role as a physician keeps you so busy. I was so impressed that you also had a very busy large farm and I was wondering, how do you manage your time between those two professions?
Kate Field:
It's always a source of tension for myself. I always feel like I'm never doing the other the justice it deserves. And sometimes I get into my career mode where I think, and I could do this in the future, and I could do this in the future, and I could do that in the future. And then I think about the cost of doing those things, and how that will then impact on my life on the farm and my life as a wife and mother. And then other times, I get really excited to be on the farm and think about how much more I could do and how much more I could give to the farm world. And then I think about the cost of that, about the financial cost as well as the cost to my career.
Kate Field:
So I sort of muddle along between the two. I feel like I'm fully committed to both, but can't progress either as far ahead as I would potentially like if I didn't have the other. But at the same time, one is the perfect foil for the other. So when I go to work, I go to work, I do my job, and I come home. And when I'm at home, I'm fully at home because I have to be immersed in our life, and our life on the farm. And that gives me such a great reprieve from emergency medicine, and patients and illness and disease and death and wonderful joy as well there. And the farm is usually a very joyous place. Occasionally, there are times of great sadness as well.
Kate Field:
When I'm on the farm, and I'm up to my elbows, I'm not thinking about work. When I'm at work, I have to be wholly present, and I'm not thinking about the farm. And I just find that the social side of my work is also, I find very fulfilling, because farming can be quite a lonely pursuit. So both complement the other in a way.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. At what stage of your career as a physician did you and your husband decide to start a farm?
Kate Field:
We talked about it before I'd even finished medical school. We talked about farming one day, but that was a one day, one day. Because he had his career in science. I think we both rather liked the idea of it, but that was something that we do when we retired. Then when we moved to Darwin, which is right up in Northern Australia, right in the middle, but up the very top on the coast. We heard about a buffalo farm that was closing down and we sort of talked about buffalo and milk and the byproducts being the meat, the buffalo meat. And we sort of joked about what a great opportunity that would have been had we been in a position to do something about it.
Kate Field:
At the time, I was still training, still specializing. And he was completing his first postdoc. So that was just a conversation that we'd have in the evenings over a cup of tea. Then we moved to Sydney, and things were going quite well for us. I got my specialty qualification. He was doing really well with his science work, but we weren't really happy. We were in by this stage, Australia's biggest city. So with one in five other Australians living around us and there's a whole lot of traffic. It was just very impersonal. We weren't really connected to the community. It was really hard to find those connections.
Kate Field:
We lived there for nearly three years and we came away with two friends that we still keep in contact with. And I think that's ... And we're not unfriendly people. We just didn't find our sense of community there. And we both missed that. We had a great community in Hobart before we left. We had a great community in Darwin when we lived there, but we lacked that in Sydney. And I think that is very disquieting. It made me realize how important local communities to your health and to understanding your place and having those connections with people is so important, and it's something that we really need to invest in.
Kate Field:
He was pretty upset with working at University. He was getting sick of the way the Australian Government was removing funding from science because our political leader at that time was climate change denier. Very, very difficult environment for Iain. I hadn't found my place in emergency medicine in Sydney. And so we decided to move back to Hobart and Iain decided on a career change. We were making cheese as a hobby at home in our kitchen. We were making some quite good cheeses. We decided that we could do this. But to make cheese you need milk and to get milk you need animals. And we wanted to ensure the health and well-being of animals as a priority. And we felt that the only way that we could ensure that the milk was quality milk from happy animals was to have our own farm. So we just decided one day to buy a farm. It kind of was a bit like that.
Tania Marien:
Oh, my goodness. And what was Iain's specialty when he was teaching? Is it AgroSciences or?
Kate Field:
Yes. Well, sort of not really. He was a marine vertebrate ecologist. So he used to go down to Antarctica in the Subantarctic and work on marine vertebrates. So seabirds, but mostly Weddell and elephant seals. So he was used to handling large animals. He had developed some great veterinary skills as well working alongside wildlife vets. And he had some great relationships with some of those vets. In particular, one who worked rurally in South Australia when he was working. And he specialized in cows and his wife who was also a vet specialized in goats.
Kate Field:
So Iain an Andy would talk extensively in that long, cold winter or Antarctic nights when they were out in the field in the hats with nothing else to do about a whole lot of farm ideas. But Iain's a main teach ... He was teaching at the university, as well as researching. And he was teaching ecology. So really understanding systems in nature. And one of the things that he's always said was he felt like somewhat of a fraud standing up lecturing students about farm and agroecology, and that was part of the teaching that he was required to do. And part of having a farm was that he was then able to practice good ecological practices on a daily basis. And that's been fantastic for him. And that big system thinking has been really beneficial for our farm.
Tania Marien:
Okay. So you return to Tasmania and start looking for form right away. And how did you find your current [inaudible 00:16:06]?
Kate Field:
We didn't actually return to Tassie, we bought a farm online.
Tania Marien:
Okay. How did you do that?
Kate Field:
There's a great website in Australia called realestate.com.au. And pretty much everyone lists their property for sale on this website. So we were just perusing the websites in the evenings. And we were looking in certain areas that we wanted to live. Iain's family had moved from the UK to Hobart. So we wanted to be around Hobart and that's where the university was. That's where a lot of our friends and their young families were living as well. So we were quite keen on living in the vicinity of Hobart. And there are a couple of areas that were particularly close to our hearts because we'd really enjoyed the beauty of those areas.
Kate Field:
We saw this property come up for sale online. And I actually went to a conference in San Francisco. And while I was there, I think I was only there for six or seven days. But while I was there, Iain flew from Sydney to Hobart, had a car, drove to the farm, had a look at it. We had a chat about it. Came home, I came home. We went away for a couple of days, and we put an offer in and it was accepted. So it wasn't sight unseen by him, but it was by me.
Tania Marien:
And what were your first impressions of the farm then? Were what?
Kate Field:
I felt very lucky and had a lot of gratitude for the fact that we'd been able to do this. It's really, really expensive. I don't know what it's like in the States. But in Australia, land is expensive, and it's getting more and more expensive, which is making it really, really difficult for young people to move into agriculture. And a lot of the people who farm, second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh generation farmers, neither of us have a farming background. We've got families who have had farms in the past, extended family, but his parents didn't farm, my parents didn't farm, and we had no family to bequeath us farms.
Kate Field:
So we had to sell all assets and borrow money to be able to farm. We made a decision that we weren't going to say external investment in any way, shape or form through our operation. And that's largely because we didn't want to have our actions dictated by an investor looking for a return on their investment in a certain timeframe. And that was incredibly important to us to be able to farm the way want to, without expecting an overnight return on investment.
Tania Marien:
Okay. You purchased the farm in 2012. What was the land like? And now that you've had eight years of applying your ecological principles and your own practices and setting up your own systems, how has the land changed, or has it changed?
Kate Field:
It probably has changed. It's hard to see when you live here on the farm every day. You really need to look back at photographs over time. It's been an interesting eight years that we've been here. We're just coming out of a drought. So we're on the lower east coast of Tasmania and the whole east coast of Tassie has been interrupt for at least three years, probably below average rainfall for five or six of the eight years that we've been on the farm. And that's been quite challenging.
Kate Field:
So when I first looked at the farm, which was in December in 2011, the grass in the past year was up to my waist. And there were pretty much no fences there and I had cattle on there and about 300 goats that were quite small that we're there to help manage weeds. And the external fences were okay, but just okay. And since we've moved on to the farm, we've had five or six years of below average rainfall. We've had the fences just aging and clapping out. We've changed the goats from the range land cashmere breed that were quite small to our milking dairy goats.
Kate Field:
We've decreased the stocking density of the cattle. But over time that creeps up and then we have a big sort of decrease in our numbers again, and then over time that gradually builds up. But it's been quite challenging with the conditions, and that's actually hampered our ability to do certain things. We've managed to lock up areas of remnant Eucalyptus forest, which is quite rare, and it's associated with a spring that is on the farm. So we've managed to fence that and exclude the stock from that. And what we're seeing there is after seven years, we're seeing the eucalyptus forests start to encroach now on the old pastured land.
Kate Field:
We've seen an increase in biodiversity of animals, Australian-native animals are On the property, which I think is really, really exciting. But then there are other areas of the property, which I think are actually deteriorating because we haven't adequately fenced them from there from the stock, and we need to do some more work there. So we make gains in one area and losses in another. So it's not yet at the place that either of us wanted. But we only have finite resources to be able to invest in things like fencing. Fencing is 11 Aussie dollars a meter. And that's just incredibly expensive. Now the Australian dollar is doing really poorly today against the greenback, but that's about two thirds of that is what it would be in US dollars, two thirds to three quarters. So $8 a meter, I guess. It's really expensive.
Tania Marien:
Are you keeping a field guide of what lives on your farm?
Kate Field:
No, but we often take photos and we often talk about things. So we've identified wombat burrows, where they reside at night. We see two or three different species of wallaby. I saw a potoroo the other day. We've got antechinus. I saw a platypus a couple of years ago. We've got echidnas. Quolls, spotted quolls which are really exciting because they only occur in Tasmania. I know that there are Tasmanian devils which a threatened species. They might actually be on the endangered list now. There was a lot of work that was being done because they had an infectious facial tumor in Tasmania, and our district is quite close to quite a protected area where they were able to keep the facial tumor out. So what we're seeing now is that Tasmanian Devils are repopulating in our local district. I haven't seen them on our farm yet, but I know they're in our district, which is also super exciting.
Kate Field:
We've got endangered bird species as well. So we've got nesting wedge-tailed eagles which is Australia's largest flight bird. And they've produced quite a few ... We see them produce fledglings every spring. We've also got the are orange-bellied, no, not the orange-bellied parrot. We've got swift parrots and musk lorikeets, which aren't endangered but they're rather noisy and wonderful as well. So lots and lots of wildlife. We've only got a very, very small farm by Australian standards, tiny compared to our neighbors on either side as well. So we're just doing what we can to try and help it all fit into the rest of the landscaping and district.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. Well, as you call it, your tiny farm you're in, in 2019 Leap Farm received the Small Producer of the Year award. And this award is given to small farming businesses, which produce either fresh fruit or vegetables or meat in an ethical, sustainable and small scale method. What do you produce on your farm?
Kate Field:
Our primary produce that we manufacture on the farm is our cheese. So the majority of our income comes from our cheese sales. So I call Iain a cheese farmer because not only does he ... I mean, he's more than full-time farmer and I'm a part-time farmer really. But he melts the goats here, he manages the farm, he takes milk and turns it into cheese. I do a lot of the marketing of the cheese and we really believe in direct to consumer sales. So he manages the food service side of selling the cheese and I help with the management of the retail side of the cheese. But really the cheese, he's the cheese person, and I tend to stick more to the meat side of our business.
Kate Field:
So as I'm sure pretty much everyone's aware of dairy, that in order to be able to produce milk, a female and a mammal needs to have a baby. Goats tend to have twins. They generally have a boy and a girl. Statistically sometimes we have more girls sometimes we have more boys. But as our herd size grows, we're finding that statistically it evens out. And we get about 52% girls and about 48% boys, which is similar to what happens in the human population actually. But what we do is we've made a decision that none of our animals are a waste product or a byproduct of the industry. And so we keep all our kids and we keep the does, the goat does as well.
Kate Field:
So the girls will get milked in the morning, and then after milking, they are reunited with their kids. And as a herd, they go out into the pasture on our property. Hopefully, just our property. At night, they come home and we give them some food. We separate the girls from the kids, the kids go into their house, the girls go into their house. They shed it at night and we have a floor that's made out of concrete with the drain in it, but then it has hay over-ish. And every day we just add a fresh layer of hay. So at night they trample on the hay, they wee, they poo. And that process once we put fresh, clean hay over everything every evening so that they've got a nice soft bed to lie on. That process starts a composting reaction. So it produces heat because that's exothermic.
Kate Field:
What happens is that inside the hay floor, it's about 50 degrees, but on the surface, it's probably about 25 degrees. So it's like they're sitting on an electric blanket. What that means is because they're warm, and they're out of the elements, that all their energy goes into producing more milk. They also produce more milk because their kids suckle all day in the pasture before they're in. So we have less problems with metastasis because they've constantly got milk draining during the day, and we also have really good production of milk. So we get as much milk from our does as dairies that milk twice a day.
Kate Field:
What that means is that when we've got 70, 80 girls that have kidded in the spring, we've usually got about 160 kids, and we can't support 160 kids. So we work out which girls we want to keep as replacement stock or if we decide to grow our herd a little bit more. And we label them separately. And then the rest we grow on to reach a reasonable size where it's worthwhile sending them to the abattoir for meat. So we have goat meat as well as goat cheese. And the other thing that we need to do is to manage our pasture. We also have cashel. And so we have cows. We did have a bull. We've recently retired our bull, and we'll have to get another one, but we also calf as well.
Kate Field:
And so with our meat, we tend to sell direct to our customer base as well. We don't like putting animals through sale yards because they have to be transported. They have to sit around, they have to be transported again, and we don't know where they're going to end up. So occasionally, when we have to de-stock, we will send animals to the sale yards but generally we try to keep them on farm until it's time for them to go.
Tania Marien:
And then your customers are restaurants, they're stores?
Kate Field:
So are restaurants mostly in Tasmania, occasionally. We do have one regular restaurant who takes out cheese that's in Melbourne that's specialized in Tasmanian produce. But at restaurants take some of our cheese. We have couple of shops that take our cheese for retail sales as well. But otherwise it's us selling products at farmer's markets. And we prefer that because it means that we get to have a conversation with people about our products. And there's nothing that either of us enjoy much more than watching people try our products and just go, that just tastes amazing.
Kate Field:
This isn't like the goat cheese that I've had before. And we're like, yeah, that's because the goat cheese that you had before is mass produced without the love, the care, the intention. And they'll say, "Where's your farm?" And we say, "Look over there." We point to the other side of the hill from our local farmers market. And they're like, "What? That's your farm?" I'm like, "Yeah. See those little sort of pale brown specks in the paddock, they're our goats. They're out there eating the pasture. Eating the weeds." And people love that. And so do I.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. Do you offer tours or visits to your farm?
Kate Field:
We're always happy. We have nothing to hide. We want people to be able to see how the animals are. To be able to see that there in the pasture. We're not just paying lip service to it. So people can contact us, and if it works out for both parties, more than happy to have them come and give them a bit of a tour. Sometimes people contact us to buy cheese from us directly on the farm. We don't have a farm gate as such properly set up at this stage. We're just too busy to have got around to it yet. So yeah, we do, do some farm tours. It's amazing how few people take you up on the offer when you make the offer.
Kate Field:
When people know that you've got nothing to hide, they don't feel that they have to check. It's only if you refuse to let people onto your farm that they'll wonder what on earth is going on there and want to have a closer look. It's really interesting psychology. But we're always, always happy to have anyone, particularly people who buy our products who want to come and save themselves. I have done some or we have done some open days in the past. And a couple of years ago, we had a long table lunch in the paddock and sold tickets to that. And that went really well actually. And I'm thinking about doing it again, but it's so much work.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. So you teach at your farmers markets, you teach on the farm and in March you launched the podcast, The Curious Farmer and you teach through your podcast as well. Why did you decide to start a podcast and what do you hope to do with the podcast?
Kate Field:
I really like the sound of my own voice. No. That's not the real reason. No. Towards the end of last year or maybe in 2019, before COVID happened, I really felt like farmers were being given a really hard time by a well-meaning but somewhat misinformed public. The plant based movement is gaining a lot of traction around the world for some really, really good reasons. But what we were seeing in Australia were militant style tactics, and basically disrespectful behavior by certain groups who were storming onto people's farms. Particularly, small farmers and the people who were trying to do a really good job and really look after their animals well.
Kate Field:
And they were trespassing and they were damaging property and damaging reputations. And often they were picking on ... It felt like, from an outside perspective anyway, it felt like they were picking on the more vulnerable smaller farmers as well. And this made me really cross and really frustrated for those individuals who were being treated, I think, unfairly. And the militant activities were given very minor kind of reprimands by our legal system, which was even more frustrating because it was almost condoning the behavior. In addition to that, there was a lot of press in the media. And I think this was internationally not just in Australia, that the whole reason that we have climate change is because of agriculture.
Kate Field:
And that agriculture leads to the most carbon emissions and agriculture's the problem, and all farmers are bad was what it felt like when I was reading this information. And it made me a little sad, it made me really angry, and it made me feel really frustrated that people didn't value food. I still don't think people value food as much as they should. So around the time of or in between World War I and World War II, I think, people were spending about 25% of their household income on food. Today in Australia, it's about 10%. And in the USA, it's 6%. And I'm not talking about everyone, this is average. 6% of your income is spent on food as opposed to one quarter. So of course, food doesn't hold the same value that it used to.
Kate Field:
And food has changed. So much of what people eat, it's not even recognizable as food. Our grandparents wouldn't recognize. My grandfather would have turned 109 last week. The stuff that is produced, he wouldn't recognize as food anymore. I agree with him. Frankly, I don't actually think that food. Certainly, it's not always nutritious. I think we need to change the conversation in the community away from agriculture is bad to agriculture can be part of the climate change solution, and this is how we do it. And what we need to do is we need to celebrate the farmers that are helping to provide food and fiber and climate solution. And we also need to create a consumer demand so that industrial farming practices are not rewarded the way they currently are rewarded.
Kate Field:
We need everybody who buys food to demand better practice in agriculture. And the only way we can do that is to stop pointing the finger at farmers, and actually start pointing the finger at ourselves and say, what are we willing to pay because climate change is a global issue. Every human being is going to pay in one way or another for climate change. And if we say that agriculture is the worst of the climate change contributors, then as a society, we need to say, well, how can we help the farmers whose food we need to eat to help prevent the carbon emissions?
Kate Field:
So that's really why the podcast started. Because I want to drive consumers to ask the questions, to understand how food is manufactured. To understand that farmers, be thy conventional farmers or regenerative farmers or industrial farmers, they're not bad people. They're only behaving the way that we, the community around them, is demanding that they behave. So that's why we to change the conversation, and that's why I started the podcast.
Tania Marien:
So far you have, in your podcasts, you really you're giving voice, you've given voice to lots of different people with lots of different approaches. You've had conversation with a chef who's changed how he works with local growers, and then in turn has changed how he runs his kitchen. You've talked about community partnerships. You've talked about a dairy farm that transformed their practices.
Tania Marien:
You've talked about permaculture, of course regenerative farming. You've talked about holistic planned grazing and soil health. You've talked about someone who grows a fantastic vegetable patch, and you talk about how that is an example of small scale regenerative farming. And you also speak with young farmers and so you speak about the future. And you mentioned that the average age of the former is 58 in Australia, I think it is that you said.
Kate Field:
Yeah. 58, 59. It might even be slightly older now. I'm not quite sure what the statistics are right now. I know that it's late 50s, early 60s, and I know it's the same in the US as well. And what we're seeing is we're seeing people who have been farming their entire lives, who are now coming to the end of their working careers, for many of them, and we're at a really pivotal point in time because they've been working so damn hard. Most of their kids don't want to get onto the farm. So what are they going to do with their land? Land it's going to need to be sold and land is incredibly expensive.
Kate Field:
So what we're going to see is that large investment companies are going to be buying the land, because people don't want to get into farming, and the people that do don't have the financial resources to do so. And those investment companies are going to be driven by profit. And the best way to make profit in farming is to have a high input, high productivity. I shouldn't say that this is the best way. I don't think it's the best way personally. But traditionally, what people say is the best way to make money is to have large scale conventional industrial farming operations that basically mine the soil for carbon in the air to go into vegetable or make production.
Kate Field:
I think that's really problematic because we're going to lose food security, we're going to lose food sovereignty and we're going to lose it to corporations. And they're only interested in making money for shareholders. So once again, the rich are going to get richer, the poor get poorer. And we as members of communities are going to lose access to food security. One thing that I think that has been really, incredibly beneficial this year, and the horror of COVID-19, I can hardly begin to fathom. We just haven't experienced the horror that is occurring in the US, the UK and a few other countries around the world.
Kate Field:
But one of the great benefits of silver linings, I think, has been that people have started to value what's important in life. They're valuing food security, where their food comes from, local food production systems. They're valuing toilet paper, the valuing childcare, education and those that work in health professional. I mean, that's great for me as a farmer and a health professional. But I think it's focusing people on what truly is important in life. And family. People are reconnecting with family and reconnecting with their communities. And those are some of the great benefits that have occurred out of this global pandemic. But at such a cost. Such a cost. A personal cost for so many people.
Tania Marien:
You mentioned in one of your episodes that younger people are entering farming with different ideas about farming and climate change. Do you see in your future at some point you yourself working with younger farmers? You mentioned also in one of your episodes, a role that I had not thought about until you mentioned it, which is regenerative consultant. Which I assume is a teacher of farming practices as yours with following certain ecological principles. Do you see yourself in that type of a role perhaps in the future?
Kate Field:
I hadn't seen myself in that role as a defined role as someone who looks at other people's operations and consults for a fee. That's not a role I've ever seen myself. And I feel like I am scratching the surface. That's why the podcast, The Curious Farmer, the more I learn, the more questions I have and the more trails I have to follow to get more answers. So I don't feel like an expert in anything in regards to regenerative farming, and it's not something I would see myself doing in the near future.
Kate Field:
What I do want to do, though, is Want to encourage people to have conversations otherwise that we can improve food sovereignty and local food systems through new mechanisms such as share farming and community farming. There's some great examples out there. We live in a society where it's so easy to disrupt the status quo with a fantastic idea. And I have so much hope and I get so much joy from talking to people in their teens and their 20s who are not bound by the same rules that my generation have always played by. They've grown up saying that you can disrupt the status quo. It's considered okay to be able to disrupt the status quo and desirable to do so, In fact.
Kate Field:
There's so much more ability for information to flow. I didn't have the internet when I was a kid. It wasn't around when I was a kid. We didn't get a computer at home. I mean, I'm not that old. I'm still considered a young farmer because under 50. But at 42 ... I was 14 when we first got a computer in our house. When I first started working as a doctor, we didn't really have access to the internet. The internet was there, but it was so that we could look at pathology results. It was an intranet. There was no Google, so there was no ability to look for or find information. So the world that they've grown up in is so completely different from the world that I grew up in.
Kate Field:
I had to go to a library as so many of us had to do to get information. I had a photocopy card so that I could photocopy the articles. Not like you can have a quick scroll through the article on the computer in your pocket, which you can do these days. So there's so much more access to information. Books are still my favorite way to access information, but there's so much more access to information. And so many conversations that can occur so easily in an asynchronous manner through media such as Facebook or Instagram. And because of that, I think that there is so much hope that we will be able to, if our local communities want us to succeed in this way, we can. I really think we can. But we need the help of anyone who eats.
Tania Marien:
Yes. So I've learned from you that regenerative farming is about soil health. And in your experience, what do you feel that people don't understand about food?
Kate Field:
There are so many ways to answer that question. I think people have become completely disconnected from the fact that food is grown. I think food is something that's in a shop, a restaurant, a supermarket, but I think people had forgotten that food actually requires sunlight, water, and soil. It doesn't matter what that food is. It doesn't matter if it's meat, it doesn't matter if it's dairy, it doesn't matter if it's fruit or vegetable. It requires those three basic ingredients. You can muck about a little bit with one of those, for instance, growing food in hydroponic systems, but there's a cost to doing it that way. And that cost is usually in flavor and nutrition.
Kate Field:
So I don't think people understand that the way food is grown impacts its nutritional quality. I don't know that people understand that the food systems that we have developed over the last, particularly the last 10 to 20 years, where global markets have become ever more hungry for seasonal produce from other areas of the world where it's not in season and with the freight of food across the world, usually by air freight. And that impacts on the quality and the nutrition that's gained from that food. And it also impacts hugely on carbon emissions.
Kate Field:
I mean, if you put a pallet of cheese on a plane to fly it from Tasmania to say, Japan, that's a lot of carbon emissions that are being caused by that just for someone to be able to eat our product, for instance, or someone else's product in a very different part of the world. Wouldn't it be better off educating other people how to produce similar quality food that could be produced locally, employ local people, use regenerative practices to improve soil while I do that, so we can draw down carbon locally rather than burning up carbon in the form of fossil fuel to export an import products.
Kate Field:
I mean, I Understand why it's been allowed to occur. But isn't it time we had to think about it? Especially now. I mean, it's really hard to get into and out of Australia at the moment. I think we've got one flight. We were having 40 flights coming to Hobart a day. Now we've got one flight a day, I think. So air travel has changed and with that, so has freight. Now is the time that we should be having these conversations about, do we actually want it to go back to how it was six months ago? Or do we need to have a long, hard think and look at ourselves about how we're choosing to burn fossil fuels for what doesn't seem like a really great impact to me. I've got a very furrowed brow, Tania. Because I think-
Tania Marien:
I know. What's next for you and Leap Farm.
Kate Field:
I'm not happy with where we're at in terms of our soil health and how we could be doing things. Our internal fences are just rubbish. And because of that, it's really hard to manage our stock in a rotational grazing. We also don't have the water infrastructure to be able to do that properly. And so we've got some beautiful hundreds of year old blue gums, which I'm not sure if the, eucalyptus globulus, for those who are interested, also known as the Tasmanian blue gum, really important species for endangered animals. We've got some ancient stands of those, we've got dry eucalypt forests. These areas need to be fenced and the area in which they are growing needs to be improved in terms of soil cover. And understory at the moment, the goats love hanging out underneath it. They're compacting the soil underneath and preventing other things from growing other than what I would call weeds.
Kate Field:
So we need to do some heavy duty fencing and trying to plan that and trying to plan water infrastructure, water troughs, basically, for the animals to drink from. And then that will allow us to better manage our pastures so that we can start improving the carbon in it. And by doing that, we improve our resilience to drought because the rainfall that we get is more likely to soak into the ground rather than run off. I mean, that has improved since we've been here anyway, but we've got so much more that we can do. So there's a lot there.
Kate Field:
We're still trying to get in a wage. So that'll be nice. Financially, improve things financially, there are some changes that we can make. Last year, we put enough solar panels on our dairy that we actually export more energy than we utilize. I call it green cheese. But Iain's quite keen to put more solar on so that we can do even better there. So there's lots of things that we want to do. And we want to continue to show people that this is a way that you can farm and you can be profitable, and you can be productive, and that it is possible, really.
Tania Marien:
Thank you for joining us and for helping to kick off a new season for the Talaterra podcast. To learn more about Kate, her podcast, The Curious Farmer, and to visit Leap Farm online, visit the links in the show notes. Thank you for joining us today. See you next time.
Tania Marien:
Talaterra is a podcast for and about independent educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is Tania Marien.