Field notes

Standing dead grass

In paddocks we’re resting as part of the rotation, we now let patches of grass go to seed and stand rather than grazing or mowing them flat. It looks like neglect. It isn’t.

Standing stalks are overwintering habitat — hollow and pithy stems shelter native bees, beetles, and moths through the cold months. They’re nesting material and cover for small birds and reptiles. The seed heads feed finches and other seed-eaters when the rest of the paddock is bare. And even the practical, unglamorous stuff matters: a litter layer of dead grass protects soil from crusting, holds moisture, and slowly feeds the soil biology as it breaks down.

Logs, not piles

We’ve also started scattering logs through paddocks rather than leaving them where they fall or clearing them off entirely. Deliberately — logs, not brush piles. Piles of loose branches can harbour rabbits, and keeping rabbit numbers low matters to us, so we’ve settled on solid, well-placed logs instead: enough structure for habitat value, without the warren-friendly cavities a loose pile creates.

Logs turn out to do several jobs at once:

• Habitat complexity — they shelter skinks, frogs, and small mammals, and give insectivorous birds somewhere to hunt from
• Nutrient cycling — fungal and invertebrate decomposition slowly returns what’s locked in the wood back into the soil
• Microclimates — the shade and moisture under a log support different plant germination than the open pasture around it
• Stock relief — cattle and sheep use solid logs as rubbing points for fly and itch relief, which takes some of the wear off fences and gates, and reduces how much they lean on chemical fly and lice control

We place the more solid ones near water points and other spots the sheep already congregate, so they get used for scratching. The smaller ones we spread further out, at wider spacing, closer to the contour swales, the shelterbelt plantings, and the wildlife corridor along Deep Creek.

Stepping stones

That spacing is deliberate. Ecologists call small, scattered patches of habitat like this “stepping-stone habitat” — individual spots too small to support a population on their own, but close enough together that species can move between them. A spider or beetle that can’t cross open, structureless pasture can shelter at one log, then move to the next, and the one after that.

Placed well, a scatter of logs can functionally connect habitat that would otherwise sit isolated — linking a dam edge to a tree line, or a patch of remnant bush to a new native planting. For us, that means the logs aren’t just individual features. They’re quietly stitching together the swales, the shelterbelt, and the creek corridor into something more connected than any one planting could be on its own.

Spiders, specifically

It’s worth saying a word for spiders, since they tend not to get much good press. Dead grass stalks give them anchor points for webs and safe places to attach egg sacs. Logs give ground-dwelling spiders — wolf spiders, huntsmen — daytime retreats and a moist microclimate to hunt from. And the habitat that supports spiders supports the insects they feed on, which means a paddock with some structure in it does more of its own pest control than one stripped bare.

The general principle

None of this requires much. No capital works, no approvals, nothing that competes with the rest of what the farm needs to do. It’s mostly a matter of leaving a bit of what’s already there — a patch of grass gone to seed, a log left where it lies, or moved somewhere more useful — rather than tidying it away.

The pattern that seems to matter most is patchiness: not uniform tidiness across every paddock, but ten or twenty percent given over to rough refuge — corners of standing grass, a scatter of logs, a few less-managed edges. Most of the biodiversity loss on working land comes from over-uniform management, not from any one practice. A little deliberate roughness, placed with some thought, goes a long way.

Whether it’s bringing a project to financial close, solving a commercial problem or carrying a newborn calf to safety, the principle is the same: show up, take responsibility and do what is needed.

Different challenges but the same mindset.

Reposted from LinkedIn.

When we arrived, the paddock had been hayed most years for as long as anyone could remember, and set-stocked from time to time between cuts. It was not uniform in its condition. The creek flat at the lower end produced the best hay — deeper alluvial soils, more moisture, naturally higher fertility. The slope above was poorer. The area around the single water trough at the entrance end was the worst: heavily poached, bare, nutrient-loaded from concentrated dung and urine, and compacted by stock pressure. A small group of old pine trees in the middle, removed before we built the house between January 2019 and June 2020, left a zone of acidified, low-biology soil whose legacy is still visible. The previous owner’s cattle had also camped under the pines, adding long-term hoof compaction and nutrient loading to the acidification — about as difficult a starting point as a patch of ground can have: compacted, nutrient-overloaded, biologically depleted, and dominated by the weeds that move into exactly that kind of disturbed soil. A further row of pines remains along the road fence line, continuing the acidifying influence. Much of the slope above the old pine zone is still weedy and slow to grow grass. Weeds are not the problem — they are the symptom, pioneer species doing what nature does in disturbed, low-fertility soil. The challenge is that many of those pioneers are introduced species very good at staying once they arrive.

The home paddock is not a single uniform recovery project but a mosaic of different starting points, each responding at its own pace. The house and garden sit in the middle of the paddock rather than fenced apart from it — when stock are grazing close we use portable electric fencing to keep them away from the plantings. The clearest proof of what is possible sits right there in that garden. We began developing it in earnest in 2023 — mulching extensively, planting natives throughout, and establishing a small pond where water pooled naturally. The soil in those areas is already noticeably more friable and full of earthworms than the paddock on the other side of the temporary fence. Whether the microclimate around the house has yet changed is harder to say — that is the aim — but the direction is clear and the biology is responding.

The creek corridor tells a more advanced version of the same story. We have done extensive planting alongside Deep Creek — trees, shrubs, and grasses including Poa and Lomandra — adding to the existing Eucalyptus and Acacia overstory that runs along the creek line. The results there are already encouraging. Now that the creek flats are getting adequate rest and are no longer being hayed, we are seeing spontaneous regeneration of native trees establishing without being planted. That is the landscape doing restoration work we did not ask for and cannot fully take credit for. It is what happens when the conditions are right and the seed bank still has something to offer. It is also the most honest measure of progress we have: not what we have put in, but what the country is beginning to do on its own.

Three decisions have driven the change in the paddock since 2021. We stopped cutting it for hay — with one exception: a portion of the creek flat was cut again in 2024 simply because we did not have enough livestock at the time to eat and trample the standing grass. That pragmatic decision aside, the paddock has not been hayed since 2021. We introduced rotational grazing in place of continuous set-stocking. And in early winter 2025 we installed contour swales as part of a whole-of-landscape water management plan: one cut through the slope above the creek flat, where it intercepts rainfall running down from higher ground; and another along the creek flat itself, slowing surface water before it reaches the creek. A further contour is planned higher up toward the road at the top of the property, along with others identified in our NSF plan — including a large pond on the creek flat. Each one costs money and brings consequential decisions about fencing and water infrastructure, so the programme unfolds as resources allow. This post attempts to explain what the decisions made so far have done, why they mattered, and what we are seeing now as a result.

The Hay Problem

Hay cutting looks like farming. The paddock grows tall, the cutter comes through, the bales are stacked and carted away. It is a satisfying and visible kind of productivity. But looked at from the soil’s perspective, it is something closer to a slow withdrawal from a bank account that is not being replenished.

Every bale of hay that leaves a property takes with it the nutrients that the plants drew from the soil to build that biomass: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, trace elements, all of it accumulated over the growing season and loaded into the bale. Unlike grazing, where the animal returns a significant proportion of what it consumes back to the paddock as dung and urine within hours, hay cutting is a one-way transaction. The fertility goes out the gate and does not come back. The only way to sustain production under that model is to replace those nutrients artificially, year after year, which means the paddock becomes progressively more dependent on inputs even as its underlying biological capacity declines.

As Nicole Masters describes in For the Love of Soil, it is a system that treats soil as a growing medium to be fed rather than a living community to be supported. The soil does not collapse. It just quietly becomes less than it was.

The Tall Grass Paradox

A paddock full of tall grass looks, from a distance, like a well-covered paddock. And at canopy level it is. But the grasses that dominate a hayed paddock in this district — phalaris above all, along with tall fescue and cocksfoot growing in dense clumps — cast a deep shade at ground level. Phalaris in particular is allelopathic, actively suppressing the germination of other species through compounds released by its roots. It was widely sown across the Macedon Ranges for exactly the reasons that make it ecologically problematic: it establishes quickly, grows vigorously, and crowds everything else out. The soil surface between the clumps can be almost bare — no leaf litter, no prostrate stems, no low-growing species filling the gaps. When the hay cutter comes through and removes that tall growth, this is suddenly revealed: the paddock that looked covered is, at the surface where it matters most, quite open. Raindrops hit bare soil directly, breaking up the fine aggregates that give healthy soil its crumb structure and sealing the surface into a cap that sheds water rather than absorbing it.

Set-stocking between cuts compounded the problem. A single water trough at the entrance to this long paddock meant stock congregated at that end, heavily poaching the soil while the far end often accumulated rank ungrazed material. The paddock was under two forms of pressure alternately — the annual cut removing fertility and disrupting soil structure, and uneven grazing without recovery time eliminating whatever diversity remained. Neither gave the ground layer a chance.

What the Machinery Does

Heavy cutting and baling machinery passing repeatedly over the same ground — often when the soil carries some moisture — compresses the soil profile, reducing the pore space that allows water to infiltrate and air to circulate. Soil biology requires both. Repeated passes over years create a compaction layer: a zone of dense soil at a consistent depth where wheel pressure concentrates, deflecting water sideways and preventing roots from going deep. When the contour swale above the paddock was cut in 2025, the excavator exposed this layer clearly — a distinct change in soil colour and texture at about thirty centimetres depth, a readable record of decades of mechanical pressure.

What We Are Actually Seeing

The home paddock is not recovering in the way a before-and-after photograph might suggest. It is changing from the ground up, slowly and unevenly, in ways that require some knowledge of what you are looking at to read correctly.

The most visible shift is in the composition of the sward. Phalaris is still present and still clumping — its architecture has not changed — but it is no longer dominant in the way it was. What has changed is what grows between the clumps. Those inter-clump spaces are now taken up. Ryegrass, cocksfoot and clover have moved in and the ground layer is genuinely continuous in a way it was not before. That is a more significant change than it might sound: it is exactly the surface coverage that protects the soil from raindrop impact, reduces capping and improves infiltration.

The clover increase is the most encouraging single indicator. Clover is a legume, fixing atmospheric nitrogen through root nodules in partnership with soil bacteria. Its establishment and spread tells us the soil biology is recovering enough to support that relationship — and that the paddock is beginning, in a modest but real way, to generate its own fertility. This is what Nicole Masters means by the system starting to feed itself.

The picture is not uniformly positive. Chilean needle grass persists in parts of the paddock, and this is not surprising even if it is frustrating. Transitional pastures — where a dominant species is losing its grip but the replacement ecology is not yet dense enough to exclude invaders — are actually more vulnerable to CNG ingress than either a tight monoculture or a well-established diverse sward. We are in that awkward middle phase. As the inter-clump spaces fill more completely with desirable species, the available ground for CNG establishment should reduce. But we are realistic about the timeline. Bent grass has also established in parts of the paddock — a reliable indicator of compaction, poor drainage and low fertility. Capeweed persists on the thinner soils of the slope where ground cover is still not dense enough to shade it out. All are symptoms rather than causes, and should retreat as soil structure and cover improve.

Three Decisions, One Direction

Stopping the hay cut was the first and most fundamental change. Without the annual removal of biomass, the nutrients that previously left the property in every bale now stay in the system. Grazed material is returned to the soil as dung and urine within the paddock. Ungrazed material dies back slowly and is incorporated by soil organisms. The organic matter cycle, interrupted every year by the baler, begins to close. Without the repeated machinery passes, the surface soil has had six years to begin recovering its structure — earthworms have returned in numbers to the wetter areas, opening vertical channels through the compacted profile.

Rotational grazing has done something different but equally important. Under the old set-stocking model, any plant species attempting to establish or set seed was grazed out before it had the chance. Under planned rotational grazing, stock move through the paddock in a concentrated group, graze hard and briefly, and then the paddock rests — long enough for plants to recover fully before the next grazing event. That rest period is what allows species diversity to develop, and it is what distinguishes regenerative grazing from simply reducing stocking rates: it is not about grazing less, it is about grazing differently.

A more personal addition to the system (the daily eggs!) has been the chickens — moved through the paddock in a small caravan, following behind the cattle and sheep. They scratch through the dung, breaking the pest and parasite cycle, and deposit a concentrated hit of nitrogen as they go. The fox pressure we have experienced means we keep the caravan close to the house rather than ranging it freely across the whole paddock, which limits their reach; but within that constraint they are doing useful work. Each time we move the caravan we apply a layer of mulch or straw over the area they have just worked, diluting the nitrogen load and beginning the carbon-to-soil process. It is a small intervention, but it is the right direction: biology doing what biology does, with a little management to keep it in balance.

The contour swales installed in early winter 2025 have added a third dimension. They are placed where water once naturally flowed across the landscape — we are restoring that function. Plants are also necessary to support the contours in this work, restoring the natural flows of water and the hydrology of the system. One swale runs through the slope above the creek flat, intercepting rainfall moving down from higher ground and holding it long enough to infiltrate rather than run off. A second runs along the creek flat itself, slowing surface water before it reaches the creek. The fenced planting corridor now going in sits below the upper contour, fed by the moisture it is collecting — and in turn stabilising the earthwork and deepening its effect on the water cycle. Within a single season the effect is already visible: the pasture below the upper swale is noticeably more sustained than it was. Water that was previously leaving the property is now staying in it, doing work.

The June Planting

We have been planting since 2021 — Acacias, Sheoaks and Eucalypts along internal fence lines and in paddock corridors, trees that are now established and visible across the property. Any tree a visitor sees inside a paddock at Mirrim Wurnit was put there by us. This June’s planting is a continuation of that work, not its beginning, but it is the most deliberate and ecologically considered planting we have done: a fenced corridor running through the middle of the home paddock, below the upper contour swale, planted with local native species drawn entirely from what belongs here on the Victorian Grassy Plains basalt country — Carex, Poa labillardiei, Acacias, Cassinia and Eucalypts. It will provide stock shelter the paddock currently lacks, a biodiversity spine connecting habitat across the property, and deep root architecture that introduced pasture grasses simply cannot provide.

The Acacias will establish fastest and do the most immediate biological work, fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and creating the sheltered microclimate under which slower species can take hold. Over time the Eucalypts will come to dominate the canopy. The Poa and Carex will fill the ground layer. The corridor will become a recognisable piece of Victorian Grassy Plains woodland threading through the middle of what is otherwise still a conventional-looking paddock.

There is also something more personal in the choice of species. Early survey maps of this property, drawn when the lots of this district were first being marked out in the nineteenth century, carry notes referring to the preponderance of Lightwood and Blackwood across this country. Both are Acacias. The same maps refer to what the surveyors called Cherry Gum, most likely Red Box, Eucalyptus polyanthemos, which we have been planting across the slopes, along with Manna Gum, Eucalyptus viminalis, on the creek flat where it belongs. They were here before the clearing. Planting them back is not an introduction. It is a return.

It will not look like much for the first few years. The plants will be small, the fencing conspicuous, the bare ground between establishing plants an invitation to weeds. We will manage it carefully through that establishment phase, controlling competition and protecting the corridor from stock. And then, gradually, it will begin to look like something. We expect to be watching that process for the rest of our time on this property.

What We Are Watching For

Native grass species returning spontaneously would be the most significant longer-term marker. Under the old regime they were eaten or cut out before they could establish. Planned grazing, with its long rest periods, gives them the window they need. We have good reason to think this realistic rather than merely hopeful: the road reserve along our boundary carries kangaroo grass and spear grasses, both characteristic species of the Victorian Grassy Plains basalt country that once covered this landscape. Road reserves are often the last refuge of remnant native grassland species, never having been ploughed or intensively improved. Their survival there tells us the ecological memory of this country is still present within metres of the paddock fence.

Earthworm activity spreading into the drier parts of the paddock, away from the creek margin where they have always been present, would indicate that soil structure and moisture in those areas is improving enough for them to colonise further — one of the most reliable and visible signs of recovering soil health.

Dung beetles are another indicator we are watching, and here there is already something to report. They have begun arriving from neighbouring properties — the species that work cattle dung are the first to appear, which is consistent with what is recorded elsewhere: the cattle-dung feeders tend to colonise new ground ahead of those associated with sheep. Whether the sheep-dung species are yet established we cannot say with certainty, but in any case the beetles will do their work regardless: tunnelling dung into the soil profile, improving infiltration, cycling nutrients directly where the roots can reach them. Their presence is a sign that the paddock is becoming a place worth arriving at.

Water behaviour after rain is the other thing we watch closely. The difference between a paddock that sheets water after twenty millimetres and one that absorbs it is visible within minutes of a decent shower, and it tells you more about the state of the soil than most laboratory tests would.

The home paddock is the most personal piece of this whole project. It is what we look at over the fence every morning. It is where the June planting will be most visible and where its progress, or lack of it, will be most closely felt. We have no illusions about the timeline. But six years in, with the swales doing their work and the planting going in, the paddock is unambiguously moving in the right direction.

We will report back as the seasons turn.

Peter
The Farm at Mirrim Wurnit · Monegeetta, Victoria

Grazing practices play a direct role in that. Soil structure, ground cover and contour all influence whether rainfall is retained, slowed and used productively, or lost quickly through runoff.

On our property in the Macedon Ranges, we have been applying Natural Sequence Farming principles as part of a broader approach to land management. Contours are installed where water once naturally flowed across the landscape, restoring that function and keeping water on the property for longer, allowing it to infiltrate and support pasture, while also improving the quality of water that eventually leaves the system and flows into Deep Creek. Plants are also necessary to support the contours in restoring natural flows of water across the landscape, and the hydrology of the system. We are using these contours as the basis for a targeted planting program; establishing shelter, stabilising soils, deepening the root architecture that anchors the earthworks and sustains their hydrological function, and enhancing biodiversity across the landscape. By rehydrating the landscape and maintaining higher soil moisture and ground cover, these approaches also contribute to fire resilience; reducing fuel loads, slowing fire spread, and supporting quicker post‑fire recovery.

It is a practical approach, requiring a shift in how land and water are considered together, rather than separately. Fencing and grazing practices also need to be adapted to fit the landscape and the contouring, ensuring stock movement and pasture utilisation work with, rather than against, the hydrology of the system. In a changing climate context, where variability is increasing and there remains the possibility of a strong or even super El Niño event this year, this kind of landscape‑scale adaptation becomes increasingly important for maintaining ground cover, water retention, and broader resilience.

There is good work happening in this space. Jason McAinch and the Healthy Landscapes program, a joint initiative of local councils, catchment management authorities, water corporations and Landcare groups, has been a strong advocate for approaches that improve both farm productivity and broader catchment outcomes.

I would strongly encourage landholders to engage with programs like this, particularly those who are newly establishing themselves on the land. The benefits are practical, and the cumulative impact across a catchment is significant.

These are not abstract or unproven ideas. They go to the resilience of regional landscapes and the long‑term security of the water systems they sit within; requiring genuine collaboration between landholders, catchment managers, and local government to deliver lasting outcomes.

Our farm sits nearly 10 kilometres from the nearest town and more than an hour from Melbourne. The property is off‑grid for both electricity and water. That brings a level of independence, but it also makes energy decisions very real. Diesel still runs a backup generator, and gas still does the heating — both we would prefer to replace over time.

Heavy farm machinery will remain dependent on diesel for some time. That is simply the reality on the ground. But it should not distract from where change is already practical.

A large share of fuel use in regional areas sits in light vehicles. Utes and everyday transport now have credible electric alternatives. With solar and batteries becoming more common on farms, those vehicles can increasingly be charged on site. That starts to shift part of the energy task from imported fuel to locally generated power.

At a broader level, that strengthens resilience and reduces exposure to price volatility. For households and farmers, it brings a greater degree of control over an essential part of daily life.

Not everyone has the ability to generate and store their own energy. In those cases, EV charging in regional towns plays an important role. It supports local use and, as noted previously, brings additional visitors into those communities.

Energy security improves by acting where change is already achievable, rather than waiting for complete transformation.