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Broadacre Farm Design – Regenerative Agriculture at Work (Australia)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmAMDKNksok

Over the past year Yandoit Farm has been going through a few changes. Located in Victoria, Australia, north of Hepburn Springs, the farm has had an interesting past, at times being heavily mined for gold, with the miners living on the property, and more recently used to run cattle.

Working with an array of permaculture and regenerative agriculture designers the stewards of Yandoit Farm, Lisa and Michael, worked on designing and implementing a whole farm design to regenerate the land.

Darren Doherty led the broadacre farm design that involved implementing an integrated system of water catchments and access roads. The newly build roads were designed to catch rainwater and divert it to the dams throughout the property.

Dan Palmer from Very Edible Gardens helped to organise and run a week long hands-on workshop. The participants worked on marking out the roads, took soil tests and even keyline ploughed areas on the farm.


David, Lisa, Dan, Darren, Michael, Adam

Yandoit Farm is well into the first phase of regenerating the landscape. The newly dug dams are full, trees are being planted, soil is being built and I’m really looking forward to seeing the good work that the people on this farm will accomplish in the future.


Road creation


Dam creation


Dam now full!

13 Comments

  1. What about the cowpie/urine water runoff getting into the basins. Would you plant marshes, and add ducks, around the edges? Fish?
    What are the health issues here. What is your rotation/fallow plan?

    1. great question. I wouldn’t know the specifics of the next phase of the design implementation, but I’ll definitely be back out there to document it as it progresses. I’ll check in on that front for sure!

  2. Fantastic work. Could you please tell me if you needed a permit from the council, and how difficult it was to obtain. Was it expensive? Was there bore water used to help fill the dam or is it purely rain runoff? Thanks for any info.!

  3. Wonderful work. I hope there would be posts about the project as it progresses. Will there be any data collection happening on C seq or water quality monitoring?

  4. The article says soil is being built. How is this being measured? Were baselines of soil depth, fertility and carbon content taken before the project started?

    And planting trees is generally a good thing. Even better if there’s a plan for the objectives to be met by planting the trees. I would be very interested in another article covering what trees have been/will be planted and what the objectives are from these plantings.

    And that dam looks very shallow with a high surface area to volume. There’ll be an enormous amount of evaporation over summer.

    1. All great questions David, hopefully we can get one of the core team over to comment on them. As for building soil they have keyline plowed areas of the farm so are increasing the moisture content/absorption within the soil and are introducing mob grazing.

      In regards to the dam critique, it’s been designed by Darren Doherty who has decades of experience in this work, but guess time will be the true test.

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