Machinery for Agroforestry — with Darren J. Doherty

Darren J. Doherty, founder of Regrarians, is a pioneer in modern regenerative agriculture and agroforestry in the anglosphere and beyond. He’s planned hundreds of farms across Australia, New Zealand, The United States, Vietnam, India, The Country of Georgia, Mediterranean Europe, and beyond. Today we’ll dive into the mechanization of planting trees. 

Trees are permanent infrastructure, so you want to plant them in the right place, the first time, and in the most efficient way possible. Often that means mechanization, from soil preparation and simply marking where the trees go, to understory management and fertilization. He has been a trusted advisor of Propagate since we started the business 10 years, and without further ado, here is Darren Doherty.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Darren J. Doherty, founder of Regrarians, is a pioneer in modern regenerative agriculture and agroforestry in the Anglosphere and beyond. He's planned hundreds of farms across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Vietnam, India, the country of Georgia, Mediterranean Europe, and beyond. Today we'll dive into the mechanization of planting trees. Trees are permanent infrastructure, so you want to plant them in the right place the first time and in the most efficient way possible. Often that means mechanization, from soil preparation and simply marking where the trees go to understory management and fertilization. He has been a trusted advisor of Propagate since we started the business 10 years ago, and without further ado, here is Darren Dowerty. Darren, welcome back to the Plant the Trees podcast. Last time you walked us through the Regrarians platform and how you think about whole farm planning. This time we're going to dive into mechanization for tree planting. But for those that are unfamiliar with regrarians, could you give a brief overview of your work establishing functional trees on farms?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Well, today's a good day for that because we've got some retrospection being the 33rd year, 6th of March 1993, when we as a well, when I as a 25-year-old embarked on this, left my job running an organic grocer and um started this farm planning company. So a bit of retrospection. And as I wrote this morning, our original business plan, which I think I put out in about the middle of 1993, said something like, We wanted to, or the mission statement was that we wanted to see that ecological agriculture went from being a marginal methodology to an unconscious practice. And for some people over that time, including myself, um, that's definitely been the case. So I think that's the foundation of what we do. I mean, where I started working in the organic ecological agriculture, biodynamic industry in 1989 when I was 22, and it's sort of all just built from there. So our primary purpose and work is in helping people manage uh practice change, and however that starts. So the whole concept originally was yeah, we're gonna do farm planning. And I've often said this, you know, that I thought when I started that that I'll be making plans and drawing maps and doing all that sort of cool stuff, which I really enjoy. But the reality is that we're managing relationships and we're managing a whole lot of human decision making that's never stopped. So that's what we do more than anything else. So agrarians really yeah, we call ourselves farm planners, but the reality is most of the time we're actually working out what that farm plan is actually going to look like with a whole lot of discussions and stuff, which I know that you at Propagate um have similar discussions because it's all unavoidable, right? It's human journeys that you're helping to navigate.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Managing relationships between people, soil, trees, metal, all of the potential interventions in a landscape and adaptations. And so I've seen a lot of work over the years from regurians. A lot of that has to do with roads and ponds and access and water availability and water management.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

The stuff that you can share, because you can't share all the conversations that you have that lead up to those decisions. They're not as easily Instagrammable, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Yeah. Yeah. And the these these conversations, these relationships have to precede tree planting. And I figured we could go into a a few different instances of the work you've done in Australia and beyond. I'm thinking about olives and how a farm that you designed is now producing award-winning olive oil. Is that is that right?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Yeah. Um, Campbell Mercer and Julie Nitschke's property, Manor Hill Estate, which I mean, ever since we did a I hate I lost we built designed that in 2000, 2001, and built it in 2000. And it was really, I mean, it had a lot of things going on that property, which was really cool. So Campbell is about the same age as me. Um, he was working in the oil and gas industry at the time, and he's only recently retired from that. So he was that classic. Well, he wasn't wasn't really a usual client at that stage because most of them weren't my age. Most of them were always 20 or 30 years older. Um, because that's the demographic that could well, we had this specific demographic at the time, and we still do, and I think you do as well, where you've got people who uh made a bit of money in business and they, or they're a market segment and they made a bit of money in business or whatever, or sold a property, then they go and buy a rural property and then they develop it. So that's one particular market segment. And Campbell was one of those people, except he was still like he was only in his what 30 or something when he got on this train, 33 or something. So anyway, we did what we always did. We went and surveyed the block and did all of that. And around that time, well, I was working with a guy called Conrad Ensor, who was our surveyor, and we were doing everything manually and we're using total stations to survey. So we're pretty modern at the time because there was no well, tractor guidance systems were quite nascent at that time, and they were bloody expensive, and they weren't that good. So they basically just did straight lines, right? They did, you know, the whole idea of doing this nice curvy lines and stuff was not there. Anyway, so we had this idea that we could do a key line, because it was mo there was one um block which is quite well known now. A lot of people use the photos of this curved ridge block. And we and Condod and I said, Imagine if we could make that symmetrical. Because I don't know if you've seen this, well, you would have done it yourself. You know, when you line everything up and you sort of you go along a vineyard or something, like a lot of people when they drive along vineyards, they see all the posts, and it's almost you've got a strobe effect because everything just lines up in all of these different directions. And he said, Heck, how about we do that with curves? And then we started to draw it out and look at the geometry of doing such a thing, and we went, no, this is crazy. But Conrad, God bless him, he started to move a tree a hundred millimeters this way and a hundred millimeters that way, and we actually cracked it, and then he went out and marked it out. So there's like a thousand trees in this block that is everywhere you look, they're all perfectly symmetrical, and that was just for ourselves, it was for nobody else, like Conra um, but the well, the other thing is we actually did it on a quinks pattern, which is where you've got it's like the dice, um, the full dice. So you've got every tree is offset to one another. Or they're um, so we did so we had all these patterns within patterns, which was I don't know, did it increase the value or the of the oil? I don't I think that's that's really Campbell's management that's done that, but I'd like to think we perhaps had a small part to play, at least from the energy of intent that we put into the seriousness of the job, right? Which I think I'd like to think is is something. So it was a it was a job that involved a lot of love and attention from the go. And I think Campbell and Julie's oil perhaps reflects that. And it's biodynamic, which is all about a lot of that's about good quantum energy, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:18

I feel like when you take layouts to their natural extreme, the more simple layouts become that much easier when you just have a north-south grid or a key line grid and you've done the Quincux pattern on key line, uh, the aforementioned varieties of planting trees just become that much smoother. And so you mentioned that you marked all of that out by hand with handheld GPS implements. And now you're also not with GPS.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Not with GPS. No, we the way we used to do it then was so we'd survey the whole place and create a um a base, uh like a r an RL, which is um a reference level. So we'd put a put a peg in the ground and cement it, right? So it's like a datum. We'd do that. So that became the reference place for the whole job. So then we go back once we did the digital design, we'd then go back out to the property, find that reference level with the with the total station, and then from that, we would then mark out each and every row, end of every row, and then the actual there's the impression that the row is in a curve, but it's actually in these segments. Right? Now, as we'll get to talking about when you use then a tractor to then go and rip that line and cultivate the row and all of that sort of thing. Well, the tractor doesn't, you don't go, you know, the tractor doesn't make these sorts of angular changes, it just runs along the curve, it creates the curvature. But the center line is we've created by putting all of these pegs in at strateg on it's kind of like point-to-point straight strings, you might say. So the so the curve is actually made up of s of various lengths of straights of straight lines, if if people can follow. And then what we would do is then we would use what was called a fiberglass chain. So it was a fiberglass cord wrapped in plastic, which had these measurements on it, and they use it in mining and so on. So we would pull that and we had a fish scale, you know, the fish scales that you weigh a fish with. We had that, so we pull it to the to the to a predetermined tension, and then that would create the resolution along that, and then we go and put bamboo stakes in, which would mark the positions of the trees according to what Conrad specified with all of this trickery involved, this visual trickery. And um, so that's what we did for that whole layout.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

And now you can design all that on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Yeah, pretty well.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

And then and then hit control P and have a tractor draw it onto the landscape in many cases.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Pretty well. And now, I mean, I know you with Bob Bob Walker and the Propagate team, you've done what um I know Caesar at Surreya GPS in Spain, is that you can not only design the line for the tractor to drive the line with tractor GPS, but you can also go and actually position every single tree along the line. So if we programmed in what Conrad did, well, we wouldn't have to use the string level to go and mark out those variations which give us the optical illusions that we're after. I have I must say, I've not done anything like that ever since.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Um, because Arlington National Cemetery for Olives or Normandy if you're in France.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yeah, but on key line with equidistant geometry, it's um it's quite something. Yeah, anyway. We used to stand back from that and go, and it would just pop. Like we'd go and our steps were we'd put all of these bamboo stakes in, and we put, you know, three three thousand or four thousand trees in a block, and you get that work done, because as you know, when you're doing tree planting work, everything happens in a in a pass, right? You do a passive ground prep, then you do a passive staking, you do a passive planting, you do a passive guarding, of mulch matting. So everything's done in these passes, and you stand, you finish that, and then you stand back and it just goes. And what we used to do when we planted each tree, we would put the tree was planted in if it was olives, we'd put that on top of the six-foot bamboo stake or or timber stake. And so I know I've got some photos of like that there are like little hats on each post, and you just look back at it and just go, tung, tung, tung, tung, like a cemetery, and go, job done, right? And yeah, it it's quite a good vibe at that moment. You have a good feeling. And you know if it doesn't work because it stands out like the proverbial, the symmetry just goes, oh damn, what happened there? Anyway, that's very human. That is very OCD.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

I'm I'm thinking about ascending and descending in the quantity of technology and machinery that it makes sense to use in tree planting. And were the olives before or after the cacao in Vietnam? Uh before. And so you olives on the home turf went to Vietnam, planted a decent amount of cacao, and or at least just really uh fixed in on the design of those multistrata cacao agroforestry systems. I would suspect that a lot of that, or most all of it, was done by hand, the planting.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah, the planting was the ground prep. I imported a yeoman's plough shank. Well, actually, I carried it in our luggage. Um, done a bit of that sort of metal stuff over the years. Um yeah, and um then we built a frame, a toolbar over there with some local welders and did the gr did the ripping and the mounding with um I found some one-way discs, which are scalloped discs that they use for like disc plows, disc arrows. I found some of those and we cut and welded them so that we could use them to do mounding. But yeah, absolutely everything else was um uh by hand. I do say on that particular job, and I this is one one regret I have, um, which I'll always carry with me, is that for the scale of that particular research project, because the research project was to determine the optimum density of cacao, of Theobroma cacao in a mixed species um agroforestry system. That was the brief. And to demonstrate best practice waterc water and soil conservation in the foothills of South Vietnam. So they were the briefs that I got from Howard Shapiro, the um Yana Shapiro at Mars, who I was working with. And so we did everything on a key line layout, we built dams and dah, blah blah. But when it came to the planting, my biggest regret was that I hadn't learned about syntropic agriculture at that stage. And I think, well, in fact, not just I think I mean I really regret it because I had had the opportunity, because I was working with the the Nonglam University. Nonglam in Vietnamese means agroforestry, agriculture and forestry. So I was working with the Nongnam University and in uh Ho Chi Minh City. We were very, very I mean, it's rare that you get these hyper connections between a major global player that I was working with and the universities and government, such that we led to cacao becoming an official crop of Vietnam within, I think within a year and a half of the project starting. So there was all of that, and I'll just go, oh wow. Wouldn't it have been good if right at that genesis moment that we could have introduced something like Centropic Agriculture, which was founded on by Ernst Gotch to grow really elite cacao. And I just didn't know about it until oh god, probably a decade or so later, and it was like, oh no. Because that because we were using we were using I because I hadn't had an experience in cacao, and not many other people did, we applied a real mechanistic way of developing that those systems, and that was what I was brought in for. They wanted someone who knew about how to upscale and do things quickly and blah blah blah blah blah, which I had demonstrated expertise in, but it just didn't fit I don't think it fit with that particular crop, which for many of us would know is the world's biggest commodity that is grown primarily by smallholders. The vast majority of cacao, I think cacao is like the fifth or sixth biggest traded commodity on the planet, which is saying something, it's all produced by farmers of under one hectare, two and a half acres, which is incredible. So, you know, that's not a mechanized scale on any stretch, right? So I yeah, so I still you see where I'm going? I really regret, and that's where we've got to look at the um yeah, there's lots of lessons in that for me around ego and around, you know, but at this by the same token, I just hadn't had exposure to syntropic agriculture. But yeah, it was an interesting moment.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Let's double-click on Cintro and then link it with metal and machinery. So for those listening that are unfamiliar with centropic farming, it's a method of successional agroforestry that rapidly accumulates biomass, woody biomass that you then use to at a baseline mulch the trees, but then increase the amount of biology in the system, fungi, all of the um biological jackhammers that decompact the soil, uh, whether that's roots or all of the mycorrhizae that are thereby associated. That's one way of improving soil. And it's not mutually exclusive with a key line shank disks and ways of when you first approach a highly compacted landscape to give the trees a really good head start. So when they put roots down, they have somewhere to go. You Darren, you also mentioned this series of I won't call them implements, perhaps the whole thing is an implement, but a shank and a coulter and uh maybe a roller. You sent us a video of what I assume the updated version of this might be on WhatsApp. But could you kind of walk us through that implement that you would use to decrease soil compaction and pave the way for trees?

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Well, uh first thing I do when it comes to compaction is I or use a penetrometer. Go out the year before you're going to do anything and in the growing season and use a penetrometer, soil penetrometer, to actually test just how compacted the soil is at different depths of the strata. Because it may well be that when you test the soil, I mean there's no point going out when it's dry because oils all soil is resist is at its strongest when it's dry. And that's when plants aren't growing. It's generally not the growing season. So, you know, you're not there's nothing really to be gained there. So, but going out when the roots are growing and they're or they're being challenged by compaction, and that's when that's when we want to go out. And it's that old saying, when you're a hammer, all you see is nails. Well, when I started out, and kind of like what P.A. Yeomans, the inventor of the key line plow and system, said, like people would say, Where should you use a key line plow, PA? And he'd say, anywhere you could drive a tractor. And that's kind of like, well, you know, there's the hammer and the whole landscape is your nail. And um, kind of like what permaculturalists, you know, where can you put a swale or where can't you? Right? It's sort of similar sort of stuff. So I think that you know, we need to be more analytical about that because when you're expressing capital, um, using diesel, you know, all of this energy, etc., we need to be more responsible with it. So, yeah, going and doing the analysis is the first step. Let's say you do find that you've got compassion, which is pretty usual. We've sort of changed our approach a bit. I've had this idea and concept for a long time, which I know I've shared with you at Propagate, and some of this has been taken on by you with your own work of this sort of daisy chaining. So, since not in so 1995, we put a cultivator, a rotary hoe behind a ripper, behind a yeoman's plough. That was the first time we did that. And that saved us. Instead of going along and ripping and then cultivate at different paths, we could get all of that in. And because so much of what you want to do when you're a contractor, I mean, a contractor, and you know this at Propagate, you've got all of these jobs that you need to do to keep your business going for all of these clients who are basically hiring you to do what they can't do or won't do, right? So you might have so you've right now, if I still had our tree planting business, tree contracting business, I would not be talking with you because I'd be out in the field. We've just had our first autumn, what we call the autumn break. I'd be out there right now and I'll be going all the way till probably June, and I'll be just every day just ripping, ripping and cultivating. You've got this time when you've got to get in and get your money that established. Establishes your revenue base and your profit to run your business, right? So there's a practical part from a business point of view as a contractor, but then there's also we want to limit the amount of diesel that we're using so that we can be more productive with it. And that's where where we get this sort of daisy chain concept. Now, once you start it, it's sort of like I came up with this, and I've drawn a few crazy drawings where it's sort of like this caravan. So, except you haven't got just one caravan behind you, you've got about six or seven, and I know Propagate's been playing with that idea a bit as well, where if you're going to drive in the paddock and you're going to be driving at one, two, three miles an hour, which is bloody slow, well, what are all the other things that 80 horsepower tractor can pull and do at the same time? Right?

SPEAKER_01 22:47

We're up to uh mow so flail mower on the front, yeah, and then rip, till, seed, and mark with a paint gun on the back. And that's that could seem a little bit excessive, but it is very possible and functional.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

Yeah, yeah. So getting to your original question, where we are now is so I've got a machine which is what I would call a well, it's a hydraulically powered strip tiller. Because what so strip tillage, I don't know where it was first invented, but it's very common in cereal, grain, legume, and oil seed um production in of row crops in the United States. It's sort of like a a branch of no-till. It's where you have a narrow strip of soil which is cultivated and it might only be four or five inches across. And then the you know the ten inches or whatever in between the next crop, the next line or row is uncultivated. So it's it's a method. So I looked at that years ago and I thought, wow, that'd be really cool. Because the actual strip that you need to cultivate to grow a tree is actually quite small. I mean, if you look at trees, you've either got a root mass of about you know two inches wide by say about four inches or six inches deep. That's what you plant. And then maybe, you know, 10, 15 inches or whatever above that of um the tree itself, the seedling. Or you're doing bare roots, which you know might be say six inches by ten inches or twelve inches of root mass and you know, three or four, five feet of trunk and and branches above that. So you don't, either way, you don't actually have that big an organism that you're putting in the ground. And the reality is that what we often do is we cultivate areas or we spray out areas. We preferred to use cultivation instead of herbicides, is that we cultivate a much bigger area because we just haven't we're trying to match machinery from other purposes to do the job. So, for example, we started out, we had um the yeoman's plough, and we put a one-meter-wide rotary hoe. Now, to rip soil, you need a tractor of about 65-70 horsepower if you're going to deep rip soil. A one meter rotary hoe has a gearbox which is designed for a 35 or 40 horsepower tractor because that's what most people are rotary hoeing are using that for. So there's a mismatch between the power of the of the tractor and the capable power of the gearbox. So we used to destroy gearboxes and we factored that into our annual budget. And I became very adept at replacing those back in the gearboxes per year.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

And some of this almost looks like a BCS implement on the back of a 80 horsepower tractor.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Pretty well. Because we just don't. I just I just thought, why the hell are we cultivating this? You know, one or because the tractor, the rotary hoe that had the gearbox that would you know, power that could take that was like one point, it was like six or eight feet wide. And I was like, this is crazy. We don't need to cultivate that. Because when you cultivate, you get more weeds and dot da. And more compaction. More compaction, especially when you're using rotary hose and so on. So I had this idea for a long time of going much narrower. And I also prefer not to use rotary hose. I prefer to use power harrows because it goes with the whole non-inversion concept. Rotary hose, when they go through the soil, if you can, if you can imagine me how I've got one hand and I'm using the back of my hand and I'm touching it. So when they go through at 540 revs per minute, that laminar face at depth creates a plow pan because there's a fraction of moisture and you get glazing. So it's a very common feature of using rotary hose that you will cause a compacted layer. It's actually a glazed layer. So I've never liked using them, and we've always backed the revs off, so we go about 200 or so revs, not the full 540, to sort of overcome that. The power harrow, which is where you've got these vertical tines which counter-rotate into each other, um, they don't invert, and they do have a bit of they still glaze a little bit, but they're not as bad at the tip, so you tend not to get as much of an issue. And they provide a they provide a similar result in terms of tilth and so on.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

So for the culinary folks among us, it's as if you took a blade and a Vitamix, uh really nice blender, and increased the size of it significantly, flipped it upside down and stirred the soil.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's a really good analogy, thank you. And you don't want to put your hand in there. Um anyhow, or your spoon for that matter. So I got that concept years ago, and like a lot of concepts that people like me come up with, they get shelved because they don't have the time and space. But when I was working in India um a couple of years ago, we had a project which had an immediacy in terms of meeting targets, and so I was called upon to help meet those targets. And there was also some of the carbon um discussions around that project was that we needed to limit, there was actually a requirement that um that we limit the amount of surface disturbance, otherwise it was going to break some of the carbon rules. So so that whole idea of doing a one, or like I think you know, your gizmo is what probably six foot wide, wouldn't it be?

SPEAKER_01 28:41

Yeah, that was for when we were seeding hay beside the trees, but it's really wide. And I think what what you're getting at is having a much smaller area of disturbance, and you can almost have two of them on a bar on the back of the tractor.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yeah, exactly. So I went back into my mental toolbox and my notebooks and went, yeah, well, I've I already thought about that years before. And so I just pulled that out, and then I found some equipment that um we could do that with. So I found a as you do, go online, hydraulic power harrow, like nothing came up, scroll, scroll. Found this Facebook page of somebody in England who put a hydraulic power harrow on the end of an excavator. So I rang them up and they said, Oh yeah, we bought this from some guy up in the hills of Piedmont. And I said, Do you happen to remember who they were? And anyway, he said, Yep. And so, and I was in the south of France at the time with Lisa and Pearl, our daughter, and um, anyway, I rang up and I know I typed onto their site and they had a WhatsApp thing on their contact on their site and got in contact. And two days later we were there at their factory because we just drove up and here it all was, and I went, Cool, this stuff's really cool. Because the Italian I mean, it's amazing, Italy is this unusual font of manufacturing and small scale innovation and manufacturing in a in the fifth biggest economy, I think.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

Why do you think that is? Everything comes from Italy.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

I don't know. I haven't been able to put my finger on it, to be honest, but um but that's an aside, right? Let's not get sidetracked there. As much as I would love to. I did say to someone the other day, isn't it cra uh yesterday? I said, Isn't it crazy that here in Australia we used to have such a great manufacturing base of all of these mum and dad factories, as uh what Kropotkin calls that, fields and factories of tomorrow, I think his book was, or Fields and Workshops of Tomorrow. And in the United States, you had the same. You had all of these amazing innovators in in towns and and cities across the US, and they've basically all disappeared completely. And it's not like they've been shipped somewhere else. China doesn't have that, they have big manufacturers, Korea, you know, because that's where it all went. But Italy is the one place where those mum and dad operations doing this seriously good engineering um still happens. And it's thank God for for the Italians from that perspective.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

So if you're a mechanical engineering student listening to this and you are 19 years old and want to get into agricultural machinery manufacturing, you should study abroad in Italy.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Especially for stuff that's horticultural, that's the basis of it. If we go for um broadacre stuff, um then that's different. And I'll get I'll round back on this thread in a moment. So I found this piece and I went, beauty, right, I've got that. I can mount that onto the back of a power onto the back of a ripper, and my sort of whole concept of daisy chaining was sort of lit, the fuse was lit again, right? Um, after a hiatus of you know being a teacher and designer and not in the field as much. So we did that, that worked. So we got 20 imported into India, and um they're still working today. They've done thousands and thousands of hectares of ground prep, and from all accounts, it's working quite well. So that's good. So we've had our proof of concept there. So the machine I'm working on now is I'd say a sort of a mark two of that concept, and I've basically got a box um that I've built around this unit. Um, so the unit is basically a 40 centimeter, what's that, 13-inch diameter disc that's half inch thick plate, and it's got four rotary hoe blades on it, which um if you had a video, then that's what they look like. They're about about nine inches deep or long, and they will spin around uh power harrow blades, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

And looks like a big hefty kitchen knife if you're listening.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

And that's powered by a hydraulic motor. So we're not using the PDO of the tractor. And this was one of my thinkings way back. I thought the problem because I wanted to do not just the daisy chain in a row of having a ripper, a cultivator, a cedar, so we could sow cover crops into the strip. But then I wanted to have that interchangeable so that when we do another pass before planting, so you've got the ideally you've got the pass at the start of the growing season, and then you've got another pass immediately prior to planting. So my big idea is I'll do ripping, cultivating, sowing of a smother crop, like ricorn, for example, and then I'll let that come up, and then at the time of planting, which is usually spring for us, then we'll come along and use a roller crimper or an orbus from Rollinsem in France or that sort of concept, roll flat that cover crop. So swap out the modules, so it'd have this module effect where you have the same toolbar, but you swap out the components on a standard coupling system, basically like a USB for tractors, and you swap out this module for now a roller, and then behind the roller you mount a mechanical transplanter where someone sits on their ass and drops the tree, basically in a no-till format, just the same. This gets back to where I wanted to round back to, just the same as what is done on hundred, probably hundreds of thousands of acres now in the US using roller crimpers and soya bean and corn planters running behind. So this is where we get to. You know, when you said I'll go to Italy and study mechanical work there, well, no, don't just study there. Look at everything because what the big problem is here that we all operate in so many silos that the row crop guys are doing super precise planting, super precise no-till, they're doing the rot, you know, they're doing the roller crimper work, they're doing all this sort of stuff. Whereas you go over to horticulture, horticultural machinery, they're doing their all their own stuff, which is whatever it is, and that's quite precise, and a lot of it's hydraulically powered, not PDO or ground powered, and they don't talk to each other. And so when we come into our agroforestry space, which by definition is uh is an integrated exercise of agriculture and forestry, and we have that integrative mindset. Well, why aren't we doing that as well when it comes to machinery design? I mean, GPS tractor guidance is a great system, for example. Before us doing our work, tractor guidance was not used in agroforestry. It was only used in row crops, but that's where the system comes from. If you go into grazing areas of the US, hardly anyone, you know, they'll have a hundred thousand dollar tractor, but if they're doing row row crops with hay and that sort of thing, hardly any of them are doing that with tractor guidance. They're still operating the steering wheel. So we have this ambition to limit the cost of putting trees in, but we also have an ambition of doing it in a way that doesn't require any herbicide whatsoever, and generate superior outcomes in terms of soil health, tree establishment rates, and then growth rates. I'd look at that as being the main prism. And we and we know we can pull that off. And in some ways, we already are pulling that off.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

What are you mostly focusing on now in terms of crop types? I know more recently you were looking at and designing larger vineyards in the country of Georgia. And as far as I know, there's you're also doing a good amount of work in Australia as well.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

We work where we're invited, so that means the jobs come to you that that drive, in a sense, what you're doing. I'm working with a company in Australia called Covalent Land Australia. I don't know this to be true, but I think they're at least in the agroforestry space, that is the integration of trees into agricultural landscapes which will continue to be agricultural, not swapping out a tree system for an agricultural system. Um, the continuation of both. Um I'd say they're the biggest in Australia, um, and they're doing and their their principal and their team are really cool people, and I enjoy working with them. Um, they have to work within the unfortunate parameters of the Australian carbon market's requirements as far as tree selection and spacing and all that sort of stuff, which for someone like me, um, who's perhaps a little bit on the libertarian side of the political ledger, um I I that streak goes into me not wanting to have limits as a designer about how I can func design a functional landscape either. And it seems to me that the whoever designed these schemes um has got no fucking idea, to be quite honest, um, when it comes to practical integration of trees. And the same with others. So so I'm working on that from a species perspective, the Australian scheme is is super limited, unfortunately. You have to plant whatever plants are indigenous to that landscape, which is as I said at a talk a couple of weeks ago in New Zealand. I said if if climate change is such an existential crisis, well then why are why well why don't we have a Manhattan project about it? You know, we had a Manhattan project more or less of types when we had the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, it was all hands on deck, no money spared, all that sort of stuff, but we haven't had that sort of approach to climate change. And an extension of that is, well, if it's such an existential crisis, well then why don't governments actually go and work with the people who are doing this work and get a better rounded idea? We're going to be forced to plant by the stupidity of these laws, of these frameworks, to plant species in really elite growing conditions, species of native trees, which are just it's just so bad performers as far as carbon um carbon performing trees, but we're forced to do that because of some nativism rhetoric that sort of rattles around the corridors of power.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

What are the species that you're inclined to plant versus what you're required to plant?

SPEAKER_00 39:53

Um, it may not be necessarily non-native species, non-indigenous species. So when you get into the woods on this, as it were, there would be species like if I had a site, and I'm thinking of one particular, I can't speak of it, but it's a really elite site, and it actually has the highest rating of carbon of what's called accu's. So Australian Carbon Credit Unit. So different landscapes have different ratings as to how many accus they're rated at. And so this particular site we're we're working on at the moment, or planning at the moment, it has the highest amount that you can get in Australia, right? So it's a super productive site. But we're going to plant trees on there, which are I don't know. I mean, I just think that they're crap for that. But if I would go, okay, well, what are the other eucalypt species or casuarina species or acacia species and provenances that I would select and there would be a number. Um, so I'd I just that would be my and that's my typical approach. Let's not go exotic straight away, let's go native straight away. But if there's a capacity to also go exotic and that performed, it just so happens in Australia that you know we're blessed to have eucalypse, which you know well eucalyptus regnans forests in just outside of Melbourne are the fastest accumulators of of carbon in the world, right? There is nothing that grows that accumulates carbon faster than that organism. So we're already we don't have to go and look at a black locust.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

Not that you need to. I mean, you have the eucalypts and casharina and carimbia. And I was working on a carbon project and proposed Carimbia maculata spotted gum because the wood is beautiful, the density is extremely high, so a lot of carbon storage. And it's only suitable to Florida, zone nine, I don't I don't think zone eight. And California. Carimbia maculata is in Southern California as well. Yeah. And the so the Carimbia being associated with eucalypse, but not the same thing. Generally spooks a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

Well it used it was reclassified by botanists a few years ago. It used to be Eucalyptus maculata, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

And so we have these options from all around the globe, and you were uh I believe alluding to species that are native to the Australian continent, but not the hyperspecific bioregion. And you were uh prohibited from planting tree species that were native to Australia, but not native to the what what's your reference here? It's probably not 1492, but like native to when is what I'm getting at.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

Yeah, well that's the yeah. Well, native to when Europeans decided that they decid that that is the um is the vegetation that grew on that site within the European frame, which is or at least in the in the state of Victoria, which is where some of these projects are, um, is uh 1836.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

And you might want to go back 70,000 years before humans were even had cross had even crossed the Wallace line and made it to Australia.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

I just think it's all bullshit because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, nativism doesn't extend to Homo sapiens, which up until say 70,000 years ago were not native to the Australian continent. So, and then go forward to to now, where no one's concerning themselves with pastoral species or or the fact that the majority of our agriculture is not based on in on indigenous plants, it's based on exotic species, so species of plants and livestock, and goodness know how many different microbes. I mean, are we really going to go down that rabbit hole and go, oh, I need to eliminate that mycorrhizae which came from Europe or this or that? I mean, it's just a stupid, stupid place to be. My friend David Holmgren, I think, who co originated permaculture, puts it beautifully that nature is an equal opportunity employer and you use now that's not to say that we want to be irresponsible about it introducing species which are going to be prob which we know using our experience and observation are going to be problematic. No. We're just using species that are going to be better performers. It's just as simple as that. Like if I go and improve a pasture, there's no there's no argument by the same people about using an exotic pasture mix to do that. That's actually the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom when it comes to tree species is completely different. It's all about you know the official orthodox conventional wisdom and requirement is not about exotics at all. It's it's like this really, really tight framework of using not only local species but local provenances. Right. So it's yeah it's it's quite bizarre. I always find the movement and and the stasis of orthodoxy to be difficult to reconcile at times when there's such when there's such contradictions.

SPEAKER_01 45:10

And then you have folks that are effectively vegan for native species. Yeah which I there's no word for it.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

But um eco-fascism is what um David Holmgren calls it.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Yeah that's really strong. I'm trying to figure out how to like maybe ascend to that as a concept and when folks bring up native versus non-native but like have outdoor domestic house cats uh there's a certain amount of uh hypocrisy there because the number one cause of bird death in the United States in North America outside of habitat destruction and they're responsible for 28 29 uh indigenous mammals in Australia go going extinct. So if you're worried about black locust or the wrong type of eucalypt but you're okay with cats I uh I'm not sure what to tell you.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

Or you're doing all of that and you you eat cereals every breakfast which are just you know so so problematic with habit habitat destruction on it goes.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Or feedlot bacon, etc. And I I don't I don't want to heavily criticize food choices necessarily because I find people get put off by that pretty quickly. I I was the let's see young environmentalist that was really keen on eating only local organic regenerative food for a while and in order to be more or better at inviting others in, I just try and meet people where they're at. But you do ramp chestnuts down their throat by the same token. I just talk about chestnuts. Yeah I I there's uh it's it's all positive reinforcement for sure. So we've jumped into native species versus non-native species versus the food we eat whether apple pie is American uh when apples are from Kazakhstan or not is is something we can dive into another day. I'm thinking about mechanization jumping back to that subject so we've gotten to the point where we've done soil prep we've planted the tree you talked briefly about tree transplanters and once you've prepped the soil once it's a good chocolate cake adjacent texture uh looks more like compost ideally uh than flour itself you can walk up and plant the tree by hand or you can run a tree transplanter through and do that mechanically that seems a bit more straightforward compared to the soil prep side of things. I was speaking with Bob about this last week and so there are different sorts of tree transplanters it almost looks like a keel on a sailboat that opens that it's not a ditch it's a call it a furrow put the tree in closes the ditch and there are others that drive a stake at the same time spit some water on the tree is there a kind of a an ideal amount of technology that you've seen on that front um yeah what you've just described then where you're doing staking and push and assumedly guarding as well um I mean there's going to be as you would realize a diminishing return between or an options analysis that one would do between putting say a deer fence if deer is what you're in your case in particular your main reason for putting a guard on a tree.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Do you need to put a stake on a tree? Well a stake on a tree is that is a function of how big the tree is when you plant it a garden on the tree is to ward off animals which would predate upon it and there's going to be a point where it's going to be cheaper to put a fence than it would be to put a guard. So you're kind of looking at all of those things as to what what sort of in that pass what will that machine ultimately do I actually designed a concept I've got to find the drawing of it I've got it somewhere in one of my many notebooks which I'm looking at of a machine that actually installed a tube guard as well but anyway that's a for another day. But I think of I've been influenced to an extent by going into factories I've been really lucky and I'm sure you have now as well when you're working in processing facilities food processing facilities and that's a whole different branch of mechanical engineering. I mean the people who have designed how to fill a bottle how to put a label on a bottle how to turn the cap do all of that shit I mean that's seriously good engineering right um you know the the us with our sort of basic putting a little rotary hoe on the back of a ripper I mean that's super basic by comparison or driving a stake into the ground that's super basic by comparison to these production lines and you look at that and they're super reliable. And a lot of them are running on air not on mechanical power they're running on air power you know so pneumatics and stuff. So when I look at that and I think well geez what are all the things that we could do if we Manhattan project this or even just a little manhattan project then you know if we're really serious about it and the capital was applied capital and ingenuity was applied then yeah we could we could definitely do that as opposed to what people are I mean I I've been exposed to a bit where people are saying oh why don't we use drones to plant trees and it's like yeah do you just want to it's just that's such a waste of seed. And if you've ever gone it's like people come up with this concept and it's like have you ever gone and harvested seed? Do you know how hard that is and not only harvest the seed but then process the seed I think you'd be a bit more We just cut the trees down here to get it. Yeah but even then I mean you take that and then you put that through the process to get the seed it's not easy work and you know there's no way you would then just go and drop them even if you put them in the seed balls which is sort of like a a pretty dodgy low um survival rate or low success method you know people are talking about making like a rhodium seeds drills and so on. It's like come on. So when we look at this and we're gonna do it properly and we're gonna integrate into agricultural land I think there's lots of upside in terms of using engineering and machinery and make and our mechanical engineering expertise from a whole suite of domains and bringing that together into making some some shit hot cool gear that's going to get us in and out, give us really good survival and growth rates um but with really high levels of reliability. And I think the other part of this too is I'll go back up the supply chain a little bit one of the critiques I've had of the industry to an extent is that we have the main variable that we're dealing with is actually the tree stock. We haven't actually standardized the tree stock so we've got berries seedlings which are bloody huge or varying in their sizes all of that you know if you look at if you use the bottle analogy again I mean we only you know wine bottles are all pretty well the same size wherever you go in the world right so the wine bottle plants are basically they use that form of standardization. We don't well there is some like the BCC the big Swedish company they make the Hyco cell and I think they've got about 10 different models of that Hyco cell which is a root training air pruned cell that's fused into different numbers of of uh tree cells. Well I'm a big advocate of that sort of system because um it standardizes the um the plant size a dimension which then means that you don't need to have five different machines to do all of these or you know what I mean you don't have to have as many different machines to do all of the work you can simplify the machines that you as a contractor or as a as a farmer can use to inject these trees into the ground because that's basically what you're doing. So and do so with with also a lot more elasticity in terms of time which again going back to the start time is a problem with a contractor because you know again you've got to you might want to plant let's say you've got to plant five hundred thousand dollars worth of trees for your business to run or a million dollars worth of trees for you to run your business and pay everyone and pay your taxes and run it all and get a profit well that means you've got to do it over a three, four month, five month period to do that you've got to do your ground prep over a period and you've got to do your planting over a period. So having all of these variables just and having being hamstrung say by using bare roots which have a really finite period and usually a shit time because the time when a bare root is bare is really not a good time to be in the paddock. Usually you've got suboptimal moisture levels it's cold it's wet it's just crappy whereas if you took that same tree and grew it in a container in a nursery well then now you've got all of this elasticity in terms of when you can go and plant that and that's what we did in India they were um planting a whole bunch of species bear root and I came in and said all right well let's rationalise this so we came up with a two pot system so we had a 100cc pot and a 300cc pot in trays and we were growing like in that particular case we uh I think we planted something like uh four and a half million or five million mulberry cuttings were planted in the nursery as cuttings into these 300cc root trainers and now we weren't that meant that we could basically we expanded our planting type table out by by six or seven months which is gold for those now if we had just gone with bare roots because that's what everyone does then you've just got this you know like a one month window to plant five million trees good good bloody luck with that you know not going to happen. I mean we often talk about this at regrarians when we're doing any kind of planting there's a starting point and then there's an end point. So when I'm looking at the whole forestry game or agroforestry game I'm not starting at the machine that we're planting with I'm going back to all of these different nodes which are influencing this is where you basically do your flow charts you look at all right well what's the nursery game that's coming at you what's the game that's happening out in the field what's the game that's happening in terms of the design and you're trying to bring all of that together into an integrated whole and then hopefully then using your influence where you as the key character in this whether it's a propagate or us or whatever because you are the key character then driving change within the supply chain whether that's in how trees are produced and how they come to you because they've got to fit with you because you're the key character or as they say the kids say now the main character. So being the main character you have an influence on driving this so it works for you. And of course if it works for you then it works for the client who ultimately is the master here. They are the real they're not they're not the main character they're the master carrier character. So because they're paying for it. But we yeah we're constantly in that sort of business and so I think people need to um understand their power in this and understand their influence on by volume and so on to to drive these changes and it's part of a whole mechanical ecosystem we might say we can definitely mechanize tree planting can we mechanize mulching? Huh yeah well I'm interested well yeah I think we can by using and this is my change in this is that what are we doing in cereal production? Well Jeff Moyer and the Rodale Institute God bless them came up with the roller crimpus concept and I think that why aren't we doing that in if you can if you can run out and use a a ripper and a cultivator in a field then that suggests you using a tractor. It's tractorable right it's cultivatable. So if that's the case why aren't we going out there with a roller crimper or what I think is a superior implement from Rollinsem in France which is called the Orbis why aren't we going and using them as part of the pass so that instead of us going and trying to make handle this god awful material called loose mulch or an expensive product in terms of a of a mat, like a qua mat or a hemp or wool mat, and put that on a tree as opposed to just growing the mulch and growing not what is what some people call a cover crop, but a smother crop, which I think is a really good way of looking at it. So a smother like if you grow if you grow eight foot high or seven foot high rye corn then that is that's a three to four inch layer of mulch when you roll it down. That's seriously thick. Nothing grows through that it shrinks way faster than wood chips but it's so much easier to apply. And how long do you need it and you know you look at your turbo obelisk beautiful black locust you go planting and then they only need mulch for a year or two. That's it. No if you mulch them they grow too fast so we just don't mulch them really but chestnuts and other crops but I think even for um it's just interesting me to me that and I'm not saying that we won't ever use mulch again as a product but we just haven't put the time and effort into um using a technology which is very well proven across the US and that's um roller crimper crops.

SPEAKER_01 59:32

Crimper's amazing and the side discharge flail mower. So you grow five, six, seven foot tall Sudan grass and then spit it right out the side the best mulching intervention that I've seen or a mulching process is cereal rye seeded in the fall overwinters you come and plant and then either cut the hay and then rake it or side discharge flail mower in the spring right when you actually need it for that summer heat. Yeah. Because if you're if you're mulching with Sudan grass like fluffy almost halage at the end of a growing season I don't mean to harp on rodents too much but just in this climate in living orchards and living agroforestry systems you do get that rodent pressure. So mulching with hay in the fall doable and um it just squicks me out a little bit in terms of uh rodent pressure nests.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:26

Yeah. Yeah that's fair enough. But you'll get the same if you're using mulch right?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:31

The so wood chips yeah yeah I would I would sooner mulch in the spring with wood chips. Uh rodents don't love to burrow in wood chips unless the wood chips are really large. But yeah there's I have a whole spiel presentation on rodent strategies.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:47

Yeah well I think well apart from which is just trying to get biology uh trying to get a uh other trophic level organisms into the field which is your hawks etc which is all part of that encouraging coyotes even um I had a good time with um John Chester in New Zealand uh at Aurora a couple of weeks ago where he was um showing his uh he was the other keynote and um he was showing his his show the Little Big Farm in um or Lig Little Biggest Farm I think it's called his movie in California and yeah it was very interesting. I hadn't seen it before so it was interesting to watch. Anyway John was telling us how much he actually was spending on gopher control and it was like 10 bucks a gopher. He's spending a hundred K a year to get this and yeah he worked it all out and it was like like he worked out how much Barnells they the investment that he put into Barnells the investment to return was just phenomenal in terms of you know if you use the baseline of human control of gophers compared with Barnells it was a n it was beyond a no-brainer. And everyone loves owls. Of course yeah I haven't met anyone that didn't like an owl yeah but anyway so the mulching thing I think probably the other part of it too is you know if you look at the side chart side discharge mulch you've got a wagon with a side discharge I mean that's pretty well all we've got can we improve on that I'm sure because I mean a lot of the time what we're doing is we're unnecessarily mulching a part of the row that doesn't have a tree in it. But because those systems sort of put they've just got a um conveyor belt which is just side discharging that mulch along the whole row I mean ideally it would be that the material's only going on where the tree is but that would require GPS control and and that relating to the conveyor and all of that sort of stuff which is again very doable but I don't know that anyone has done. Anyway, so but you're right I mean Scott Hall um talking about syntropics earlier Scott Hall is a guy um who I follow a bit um he's in here in Australia in Queensland south southern Queensland and he grew up on a broadacre cereal row crop farm and then became a market gardener and then got into syntropics. So he's got that sort of practical bent to him off growing off a sheep and wheat farm and then coming into town and doing market gardening and all that especially intensive market gardening and all the cool tools the jang stuff of planters and all the you know cordless drill powered stuff that Elliot Coleman's come up with all that sort of cool tech and then come out of it with Ernst Gotch's sort of multi-layered da da da da and he's brought all of that together as well as I can anyone I've seen. So he's mechanised syntropics as best I've seen anyway and he does something similar to you in that he grows um he even just lets the tropical grasses grow up cuts them um with some sort of um scissor mower so that you keep the stalk in as long a shape as you can as opposed to um cultivating like with a flail mower and then he comes along with a hay rake and he might do say a 10 foot or 20 foot row row spacings and then hayrake that over and he he has got really good success with that and then he comes then he comes into that you know berm of or that windrow of sidecast hay or raked hay and then he plants directly into that without any cultivation, without any ripping and sort of plays the whole centrotropic game. And he's done that on on I know he's doing that on a block that's about 25-30 acres which from a centropic point of view when you know how intensive its management is is that's a pretty intimidating area to be playing with.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:50

Yeah when I think of Cintro I think of gardening as opposed to farming because even even if it's a larger scale if it's not mechanized you are effectively gardening the farm with all of the hand management. And that this is not to say that you can't have more people involved in the system and scale hand management as you would with pruning a conventional almond, apple, citrus orchard etc etc but yeah it's uh that's an elephant right there.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

There's so much timeliness with um when you intervene and when you cut he's doing really good with bananas in particular but anyway he'd be a good person for you to talk to at some stage I reckon um to delve into all of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

Yeah I should go watch all the videos there. Probably have one more question for you and then we can wrap. There's a ton of info here. If someone didn't grow up on a row crop farm like Scott and they say that you can't learn to swim by listening to a podcast about water. How might you recommend they increase machine experience as it relates to agroforestry or otherwise what what are what are those um tips and tricks that You'd give a general audience or an interested, educated general audience.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:04

I might have had someone ask a very similar question to me who grew up on a summer camp last year. Someone asked me that sort of question, if I recall. At the workshop. There you go. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, everyone has a different springboard and launching place. And I think that well, first of all, I say to people, when you're trying to imagine what goes on, imagine what happens. Like I say, oh what happens when you use this piece of gear, like a disc plough, for example. Okay, well, well, imagine or go and watch, go out into the countryside and just watch these operations, and you can see and you go, ugh, if it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't right. If you see a disc plough running through the ground, it's um it's they're apparently originally designed for snow as a snow plough, but they weren't that good. But they actually then worked out, Eugenio Graf told me this, that they uh worked out that they incidentally not good at plowing as a snow plough, but actually really good as a as a cultivator.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:11

I'm trying to imagine plowing snow with a disc, but just just go for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:15

I don't know, but anyway, maybe that's an urban myth that Eugenio shared um shared and I've promulgated. But anyway, there I try and get people to go, okay, imagine what happens if you drag a piece of metal through the soil and the reaction of the soil to that, and what does that mean? Well, not only the physical reaction with the physical soil, but the reaction of all of the organisms, of what the residue of that will be in terms of air spaces, in terms of all in terms of potential inversion of layers and all of these different things. So that to me is a starting point. So, you know, you've probably been to the beach and you've dragged a finger through the through the sand and you've got a reaction to that, or then you've got a stick and you've dragged it through the sand. These are all the primal things that are basically the start of what we know as cultivated agriculture, which we've been, you know, that's where it all started. Us dragging a stick through the ground to to then plant a seed behind, right? So that's where I get people started in the conversation. And then once you get past that, then if it's going to be your industry that you then get into, well then, like anything, you've got a bit of a dive ahead of you. You've got an apprenticeship where you've got to get out there and um meet people and see what people are doing and sort of look at it a bit from above, get on the crew. I mean, I've learned a lot by being on our well, I wouldn't be here today with my expertise unless I was the designer and the installer and then the manager, because I was able to get that holistic feedback through the whole thing. So the decisions that I made as a as a designer then influenced the the establishment, which then influenced and just I was talking last night about this. One of the reasons why I developed really, really good cultivation techniques was because when I was out there planting, it was hard on my body, even as a you know, 25, 27-year-old, which is you know, when you're at your prime, you would say, and flexible and all the rest, more flexible and stuff. And I'll be going out there planting, and it was just really hard work, and I was only planting like you know, 2,000 trees a day or something like that, and twisted ankles and you know, all that sort of palava, and then the plant, and then you go to the other end of it, and your plant growth rates and survival rates weren't weren't as good, which then gives you negative feedback when you've got a client conversation, and then you're walking around a few months later and there's holes in the in the planting and so on. So that that's what I so my advice to people is be involved with the different parts of the whole chain of production, which starts at design and ends at management, you might sort never ends with management, but you know what I mean? Management is an open-ended thing. But be involved with all of that so that you can then understand the whole ecosystem of what's going on. And then you're in a better position to just start going, okay. Well, I one, I can see what mechanical parts of that, which is to the threat of today. And then two, I can see I have some license, then I think to go, hey, what do you reckon if we did this? Because there will be things that you've been exposed to, whether it was your uncle's bottling plant or whether it was whatever it is, or just your imagination that you that will come out of nowhere and will be foreign, possibly foreign to the activity, and bring some innovation, which which is a big leap forward, or even a little leap forward.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:52

They say, How do you eat an elephant? and the answer is one bite at a time. So there's no substitute uh for going out there. Uh you have to know how to cook the elephant. And they also say that quantity has a quality unto itself. So I think that's a that's a good place to wrap anything else that's top of mind that we haven't touched on besides everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:17

Oh, not really. I think I think we've um I think I've given a fair bit of energy and enthusiasm, which uh continues to drive. Um I mean I've spent the last three days doing CAD of this new design. Lisa said to me a couple of days ago, can't you get Georgie to do this? And I go, No, no, no, no. I mean, I love Georgie and all of his and it's like the sort of job, I mean, could I even give it to a mechanical engineer who I know to do it? And I go, not at this stage, because you know, I'm so invested in understanding exactly what I want to do. It just as a creative process, it just wouldn't do that right now. Um in the future, perhaps, but right now it's right on me to to do that. But um, yeah, so that's where I think if you've got these ideas and you want to start playing, well then get a sketchbook and start drawing. Goodness knows what's going to come out of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:14

Gotta start. With that, Darren, thank you so much for joining us, and let's talk again soon.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:21

I hope so. Thanks, mate. Thanks for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:25

An earnest thank you to Darren Doherty for joining us. Darren is a wealth of knowledge, and we're perennially thankful for his experience and his candor. If you'd like to hear a similar conversation on mechanized tree planting with Propagate's own Bob Walker, jump back an episode or two and take a listen there as well. If you'd like to learn more about regrarians, they have excellent training programs and forums with regen ag practitioners from around the world. Darren is also the author of the Regrarians Handbook, which is effectively the gold standard of regenerative farm design. It's available in PDF on the Regrarians website, and I refer back to it regularly. If you'd like to learn more about Propagate or chat with us about planting trees on non forested land that you own or manage in the eastern half of the United States, don't hesitate to drop us a line via propagateag.com. Until next time, plant the trees and make it count.