At Glenlands Farm we see regenerative farming as using animals to improve soils. Regenerative Agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services, by capturing carbon in soil and above ground biomass.
Grazing Management
- Allows full recovery of pastures (grazing at the top of the pasture growth curve)
- During fast growth periods we light graze pastures with faster rotations building covers (take some area out of grazing giving a reserve when growth slows)
- Keep soils covered especially during summer and when wet
- Change it up – don’t do the same thing in the same paddock at the same time of year e.g. calving paddock and weaning paddock
- Make grazing decisions on species you want – don’t leave animals in the paddock to clean up undesirables
- Encourage diversity of grasses, legumes, forbs and even weeds – yes even weeds are diversity
- Animals are a tool you can use to improve pastures as well as destroy them
Trampled grass covering the soil
- Creates an ideal environment for seed germination and seed survival
- Keeps soil cooler over hot summer months and improves growth
- Keeps soil microbes more active
- Traps CO2 close to the ground where grass seedlings are germinating
- The carbon layer helps hold onto nutrients especially nitrogen
- Improves rainfall infiltration
What’s left behind 
Close up of recovering grass
Example of 60 Plus Days Recovery – One Week Out From Grazing
- Grasses have mature seed heads
- Grasses / species have had time to put roots deeper down into soils
- Plenty of flowering plants providing pollinators and other insects with nectar source
- Mature grass ensures soils are covered post grazing
- Grasses and herbs have time to pump surplus sugar from photosynthesis into soil
- Improves ran infiltration
- Drought reserve can slow round by increase utilisation from 30-40% to 60-75% of pasture
60 Plus Days Recovery – One Week Out From Grazing
Observations and Tools – Paramount to Success
- Spade essential to soil observations – colour, depth, smell, structure, worms
- Brix Meter is used to track energy in pastures, are some species higher? Why?
- Gut fill of animals – looking and observing animals – weigh young stock regularly – they may look full but are they putting on weight
- Dung and urine PH
- Animal behaviour – what are they eating and why
- Pasture species
- Pasture fertility across paddocks
- Look at your pastures 3-4 days after grazing (recovery) not just 3-4 days before grazing. Easier to make round adjustments
Using live stock as a tool
High density grazing 400,000 kg live weight per hectare
Start of grazing 1st June
6 hours later
Soil Crumbs 
Soil Plates 
Rasta Roots
What’s going on
High protein low fibre
Good balance protein fibre
High fibre low protein
Cocktail Cropping
- Feeding Livestock
- Improving / Feeding Soils
- Feed for Pollinators
- Feed for Birds
- Feed for People
Mid Winter Cocktail Mix
Cocktail Mix 29 Species Drilled November 29
December 29 
January 20th – Crop was a permanent wilting point
Carbon and CO2
- The carbon reserves in your soil are an asset for your farm. This will help buffer effects from floods and droughts and store nutrients, reducing down stream issues
- CO2 is essential for plant nutrient and is not a pollutant
- Increasing CO2 levels have improved plant productivity 15%-20% since 1950’s
- We need to celebrate the stable climate we have had over the last 100 years that has allowed civilisation to flourish
