"THE way I look at it, the way commodity prices are at the moment, almost everyone is doing pretty well, this is the time we should be investing back into our land for the future,'' says Blackwood Valley farmer Warren Pensini.
"If we can't do it now, it is never going to happen.
"I think good farmers recognise that.
"There are some practices that we can't keep doing forever, because they are not sustainable."
The Pensinis market Angus cattle, under the Blackwood Valley Beef brand, and grow perennial grasses and multi-species cash crops on Paraway, the family's 664-hectare property near Boyup Brook.
But what they are really focused on at the moment is a paradigm shift in the way they farm.
The ingredients are pretty simple - slowing the flow of water through the property, addressing patches of salinity and waterlogging, planting thousands more trees and monitoring the soil and water - all done in the name of improving his farm's ecology and productivity long-term.
In doing so, they are continuing a deliberate, considered move begun two decades ago, away from high-input farming, via a period of organic farming, to focus instead on "landscape function'' and rehydration.
"If we want to be more sustainable, then let's implement some practices that are going to potentially decrease our costs of production going forward,'' Mr Pensini said.
"That is kind of the promise of regenerative agriculture.
"I don't think we are there yet.
"But I think a part of this is restoring the landscape function - that is water, soil and biological cycles.
"Once you get that working in your favour, that is when you can start dropping your inputs out.''
To help achieve this, the Pensinis are the first of four Western Australian farming families to set up a landscape rehydration demonstration site on their properties, supported by the New South Wales-based Mulloon Institute.
The Pensinis trial has been funded by Mulloon and the Dutch-based not-for-profit Commonland.
He and his wife, artist Lori, will host a field day and workshop with the Mulloon team in March (2023), to share their progress so far.
"With this broader scale landscape function, quite often the reaction you will get from Western Australian farmers is 'oh yeah, it won't work here' or 'it will work over east, but not over here','' Mr Pensini said.
"That was one of our driving forces, to demonstrate that it can work."
What the Pensinis have achieved already is impressive.
They have planted 28,000 trees from 25 different species on 25ha, graders have circled its ridges and hillsides with 3.3 kilometres of 35 centimetre-deep contour banks, they have started fencing off remnant bushland and the creek line to enable tree regrowth and have hand-built weirs aimed at restoring areas of erosion and emerging salt scours.
They are also setting up dozens of photo points, soil and water testing points linked to the Soil Mentor app, which will let them monitor and record a range of different measurements and track them over time - and hopefully provide the proof that what they are trialling actually works.
The approach was ultimately inspired by pioneering NSW farmer and race horse breeder Peter Andrews, but while Mr Andrews was looking in isolation at a water course and creek system on his 810ha property, in the NSW Upper Hunter Valley, Mr Pensini's family is attempting to do it on a broader, holistic scale from the top of the large Blackwood catchment.
Mr Pensini said their property had a natural advantage which would allow them this influence.
There is no water flow or creek running onto the central catchment of the farm - although for most of the year, by the time it leaves, the central catchment creek is brackish and unusable.
The undulating, elevated property, instead, catches the rain which falls on the top of the ridges which run around its perimeter.
The water flows down the hillsides to form the Blackwood Creek running through the farm's centre and then out into the catchment.
"There is no water coming in from next door,'' Mr Pensini said.
"It provides us with the opportunity to completely influence the top of the catchment.
"Landscape rehydration is really about working at the top of the catchment to get the ultimate outcome."
Before being selected for the program, the Pensinis completed a $30,000 farm plan.
It's what has allowed them to get going on their "paradigm shift" so quickly.
Based on the plan, they are concentrating mainly on one 200ha valley and have split the hillsides for different uses - recharge zones designed to hold back water, agriculture zones for grazing, pasture and cropping and protected zones around remnant and re-establishing bushland, soaks and the creek line.
The recharge zone sits at the top of the landscape - and "if you are not holding the water back up, it just ends up down the bottom of the hill and in the creek'', Mr Pensini said.
They are experimenting with a series of 35cm contour banks that have been graded across the hillsides, up higher and within the productive zones and just above some of the salt scours, to act as mini dams or speed humps to slow the water flow down.
"Over time we shouldn't get any run off at all into the contours,'' Mr Pensini said.
"They are just holding water back a little bit higher in the landscape."
As well as, and between, the contour banks are extensive lines of tree plantings, aimed at improving the valley's ecological function.
Marri, jarrah and endemic shrubs have been planted on the higher slopes and paperbarks and sheoaks on the wetter areas.
The first plantings, which are slowly establishing, cover 25ha and a further 10ha remains to be done.
"Again, the idea is to hold more of the water - and nutrients - up higher in the landscape and this will slowly percolate out as these areas become more established,'' Mr Pensini said.
In the productive zones, the Pensinis will strategically grow cash crops and graze the Angus herd, which runs to about 600 head.
At the moment, the southern hillside is planted to perennial grasses, which will be harvested for hay and a multi-species crop of wheat, barley and field peas which is contracted to supply chicken growers via the Wide Open Agriculture (WOA) program.
The northern slopes are devoted to grazing for the cattle enterprise, which also directly supplies WOA.
This 40ha grazing area was previously divided into three big paddocks.
But having just extended the water pipelines to the slope, they will be able to split it into 24 paddocks.
It will allow for strategic recovery of the paddocks and, when being grazed, to utilise the cattle alongside hay and other feed inputs to make improvements to the landscape.
"We will strategically graze that area with larger mobs, in smaller paddocks for smaller periods of time,'' Mr Pensini said.
"We will be using the livestock to regenerate that country as well.''
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In the protected zones, they are in the process of fencing off the creekline, an existing soak and one of the main salt scours, which is undergoing rehabilitation.
Remnant stands of jarrah, marri and wandoo trees, much of it on the top of the hillsides, have no recruitment of new seedlings and will be fenced off initially from livestock.
At the creekline, existing flood gums should self-recruit quite quickly as the livestock is excluded.
"As stock has had access, we are not getting any recruitment of young seedlings in these areas,'' Mr Pensini said.
"In another 10, 20 or 30 years' time, these trees will all be dead and there will be nothing to replace them.
"In terms of the landscape function, they are not doing what they used to do because they are getting towards the end of their life.
"But if we can fence them off, and start to get some natural recruitment back in there, then over time that bush will regenerate."
All of the new native tree plantings have been registered as a tree carbon project, which means the potential for earning back income, via Australian carbon credit units.
They are also looking into a potential Federal government scheme to facilitate natural capital payments for tree plantings.
Onfarm, holding the water higher on the hill should have a couple of productive benefits.
It should keep nutrients in the agriculture zones - helping to lower the requirement for expensive inputs, improve yields and cattle health - plus address areas of salinity and waterlogging which are popping up in the landscape and making areas unproductive.
An experiment planting saltbush around a large salt scour failed but they are considering an alternative fodder shrub planting next year.
"What we are attempting to do is remediate the salt issue, but also retain more of that water higher up in the landscape, so it is then not coming out in places down the line,'' Mr Pensini said.
"One of the goals of this project is to monitor and measure all the water that exits our farm and over time we want that to be fresh and have less nutrients.
"We want to be retaining more nutrients higher up in the landscape."
Three hand-built weirs have also been built on the salt scour, which has been considerably eroded and lies at the bottom of one of the southern valley paddocks.
If the area can be rehabilitated, he hopes to plant more salt-tolerant species around it over the next five years.
"These lower parts should be some of the most productive parts of the farm but, at the moment, they are probably some of the least productive,'' Mr Pensini said.
"The weirs hold the water back, over time you get debris and other bits and pieces building up and it should start to fill in.
"The bottom side is quite washed out, but you can already see some sediment starting to build up at the back of it.
"So over time you get more and more of that build up and eventually you will start to get some recruitment of new plants."
Mr Pensini said the rehydration project was deliberately chosen as a way of speeding up the farming changes the family started about two decades ago.
As newly-weds, the couple had moved to his family's cattle station, Wyloo, in the Pilbara.
They moved south in 2002, buying the farming property at Boyup Brook and ultimately converting it from a Shorthorn to the Angus operation.
The difference in the southern farming systems came as an initial shock - it was so much more intensive than the approach in the Pilbara, where the landscape cannot be manipulated.
They came to see that maintaining - or improving - the soil health was crucial.
The couple slowly made changes towards regenerative farming - even moving into organics for a time - which all brought benefits to the soil health and productivity.
"But over time, we saw a bit of a drop off in production,'' Mr Pensini said.
They jumped out of organics because they found they were needing to buy inputs to maintain productivity, which proved too expensive for the business to justify, particularly when the premium for organic beef and cattle evaporated.
They then went down the biological route and now use conventional and biological inputs strategically.
They will use a herbicide to establish crops and conventional fertilisers and make their own composts and extracts and mix other fertilisers with them.
They no longer use insecticides and fungicides.
"Quite often in agriculture it is all based around inputs,'' Mr Pensini said.
"So for me, we will still use inputs - but strategically - and we will really work towards this new system of landscape function to drive that next level of productivity and ecological outcomes."
He acknowledged cost remained a disincentive for many WA farmers who might otherwise adopt aspects of regenerative farming.
As well, a lot of regen practices were established in the northern hemisphere - with its six metres deep, organically-rich soils - which can't be directly replicated in Australia.
"Regen ag can be a cheaper form of production, once you have the system working in your favour,'' he said.
"People get a little bit confused about what regen ag really means.
"A lot of farmers look at regen ag with suspicion and wonder what it is all about.''
"For me it's about working as much as possible with nature, restoring the ecology, while increasing productivity through improved water/soil health and function".
Mr Pensini is also trying to be very upfront about the cost of what he is trying to achieve - in the hope that others will see that it can be cost-effective - and he is keeping a tally of the rehydration project outlay to present at next year's field day.
Of a total of about $35,000 spent so far, it cost about $1000 a hectare to plant the trees and $6000 to grade the contour banks.
"If you take into account everything we are going to do, divided by the total hectares of the farm, it is not that expensive - plus we earn income from the tree carbon project,'' he said.
"I am sure some farmers would probably put the equivalent amount out in fertiliser every year.
"We were fortunate to have the $30,000 for the farm plan co-funded by the Mulloon Institute and Commonland.
"Most people would spend a lot more than that on fertiliser each year, so if it is something that is going to give you a long-term plan and it is going to make you more productive and less reliant on inputs, then it is absolutely worth doing.
"It is one of the reasons we went down this way.''
Ultimately, Mr Pensini said, all this was being attempted with one clear outcome in mind.
In this beautiful, dramatically sweeping part of the South West - which is undoubtedly under pressure - the family is focused on restoring the ecology as best they can.
"I want to leave this property in a better state than when we first came here,'' Mr Pensini said
"That is one of my goals."
