WHEN New South Wales farmer and race horse breeder Peter Andrews bought a degraded 810 hectacre grazing property in 1976, he started a journey to rehabilitate the land.
His pioneering approach, which he called Natural Sequence Farming (NSF), reintroduced the natural landscape pattern at Tarwyn Park, in the NSW Upper Hunter Valley, rehydrating it and redistributing nutrients and biomass across it.
And Tarwyn Park thrived.
From there, Mr Andrews made it his life's mission to explore a variety of approaches that could repair landscapes, which would now be considered regenerative agriculture.
His story has been told and revisited - no more so than on ABC TV's Australian Story - for which he holds the record for the most number of appearances.
And it has inspired many champions - including Western Australian-based landscape planner and hydrologist Lance Mudgway, who for the first time is helping bring a formalised landscape rehydration project to the Wheatbelt.
Four WA farms are starting a three-year trial using landscape rehydration techniques, which aims to provide the data necessary to show that the approach can work in WA.
"Lots of people had heard about Peter Andrews online or on TV, but there was no direct connection with WA,'' said Mr Mudgway, who is now working with the New South Wales-based Mulloon Institute to bridge the distance.
It's hoped that having 'feet on the ground' in this State will grow interest among local landowners, who as individual farmers or as a collective across a catchment, could adopt the measures to tackle their salinity and waterlogging issues.
"This project is only dealing with individual landholders but if we could, down the track, generate some interest at a catchment level - that would be terrific,'' Mr Mudgway said.
The landscape rehydration principles being applied through the trial are part of a regenerative approach to agriculture which aims to slow the flow of water, holding it up higher in the landscape.
It uses contour banks, revegetation and weirs - with the aim of addressing salinity and water logging issues, improving soil health, protecting the local ecology and, ultimately, improving farm productivity, profitability and sustainability.
The WA trial is being funded by a $300,000 State government Natural Resource Management stewardship grant, awarded in 2020, which will fund pilots at three farms.
The grant has already enabled Mr Mudgway and a team from Mulloon to run an introductory workshop early this year at the Muresk Institute, at Northam.
Mulloon and RegenWA last month also launched the online Landscape Rehydration Information Hub and Mulloon released a literature review it compiled to consolidate research, resources and stakeholder views to support landscape hydration initiatives in the State.
Warren and Lori Pensini, at Boyup Brook, have had their property plan funded through a joint venture between Mulloon and Dutch not-for-profit Commonland.
Mr Pensini and Mr Mudgway are preparing to hold a field day and workshop onfarm to give attendees knowledge and understanding on how to rehydrate their own landscapes.
An introductory course is scheduled for March 21, with advanced sessions on March 22 and 23, 2023.
Bev and Geoff Kowald, at Katanning, Stuart McAlpine, at Buntine, and the Muresk Institute, are also participating in the project, funded by the NRM grant.
Mr Mudgway is in the process of developing their farm plans, and once implemented they hope to begin producing figures on carrying capacity, profitability and environmental benefits, which can be shared as a proof of concept with other interested farmers.
Mr Mudgway said although the landscapes of the pilot farms all varied, they all had cropping as part of their operation.
The Kowalds already farm holistically on their home farm where they have an extensive system of dams and earthworks in place.
Their pilot will be on a new farm - set over two parcels bought in the past few years - and will trial the Mulloon Institute's rehydration approach.
Mr McAlpine is well-established as a regenerative agriculture farmer, but is venturing into landscape rehydration for the first time.
"We will be fitting the rehydration interventions in with the cropping and also working in a saline landscape on all four properties,'' Mr Mudgway said.
"We want to demonstrate that it can work in those environments and in WA.''
Like many involved in landscape rehydration and other aspects of regenerative agriculture, Mr Mudgway has taken a bit of a journey to get to this point.
He became aware of Mr Andrew's work with the Mulloon Institute via Australian Story in 2005.
"When I saw the episode, I wondered 'why are people getting excited about this?,'' he said.
"It was common sense to me... but it has stayed in the back of my mind.''
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Mr Mudgway, who has a background as an agricultural engineer, worked for 23 years in WA in various roles, including landcare, as an Aboriginal landcare project officer and as a regional hydrologist for the then Department of Environment and Conservation.
He later set up a consultancy offering technical support services to landholders and managers in the Wheatbelt, who were managing salinity and other natural resource issues.
He met up with Mulloon Institute chairman Gary Nairn, chief executive Carolyn Hall and principal landscape planner Peter Hazel, when they visited WA in 2019 and then again for a RegenWA conference in March 2020 - a connection which ultimately led to him working with Mulloon to deliver the WA project.
The Mulloon Institute, and its related fundraising, research and advocacy foundation, is based at the 2500-hectare Mulloon Creek Natural Farms, which comprises a free range egg enterprise and beef cattle operations, 40 minutes' drive from Canberra, on properties Tony Coote, of Angus and Coote Jewellers, and his sister started buying in the 1960s.
In 2005, Mr Coote undertook a pilot project with Mr Andrews on the Home Farm, to repair Mulloon Creek.
This pilot project was embraced by the local community and has expanded into the catchment-scale Mulloon Rehydration Initiative (MRI), which covers 23,000ha and 50km of creek and includes 23 landholders.
The MRI is jointly funded through the Mulloon Institute, which Mr Coote and his wife Toni set up in 2001, and the National Landcare program.
It includes a comprehensive biodiversity and hydrological monitoring program overseen by TMI's science advisory committee led by emeritus professor Stephen Dovers, at the Australian National University.
"I was just out looking at a structure on a property, where the landowner came onboard the MRI at a later stage, as he was a little bit sceptical,'' said Mr Mudgway, during a visit to Mulloon Creek farms last week.
"But he was happy to have in-stream works go ahead on his property and he has immediately seen the benefit."
The institute's work has been recognised by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solution Network as a demonstrator of sustainable, productive and profitable farming.
The Cootes, who both died in 2018, bequeathed Mulloon Creek Natural Farms, which operates as a landscape rehydration operation, to the Mulloon Foundation and the expertise developed at Mulloon has since also grown into a for-profit consultancy business.
In the past four years, the Mulloon has increased its team from five people in 2017, focused on the MRI, to more than 20.
It has become established in North Queensland, with an office at Townsville since 2020, where it works closely with North Queensland Dry Tropics on projects focused on boosting agricultural productivity, restoring biodiversity and reducing sediment reaching the Great Barrier Reef.
It is undertaking projects in WA, the Northern Territory and Victoria.
"In the past few months, it has acquired a client in Texas, in the United States, which is interesting,'' Mr Mudgway said.
While key elements, such as contour banks, have long been used to control water onfarm, landscape rehydration turns their purpose on the head.
Rather than lengthening the water path to inevitably still discharge into a creek, like a funnel, the bank disperses water slowly across a slope, like a soaker hose.
"I think one of the big differences is that most of the conservation earthworks that have been done in the past have got a grade on them and they usually grade into the creek - so at some point the water is going to become concentrated,'' Mr Mudgway said.
"We are trying to hold the water up and disperse it on the ridge lines, so the water can spill out over the ridge and expand out, rather than concentrate.
"We are trying to lengthen the flow path and we are not putting it straight back into the creek.
"When it get dispersed out on the ridge line it is going to filter out through pastures or the cropping, or whatever it is, and you are banking that water for later in the year when it would otherwise dry out.''
The other main focus of the approach is restoring perennial vegetation - whether that be via productive crops and grasses or re-establishing shrubs and trees.
Mr Mudgway said vegetation provided innumerable benefits - from reducing salinity by lowering the water table, to providing shelter and windbreaks and thermo-regulation in a paddock - they can even hydrate the landscape by capturing water vapour.
With a system of agronomy traditionally focused on clearing paddock trees and old grading banks to maximise productive land and provide clear run lines - and suspicion about holding onto water in an increasingly saline environment - Mr Mudgway admits there is a "big hill to climb'' to change the way of doing things.
"One of the questions we usually get asked upfront is 'we have got all this salt problem, our problem is too much water in the valley floor and you are talking about rehydration - what are you on about?','' Mr Mudgway said.
"But, of course, we are looking at fixing the hydrological cycle.
"The hydrology has been put out of balance, which is why we have saline valley floors, and we are trying to address that imbalance by holding the water further up the landscape.''
