 To turn scrub and jungle of wasteland into crop and pastures is a constant challenge to the farmer, the grazier and the nation. The age-old tangle of shrubs, vines and trees must be beaten. The problem is as old as farming itself. Overrun by vines and trees entangled useless profusion. It is this notion that we're entering an epoch or an era where it's humans who are the major influence over physical and biological processes on the planet. When you think that we've locked out nearly two million hectares of forests in the early part of this century, when we knew better, that's pretty extraordinary, I think. I think as a world we're realising we're reaching the limitations here of our clearing and we need to start to rebuild because the forests and the natural systems give us our life. Water, air, all of that starts with a forest and I think we've forgotten that. We can afford to do better and we should do better. We certainly can't run around lecturing everybody else if we can't fix up our own backyard. And our own backyard looks a bit grim. If we continue with just a monocultural approach and that monoculture is resulting from the clearance of forests and other native flora, then we're heading down a very negative pathway. We just can't keep tearing it down and clearing it. I think we've reached a limit to that and now we need to look at rebuilding and it's possible. So land restoration projects are a really creative way at looking at marrying the production of food in a much more sustained fashion with enhancing biodiversity by using endemic species to link large parcels of natural land and also all of those are capturing carbon. Land restoration becomes a key because in states like Victoria where private land is the predominant ownership. It's got to be the private land owners that contribute and so I think that's where we come in with the positive land restoration messages. I think there's some really good examples currently in Australia. They tend to be community driven and in our book linking Australia's landscapes that we did for CSIRO last year, we've brought together some classic examples of both grass roots building up into large scale corridors, but also plans where just the local people get together in a conservation management network and pool their resources. So there's some very strong possibilities in this area. Often it's the people who have a vested interest in that landscape, who get involved in community driven landscape restoration. It's the farmers, it's the friends of groups, it's the land care groups. People really need to be connected to their landscape. The first grant that the Foundation ever gave out was to the Regent Honey Eater Project back in 1997. So they've got a long history, this organisation of working with private land holders to put in habitat corridors and they are beginning now to see some results with certain bird species moving across the habitat. Private land holders realised that from the number of dead trees in the district and mistletoe, proliferation, killing old trees all over the place and people were seriously concerned about the landscape collapsing under their very noses. This is year 19 now, we're up to nearly 1500 hectares of habitat that we've either protected or restored or both and it's well over half a million seedlings that we've put in the ground up to date. Now Regent Honey Eater is a rich patch specialist so adding on to the little bits that are left to make them bigger, extending them into the more productive countries so we get more nectar production and safer denser habitat like you see up the hill here. That's where the Regent can get its feet in and get a chance at the nectar. So the Norman Wettenhill Foundation's Landscape Restoration Program actually started with connecting country in the Mount Alexander region. The most important part of the project at the beginning was to look at the base structure of how the group was going to work and they've had tremendous success over the last seven years and so that has been a really great story about the community getting together, putting together a project and driving it themselves. I think there are a lot of benefits from organisations like that, being local and being on the ground, knowing the area, it's not just a decision being made in Canberra or Melbourne. The decisions are made locally, the Committee of Management is made up of local people. Our general community education has been for connecting country a useful tool and I think increasingly could be just to raise awareness by the general community but also by farmers of the integration of production and environment. Our family has been on this property since the early 1860s and my father was a sheep and beef farmer and I'm now really a sheep farmer who's also got an interest in environmental markets and really integrating conservation and agriculture. I see these two very significant parts of what we do and how we exist and really recognising that native species have a right to exist. We've recently purchased a property near Barfold just on the back of the Barfold Gorge, it's about 1170 acres. I have always thought that it would be really good to get it protected with trust, to get a covenant put on the sections of the gorge of this property. The long term for us is to protect about probably about a third of the property. Take away from agriculture most of the gorge country where there's some threatened species, where there's also the Piper's Creek and the Compasby River but also to link up some significant patches of native vegetation on the other side of the property as well. To link what's on the east with the gorge that's on the west so we'll potentially put into a covenant the limitations of the agriculture use on those areas. So although they may be still grazed and used agriculturally they won't be able to be intensively fertilised, they won't be able to be plowed up, they won't be able to sown down to crops or improve pastures, that sort of thing. So we're really trying to protect in perpetuity the conservation values that they still have. Hopefully in three or four years any winds that we have we can really share those with the rest of the community and really give back in the way that connecting countries have been very generous in giving out and helping us, not only with financial help but also with information and support through this whole process of planning the property like this. So that's our goal that we can really give something back. Peer group mentoring is basically about one landholder leaning over the fence and talking to another landholder about what works, what doesn't work and what can happen on one's property. And we think that the crux of community driven landscape restoration is that this knowledge sharing is happening at the local level. It was sort of one of our meetings that probably about eight or nine years ago that why don't we set up a mentoring system and use the farmers and the people within our network as mentors. So we've put our mentors through some professional training and information sessions and so the mentor now takes the site report back to the farmer providing they would like to have a mentor and some seem to want to have one and then they can continue the discussion. So the mentor is the face of the network for the landholder. The mentor can't answer the question. We've got a broader network of 200 members and other partners that we can draw upon to come up and help with solutions and provide answers. The whole Peer Group Mentoring, Otwaga Forest Network ethos and philosophy is about working with trusted people and giving people confidence to do things to know that they're supported and that they're people they can go to and work with. So this is an important site that's being developed by Ballard Region tree growers because it's a site, a revegetation site with a difference. It actually incorporates some forestry into the environmental planting. The by-rich planting system, design system, endeavours to revegetate areas with plants that will actually survive for more than two centuries. So to achieve that we've actually set out to mimic the natural system. We've incorporated plant diversity, more structure into the design. Plantations need to be wider. They have to have connections with remnant vegetation ideally and with water and they have to be able to achieve longevity. So in that we're looking at genetics for seed collecting and also group planting which is really important in the whole system. So if we look behind us here we've got some really important aspects of the by-rich system. We've got a group of acacias behind me which are group planted and that's a shrub layer and behind them you can see some forestry trees that were part of the forestry that's been incorporated into this environmental planting. Corporating these old trees into a new plantation actually matures them by about 80 years or more because it actually takes about 80 years for hollows to start to develop in these old trees. And more than 300 different species of Australian fauna require these hollows as part of their life cycle. So it's really critical that these trees are kept and incorporated into these revegetation sites. At LLL here we probably have about 10% of the trees are actually for profit. That's not to say that some of the indigenous plantings can't be developed for profit. Just this morning I was here collecting seed of some of the tree everlasting and in five minutes I collected probably $80 worth of seed. So there's all sorts of positive outcomes from this sort of unexpected outcomes from this sort of mix. I think it's an important next step that we need to take to actually look at the by-rich planting system on a variety of topographies and soil types as well as how the mix of economic and environmental plantings can be developed. In Sri Lanka there's an emerging movement around analog forestry regenerative agriculture systems that tend to plant more of a mix of trees for products and for food to actually help the poorer farmers restore their natural environment whereas at the same time provide income and food for their families. Analog forestry emerged from Sri Lanka. That's where the thinking started and the proponents of that now have learnt how to rebuild a forest system and in a way that is also commercially useful. So they're tackling different problems at the same time. Rebuilding forest, looking at commercial outcomes so that people who live in and around those forests can actually have a livelihood meanwhile strengthening the forest support that they get. The major component, the agroforestry or analog forestry or a candid home garden is actually the cash crop. So they get a cash flow throughout the year. They utilize or they capitalize the monsoon time to get a lot of paddy fields and get the rice going and after that they come to the harvest to the jackfruit which is a very major component and the tree timber as well is an important component as well. Plus they have a lot of cardamons and the other fruits as well, it is actually diverting the people not to touch the remaining untouched forest as also sort of a win-win situation. Forestry is also maintained. There is no logging going on. At the same time people are happy with the cash flow and international organizations can come and learn and to apply that model to the other parts of the world as well. I was in Colombo and I picked up a magazine on organic farming knowing how ignorant I was about how to farm in this place and the last article was by a person called Kamau Mulvani and it made incredible claims as to what had been done in a very short time on a number of projects. I said, can I believe that? I must talk to this person and see. Well, that was the beginning of our very, I believe, very productive relationship. I'm learning about the nature of regeneration of land, the importance of the riparian strips in retaining water along the way as it comes down from the highlands, the significance of leguminous plants in establishing the beginnings of a richer cover for the land and of course the enormous variety of plants that are needed to achieve the aims of analogue forestry. Today it is possible for us to, in participation with the collaboration of a farmer and his family, transform the most degraded piece of land wherever in Sri Lanka it may be and not just in Sri Lanka. It's the principles that matter. It is possible in three or four or five years to transform a very degraded piece of land into a productive, shady, aesthetically pleasing environment that increases farming income, improves habitat for biodiversity and increases fertility in the soil. That is possible. I say that with absolute confidence. When you are coming here, actually there are only like sand on the land. There is nothing leaf litter. Now we can see that how much leaf litter is here. Now the soil fertility is very high. The leaf litter count is very high. There is water. Absorbence is very high. That is what we want to put into the practice with the farmers. After four years time, we saw that this aquifer has been recharged. Downstream we saw that the water is coming. Like spring water came little by little. That is what our expectation has to come into the success story. It was a challenge for us to take what we had learned and now apply it with a farmer, with a farmer's family where he wasn't too concerned about which butterfly and which bird. His main concern was that if he restored or transformed his or converted his garden into a tree-dominant agricultural situation how he could economically benefit from that exercise. This farmer Peter was totally intent ten years ago to cut this section of riparian forest. Nearly valuable riparian forest, matured with leans and what not. And so we convinced him that if he developed this side as an analog forest with pepper and coconut and rica and cinnamon and mango and various types of citrus and banana he would have no need to cut this side and plant only banana. Now ten years later, the way they did it was they totally cleared everything. Totally clean raised the ground and planted. If we want to actually increase the number of pollinators who visit the garden increase the role between predator and prey, increase the biological activity in this garden we would certainly need to put in our landscape design a substantial number of endemic species. Species that for millennia had evolved flora and fauna that had evolved together. We did inventories of the forest here, different forest sites because there are three elevations. This goes from 500 MSL to 3500 MSL, this mountain range. So we did biodiversity inventories at ground level in the middle on top in savannas in the different ecosystems here especially the riparian ecosystem. So our planting was targeted, our propagating in our nurseries. So everything, the landscape design took into consideration the biodiversity, the water, the soil, what was here before. All of this contributed to making this grand landscape design for this mountain. No matter what we do in the final process it is the farmer or rather the farmer will maintain what he thinks, what his family thinks is valuable. That decision of what he will maintain and what he will continue with is beyond us, lies with the farmer. So finally it is what he thinks is worthwhile that matters. You know, I think generally farmers are good stewards of the land but they're often in quite a dilemma about how they can increase their production and their yield and their profit at the same time, you know, improve their natural resource base. I think it's very easy to sort of impose our particular personal goals or what we think the community's goals are for the land on to farmers and have unreasonable expectations about what farmers might do to protect the environment on a large scale. I think it's very difficult to enroll landholders into the vision if it's imposed from somewhere else, if it's transported from somewhere else and it doesn't actually mean something to them at the scale that they're working at and I don't think enough time and energy has been spent on understanding what motivates and will influence farmers at that more local level to protect environmental assets that the whole Australian community values. Well the reason why we set up Jigsaw Farms or called it Jigsaw Farms was because we wanted to talk about connections between the properties to actually physically connect them, particularly when we were planning the farms we talked about and we planned to have corridors linking which involved revegetation, wetlands and agroforestry sort of lined by our laneway system so that we could access all the farms. I think it's one of the best stories we've got at Jigsaw is it is about integration of both farm forestry, permanent revegetation and high input pastures. We double the amount of food and fibre that is produced off the same amount of country of when we purchased the property till now, yet at the same time we've taken out 20% of the country for agroforestry which is a later source of income sort of 25 years further along but with co-benefits along the way and also the permanent revegetation which also has the benefit of obviously the biodiversity but also some of the carbon offset opportunities. We came here in June 1980 and bought this place. It was the time locally regarded as a bit of a basket case primarily because of bad dryland salinity which affected the vegetation and led to erosion and a whole string of other problems. I saw this as a challenge and set about rectifying it from more or less from day one. We had a plan how to address it. For Telahidi here we now have over 30% of the place under trees that are in no-go areas for domestic stock. In addition to that we've got an extra estimated something order of 250,000 trees on the place since we came here in 1980 through managed natural regeneration. Now we have used the ridges to get most of the re-establishment trees on and that has led to lowering the water table by turning off the recharge tap because it was on the ridges that the water entered the landscape and once the recharge tap was turned off then the water table started to decline and the flats are now able to realise their production potential. That plus the fact that we have specialised in what we do rather than just being bread and butter wall producers which we were when we started out when our high quality ultra fine wall producers that combined with the increased stocking rate has meant the difference between being here and not being here. There isn't enough money in the world to be able to fix the environmental problems that we are facing and that's whether it's Asia, Australia or in any other country. What we've found is that working with the people on the ground who are best placed in the best position to help to rebuild environmental damage are also the people that depend on that land for their livelihoods and so it's important to work with them on several fronts for their livelihood for environmental repair to improve that and also to help to strengthen community. I think a diversity of thinking is really important that's why network is important, that's why community capacity is important, sharing your ideas to open our minds that we have that more creative approach. Smart design to me would be about revegetating 10% of our farming landscapes with multi-purpose vegetation to develop a really good biological infrastructure to support the agriculture and to address the environmental issues and not only that but connecting these farms so that we can have movement of flora and fauna up and down and sideways through our landscape so that we can have better adaptation in the face of climate change and that we then get good social values coming from this because if we're living in a more biodiverse revegetated community people feel happy about this ecological there's an ecological health component here as well so we need to think about that also not only for the protection of the stock and the soil but for the protection of the health status of the people who are living and working in the landscape. I think we've worked out the vision and that is around we need to restore the Australian landscape so let's figure out, let's get to the guts of the problem and that is about where and how and what's it going to cost and making hard choices. It's a question of putting life into something giving agriculture an honourable image a proud image, something to be proud of something that you can go to sleep thinking that you've done something good especially in our kind of cultures where karma is an important component good karma, meritorious action if you can generate life and positive spirit and will, determination to do something good something that you can die in peace with that is the thinking, to bring it back my teacher Upali Sena Nayaka said that if we can use the wisdom of our past and project it into the future and that's important, that's significant that's what I'm seeking, of course we cannot reproduce it but we can regenerate what was good in it that's the message here