 Right, the key elements to know till really are no soil disturbance, retaining residue on the surface and trying to get diverse crop rotations. And how does it reverse degradation? Well it actually builds soil, some soils naturally are infertile and we can actually lift organic carbons and soil fertility above the levels that exist naturally by using this technology or this technique. Obviously we use good agronomy as well with no till so we use appropriate fertilisers, we make sure the soil is treated properly with lime and gypsum and whatever other amelians that might be required and then we plant earlier the normal and by planting earlier the normal you grow more carbon, by growing more carbon you put more energy into the soil especially when you keep the residues and that energy drives a whole world of biological activity under the soil and that biological activity stimulates complete soil fertility process which is not just biological, it's chemical and it's physical. So those three things of soil fertility are lifted and elevated by no tillage whereas if we cultivate the soil we bury the organic matter or we burn it, some people do and then if you bury it you also burn it because you oxidise the organic matter and that organic matter then disappears very quickly through a bacterially driven activity and bacteria are born and they go home and they get married and they have children and then they die after they've got their website up and running and that all happens in 20 minutes. So when you bury the soil you create a very fast microbial activity and that microbial activity consumes or burns organic matter and sure there's a benefit in that you get looser soil which is good for faster early root growth. You also release a lot of nitrogen through that oxidising process but the big problem with it is that next year you haven't built anything, you've destroyed things. No till or conservation agriculture allows you to build and develop soils that are deep and rich in organic carbon, organic matter and that creates a tremendous leaf fertile environment that softens the soil, that creates opportunities for microbial activity and root symbiotic activity, a busket of micro riser and free living nitrogen fixing bacteria and a whole suite of penicillums that can fix nitrogen out of the soil. It's a very exciting and mostly not well understood field of science but that's what happens when you do conservation ag or no till. Well there's a few aspects to that. One is that with no till farming we do less tillage so we burn less carbon and that's good because that carbon stays more in the soil and contributes to cycling. We also use less diesel because we're not going over the ground over and over with expensive and time-consuming process and that requires a lot of horsepower which is what you do with cultivating so that's another aspect and then it protects the soil from temperature extremes as well you know there's many examples where people have got their little gun out and measured the temperature of the soil with organic matter and without organic matter and often it can be 10 Celsius or 15 or 20 difference between on the soil surface where you've got organic matter and where you haven't so the organic matter reduces the temperature. I don't really know the main constraints to adoption no till in European farmers but I do know that's probably a lack of knowledge of the benefit of the system that's holding them back and that's probably the same as back in Australia you know to begin with we didn't realise the benefits that we would get from no till we in a very dry agricultural environment where we have a Mediterranean winter wet summer dry and we have very sandy soils we were very tired of having the beach blow into our house every afternoon from tillage and we had sandy soil big strong winds and the house would fill up the soil so what we said was well was a group of farmers and I was a young graduate but I grew up on one of these farms and I caused a lot of tillage by plowing the soil as a young boy in the 60s and 70s was that we don't care if we lose a bit of yield from no tillage we do not want to lose our soil because we know that it takes a thousand years to develop one millimetre of topsoil or to turn bedrock into topsoil takes a thousand years and with tillage through wind and water erosion you can lose one millimetre in one afternoon and you can lose ten millimetres in in a week if you have a bad year and it's the soil is predisposed to erosion through tillage so probably what Europe could learn is that the soil is not an infinite resource and it's worth protecting it's worth protecting so therefore I would encourage them to do what they can to do it and then I think that would be surprised like we were that this biological soil fertility aspect bursts into life and interacts with the chemistry and the physics and creates some nice surprises one of the things that we've learned with with diverse mycorrhizae and soil microbial activity and mesoflora mesofauna in the soil is that our soils letting go of more chemically bound phosphorus and that's good let's go of it in a way the plant roots can get it through no tillage and that means we can put less phosphorus on so that's a good saving we've also found the same thing with nitrogen you know 78% of what we breathe now is nitrogen and there are bacteria in the soil that are able to convert that nitrogen with two nitrogens with three bonds and lightning can also do this but so can bacteria and so the legumes they split that nitrate nitrogen double nitrogen into in half and oxygens added to it through processes of biology creating free nitrogen which means we're not also relying on petrochemicals as much as we were because nitrogen comes from petrochemicals the form that we apply on the soil and then there's another tremendous benefit about soil water interaction the the longer the soil is in no till the more spongy it becomes and that sponginess when water goes through it it doesn't actually and if you do get so much water it just keeps going through but you can measure this it's been measured and shown you could go on the internet and look at Ray the soil guy's got a very good demonstration of this where the water comes out clean pristine at the bottom if you're overwhelmed test tube of soil long-term no till whereas next to it you have a long-term conventional tilt multiple tillage you put water on the top and it won't go in so you get a flood I think London's experienced a bit of that you get a lot more water that runs off it will not go in will penetrate because tillage has smashed up all those earthworm pores you know Darwin said that earthworm is nature's plough it creates all these straws that go up and down and in Australia we have a lot of ants and I like to say to the Australian farmers when we were first starting no till 25 years ago that if ever you've been out in the field we call it a paddock and and had to go to the toilet chuck a whiz as my young kids would say if you line up a little hole an ant hole and see if you can fill it up it's damn hard to do fact that's impossible because it's got all these little holes that just go straight down so then if you've got this soil it's improved with all these micro pore all these pores through the soil through roots through no till through continuous pores you just can't fill it up and it infiltrates and that infiltration then means the water's down deeper for later on so it's a real weird thing going on and European farmers must say oh it's a flood then it's a drought but no it's just the soil is stuffed up you've screwed your soil up by breaking all the pores in the soil smashing them to pieces and then it will run off and it won't run in if it runs in then we'll grow more roots and if it grows more roots then it'll be drought tolerant and then you'll grow more carbon you grow more carbon you then create the cycle and it's a very exciting cycle and we were accused probably in the early days of being almost religious about this too enthusiastic my boss said to me he flew all the way down to Esperance where I was working Dr. Professor or Dr. Graham Robertson's his name we joke about it now because it was the beginning of the no till revolution for us which we're 95% now plus in Western Australia he came down to me once and he said Bill your problem is you're too enthusiastic but it was that enthusiasm allowed us to ride the wave of change and help take people with us on the ride and it's a tremendous view up there on a wave and it's just a great ride and I'd encourage European farmers to jump on board and experience the wave of enthusiasm that you can and don't be too critical folks of people that are doing it differently you know of people that are having a go at being brave because they're not going where people have not gone before people have gone before and it's working and you're with the globe ready to go to nine billion people soon we are not making any new land but we have to make the old land that we've destroyed new again we have to restore it to its physical chemical and biological potential which we can do