 Welcome everybody to another one of HydroTerror's webinars. Today we're joined back by Phil Mulvey, who's going to talk to us all about managing water use efficiency on farms by managing the small water cycle. Phil joins a very elite bunch of repeat presenters on our webinar series, so well done, Phil. Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet today. The Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation, I also pay my respects to their elders past and present. So Phil's here today representing Riso Australia, which was formerly known as Carbon Count. He also is CEO of Environmental and Earth Sciences. I'll just give you a little bit of background about Phil. Phil is part consultant, part contractor, part researcher, and part entrepreneur, but has always been a free thinker. He has built army bases in East Timor, supervised the erection of the largest tent in the United Kingdom, sold meat pies in the USA, cleaned up two uranium mines, developed townhouses on landfills, rewrote the manual on oil palm development on potential acid sulfate soil and Sumatra, evaluated rehabilitation of the desert in Kuwait, participated in the first green city design in the world, evaluated degraded land on the Manaro, and he has represented Australia in sailing. He currently has businesses in environmental soil science, whole of farm management, remediation, and civil earthworks and property development, in which he has trained numerous scientists in the art of commercial scientific problem solving. He's a father of four and a grandfather, seemed to be of eight. Well, I think he might actually have eight now. I'll skip over that next bit. He's proud to say he is a soil scientist in landscape repair. He remains passionate about the subject and value of our profession, particularly with regard to our role in landscape repair. I would say that we're very lucky to have Phil here today. He is one of the unique thinkers around landscape repair, and the detail around an understanding of soil science and how that relates to the hydrology that we are looking at today is something that very few people actually do have knowledge of in certainly in Australia. So it's fantastic to have Phil here today to present on this topic. Before we charge in and let Phil get going, we love your questions and thank you very much for all those early bird questions. We've got heaps of early bird questions for this webinar, but love to have more questions as we go and use the Q&A button at the top of your screen to lodge those questions. Why does HydroTerror undertake these webinars? Well, it gives me a chance to catch up with friends like Phil, but we really love to share our knowledge. We like to facilitate education, and we like to take an industry leadership position. So there's something that HydroTerror is very proud of. Without further ado, I'd like to pass over to Phil and start his presentation. Thank you, Richard. It was a very flattering introduction. I do appreciate it. I also would like to thank all elders, past and present, who nurture and care for land wherever they may be. Managing the water use, sufficiency on farms, while managing the small water cycle has been somewhat of a passion of mine for many, many years. Next slide, please, Richard. And it really focuses on holding water on landscape, which is what the talk is going to be a bit about. So you can see in that talk just the fact that that slide, just a faint mist hanging over the landscape. So we'll talk about why we've had quite a bit of it this season and why we really want to keep it. Next slide, please. My background is a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture. I have a Master's in Hydrogeology and Environmental Geology, and had the pleasure of working with Richard for a period of time whilst he was doing his Master's on Hydrogeology. I've been in consulting on land repair for my entire career in excess of 40 years. And more recently, I published a book with my daughter on ground, called groundbreaking soil security and climate change, which has been re-released in the second edition in September. Next slide, please, Richard. Most people think about climate change as, you know, rise of temperature, but in actual fact, you can plot climate change starting a lot earlier. And it's the frequency of extreme heat events that is most outstanding. This is a direct extract from State of the Climate, which has done in the two years by Bureau of Meteorology. So this was the 2020 release. But you can see the impact there. Most of that heat rise is actually due to the loss of small water cycle and how we have managed the landscape to cause that. So that's what we're going to be talking about today, is that the climate change I'm concerned about is what's coming from landscape. Next slide, please. It's interesting that the impacts of climate change in Australia are first identified by the explorer Paul Spresslecki in 1845. And he wrote very clearly that climate change in Australia was being caused by loss of organic matter and so on vegetative cover. And the loss of the frequent rains that occurred in Sydney had dissipated with some of the seasons beyond just the standard drought cycle that Australia was aware of even at that time. He was 50 years ahead of Arnhenus, who actually discovered and wrote about the greenhouse effect. Next slide, please. So there are actually two slides, two aspects to the climate debate. One is the heat and one is the blanket. And when Dr. Keeling, the guy who measured CO2 from Hawaii for over 50 years, was asked by President Carter back in 1978, what should government do about climate change? Keeling replied, it's way too complicated for people to understand. So just focus on greenhouse gas emissions and that's where you've been ever since. So brief little bit of science, sensible and latent heat. Next slide, please. So this is important particularly for the small water cycle where you've got a situation where the incoming solar energy, what gets past the clouds, 95% of it goes to one of two heats, one being latent heat and one being sensible heat. Latent heat is a change of state. So it's moving from solid to liquid or liquid to gas. So when you boil water, it never changes over 100 degrees C until the water changes. Even if you put huge amounts of energy in, whilst the water's there, it's controlling the temperature to 100 degrees C. That's latent heat. It's surprising enough, it's also to do with the melting of bitumen which I'll come back to that one later. The other heat is sensible heat. So when you heat a surface, so all the water's gone and you continue to heat the sourceman and it's a metal source, so an iron sourceman at 550 degrees C, so it rises up to that temperature, produces, it goes red hot. That red it's releasing is infrared. So you heat the earth during the day and it releases infrared in the evening or late afternoon evening, which bounces off the clouds and comes back. So everyone's been talking about, well, we've thickened up the blanket, but have we also changed the amount of heat that the land is producing, i.e. changed the heat source? Next slide, please. Well, we have. So here's an example, published example from Slovenia, where you see that a wet pasture meadow, which is a type of summer pasture that's used in production systems in southern Europe, has 70 to 80% latent heat of apotranspiration and 5 to 10% sensible heat for the incoming solar radiation conversion. The same land, same slope, a couple of kilometres away, had been cleared for agriculture, cropping and tilled. So this is not a no-till system. This is a tilled system. And you've actually got 60 to 70% sensible heat and only 10 to 20% evaporation. So what you're doing there now is you're effectively putting somewhere between 6 and 10 times increase of the energy being created from sensible heat. No one's looking at this. Next slide, please. So what does that do to the day? Well, what it does to the day, as you can see there, is it gets much hotter during the day, which has a big impact on what happens to the slow water cycle. So you get much hotter during the day because of all that baked heat, that infrared being released up. Next slide, please. So that's Europe. Let's look at Australia. So there was an exercise undertaken down in Adelaide on the science show where they just used a temperature gun and aimed at different things and gave it to the public to go out on a 35 degree day. They gave, I think, 10 or 12 to schools and the schools went out and shot at various things. So there was 35 degrees C day. The bare ground was 50 to 60. The artificial grass was 50 to 60. It was 50 to 60. Don't have your kids playing on artificial grass during a hot day. Natural grass was 25. That was pretty good. Bitumen was 35 to 40. Bitumen melts at about 35. So the melting of the bitumen actually meant that the temperature didn't get as high as the bare ground. Next slide. So that's it for theory, almost. One tree, in terms of evapotranspiration, is equivalent to 10 air conditioning units, room air conditioning units. And that's just worth bearing in mind. Next slide, please. So the small water cycle. How does it fit into all this? Everyone knows the large water cycle. We got taught it in primary school or maybe years, seven or eight geography where the oceans evaporated by solar energy. Clouds form. They go on to land. They rise up as it goes on to the land, the mountain range or whatever. The change in temperature with the moisture content forms rain. The rain falls onto the hills, which flows down and might go through a dam. It does go portion to groundwater, but then all comes back into the ocean. That's the large water cycle. Next slide, please. The small water cycle is somewhat different. It has a series of events where evapotranspiration, so you can see there's evaporation, results in local precipitation events. So the water that is evapotranspired locally falls in the local area as light winter rains, mists and summer thunderstorms. Next slide, please. So... I've got my... I've got my... So the small water cycle is actually responsible for 40 to 7% of the local rain and in equatorial regions. So if you take the Amazon and the Congo, only 5% of the water is in the Amazon River and leaves the area. So only 5% is actually of the rain that falls in the region, comes from the ocean. 95% is the small water cycle. And the small water cycle perpetuates the water inland, 2,500 kilometers. So we'll come back to that shortly. The small water cycle is responsible for the dew, the fog, the mist, the soft rain during winter and the summer thunderstorms. It magnifies the impact of the water cycle, the large water cycle. So you certainly need a large water cycle to keep the small water cycle running. This is a shot taken in Mitigong straight after the drought. As you can see, the buildup is some of the thunderstorms at Mitigong, where you've got a lot of or you've got the Blue Mountains National Park and that's where the thunderstorms start from and then move across into Sydney. Next slide, please. This is winter rain and orange back in 2020, so you can see it's a very light winter rain that's falling. Next slide, please. This is an example of the impact of the vegetation on the left. So you've got pastoral land on the left and on the right, you've got cropping. This is actually the rabbit-proof fence in southwest-west Australia. You can see the clouds are directly forming within a kilometre or so of the fence over the higher of apotransporate land. So this represents both summer, autumn and early winter, because of the growth during spring, you actually get the clouds forming the other side of the fence during spring, which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but you do with the vapour and transpiration. Next slide, please. When you look at the steady state associated with a small water cycle, that occurs when the evaporation rate is actually less than the water stored in the landscape. So that's in a tropical environment where you can have a great seasonality. It's also environments where you can get a long way from the coast and have trees vapour-transporating so much water that it's even throughout the whole year. So those trees roll water inland, and that's known as the biotic pump, which was only discovered in 2007 with some climate modelers at the distance that water is carried inland from the coast and realise it's only about 800 kilometres and that the small water cycle perpetuates water inland beyond that. And this mostly occurs in the steady state situation in Amazon and Congo around the tropics. Next slide, please. So you can see it here that you've got trees going all the way inland, 2,000 kilometres. On the bottom you've got evaporation and filtration. On the top you've got total precipitation and you've got the cycles of the small water cycle just carrying it all the way inland due to the presence of massive soaking of the land with both organic matter and vegetative cover of the soil. Next slide, please. So non-steady state non-saturated occurs in a situation you've got mountain ranges or you've got distinct seasonality. But the dry season is so long that the evaporation exceeds precipitation which is what occurs in temperate and semi-temerates semi-arid and monsoonal environments. In this instance the small water cycle is about 20 to 60 roughly 20 to 40% with the rest being replaced from the sea. It can be as high as 60%. So in this instance you can see that as you move inland the evaporation and filtration diminishes with distance and doesn't provide enough to keep the rainfall equivalent to what's occurring on the coast. So you're seeing that as you go inland the small water cycle diminishes but you also see extreme events starting to occur where you see the amplification of global forcing factors such as the different oceans the temperature of the different oceans which in the Pacific Oceans called the El Nino La Nina effect and they result in extreme events happening when the small water cycle may dry up during a period associated with the drought. Next slide please. So now we look at the non-steady state and this is when man's involved in it and the seasonality becomes extreme and unreliable because the vegetation is mostly eliminated the soil organic matter is reduced. So you end up with a lot more extreme wet and dry seasons so drought and flooding. Next slide please. So this looks like well as you can see on the pictorial above you've got mostly agricultural land you've got a rapid diminution of evaporation and infiltration or water in the landscape as you move inland and so at the same time you've got the total precipitation also diminishing and extreme events increasing substantively and the small water cycle reducing substantively as you move inland. Next slide please. So what you see is as we move to that last one the non-steady state an increase in extreme events associated by the loss of the small water cycle. Next slide please. So the water cycle increases heat it reduces rain and also reduces reliable rain and massively increases runoff and we'll explain that in more detail shortly. It increases extreme events both floods as we've seen recently and heat waves it increases the severity of bushfires it depopulates rural regions and it ushers in desivcation. It's actually a very significant thing at continental level to lose this small water cycle. Next slide please. So across Australia it's been measured clear cut in the winter rains that's the southern part of Australia roughly double south has reduced rainfall by 20-30% due to this small water cycle loss. Except in the years which is current following the La Nina when the body pump after the first rainfall I mean is reinstated. So at the moment we have a body pump that's reinstated across Australia and so you've seen and I just drove back yesterday from Cootamundra that there is now morning fogs and they're way more extensive than they have been for previous years. So we're going to see even if the La Nina returns the impact of destroying the body pump will take a few years so it will be a little while before drought returns so we will go through some dry seasons. But what's really interesting and this is where some very interesting scientific data has come up recently that Richard would find interesting is we're now using a term called a hydraulic drought that after the drought and rains has returned we're finding that the river flow has not returned. Next slide please. There was a study done in Victoria and I'm sorry about the image of this published in the Science Journal. The Science Journal is the leading journal in the world. They reject somewhere between I take somewhere between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 papers submitted. So this is talking about looking at the recovery of river catchments after the millennial drought between sort of 2002 to 2010 depending where you were and that millennial drought had a massive impact and then the 10 years before the most recent droughts of the eight or nine years following the river catchments recovered but a number didn't and they looked at a two state model to look at the recovery and to see how bad the recovery was and you can see the red areas considered where they were literally in some instances almost not recovered at all and those red areas correspond with the gold mining areas so for those who are familiar with it, there's Bendigo, Ballarat, Castle Main and you're getting as you're moving a little bit further west at the store. So you're seeing effectively a type of soil that the hydrogeologists or the hydrologists here were aware of is you're dealing with a massive soil that's quite dispersive and when you lose the organic matter the infiltration goes down a lot the runoff goes up a lot so that means you get peak floods but you get almost no base or flow because the groundwater that recharges during the winter is now actually below the level of the bed of the creek or river so you've seen a massive change in landscape associated to soil use and soil time. Next slide please so that leads into how our floods impacted Yigawe recorded a sudden and big flood interesting enough though the rainfalls were in the 3rd to 10th highest rainfalls we're getting in the last 12 months they produced these flood events the flood peaks were close to the maximum we've ever recorded and Yigawe was the maximum by far so what you're actually seeing is a degraded landscape produces a very intense short burst flood but doesn't have good base or flow so it tends to be short and sharp and then drop away but doesn't have that flow that occurs throughout the winter so you're dealing with a comparison there with a hydrated landscape with elevated soil organic matter and saturated alluvium has entirely different response to the degraded landscape. Next slide please this is the Solomon Islands I was there in February I've been going every two years to this same spot to do diving for the last 20 years in 2019 there was no evidence of sea level rise this is a 3 to 4 millimeter sea level rise flooding the island next slide please and even leave you brothers stupid enough to try and grow palm trees in plantations out in the ocean so here you can see the impact on the palm trees of the plantation interesting enough most people don't realize that the least 50% of the elevation sea level rise is not associated with melting with icebergs or thermal expansion due to rising temperature of water is actually due to increased runoff of rivers as a result of pumping of groundwater for agriculture and the fact that we now have a circumstance of increased runoff leading to greater flood events so we've just had two almost three east coast lows with massive runoffs from Australia so this is not to do with the thermal expansion this is actually the pulse of increased runoff from Australia moving across the Pacific next slide please so the thing to understand about hydraulic systems associated is that within Australia on a hilly landscape you actually get the control of groundwater the shallow ground was topographically controlled so it flows towards the rivers but there's not much of living in the rivers so you get a pretty sharp definition between fast or flowing during the winter and completely dry during the summer so that's ephemeral systems in steep hilly landscapes next slide please this is a system that's not being eroded or degraded or developed by man so you're doing the circumstance where you've got a drought where it's below the river base a normal dry season where it's right at the river base a normal wet season where it's above the river base so the difference between those two the wet season the dry season means that the groundwater is recharging the river hits the base or flow the major recharge also occurs during the flood when the alluvium is fully recharged note that the some routes go down beyond the alluvium into the weathered rock because that becomes important for the survival of tree species during the drought so they're down tapping the deep water that that's a I haven't changed that e is supposed to be a P, a Greek P so it hasn't come out all that well so that's just talking about porosity so the fresh rock porosity is less than 0.01 the weathered rock is less than 0.05 and the alluvium porosity is 0.3 so that means that 30% of the pore space in alluvium could be filled by air or water and in weathered rockets less than 5% and fresh rockets less than 1% so you really want to have a lot of alluvium if you want to have a lot of water available for you next slide please on a degraded landscape what happens is that you get severe erosion due to the way we've managed our landscapes and how we've managed our river system so the river beds itself down somewhere between the weathered rock and the fresh rock so you've now got a system that's the only thing that charges the alluvium is a full on flood the normal wet season never actually gets into the alluvium because it's in the weathered rock and the dry wet season sitting at the base of the creek it's only got very little recharge available to it and then you see the drought which has got nothing so the amount of water available for basal flow is now very minimal next slide please so when you get a flood that comes through it does recharge some alluvium but you can see if the amount of air it's recharging it's very small so the basal flow then will rapidly depend on the weathered rock at less than 5% porosity compared to the alluvium it's 30% firstly you've got a six times difference and secondly you've got a much smaller aerial coverage of the water's recharging so that means the basal flow is severely impeded by the fact that you haven't saturated your alluvium so you end up with the short sharp floods with no basal flow and not much alluvium recharge during the flood next slide notice you've got 95% runoff and only 5% infiltration because the top part of that soil is being compacted by agricultural activities by sheep by vehicles so you end up with a circumstance where you've got a high runoff and a low infiltration there's not much roughage on that surface too as well because it becomes self-compacting and passive so graphically you can see the difference between those two arrows the small arrow going in 5% the arrow running across the top of the surface runoff 95% next slide please so this is what Richard talked about a little bit later in regards to the learn institutes so this is utilizing some of Peter Andrews' theories but also it goes back to Yeoman where you look to encourage water to infiltrate in the landscape more and in this instance by a series of weeds and recovering some of the alluvium you've got recent alluvium started to fill in the erosion and you've got the paleo alluvium now can be reflutter so now you're looking at the circumstance where you're trying to create situation was only 5% runoff and 95% infiltration notice the trees have been replanted the zones of springs so if the water table rises high at that change a slope will create a spring which is happening right throughout the southern slopes at the moment where there's a lot of springs occurring a lot of plugged and boggy ground so we do have to ensure that there is mechanisms to address there was back prior to clearing of those springs so you can see that the combination of trees at the right landscape and the use of weirs and where to place your leaky weirs and how where to place your wet lands and recovered wet lands increases the water in your landscape as well as the evapotranspiration next slide please so what we're trying to do now is move to the green line away from the orange line that we have been on next slide please so what causes the loss of the small water cycle upfront loss of soil organic matter then loss of vegetative cover is what causes the water tables to drop and the erosion to appear increase sulphate dust and sulphate dust stops water droplets forming to bigger droplets so they can fall as rain it also results in keeping the boundary layer that is the cloud layer up much higher we've lost in many landscapes vertical turbulence so we don't have enough trees in the landscape our landscapes flat so we don't create turbulence in the air and so we don't create opportunity for clouds to form and we're also increasing willy-willies by giving too long a vertical run and the strength of those willy-willies is now starting to destroy trees and houses and move towards tornadoes so we've lost the roughness in our landscape and we're filing to hold water at source alluvium is not flooded our creeks are incised the top to relation to the loss of source the curing of the landscape and I'll just briefly cover those next slide please it's interesting to look at where does this happen in the world this is just a straight run from David Montgomery a soil scientist has written a number of books of degradation so you can see here the amount of land impacted by agriculture as you move from 1700-1800-1900-2000 so you can see that we are substantially changing across the world the source of the heat as well as the blanket next slide please so this is a roughage landscape you can see the willy-willies in the background this is in Griffith in 2019 next slide please and this is grazed country many people consider this you know reasonable coverage but you can see this is about 70% bare ground it's highly compacted doesn't have much roughage on it the rain won't infiltrate it will run off quite quickly next slide please so and we are and here's some of the things that resulted with fixing it so we do have to keep ground covered I'd go 100% cover 100% of the time let's start with 90% we have to avoid monoculture and we need to build organic matter we have to hold water at source which is you know be flood the alluvium and look at inflow on the slopes and we have to have eco corridors to increase air turbulence to bring more rain we have to move from yield to profit there's a measure for farmers rather than just focusing on what their agricultural yield is and we should be using systems measure of success to define our success which is things like increase children at the local public school reduce suicide rates we need sophisticated rotation systems of pest and weed management, nutrient supply and the others are particularly agricultural problem which is addressed to phosphate issue next slide please so what are your sufficiency what are your sufficiency in land is directly related to managing carbon so we started these trials and a colleague of mine Peter McEnany started them in 2005-2007 when the focus then was on what are your sufficiency not directly on carbon but what we did do is set about to increase carbon in the in the soil by a rotational system less than at that point in time was not considered a permanent cropping zone but opportunistically cropping so you can see that by increasing the what is efficiency on that first column is 0 to 5 years the second columns are 5 to 10 and the third columns 10 to 15 so over about a 12 year period we were able to increase the what is efficiency from 65 to 95% by increasing the carbon the crop inputs did greatly go down because we did have to increase nitrogen to actually increase the carbon that was stored but we were fairly careful about how we handled that nitrogen increase so you can see the profitability has just gone up hugely at the same time as the farm income in green the top has gone up as well next slide please once you get to the more wetter areas like Tundra Mill such as Colcain it wasn't so such a radical increase but we did get the increases we improved the what is efficiency from 65% to 95% over that time period we also lifted the return to the farmers significantly but not by the same amount so what is efficiency has a lot to do with improved profitability of farm and what is efficiency is directly related to the amount of carbon you've got in your soil next slide please so that's why we're excited about soil carbon next slide the primary reason there's some interesting differences between Google Slides and PowerPoint coming out here my apologies so the primary reason is associated that we increase soil carbon to increase what is efficiency which increases profit but the secondary reason is to consider carbon as a long term crop and carbon is a long term crop increases the plant available water that's to say that's the water between the permanent wilting points and field capacity it doesn't actually increase the water content in the soil overall it actually increases what's available and what a plant can get to as opposed to the total water it also increases the infiltration rates significantly which is what we've just discussed earlier in regards to the issues associated with floods and increases roughage across the land and resistance to pugging so when you get the centre of those rainfall events are very heavy and when you get a really heavy rate of rainfall it exceeds the infiltration rate of what the soil can cope with so if you get 10 or 20 minutes heavy rainfall and you end up with runoff but if the runoff is held by some roughage and things that cause puddles then the soil's got a chance to catch up so by having some roughage across your land you increase the infiltration associated with it you can put roughage in and that's the concept behind the yeoman's plough system or you can do it through your nature of your agriculture next slide please so there's the benefits of having increased carbon on terms of your water use and its infiltration but some of the other benefits are less hot spells and surprising enough less frost by having more carbon in your system next slide please I'll cover this in a previous presentation but I'm just going to do the first two slides of this but I'll make sure the rest of the slides are available for those who want to revisit it later in the the PDF of the slides I think Richard does that and certainly the recording so soil carbon is made up of dead living matter and its breakdown products and it exists of several overlapping time-dependent pools so just briefly next slide these three pools have a huge impact on what happens with time and agriculture so you've got the labour pool the intermediate or semi-permanent pool the intractable pool and mineralisation is the breakdown of the carbon rapidly by microbes particularly bacteria by the use of the plant and humification is fungi and microbes working together to convert the dead matter to slightly longer term soil organic matter so you want about 5% humification and about 95% mineralisation and a successful soil system that lays down carbon if you increase your humification you move to putrification which is the process associated with boggy ground and swamps and peat and development of that environment so there is a fine balance next slide please store carbon mining is just briefly what we've done in the last 70 years and it ends up with the three pools being not connected and quite separate and everything that goes into the soils only lasts a very short period of time is converted back to CO2 next slide please store carbon sequestration is a process whereby you return that start to overlap the pools reduce the dominance of the labour pool and as I just indicated have about 5% humification and to do that you need to have fungi exceeding bacteria exceed fungi down the bottom is the way to go about doing that which is not dissimilar to what we talked about in restoring the small water cycle next slide please to understand soil carbon sequestration you need to look at what are the system constraints the system controls and the management controls next slide please so the system constraints are directly related to rainfall again or irrigation because the amount of water you've got for carbon sequestration decides the rate of carbon sequestration it's the charge in the soil that decides the maximum I've assumed in that the manager practices you're doing optimises the rate of the available rate by the rain that's there next slide please just before you do just run that CEC comment again oh sorry yes thanks for picking me up on acronyms Richard so can I exchange capacities the charge in the soil I did rush through a little bit but if you want the labial carbon to stick instead of being washed away or eaten by bacteria then it needs to stick to mineral matter so the higher the charge in the mineral matter the more it can stick and therefore you've got the labial carbon stuck to it then the labial carbon can then use dive island cations calcium and magnesium to pull in to the the soil organic matter the material it's just breaking down and to hold it onto the mineral matter as well and then you get a thing called glomelin which is released by the fungi which cements the whole lot together to form aggregates again those aggregates then bind more carbon to them do you know the... well the aggregates you get many aggregates then you get macro aggregates and macro aggregates is what shearer mini aggregates are less than a couple of mil macro aggregates in the range of 20 to 30 mil and that creates macropause that allows rapid infiltration or mesopause really not really macropause but mesopause we better move on yep thanks for that system controls as we're just talking about is how you can improve the system to improve effective rain we've talked all through that how to increase cc is actually you can increase cc by biochar you can have pattern burning for the landscape which is what the traditional owners used to do where they would burn depending on the landscape so up north it was once to every three years down in Tasmania it was once every 50 years but mostly through western New South Wales the desert region and western Australia it's on a cycle every five to eight years that five to eight years actually corresponds with the breakdown of the char from the grass by the fungi but for a short period of time the char gets charged by the fungi and becomes a charged surface which can hold the label and intermediate carbon to it so once again that assumes your management optimises the rates that's your systems control management controls the next slide please Richard so management controls is about the management practices you do to meet the systems the systems optimisation so you've got to have the right pH if you've got a sequestered carbon you need nitrogen and phosphate and sulphur so you've got the right ratio available and you can do that by legumes but not legumes alone, you might have to top it up with manures, there's various things you can do if you don't want to use industrial fertilisers which are salts of acids fungi must exceed bacteria you must maximise mesopyroste and minimise macropyroste and macropyroste is great big cracks that go down in the soil and if you're going to maximise infiltration you need to avoid bare ground and compaction so you can see the organic matter and water in landscape and holding water landscape are intimately tied and an organic matter and vegetation is intimately tied with the small water cycle this is a C to N ratio it's more applicable to agricultural systems it's just saying to increase fungi you need to get a C to N ratio greater than 30 and a lot of our grass monocultural systems don't do that next slide please this is a very interesting example of soil carbon from a very progressive farmer who's operating irrigation areas the farmer actually thought that top yellow area would have the highest carbon it's got irrigation that puts on 30% more water than the running form and it has a circumstance whereby he thought because it's his most profitable irrigated system that it would have the highest carbon in actual fact he's mining carbon there he's probably only got a few years left of high productivity and if you look across to the area to the right it's at the same level up north with the road running through it you see another irrigation pivot that's got a lot of red and it was interesting that the one on the left the large high productive one is high productive because it contains just two grasses ryan clover and ryan clover don't produce any course material for the fungi the one on the right's got fescue in it and it produces course material for the fungi you can see that the organic matter hasn't been depleted to the same degree and the fescue was invasive so it wasn't actually sown so that's why it has that particular pattern so the grasses do control the organic matter sequestration because they control the soil byon which in this instance is stimulating the fungi next slide please this is another example of the small water cycle in its minuti this is actually a paddock so you can see that grey bit at the top the telegraph pole is actually in the middle ground is a paddock that was recently three days earlier cut for cane and the trash dropped to the trash he added a accelerant for breakdown and so three days later in the morning it's both hotter and moister the surrounding land and it's actually got a fog that sat over the land to about 1.5 meters so quite interesting there's a slight fog around the rest of the landscape but that particular paddock had a very intense fog associated with the warmer wetter soil as a result of his activity there next slide please so in summary improving the water use on farm two things need to use the rain more efficiently the water is provided more efficiently both in irrigation and rain and you need to get more rain next slide please so in summary using water more efficiently you hold water at source you promote infiltration over runoff so you do that with organic matter you promote roughage you have 100% cover 100% of the time so plant selection and rotation systems one for the soil i.e. by putting fescue in or c4 grasses or grasses that have a lot of coarse dry matter you're actually feeding the fungi which helps feed your whole system cell grazing also results in a system of 100% cover 100% of the time and it's improved opportunity for carbon sequestration which we didn't talk a lot about use plants to optimize deep micro porosity and mesoporosity and create the right soil biome so plant selection, rotational system one for the soil biome and soil grazing so those do the same two activities you need to be achieved recharge the alluvium and flatten the stream basal flow and flood peaks so you want leaky weeds, wetlands and erosion management which we didn't talk about and the detail of the leaky weeds and wetlands I'll leave to Richard to talk about and to create more rain and return that small water cycle we need to increase the latent heat so once again 100% cover 100% of the time we also need to put in eco corridors or to create turbulence by using eco corridors across the landscape we need to reduce the sulphate dust and once again the same two things occur 100% cover 100% of the time does that and stopping long wind runs which is your eco corridors reduce long longitudinal wind runs to stop willy-willies and lower the boundary layer which is also achieved by creating turbulence which holds the rain locally and having a biotic pump to ensure that you get moisture back in the air and you get better use of the moisture coming in from the coast and keeps circulating it round so that's the summary of a high level very quick appraisal of the theory associated with returning the small water cycle through farm management practices alright well thanks Phil very much very comprehensive I've been actively involved in this area for a long time and I suppose one of the key challenges actually measuring the effectiveness of land use changes that are trying to restore this hydrologic or the local hydrological cycle all I want to do today because we've got lots of questions is I like that there is a fantastic project going on with the Maloney Institute and we are measuring all of these various indicators of that local hydrological cycle and we are it's over 2,000 hectares and they are putting lots of leaky wear structures and things in and we've had some people like Luke Peel present on that in the past on our webinars but the challenge is to measure the effectiveness of those structures and that's a challenge that Hydrotera has taken on and there's many parameters that need to be measured like Phil's mentioned infiltration and overland flow it's not easy to measure overland flow you think about the structures you need to put in place and just the cost of doing that sort of thing vegetation cover we can do that with satellite imagery and that's getting very good on this project it's a partnership with a company called Cybo Labs and they can give all sorts of indicators of pasture biomass even split between pasture and woody vegetation the microbiology and fungus are the things that's hard to do there are things like metabologenetic or genics I should say and things like that on this site we haven't really delved into that in detail but it's certainly an area that requires more investigation recharge we're putting a lot of effort into measuring that up in this site and we're looking at soil moisture and groundwater dynamics stream flow characteristics we've got gauging stations and we're measuring or interpreting base flow and storm hydrographs stream storage so you know sort of resetting the I guess discharge point of your local catchment holding water back in the catchment is a very important boundary condition for how much water is stored in your catchment so measuring stream water levels the amount of water actually stored behind these leaky weirs structures that sort of things is important the measure of plant available water is an incredibly important indicator and just for everyone's knowledge DPI NSW actually produces forecasts of plant available water for the whole of the state I was pretty impressed that they do that they use a model to produce it and that's based on climate change forecasts and that sort of thing I think that's an incredibly important indicator for this side of things fills other heading you know create more rain well how do we prove we're getting more rain obviously we can measure it directly and then we can see things like the greenness comparative to other areas of the vegetation and the vegetation cover itself that's been retained are some of those the reason I wanted to spend a little bit of time on this is there's been about four million dollars of federal funding that's gone into developing this site and we are producing some pretty good data sets the next challenge for us all is those data sets to undertake modelling and also some just further data analytics to be able to extrapolate that data into interpreting the effectiveness of these changes and it's a big job but we're looking or Malune institutes looking at a very collaborative way of using that sort of data into the future so please feel free to send me an email if you're interested in getting involved in that collaboration Richard just before you move on if you just go back one point I didn't put up a slide on rainfall size versus density graphs and they're a key indicator of the small water cycle themselves and unfortunately that's only measured by laser it's quite expensive I look forward to not to sure if you're measuring it the rain drop size and rain drop intensity of storm events not yet so we see this as a long term monitoring site and it's actually a fantastic opportunity for Australia because it's got this accreditation as a demonstration site so it's only one of five organisations globally to have been selected by the United Nations Solutions Network as a demonstrator of regenerative agricultural land management practices so it is an opportunity for Australian research to get behind and it's really important that we start to really just get more definitive proof I guess of what these practices are we're also being involved with New South Wales doing a study on scaling up these works across the whole of New South Wales with a grant from that so there's a lot happening in this space but we need to start collaborating as a nation to accelerate adoption of this sort of thing without further ado we better go to I'll just skip over that it's the Malone catchment we better go to all those questions that have come in many thanks for these early bird questions so Phil are you ready for this do you have analysis of scientific data that helps prove up your theories regarding the small water cycle well I think we've just shown some but Phil do you want to talk to that? It's not just my theories I'm a spokesman of many people's theories and beliefs in the small water cycle so quite a bit being done in Europe and I can direct the question the person who posed the question to have a look at work done by Mikael K-H-A-R-V-I-C-K I can't pronounce his name but he's done quite a bit of work on looking on the impacts of the small water cycle in the farming area and throughout Europe so there is quite a bit done but if you look at the word data data equals measurement and observation so a lot of the observation done by farmers are often dismissed and there is a great concept west of the Newell where many farmers talk about square clouds where a particular farmer operating in extreme conservation practices or regenerative ag is known to get more thunderstorms than the neighbors and have a higher rainfall than those on adjoining properties as a result so that observation is part of the scientific data set that is help building this theory and the measurements that you're collecting is also part of it. There's also all the modelling done by politicians in regards to the biotic water pump in 2007 through that's been quite interesting as well and then there's the seasonality effects starting to appear in the climate data and the really interesting stuff is when the channel country flooded back in the last big flood season of I think it was 2010 and 2011 that there was a massive kick up in carbon taken out of the air of which two thirds of it was taken for the entire world was actually deposited as plant matter in the channel country of Australia so that impact of sequestration in the following year, a couple of years results worldwide is quite apparent when you look at some of that data collection that the large regional cycles and the small water cycle impacts and that the build up of vegetation is quite significant one could argue that the east coast lows we've had that have been repeating are only stuck in repeating themselves because of the biotic pump but we're not quite advanced enough to be able to work out is that a seasonal that a push effect from the Pacific Ocean was at a pull effect from the land and the body pump of Australia we're going to limit the question response times to one minute but things for that comprehensive response also just the CRC for catchment hydrology which still has records that can be accessed had a whole lot of data about small water cycle particularly associated with forest catchments there's some really good data there too. Question number two have you had any success using recycled organic products compost mulches etc to restore degraded drought affected lands in regard to degraded land definitely I mean it's how what got me in the field in the first place was fixing tailings dams and waste rock dumps using composted paper and cardboard and timber that came into the mine in the desert area bio solids can't be used because of their PFAS but composts and mulches and manures we often back load for certain farmers if they send their produce into the city so there's a barley grower who sends his barley in for mulch that we have given advice to who back loads pig manure which is composted on the property and then put out into the paddock and there's no doubt that it's had a huge impact reducing cost of sales and improved the salinity impacts on his farm and I would also argue he and his data is showing that it's not long enough that he is getting more thunderstorms as a result but that once again is just a single farmer so that's my one minute Richard that's otherwise I'll go on lots of other thoughts very good Nick good question number three how do you generally work engaged with farmers and landowners are they challenges with getting them to buy in well surprising enough there's a yes and no to that and it's not going to be done in one minute but I've just got back from Cootamundra running a a six hour prac on how to do this in terms of just from a sore point of view but we also obviously talked a lot about flooding the alluvium as well farmers are very keen to buy in the problem is there's a lack of examples nearby and the cost to buy in means you've got to change practice and the change of practice results in some expenditure but may result in a loss of income in the first two years of change that's called the valley of death and so farmers actually want good examples in their region before they're keen to swap over or they've got to have a very strong reason to swap over or they have off on income and then the second limitation is there's very few farm advisors who have experience in how to do this and that's limiting it's interesting to see the impact of say the Malone Institute that's a real extension organisation and so they're sort of proof of concept sites that they're setting up around the country to further adoption it's definitely a way to go these demonstration sites alright next question Phil we're sort of we're over Tommy are you happy to keep going for another 20 minutes yeah do we have any audience Richard because you and I can end up talking to each other without an audience yes we still have 50 people left Phil alright how does biochar help with the small water cycle well I discussed it I discussed that earlier as you'd seen is that biochar is as in any charged compound in a low charge environment and most of our arid lands are on low charge is quite useful supplements for building up organic matter in the soil there's lots of other supplements of course you can use zeolites to do a system of cyclic it's got to be somewhere between 5 and 10 years burning of local grasses to reintroduce the char and effectively what you're doing is low temperature burn late in the evening and you're building a localised char in the soil that then gets charged by the fungi there's no doubt that it is a benefit but it's one of many tools you can use alright next question how many small water cycles to make a large water cycle in Australian range lands firstly firstly you've got to work in hand with a large water cycle so it's not do small water cycles make a large water cycle the cyclones and so on push the water into the Australian range lands to keep it cycling you do needs so if you dump the first lot of rain from the cyclone then the thunderstorms that follow in the coming months are all locally generated so if you're holding more water on land you'll get more followings from that large water event so it's not the other way around in Australia we've got to pull in more water from the ocean by having some sort of connected body pump and then the more vegetation you've got on land the more evapotranspiration potential you've got the more rough each surface you've got the more you keep perpetuating that small water cycle from the water provided by the large water cycle I've got a question so some people say not the less Richard the only way to restore a small water cycle is to plant lots of trees so suck that suck that water back out do you think that small water cycles can be maintained with pastures or is there very much so Richard much of our land in Australia has swelling soils and so you've got gill guys and the pastures on those still get thunderstorms over them etc etc so and many of the trees in Australia suited for arid conditions so they don't tend to put out much of evapotranspiration whereas the pastures that respond or the grasses that respond to the cyclone input rain do provide a lot more of evaporation for local thunderstorms so trees alone are not the solution they are the solution in certain landscapes but for a lot of Australia they're not the sole solution question number six I'm interested in rain water harvesting water efficient energy efficient irrigation and groundwater recharge it's not really a question okay well the talk's been about that and Richard your inputs of measuring it have also been about that so once again rain water harvesting water efficiency energy efficient irrigation is a little bit different we didn't cover that and groundwater recharge we covered all those with the understanding that we're working towards in agricultural systems that are regenerative it's 100% cover 100% of the time we're working to diverse systems that include both perennial and annuals and C3 and C4 species in your rotation C3 and C3 for a type of chemical process that chlorophyll uses to convert sunlight C4 tend to be tropical plants that are very water efficient and hopelessly energy efficient and C3 are energy efficient and not water efficient so the C3s don't have lots of leafy matter or dead tillers if you look at rye grass and clover they don't have stalks and things whereas if you look at say kangaroo grass or sugarcane it has lots of stalks and lots of dead matter so yeah that's really what the talk has been about groundwater recharge is using organic matter the perennials the tap roots to actually ensure you get great infiltration so yeah Alright so question 7 is related to that I would like to discuss about linking groundwater related I think it's meant to be topics not tropics to this subject area I'd say that that's a big part of what the Malone Institute's investigating those directions between the shallow groundwater systems and how they can be recharged from adjacent streams particularly out into those luvial flood plains I don't know if you want to add to that Phil Look both you and I have masters in groundwater so it's an area that's dear to our heart is groundwater recharge and you can there's lots of ways we can enhance it but effectively using nature is the most efficient way to approach it so what you're doing at the Malone Institute is not dissimilar to the type of systems that we are encouraging farmers to get involved in so groundwater recharge is very very important for Australia we don't want to be over harvesting groundwater and all the state governments have departments that carefully look at that though there are a number of aquifers in non-sustainable mode and the moment that's in the process of endeavour to be corrected so recharge is essential for us Number eight I'm working on local town planning reform Western Australian Council vegetative cover key and then it's got SWC is MIA in consideration I think MIA I suspect is missing in action maybe not look vegetative cover is key we don't disagree but vegetative cover in a productive landscape system in a town so at the moment developers are because the cost of building just removing all trees and then they replant afterwards so even in the urban environment having areas of dense tree cover is essential for a whole variety of things for birds, for fungi but also for the temperature associated in those urban environments so urban heat effect is a whole other discussion and I think we need for the sake of Beverly to leave that one alone at the moment Richard Alright next question number nine is there easy links or graphs to information which can be shared with farmers to explain why or how it works well I suppose firstly there's these webinars which are saved and accessible through our website so any of the graphs and things that are included in Phil's webinar today can be sourced there Phil did you want to add to that yeah look it's part of the reason that I wrote the book two years ago was to provide some of the science behind it it is written for people with about a year 10 science level so there are quite a bit of science concepts discussed in it it doesn't include that latest lot of graphics we put up Richard just then on the erosion and alluvium flooding but it does present a lot more than what I've presented in today's talk in terms of other information your various state departments of agriculture and groundwater have information bulletins as well for the local state and local areas but at this point in time which is one potentially thinking about my second book there isn't actually something written simplistically on the whole concept from a science perspective on what it is that works on regenerative agriculture there's been quite a bit done on the journey of people so if you go to Charles Massie's book on the reed wobbler you will find there a description you've also got soils for life that also produce some background information as well so it is around and I suspect the Maloon Institute will have graphics available too but certainly there's not a simple textbook that sets out these principles they're quite new in development as I said the body pump was not known to 2007 the IPCC didn't even consider vegetation until 2014 so these concepts the fundamental theory is well known their application is quite new question number 10 tools for measuring local depot transpiration Richard I was going to throw that one to you but there are quite a few but I think you're better best to answer that to measure transpiration is actually quite difficult there's lots of sap meters and things that you can use so there's a company in Australia that makes those called ICT at Armadale that will be able to give you via modelling from sap flow meters the transpiration rate there are a series of work done by University of Queensland on quite expensive things called climate towers where they put them in the fields and they have a whole series of different measurements occurring that's sort of eddy covariance towers so you can get those towers there but they're about underground each they're not little cheap things I'm going to cut in here Phil we're running out of time but I can tell you you can measure it with den or sap flow sensors or you can estimate it based on local climate stations and various standard algorithms that convert you can also get various estimates from sites like what used to be called CropWatt for different types of crop that you can combine in with your local weather station data so we're using all we're using sap flow and den for direct measurements in particular on trees but also on some pastures with den drummeters so plenty of different ways to do it also the Bureau provides you just with forecasts of ET as well sorry Phil but we're running a bit short for time Christian 11 who are the top three leading soil CDR MRV solutions today and why and who would you name as the top three most progressive nations there you go that's one for you yeah look it's carbon dioxide removal measurement verification I've forgotten what the R stands for but so what you're talking about so they're talking about soil carbon sequestration here what's the top three leading solutions well they vary from whether you're pastoral tropical pastoral temperate or southern wet pastoral to cropping so it varies considerably New South so the Australian federal governments listed 13 practices many of those 13 don't work alone so you've got to actually do a number together so I wouldn't hazard a guess for a particular area to say what are the three leading ones but at the moment with the registrations that occur the leading ones on mass not necessarily for any particular area is multi species pasture change in fertilizer regime and mob grazing the main ones that are being utilised in the registrations for soil carbon projects the top three progressive nations by far is Australia is well out in front in terms of the rest of the world the US and Europe heavily involved in modelling and not so much measurement though Europe may well go down that pathway so it's and the soil carbon removal programs on farms are very nascent even more so than Australia and Australia itself is quite nascent in terms of river alluvium flooding the UK is probably further ahead than Australia has a national scheme for that for the last five or six years but in terms of carbon there somewhat behind us and I'm not quite too sure of alluvium flooding in most other countries the US is behind in both in terms of national approaches though they're obviously leading proponents in region agriculture out of the US but not having impacts so I suppose that's my answer for that one Richard okay very important question number 12 last to the early bird questions will regenerative farming techniques ever make it to be the accepted practice why and why not they will the term regenerative is something that farmers don't like currently because there's two types of farmers that have undertaken regenerative practice so far in the majority not sorry all of them but in the majority the first is those that have gone through some sort of perturbation in their life they've had the farm completely burnt as the case in Colin Sykes out of Dogong or they've had a number of ancestors as Charles Massey so they've been forced down that pathway as an only solution and they've been some of the innovators to some extent Gabe Brown would fall into the category out of the US as well then you've got the people who have significant off farm income and are able to play and learn so you've got Patricia I've forgotten her so and I is married to Phillip Adams who has a very successful garlic farm and so can afford the opportunity of not being dependent wholly on the income from the farm and then you've got Brian Brown the actor and his wife the actor producer who's just about to release a movie in a couple of weeks on sustainable agriculture so they tend to be the two types that have got involved and started it and been innovative in it there are some exceptions the Higgity's over in West Australia an exception who run a very successful wheat farm on regenerative pinched of bulls who weren't one of those two categories so they're the people who've started it the problem we've got in Australia as I've talked about before is we don't have enough advisors and traditionally the farmers the traditional farmers see Regendi farmers as people who've got off on income and can de-stock or do things and they're not real farmers so that's been a kind of hang back on it the other thing is people don't understand agriculture uptake of agricultural technologies that you're looking at from innovator through early adopters early majority, late majority and lag adds that's about a 40 year process and with Regen Ag we're barely into the first 10 years possibly less so if you look at no till, no till in Australia was first experiment with in 1963 or so wasn't out of the innovation phase until the late 70s so you're looking about a 15 year cycle on innovation innovation is somewhere between 1 and 2% of farmers so I think we're asking a lot of Regen Ag to have widespread adoption given what the limitations of how farmers uptake technologies which is to wait for someone's in the district to wait until it's fully studied by the state departments and fully decimated to the industry it takes quite a bit of time so I'm not despondent at all that the uptake appears to be slow because it is slow compared to no till but not hugely slow and no till had very substantive financial benefits and it took to have the majority of farmers say 90% involved in no till that cropped didn't actually occur to literally 2010 from a 1963 start so on that basis I'm comfortable regenerative practice will be uptaken because it's financially better to do so and it's more sustainable for the farm and farmers are seeing that they've lost fairing rings and mushrooms and they've lost the small birds so they know they're causing impact on the landscape and they're not horribly keen about it but how do you make the change how do you become green and stay in the black is what this is about so yeah I'm not despondent at all that it doesn't appear to be a fast uptake I think that the uptake we're getting is about on par with normal agricultural uptake it's interesting to see the demand that the Brown Institute's getting through their consultancy for taking on some of these brand use practices like demand is actually increasing substantially there's a lot of demand so that's one of the advisory groups you can reach out to if you're on the call and you're looking for some advice that's why they exist alright Phil I think we've got seven questions left in the Q&A what we might have to do is just commit to the audience that we're going to send out some emails to answer your further questions there how many are still online Richard 30 people well it's now two o'clock you won't have a quick go at a few of them and if we lose 30 people we'll respond here we go Jeanette Conti Conti I hope that's how you pronounce it any evidence of the degree of revegetation that would be needed in agricultural areas to restore the small water cycle I'm in Western Australia okay the West Australian Department of Ag is very keen to adopt in programs looking to restore the small water cycle on a regional basis and there are they have started to investigate which programs there is to do it on so I know there's starting to be a lot of work done there the short answer to the question is no Richard there is not a lot of knowledge about how much is needed across a region even Maloon Institute still looking at is a small river catchment to understand how many farmers do you have to get engaged is it all of it is it 5% is it 20% impact we don't know you it would be a good thing to work out wouldn't it that's a really important number that's one thing to take home is that the actual actions on the ground are all very doable the sort of direction on where to do and how much to do is where places like the Maloon Institute have a real important role to play but also I would have thought other advisory bodies to stick to management authorities etc well land care itself has a big role as well going forward I think and New South Wales land care are looking into this at the moment they watch this space I guess next question is it possible to restore the degradation coincident with the aboriginals arriving in Australia was the extinction of the megafauna a lot of it except for the megafauna that was useful such as kangaroos but the megafauna disappeared and then a new equilibrium was established and a cultural system called the dream time built around that to protect that equilibrium we can't fully recover to the base that we were at and we will within our system create and as a community except what a new plateau or equilibrium will be so I'm hopeful that as Australian community that some we won't continue on this pathway of potential wide spread landscape destruction desivcation and we will create practices in LAW as opposed to LOR that results in community adoption of principles that protect the land next question is anonymous attendee you mentioned earlier that people aren't looking at the small water cycle why is that that's a very good question Richard when you and I did hydrogeology we were taught only a little bit about the small water cycle and that's in a master's degree so the concept of the small water cycle was only starting to get in scientific literature associated with hydrogeology and water professional managers from about the early to mid 2000s to 2010 so to get it out to the general public is going to take a bit more and there's a number of people Australia beyond myself and yourself Richard who are communicating this importance as there are around the world but it is something that has been known about but it's huge importance largely not realised it's a difficult thing to measure so often if you can't measure it you can't manage it so it hasn't been front and centre versus say what the Bureau of Meteorology can provide us and the broader sort of rainfall patterns and that sort of thing so it might be an element of that there too I think part of the realisation also is that scale has improved the capacity to model some of these systems has improved and it's only once modelling systems analysis and flux rates, flux modelling got very popular that they actually started to realise the small water cycle and the biotic pump that the two connected together are actually a huge influence and that's only really very very recent. Okay James Stewart's got an interesting question. Great content thank you. Could holes drilled through surface and filled with biochar help water table infiltration faster than trees? Yes we put something in very similar at Nelson Bay to that which is injecting storm water to groundwater so you're dealing with and we propose something in Kuwait quite similar but also using trees to manage the small water cycle in Kuwait and restore the climate back 2000 years ago but yes injection schemes are very beneficial two of the largest injection schemes of storm water in the world one was designed by CSI and installed in Adelaide and one was designed by a team by myself and installed in Nelson Bay at the moment most of it's passive and these two systems are passive as well but they're direct injection using polishing mechanisms we didn't use biochar we used a variety of polishing systems at the front ends but we could have easily used biochar and CSI used a wetland at the front ends then with a gallery recharge system so those are available for large space systems associated with cities where you can afford the infrastructure needed rural ones will still highly depend on recharge through wetlands or through wears and river based flooding of alluvian. Alright next question Marcus Buchanan is the biggest system constraints humans the growers I work with resist these concepts that's because we're at the point of early adopters or innovators we haven't got to early adopters so the bottom line is yes it's human behaviour and that's why I went back to the adoption of technology by agriculture at its normal rate it's also what I call a valley of death is to cross that the farmers got to be comfortable that they have the reserves for the loss of income that may occur during the change that happens and they can afford the infrastructure to make the change so that there is resistance we could get and should get from the government some tax relief or funding help that encourages the change to happen because it's for the benefit of all of Australia not just the farmer so yes and then this human nature it's it's like two young kids going in the toilet and pissing up the wall to see you can piss up the highest the girls don't do this of course but us boys are animals when it comes to behaviour this analogy that's making a difference so you like to have the silo the farmer who drops the weed off of the silo likes to say you know I've got 10 tonnes per hectare and have the highest highest yield of the district rather the farmer who makes the most profit so no farmer brags about making the most profit in the district but they all brag at what is the most yield so to move from an agricultural yield to a financial yield makes a lot of sense so there is a lot of resistance and this will take longer than a minute but the leading cane farmer in the world that was a photo of his paddock we used his brother and he were the first to stop burning and to do green harvesting and he did many other things as well and the neighbours were a bit disgruntled and used to say he produced more HDs and cane off his property but he did produce a lot of money and still makes a lot of money and made a lot of money this year from having in the last two years from organic farming because he sequestered so much carbon his soils were able to get the flood water infiltrated quicker than his neighbours and he got yield off his brother when I went up there I saw his brother was burning again and I said this was a decade ago I said why is your brother burning and he said his wife couldn't cop the criticism at the shop so to be different in the farm community is quite difficult if you're the innovator you cop a lot of flak and at this stage we've not moved past the innovators there's not enough innovator there's no lots of districts with no innovators in them yet on region so yes it is very difficult at this moment if you're an innovator and so you've got to be exceptionally thick skin to survive alright thanks Phil unfortunately I have to go in ten minutes late for another meeting there's three questions left so we'll have to send out an email to those but many thanks everybody for coming and many thanks to you Phil too for your fantastic presentation thanks Richard thanks very much for coming everybody appreciate it thanks Richard it's a pleasure cheers Phil bye