They said it couldn’t be done – to bring together at least 55 farmers and agricultural consultants representing every conceivable pastoral philosophy for 2 full days and nights for harmonious dialogue. Add to this a dose of 19 scientific and social academics, 9 bureaucrats, two journalists, 5 former soldiers and a socio-economist and you probably have a recipe for disaster.

Not so, particularly when one of the former soldiers doubles as a former Governor General and his name is Michael Jeffery. At ANU’s Kioloa Coastal Campus on the NSW SouthCoast last weekend some of Australia’s brightest and best converged to find a solution to the nation’s agricultural and environmental crisis.

Today former Governor-General Michael Jeffreys officially launched the Outcomes Australia Landscape Regeneration Project at the conclusion of a unique gathering of Australia's best practitioners of bio-sustainable farming.

Based significantly on the work of the Natural Sequence Association's Peter Andrews, the Landscape Regeneration Project will also incorporate techniques of biological farming, permaculture and biodynamic farming.

The Project's aim is to restore millions of hectares of degraded farmland to full productivity by the use of these various farming methods.

To read more please go to this article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

BY JOHN THISTLETON, The Canberra Times, 1/08/2009

Although two burly Maremma dogs guard Tony Coote's free-range chickens, sometimes a fox squeezes through a wombat hole under the fence and takes one.

Nor will he touch the blackberries breaking out along the creek because they are harbouring native wrens and binding the soil together.

He has 12,000 hens split into flocks of 1000, with each flock allotted 8ha. In sheds on wheels which are moved twice weekly, these lucky hens are coaxed outside each day with feed, water and their fill of bugs, flies and grubs. He said this made them genuine free-range. Their eggs fetch $12 a dozen and demand outstrips supply.

And while the foxes are a nuisance, Mr Coote is more focused on a bigger enemy people's indifference to the land which is being forced to give more than it's getting back.

A long-time owner of Mulloon Creek, he sold his controlling interest in jewellers Angus and Coote two years ago and is championing biodiversity, permaculture and natural sequence farming.

The latter is an unconventional method of rehydrating farmlands pioneered by Peter Andrews, who is becoming well known after several appearances on the ABC's Australian Story. Swales snake along the property slowing water run off. Banks are raised to direct water away from the creek, which is filled with rocks, reeds and willows to slow the flow. In flood the water spills out across the paddocks, instead of rushing down the water course, gouging out the soil.