El nino-La Nina, Climate change, “BOM Says”. These terms are bandied around the table at the house on Logboy farm when we all have a discussion about how it hasn't rained in a while. gmaiIn recent years it has become a constant feature of Logboy farm. While we strive to maintain a permaculturally minded system in all of our operations; where adversity should not affect us as much as it would a traditional system; we are still often crippled by its effects. From the beginning of 2013 until present we have going through one of our worst drought periods on record. Which isn't to say we haven't had any good years in that time, it is to say that we have not been entirely able to regain from the damages caused by the bad ones. I am writing this in mid 2020, a year that (so far) around the world has been very turbulent, to say the least. However on the farm it has been a relatively quiet one. In 2019 we had our worst year yet in terms of rainfall in a calendar year. It was during this year and the hardship it brought we realised that like all the tradition farms around us, we were doing the very definition of insanity. So we made changes.

The first thing we did was removed sheep out of our systems. While they definitely had their place before and gave us resources beyond lamb (such as manure), they required a lot of work. One example of that; they did not apply themselves easily to short rotations, being almost immune to electric fencing with their woolly coats and high intelligence. We should have realised that conclusion when we witnessed a ram use his horns to lift a hot wire up while all of his ewes flooded out into the neighbouring paddock.

The second change we made was to temporarily drastically reduce cattle numbers to allow us room in the grazing plan to plant large amounts of fodder tree, Leuceana, and install earthworks for future drought proofing purposes. While we do miss out on all the benefits that herd effect has on our pastures during this time, we feel that it is worth it. This has resulted in many our old clear cultivation paddocks of healthy and well established native grass pastures going to a ‘rank’ state, where the lack of pruning of the grass has meant the plants are starting to die.

The third change we made was to reduce pig numbers down to just enough to cover our own pork needs. For the last twenty-ish years we have used pigs as a tool to improve our pastures, where their manure, curiosity and need to dig has been a good tool at renovating an over-rested pasture. However in the last few years we were keeping them in a system where their natural want to dig was actually actively ruining the pasture due to the constant lack of water. We needed to end this as soon as we could.

The final change we have made is to push harder to build a fully sustainable vegetable market garden. Something we are taking our time on have been working on building soil even before we removed any in the form of a harvest. For this we have found a need for an input of organic matter, ideally in the form of compost.

All those changes, born out of crisis, have actually resulted in potentially a major breakthrough. As is so often in permaculture design, the problems become the solution. We have rank grass; we have empty sheep yards; we have a few pigs out of a job; and a need for compost. So obviously we are now working on putting those three things together plus a few chickens and build what we are now terming at the table at the house a ‘Compostatorium’. Something we hope means we have the ability to grow seeds in soil that has been entirely being manufactured from on farm inputs. We don't know if it will work yet and we are sure there will be at least some kinks to work out, but experimentation is the seedling of innovation.