Why soil health and profitability are deeply connected, with Nic Kentish

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to AgTech. So what brought to you by Tenacious Ventures, I'm Sarah Nalette. Now we know for most farmers farming isn't just a job, it's a way of life. But what if what you do is even in your last name? Most Aussies grew up eating Kentish potatoes. So for Nick, Kentish potatoes and farming was really the family business. He remembers when they decided to make a big transition to Organics.

Speaker B: Maybe 3 or 4 cents a kilo gross margin. It's tiny and you just work on massive turnover. So we thought, well, we could grow organic potatoes that would take it to like about 60 or 70 cents a kilo grows much better as you're about to hear.

Speaker A: The economics ultimately didn't play out well, but in terms of farming and life lessons it was pretty huge. For Nick, it all starts with the soil rather than what he calls more on farming as in putting more fertilizer, pesticides, etc. On your farm. He's certainly not against inputs but it takes a um, more diagnostic approach where you look at what the soil is telling you as well as what your balance sheet is telling you about the land and the business. These days Nick is farming in the Adelaide Hills and is also a well respected educator for Resource Consulting services or RCS as it's commonly called. He teaches their Grazing for Profit course. I wanted to talk to Nick because I know a lot of farmers who've done the course and they talk about it being really life changing. Some would call what they teach regen ag. And I wanted Nick's take on that term and how he sees ag tech playing a role in more holistic approaches to farming. So let's meet Nick.

Speaker B: Sarah. Uh, I was born in 1964 in Mount Gambier, the bottom of South Australia. And I thought that's where the sun comes up and goes down for a lot of my early years. And I was very fortunate that the family farm had been going for three generations by then. But my grandfather and his brother employed a lot of people in potato growing around Mount Gammit. Whether they loved us or hated us, we'd had a lot to do with the community as employers. And in actual fact I think the story goes in around the war, uh, 1943 or four, I think my grandfather was contracted by the government to grow about a thousand acres of potatoes which is enormous when you think about those days. And then were prisoners of war and locals, they weren't working fine. So real significance of that is that we had a lot of people working on Our farm who were war veterans. We had people that stayed a whole lifetime. They'd have 40, 50 years working for our family. And some of those old veterans I rode side by side in old jeeps and things like that. I learned a lot from in the early days. It was cool upbringing. And there were like about 40 people working on that farm. You'd reckon we were like the Amish, the way there were so many people getting around. Anyway, I was passionate about animals really as a kid, livestock, sheep and cattle. And my dad was the eldest of six kids and he was passionate about potatoes. In actual fact, he would have been an engineer if he could have got away and studied, I reckon. But he farmed potatoes so that he couldn't have all this machinery around him. And the beauty of Dad's and my relationship was that we never crossed enterprises much at all in early or later years working. We worked together in partnership for another 15 years before he retired. And he never bugged me one day in the sheep or cattle yards. And I never really bugged him much. Oh, I think I did bug him a lot. He did when it came to the, the family business. But to his credit also, he came home the day he left school age 16, and he didn't regret it. But he did say to me when I was leaving school, you better think long and hard about coming home, because I absolutely forbid it. You've got to go away and break someone else's machinery and break someone else's heart as well, not mine. He didn't think I'd stay away for 10 years, but I had a terrific look around the world from age 17 to 27. I did the apprenticeship thing in the 80s of going jackarooing and worked my way up to a head stockman's job. Now, my first head stockman's job was actually in Vanuatu, looking after, uh, a bunch of new Vanuatu stockmen there, which I thought was going to be headstock in paradise, but it was tough going or in language barrier more than anything. And then I went to the Middle east on, um, live export sheep carriers for a couple of years based in Western Australia and had a good look there, which live export is such a, uh, tenuous word nowadays, but then was just considered a normal enterprise. And the heyday of wool was still going in the 80s. So can't explain the heyday of wool to people now in agriculture. What are you talking about? And then I went back up to the northwest of Western Australia, bullcatching for while there was a lot of fun. Then I finally Came home to work in 1992 with my folks and it was really sublime times. Although it was a family farm that had now gone out to second cousins working together. And you can see that's never gonna end well.

Speaker C: It's fascinating from potatoes the rest of your career was, or at least that 10 year period was really focused on animals. Was that just an innate interest in sort of livestock and animals or a coincidence?

Speaker B: Yep, it was an interest for sure. As an apprentice. There was a proper apprenticeship scheme in those days where you did about four years as a jackaroo or jillaroo, then you might work your way into a headstock and then you might luckily in a few years time become an assistant manager and then maybe a manager in your mid-30s. I was aspiring to that to get my way through. And should anything go wrong at home because there were so many people at, huh, home there was not really a spot for me. So should something go wrong at home, I was thinking that would be plan B. And y' all was always gravitating towards um, western New South Wales or western Queensland or northern South Australia. And I went through ag college. But their college I went to was in, in Roseworthy in South Australia. Was very focused on a northern kind of program of extensive grazing. I don't say that it didn't really help me when I went home to intensive grazing in the south. I was just a principle that applied and I just was able to take it around with me.

Speaker C: Interesting. Were there any moments you mentioned live export in the sort of view we have now, Jack, ruining like pretty different systems that you would have seen on and offshore. Are there any moments that looking back you feel like have really shaped how you've come to view animal husbandry and

Speaker B: farming in farming first and foremost. I remember on the very first year I started jackarooing. 1982 was then in New South Wales, the worst drought in history. And then as if that wasn't enough, the end of that, uh, I happen to be working back near home in February 1983 and Ash Wednesday went through. And Ash Wednesday was this awful fire that killed dozens of people and throughout South Australia and Victoria. And it was a hell time. And as if there was like, uh, the sky opening up and something good coming out of that whole terrible drought and fires. It rained in 1983 was this incredible year to then be in the industry. So everyone had their tail up and 1983 was for livestock. Incredible. There was grass from the bottom of Tasmania to the north of Cape York.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. The contrast in those seasons. Right. Just. It's so characteristic of agriculture that you just get these big swings and people that don't know ag and buy a farm in one year and then are severely disappointed or vice versa. Right. Because it can be so different.

Speaker B: Yeah, to your point, that's so, uh, correct, Sarah. And just recently I was lucky enough to get a lecture from Emeritus Professor Roger Stone and who is a wonderful speaker on climate and observations. And he says Australia was already extremely variable. We've been a variable country in climate. And if the bell curve or standard deviation is a, uh, bell, it just got a bit wider. Yeah, the average is still the average. That's why it's called the average. Yeah, but, but the outlier has got a bit more outline and I, uh, think he said 27 times more area under our bell curve than the next most arable country on earth. So the hots are hotter the cold, the cold, the wet's the wetter, the dry, the dryer.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker B: And surprise, that's exactly what my boss told me in 1982.

Speaker C: Yeah, but you didn't listen, Nick. You came back with a bit of a plan to take over the family farm, or at least, uh, an idea. You said 20 or 30 years. I know. Was it, was it on your mind to take over the family farm? Were you thinking back to potatoes?

Speaker B: I think I got a real taste of things from when I did a grazing for profit course with Terry McCoska in the late 90s. And uh, I did the Australian Rural Leadership Program a bit before that. And I met this really neat guy called Gary Cook was his name. And he said to me, he was a colleague of mine on his two year course and one day he said, if you ever do want to push your mind right out to the limits, go and do a grading for profit course for a homegrown garden variety farmer. It'll take you right out of your comfort zone and up. And lo and behold, there was one coming to Mount Gambier. My wife and I booked into it and it certainly really ticked a word on its head. Now I've got to elaborate there that my darling wife of now 30 odd years came from. She was actually migronomist. It was a very smart move marrying my agronomist. That's it. And so Alexi came from a science background and she was an agronomist for a fertilizer company. So for her, selling more fertilizer was just NPK. And her boss told her in the 80s that the way to sell more Fertilizer was to undo, um, a couple more buttons.

Speaker C: That's wild.

Speaker B: Isn't that wild? Anyway, as you said, it worked a thing. You couldn't get away with that. Now, luckily, I think I hope all

Speaker C: of that is gone, but I'm skeptical that it all is, Nick.

Speaker B: Unfortunately, it's long enough to go to be. You, uh, can put it in mythology, but everyone that was there knows that. She'll know that. So, anyway, so. But the beauty of that is, Sarah, is that she, of all people, a man who thinks he's smarter than his wife has a very smart wife. And so, uh, she said to me one day, this whole fertilizer things have got a flaw in it because you can't keep doing it forever. Uh, it'll blow it up. If you use the theme more or less, was if a little bit is good, then a lot must be better. And that was an actual fact. The inverse of truth. So when we did a, uh, grading for profit course, in actual fact, I was going there with a bit of a horticultural paradigm as well, because potatoes for us occupied 10% of the land, but 90% of the turnover. And livestock occupied 90% of the land and 10% of the turnover. Nevertheless, they both complemented each other because of the rotation. And I said to Terry McCoska, Is there anyone in the world you've ever seen could grow organic potatoes? And he said, no, I haven't, but I've heard it can be done if you go to the States. And I'd go and visit a fellow over there called Arden Anderson, if you ever get to see him. He's probably got some people. Arden was very close to the army in Illinois and Winnipeg. There's a few potatoes grown there. And then over in Idaho as well. Through him, I got to accumulate this bit of knowledge and went and visited these folks with Alexei, and we brought this information back with us to see if it might work on, um, Mount Gambia soils. So we set about trying to fix an issue that we had mostly with a pretty bad gross margin in potatoes. We were maybe 3 or 4 cents a kilo gross margin. It's tiny, and you just work on massive turnover. So we thought, well, we could grow organic potatoes that would take it to like about 60 or 70 cents a kilo gross margin. Much better. And if all else was equal, that'd be ideal. Now, obviously, you can see the stumbling block where we're heading towards, but it kind of worked okay. And if we had to just stayed at that level in attempting to become organic, but not actually Certifying we'd been right. I wouldn't recommend people do that, but it's got a lot of people where they want to go. But generally you fix one problem and create another. So that's another story for later.

Speaker C: Um, there's so many directions I could go and make. I actually do want to know what organic potatoes were. But let me come back to just the succession piece for you, because I think that was a core part of kind of your journey. And it's often something we hear when farmers make a big transition in practice, that there's a succession element of that. I'm not sure if that's true from your perspective, your experience of succession and unlexy taking over the farm change your approach to farming and decision making or cedro you like?

Speaker B: Yeah, Sarah, Uh, it sure did. Because it's one thing to get up and just work the farm every day and do a few budgets and compare budget to actuals. It's a whole nother thing to take on the balance sheet and the P and L with the balance sheet, you take on all the debt and then you got to fund the debt. Uh, and it can make you pretty. It makes you second guess yourself all of a sudden. So what happened was about 14 years after I'd come home and been married for 10 of those years, dad, ah, and his cousins started to unwind the family business because it just was never going to work. Second cousins work together, so they did a really good job. But it was tricky because of the way they'd set up businesses in the early days with probate and death taxes and so forth, being the demise of many farms. So they unwound that. And then my dad held the title for our farm in his and mum's name for 48 hours before they passed it on to the next generation, to us. And all we had to do was kind of finalize a bit of stuff. And dad said it was pretty overrated in holding that title. It didn't really bother him much as passing it on because he'd been there since he was 16 and it didn't seem like much different. We bought mum and dad out of the farm there, and so we got given part of the farm and we bought the rest fair and square and paid my parents out and then my three sisters as well. And I'd say we fixed one problem, we created another. So we set them all up, uh, we felt like pretty fairly and evenly. And what we'd done though is we locked into an interest rate that was horrendous. 10.5% back then. And I remember locking into it and having a meeting with RCS at the time, who I now work for, but were our consultant at the time, and they said, gee, that's pretty hefty. And I said, well, I remember what 17% felt like when I first came home, so that's why I'm doing it. So we did that. That's bad debt, because when the internal rate of return is lower than the interest rate, you can't get ahead. Uh, and so we were then also committed to keep on growing potatoes in order to cash flow that debt. And I was not a very good horticulturalist, as you can probably gather. I would go out and I'd check the sheep, I'd check the cattle, I'd wash some troughs out, good clean troughs. I do all sorts of things before I check the spud patch. And I had a great crew that were the horticulturalists there and I left them to it. Lastly, and Alexi as the agronomist, the, uh, only trouble was I don't think I was paying enough attention, particularly in an organic transition. So you got it. We were growing too many hectares, too much land, hadn't really had time to change, soils were sandy and not holding on to nutrition. A lot of things were going wrong. I accumulated a million dollars of debt each year for two years. And so suddenly, like, bam. In my first exercise as being the fourth generation landowner, I just doubled my debt and doubled our debt, I should say. Although there's nothing more sobering than looking at that, going, what the hell? How did that happen? So I would say it makes me a. It puts me in a good position, I think, to be a consultant. And I ask myself first, with all these people, do they actually know where their money is? They know what's going on here because you can lose a lot of money really quickly in risky enterprises like that. So not so much meat growing and wall growing. That's easy enough. In horticulture, viticulture, you can lose a lot of money really quickly because it's just not working for you. The numbers are not working. And I think it's probably got to do with slightly negative gross margins will take you under really quickly. That was my key learning, I think, from that. And my dairy farmer mates at the time said, we've got possibly plus or minus half percent gross margin, negative or positive gross margin per liter of milk. And they would say we wouldn't be better just to stick a check on the milk truck and not even milk today. Uh, and until recently that's probably been the case for a lot of dairy. They still pick. Some potatoes were just the same. A lot of horticulture was just the same. And I was just, I was coming to realize that. So it also makes a part of what I do now in coaching people through succession, in saying to them, I think there's a better structured way than just giving you the whole balance sheet, plus P and L and where you go, knock yourselves out, kiddies who are better structured way.

Speaker C: And one of the elements of that, Nick, as I understand, is this sort of soil first approach. And obviously that's the agronomic side of the financial side you were just talking about. But what does that mean to you? What does that mean in practice? And how does taking a soil first approach change how a farm operates in a, uh, day to day way?

Speaker B: If you were to start at the back door and walk out the back door and say, it's just garden ready for planting yet, and you go, no, we finally just built the house so the soil is really corrupted and not even this garden would grow much more than weeds and some sticky trees. You know, you've got a way to go. I'm going to need some mulching. I don't need all sorts of things. We look after our gardens and our veggie garden beautifully. Then we go to the paddock and then we. Then it's mass management. We manage by the hundreds of hectares possibly. And if you walk into your paddock and say, is this paddock ready to sow down to a crop, ah, of potatoes or a crop of beans or a crop of wheat or a pasture, quite often the answer is, I'm not sure. What do I need to know? So, yeah, go back and get a soil test. Get one shallow and one deep down to 400 mil. What I would say is go to a paddock that's kind of okay. Take a soil test, then a plant tissue test of your most preferential species and then a plant tissue test of your least preferential species, like a weed. Put all those results side by side and then see if you can figure what the soil's trying to tell you, what the plants are trying to tell you. Why are the weeds, yeah, the weeds are there. Not because of lack of herbicide, because there's something that you've created. I can take you to oils that are ready to grow potatoes. I can take you to soils that are not ready for maybe years of growing potatoes, or maybe they've just got one crop in them and that's it though they'll never hold together to grow. I say potatoes because they are a bit of a princess. I'm sorry for princesses out there, but they are, um, they're very precious and they don't like too many upsets. They're 120 day crop and you only need one of those days to go wrong and game over.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Whereas a pasture crop and 65 days of the year. But uh, you can have week or a month go pretty badly and it'll still correct itself.

Speaker C: I noticed that even in that soil's first framing and basically in all of the materials for rcs, you don't use the term regenerative agriculture. Regen Ag. I imagine that's intentional, but I'm curious to hear because it is the concept that you're talking about. You spend a lot of time educating on it. I'm sure it comes up as a word. But how has the conversation around Regen Ag and the way that it's been talked about in the public changed how you guys talk about it? Or maybe that's not the right thing. That's changed it. Maybe you've always had your own view and you've stuck to it and the world's just changed around you. Or. Yeah. I'm curious about sort of your views on using that term specifically for these kinds of methods.

Speaker B: What a great question. I think that I would like to regenerate my bank account. I think I would like to regenerate the relationships that I have possibly run clean over the top of with friends that I would like to regenerate a restore relationship. So I don't really mind what people call a. But what I would say is it is a little divisive because obviously the opposite is degenerative. And I'm not going to want to call any farmer colleague who I respect degenerative because they're not generally doing it. They're trying to. They just had some tough going or maybe I've got to add some knowledge to it. But we used to call it biological agriculture in the early times. We were in a transition for organics particularly, we just call it biological agricultural. And lots of biosystems grew out of that. And then somehow regenerative agriculture became a buzzword. And it's like going to third base when you're not even at first base yet in a conversation. And it's polarizing. And I would say that it is, um, all about regenerative agriculture. It's not about inputs, it's about outcomes. And it's. The outcome is Regenerating your bank account, regenerating your community, getting everyone back in your school, on your hospital board, on your soils board, on your land care group, whatever. That's all. That's all it might be. If your soil's getting better, it holds more water. It's getting deeper, uh, it's more friable. You can stick your hand in it all the way to your wrist. There's more earthworms. It's not about whether you use chemical or not. Quite often you'll have to use a chemical to fix problem. One thing I have learned over the years is how to repair any collateral damage that you may have or by using that chemistry. But chemistry in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is not fixing up what you've done. So you just keep taking antibiotics and antibiotics you're probably going to die from of what should have fixed it because you didn't have a way of repairing the microbiome or whatever of your body. So the same will happen out in the soil. And so I would say always ask yourself, when you walk into a paddock, is this paddock ready for what I'm about to do? Either grazing it or ripping it up or spraying it or whatever.

Speaker C: Yeah. Interesting. The other thing that really stands out to me about RCS and how you guys talk about it is the profit part of grazing for profit. I think so much of if you come at regenerative agriculture from the consumer restaurants and documentaries and what happens in Sydney and Melbourne and in having these conversations, it's about, I don't know, somewhere between idealistic view of farming and maybe the food quality or environmental outcomes. But there's very rarely a view that this can make you more money or this can. The balance sheet and the P and L are really the focus here and why that matters. But ultimately that is what matters. Otherwise you're not going to be farming for very long, I guess. What evidence do you have? Are you at the point where you actually have good data on these methodologies being like a successful financial way to farm versus conventional methods?

Speaker B: You bet. You bet. Sarah is so important and I'm so proud of what we do at rcs, uh, and other companies that I would say they've developed something similar. I don't suppose we've got a monopoly on it, but I know we have these incredibly good diagnostic tools that we teach farmers to use for themselves. So just a bit of coaching from us and we do a lot of coaching after we do the training to teach people how to use these tools. So it'd be really bad form as a consultant. An agricultural consultant. Ex farmer, now agricultural consultant. To have people do really well in business for seven years and in the last three years out of 10, they go broke. What's the point of that? So I want to be there with them 10 years out of 10. Anyone can make money in the good years, but it's the tough of years like this one coming up that decisions are hard to make because of all sorts of world issues. So these are the fun times to get really set together on things. And so we look at a farm and go, is it because your gross margin isn't high enough, your turnover isn't high enough, or your overheads are too high? It can only be one of three things. And so once you come along to a classical profit school and for the first two and a um, half days, all we talk about is those three secrets of profit. People are going, well, I said, I'm all ears now. Because I thought this was all going to be about photosynthesis and soils. And so what? We'll get onto that later. But first and foremost, you got to stay in business. If you go out of business, you just lost the game. Just like playing Monopoly. You went straight to jail and no money.

Speaker C: Yeah, not a very fun Monopoly game after that. I've played a few of those. I'm interested thinking why most farmers that come to a grazing for profit course or come to rcs, are they dragged along and someone said, oh, uh, you gotta come learn about this stuff. And they did have that skepticism. Are they coming in because they are regen ag converts and they want to learn about. Are they coming in because the financial situation. And, uh, the reason I ask is because when my anecdotal experience, and there's probably more than a dozen, but definitely not a hundred farmers that would fall into this category talk about transitioning to regenerative agriculture. There's often like a, uh, catalyst that's pretty serious in their lives. Someone in their family was exposed to chemicals and had cancer and God forbid, passed away and then attributed that to the chemical usage or the farm was going bankrupt, or like there's a big shock to the system that leads them to make one of these changes. But I'm curious if that's just a weird sampling error in who I talk to or that's kind of common.

Speaker B: By and large, that's the case. You hear the nail on the head. It's a shift that people are looking for because they finally figured out that what they're doing is probably not working. And they've become addicted to moron farming, but keep putting more on. They've also realized that.

Speaker C: Is that a double entendre there? Like that you're a moron too? Or a.

Speaker B: Or is that, no, the farmer's not a moron. It's often the advice that they're getting is a moral addiction. And then there's been a few really grievous stories, which are, uh, they're tough to listen to, but mostly it's. There was one where a husband and wife came. She was really energized, and she just dragged him along kicking and screaming. And they realized they're going to sit in the same room for seven days. We certainly didn't put them on the same table together, she said. When we said, why are you here? She said, oh, we just got through one of the worst droughts ever. We're now definitely in our life, in our married life. Uh, and I just, I don't want to do that again. I just don't want to do that again. And he says, he pipes up, it's not even his turn. I wasn't that bad. And she hit the road and, uh, it was just a bubble that was popped for her. And we just put the fire out there. And I said, hey, we'll get to this later on. But you get through a tough year, uh, and everyone's licking their wounds. And then some people move on quicker than others. But she said, you're not going to treat me and the kids like that again. Every day you come into that house, someone got a strip torn off them. And she was saying, oh, if I've got to keep farming, um, like this, I won't do it anymore. He was trying to make it less a thing than it was. Now I hear him because that's the resilience that we build into ourselves. But it's certainly not healthy and it's going to pop out sooner or later as another resultant affliction somewhere else. So I'm happy to say that they're farming much more happily and they're together much more happily. As far as regenerating a relationship. I actually think they hugged at the end of the day after seven days, and he stood up and actually made a bit of a speech which would. Blew me away. So people do it for all sorts of reasons. Not many people come along because things are going swimmingly. Well, they're driven by something, but they could have a, uh, $3 million EBIT of a farm, which is a grand event. Things are going okay. But they'll go, uh, you know what? But the relationships are falling apart. The kids don't want to come home because they just recognize too frenetic or the swings and roundabouts are too wide. Like Professor Rogerstone says, variability is too wide. They don't want to grab a hold of it because it's too scary.

Speaker C: Interesting. But I guess that's human psychology, that you need a shock to the system or something to the inertia. For change has to overcome the inertia for staying the same. And sometimes in these cases, that's unfortunately not a good thing to have happen. And that does cause people to make changes.

Speaker B: I looked over my shoulder after those two massive years of losses in Paternos, and I thought, I wonder who's going to fix this up for me?

Speaker C: How'd that go?

Speaker B: Everyone had left except dear Lexi. She stayed around, and we looked at each other and got some help from RCS at the time and said, okay, so what are we going to do? And so we started on a grind to get ourselves back out in this fold. And it took six years to pay that money back. Um, it was organic meat production, so I quit potatoes. I had to just. I was a terrible day. I went home and put about 12 people off, and one one afternoon, it was just awful. And some of those have been employed by my dad. They said that they could see it coming. Yeah, that's terrible. Anyway, it wasn't like going around and shooting your dogs. It was the worst thing. Anyway, they all found new jobs and went on to all be very successful. So it was cool. And we shrunk our business right down. But we were doing organic beef and lamb, and that's got us out of our, uh, hole in six years. But by then, also, we hadn't started paying back the initial debt. We just fixed up the debt we'd accrue. So, long story short, I, uh, do know what it's like to be faced with a massive debt and nobody but you to fix it. But mom and dad weren't going to come back, sell their beach house where they are now living, and help us out. And I was never going to ask them to do that. There was nobody else to do it. So it was just. I know that feeling, and it's bloody awful. And I couldn't. I never had a bad thought about suicide or anything like that. But I can see what would push people to do that, because there's just nobody there anymore. When you're used to having somebody around to help you through these tough times. Uh, but I realized a couple of things, you know, firstly, the bank is not a person. Uh, I was treating the bank like there was a person who's going to ring me up and go, hey, you, uh, owe me money. Like a bikey might ring me up and tell me. But they weren't, they didn't do that. They were quite this sort of nebulous. And so, you know, we just sold it on through. And I had some great mentors and coaches and people along the way and just started actually paying our money back or making money and paying it back and not getting too funky that, mind you, we had to get a bit funky to be organically certified. So that was if I made the alternative normal, then I'm proud of that. But I, uh, went back to the States and I really paid attention to what those Amish guys that are nanis and introduced me to. I paid attention to what they're saying about soils, about grasses, about how to thicken grasses up, about how to have no bare soil, about how to have grasses grazed as if they were talking to you. Engraving species into your country rather than out of your country. And having really profitable enterprises that I did well rather than stuff that I was thinking someone else wanted me to do. And, uh, it's not just one thing, it's everything. And then having, uh, an incredible wife to just guide me and make, um, me believe that I was doing okay. And she was too. She's not the sort of person that says, oh, just come on, get out of yourself and get going. She's quite empathetic, but also pretty handy with her best soil scientist.

Speaker C: Yeah, she had some skills. Nick, I want to ask you two questions about technology if I can. Let me tell you a story. We had a farmer on the podcast recently who talked about using quite a lot of technology in his dairy farming business and that he was a first generation farmer. So he didn't have a lot of that, what he called cowsense coming in. And so he had to build technology that could really help inform those decisions because he didn't have it intuitively or from experience. And I think it's. We hear a lot of the opposite where the technology doesn't confirm the cow sense or whatever animal sense or whatever cropping sense that someone has, and then it loses trust. And I'm just interested in how do you think about technology in terms of outsourcing too much thinking to the technology, or can it play a role in augmenting those observational skills and intuition? Does the intuition need to be challenged and just because we've done it this way for five generations, maybe we shouldn't do it this way in the future. What do you reckon about that?

Speaker B: I'd hate to ever be called a Luddite. Uh, and yet I think I've had the good fortune to be bought as a little kid by Those World War II veterans and then to go through apprenticeship when technology wasn't a feature. Now it is in our daily lives every single day. And I'm cool with it. I don't want to be getting in the way of it. I would say what I've learned over time to kick the. I've been really fortunate to belong to Low Stress Stock Standing, which is a company, uh, that teaches animal handling for all sorts of scales. And so I can then say, if you could ask the animals, what would they say? And so objectively just put a scale, put a, put an okuay out in the paddock. Great piece of technology, a fantastic piece. Well, the oddly way in the paddock and if they're still putting on two kilos a day in the cattle or 400 grams in the lambs, there's nothing wrong with that technology, be it halter or be it whatever else you get put on those animals. There's some animal technology that's mostly too clever by half. And it's just trying to save someone a job that they didn't need to save themselves on. There's some Thor technology, I think. Brilliant to be able to in real time tell what you're lacking. And, uh, now that we've got an ability to almost fix that up in real time, that's even cooler. Physics, chemistry and biology, the componentry, the scientific componentry of agriculture. So if the AI or technology enhances one of those, it's great. I've just walked into a, uh, couple of Cognton's field days and thought to myself, there's a massive amount of technology here just looking for a problem to solve. It probably hadn't even eventuated yet. And they've got a figure in their mind about what they want for it and how it's going to fix the world. And, um, I'm thinking, uh, I think they might have missed a point, that it's not that big a problem.

Speaker C: Yeah, interesting. We see plenty of that. Some technology can really help, some cannot. It's often not the technology's fault. But at the same time, with some of this emerging technology, there are people behind it, developing it, and they might not come from agriculture. And this whole new wave of pressures of how these companies are funded and things, what advice do you have? Or what could tech companies do better in how they interact with farmers? To give more of those success stories,

Speaker B: they can look at the physical, chemical or biological system or combination of those three to see if what they're providing enhances or detracts from the system. The whole thing is a system. It's a cyclical system, not linear. Most scientific proposals are quite a linear thing. Take carbon for instance. If you don't look at carbon as a cycle, it's broad, the measurement's flawed, fatally flawed. If you look at carbon as a cycle that cattle actually increase photosynthesis, uh, if they graze properly and increase their sequestration of Carlen is going to be better. You just gotta measure that and have. And imagine if you can have real time measurement for carbon in soil as one example. So if you can enhance the combination of those and then make people's lives better for it, um, then I think you're on the right track. If you're not really adding to that, then use that wonderful brain power for something that will.

Speaker C: I like that. And it goes to just understanding the context of the users that you're building the system for. And is one of the other elements of context is the patterns that you see in farming families that may come to grazing for profit and succeed versus the ones that struggle. What insights do you have about what's going to make someone more or less likely to. And I know that's, you know that phrase something is binary. That's absolutely not binary, but just interested in common patterns you might see of. You say, these guys are absolutely going to make it, they get it, they're going to do great versus nope, there's still resistance or whatever here that's going to prevent them from their goals.

Speaker B: A quick story from an observation is that I was lucky enough to go to Gunadar, um, equip, uh, and you can buy the whole farm kit in caboodle at Gundar if you want to. And I was the guest of CBA there talking about carbon and I don't think anybody at Gandar wanted to hear about carbon mutton. So it was fun being with the cva. And I said to this lovely lady there who was lending manager, what capability do you have here? And she said, oh, I can probably lend someone up to $10 million right here, right now if they wanted to add some stuff they wanted to take home. She said, but if they didn't have a decent succession plan on that farm, um, the whole thing would just go up in a huge big bonk. Would it be one big cabin? They could have all the kit, all the caboodle and all of the cropping techniques and all everything that goes with it. But you get a breakdown of relationship there between father, son, husband and wife. Well, father, daughter, mother, daughter, whatever. Boom, up it goes. So I would say, and this is where I feel for as a 60 year old consultant now, uh, way too old to be actively digging postholds. But what I can do is work between the incoming and the outgoing generation to make sure that those communications are stronger and facilitated properly so that they don't blow that farm up. And if somebody has a penchant for technology and somebody doesn't, it doesn't mean they can't farm together. But they do need to understand each other implicitly or there's going to be a war on farm.

Speaker A: Well, we certainly don't want war on farm.

Speaker C: Massive thanks to our guest Nick Kentish,

Speaker A: especially for sharing some of the tough times in his life as well as the good. I loved how agriculture as ultimately a systems business, not just a business of practices or technologies, really came through in what Nick shared. He kept coming m back to the idea that farming decisions can't be separated into isolated categories like soil, livestock, finance, or technology, because it's all connected. Whether he's talking about soil health or carbon cycles, or succession planning or ag tech, the underlying message is that successful innovation comes from understanding how each part of the system affects the whole. For agtech companies, this is a powerful reminder that technology needs to fit within the biological and financial realities of farming, rather than trying to impose a purely linear or efficiency driven solution into such a highly variable environment. Another point that I'm still mulling on is the idea that observation remains one of the most undervalued skills in modern agriculture. Nick repeatedly returns to the importance of learning to read landscapes, livestock, soils and even weeds as signals within a living system that can help make decisions. Now, while technology can enhance those observations, he argues, it should never fully replace the intuition and contextual understanding developed through experience. That difference has important implications for agtech. Are the best technologies ones that automate decision making entirely, or ones that just sharpen the user's ability to notice patterns, respond earlier, and make better judgments? And what about when the intuition and the data differ? In an era increasingly shaped by technologies like AI processing data to help us make decisions, how will the role of human interpretation evolve too? That's something I'm still thinking about. And a final insight is one we've covered time and time again on the show and in our work at Tenacious, but Nick highlighted it really well, the distinction between tools that improve outcomes and those that work but are still looking for a problem to solve. Our conversation was another reminder that adoption doesn't happen because a technology solves a problem. It happens when that problem matters and when the solution can be trusted and, of course, scaled. And that's it for this episode of Ag Tech. So what? Thank you to our guest, Nick Kentish, and thank you for listening. And a huge reminder reminder to please hit Follow in your podcast app so that you never miss an episode. For more information on the resources mentioned in the episode, visit our website, Tenacious Ventures, or check out the show notes. My name is Sarah Nalett. I'll catch you next time.