Bruce Maynard at Willydah - Practices and outcomes

Bruce Maynard is a fourth generation farmer at Willydah, with his wife Roz, and children Liam, Ella and Hannah, near Narromine, NSW, Australia. Together they run a mixed cropping and grazing enterprise. Bruce grew up farming with his parents. He remembers hearing stories about earlier farmers in their region stopping the machinery mid-field as they were ‘just dragging too many worms’. He always had an appreciation of nature and an inquiring and creative mind. Through a strong sense of curiosity and a bit of luck in his early farming years, Bruce was able to change the trajectory of his family farm, and paradigms of cropping. In this video, Bruce introduces his main practices of No-Kill Cropping, effective grazing, and tree and shrub planting. No-Kill Cropping: No-Kill Cropping ‘sits out on a completely different branch from all other cropping branches and methods’, explains Bruce. Since he developed No-Kill Cropping in 1995, Bruce has continued to implement it across his farm on native grasslands, based on five principles, including: sow when top soil is dry; use coulter-type sewing; no herbicides or pesticides; no fertilsers, and effective grazing. Effective grazing: According to Bruce, there are increasing levels of stock management, which progressively maximise the complementarity of animals and landscape. To start, Stress Free Stockmanship is a way to move stock across the landscape which ‘reinforces their ability to recover from stressors’. Building on this, Self-Herding is a way to allow animals to move across the landscape, without infrastructure, based on the anticipation of rewards. The increased ability for animals to self-select their diet based on their needs, has the added benefit of animals eating a greater variety of plants in the landscape (including less desirable plants). Tree and shrub planting: Supporting his goals for increasing the complexity and biodiversity of above and below-ground life on this property, Bruce has also planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. 0:00 Introduction Read more on Bruce’s case study at #regenerativeagriculture #brucemaynard #soilsforlife #casestudy #biodiversity #regenerative #cropping #australianfarming