Subscribe below for free holistic grazing eBook
About the Course
A Regenerative Agriculture Certificate introduces you to a regenerative design framework for creating a resilient and healthy foodscape modelled upon the form and function of natural ecosystems.
The course is designed for small farms wishing to convert to a pastoral grazing system, incorporating a diversity of plant and animal species - but focused on beef and dairy production.
The course is taught by Richard Pedley – with 25 years of teaching and research experience.
The course is designed for small farms wishing to convert to a pastoral grazing system, incorporating a diversity of plant and animal species - but focused on beef and dairy production.
- Enrolment in the course introduces you to a like-minded learning community, to explore concepts involved in the application of regenerative agriculture.
- Upon graduation from the course you will have a functional farm plan design and implementation strategy to apply concepts covered in the course to your site.
- The course acts as a primer for transitioning to regenerative agriculture or acting as a consultant for others wishing to make that transition.
The course is taught by Richard Pedley – with 25 years of teaching and research experience.
Early Bird Enrollment for 2022
|
|
Course Structure:
- 1 year part-part study
- Interactive online forums
- Online research tasks
- Final design portfolio submission (to obtain RAC)
The course is based upon the following topics:
Regenerative Systems
Leverage Your Strengths
Production Niche
Managing Cashflow
Site Dynamics
Building Health Soil
Livestock Health
Restoring Natural Systems
Farm Plan
Regenerative Systems
- Agricultural ecosystems: The design of ecologically balanced farm systems.
- Functional diversity: Creating diverse, economically viable systems that produce healthy and resilient outcomes.
- Principles of design: Identifying reliable actions that lead to creating agricultural ecosystems with functional diversity.
Leverage Your Strengths
- Clarity of purpose: What are your goals and mission.
- Identifying your strengths: What strengths and resources can you leverage to achieve a successful outcome.
- Building your skillset: What skill sets do you need to develop and what practices will lead you to achieve them.
Production Niche
- Market analysis: Guiding you through identifying the political, environmental, social, economic and legal factors that may impact on your market opportunities.
- Competitive advantage: How to leverage your strengths to target market opportunities and avoid competition.
- Surviving trial and error: Lean development of systems, based upon real time feedback to fine-tune production or make strategic pivots to change direction.
Managing Cashflow
- Diversifying revenue sources: Looking at establishing multiple production outcomes based upon a functional diversity of species that yield short and long term incomes streams (complimented by farm-related incomes streams).
- Return on investments: Monitoring capital and production expenses and if production yields are sufficient to maintain overheads and produce healthy cashflow.
- Cashflow records: How to keep track of cashflow and ensure that your business is economically viable.
Site Dynamics
- Soil: Explores soil tests to determine how this resource will impact upon production possibilities.
- Water: Identifying how to maximise the potential of your landscape to supply sufficient water to restore its health and maintain production.
- Topography: Mapping your site and identifying the dynamics of topography on water movement and aspect.
Building Health Soil
- Grazing management: How to manage livestock grazing to produce fertile soil and maintain good pasture diversity.
- Soil amendments: Investigating approaches to support plant health through improving the nutrient profile of the soil.
- Healthy soil ecology: Investigating how supporting the function of a healthy soil ecology is the main driver of soil health and quality.
Livestock Health
- Ruminant nutrition: Looking at livestock condition scoring and planning feed strategies to keep livestock in good health.
- Breeding and trait selection: Breed and trait selection to achieve the best outcomes for your site.
- Calf health: Improving the outcome of calves through feeding, shelter and care.
Restoring Natural Systems
- Protecting water health: The impact of farm production on eutrophication of natural waterways and methods to minimise this impact through whole-farm catchment management.
- Planting and fencing: Identifying key habitats to protect and restore through fencing and planting.
- Pest control: Supporting sensitive native species through pest control.
Farm Plan
- Design process: Guide you through a design method to apply concepts explored throughout the course to the development a farm plan design.
- Implementation strategy: Development of a strategy to achieve your farm plan over time while maintaining healthy cash flow.
- Reporting outcomes: Finical, production and environmental record keeping to optimise your success outcomes.
"Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil."
Free introduction to regenerative farming course
What is Regenerative Agriculture
The design of a regenerative system requires guidance from a philosophy of design that harnesses characteristics of complex systems that emerge in nature. Such systems demonstrate the complexity of mutually supportive inter-relationships that create stability and resilience over time.
Regenerative design is where the output of a system improves the health and resiliency of that system over time. This is achieved by positive feedback loops linked to production that function to strengthen that system. The characteristics of a regenerative system are having a functional diversity of inter-connected elements in ways that mirror the communities of plants and animals in ecosystems.
Nature is the ultimate practitioner of developing complex self-sustaining systems over time - that move ecosystems towards more complex and stable states. The emergence of this stability even shifts (on a global scale) life sustaining conditions within the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), lithosphere (land) in ways that benefit life. Such processes have Terra-formed Earth into more climatically and atmospherically stable states - in the process of life evolving into complex self-organised assemblies.
Humans (as part of this great flourishing of life) have the innate design hard-wiring latent within our subconscious – which we can harness to continue this work of life on Earth – making our planet a more rich, diverse, productive and beautiful creation.
To achieve this outcome requires careful observations of what patterns within actions result in the most desired outcomes. These reliably reproduce actions that could be called design principles. Aligning our design-intention to these principles will provide a framework to reflect upon our outcomes and make guided-adjustments that we can refine over time.
Adopting principles is a way of guiding and orchestrating an approach to the design of a system. By analysis of patterns within outcomes, principles can be constructed that provide a predictable guide to expected outcomes based upon prior results. Over time these principles can be refined and simplified to provide benchmarks to guide actions to replicate those predictable outcomes. By combining outcomes, more assurances can be met and more precision in expected outcomes. Undertaking this formal process will also help crystallize ideas, allow for patterns to be more clearly identified and allow for better improvements to be made.
A regenerative system is characterised by its complexity and inter-connectivity that replicates the function of natural ecosystems. To understand a systems thinking processes requires suitable information from a system, a set of principles to base your logic framework upon and a suitable outcome that can be benchmarked for success against a value like resiliency. Two characteristics of applying these design principles are systems-thinking, synergy and resilience.
Systems-thinking is a process of understanding how things influence one another. In nature ecosystems provide a wonderful reference point, where the complex interactions between communities of plants and animals creates a complexity of interconnected relationships from which the health of that system and its stability over time arises. This complexity of interactions enables matter to be effectively recycled within an ecosystem and not only produce no waste, but improve the health of surrounding ecosystems with which they are connected (locally and globally). Biological interactions within ecosystems also acts to slow and dissipate energy moving through that system so that the energy has greater ability to be transferred between species and contribute to constructing stability within that system and resources that can be accessed.
Synergy describes the harmonious relationship between the elements of a system that create outcomes that are greater than the collection of the individual outputs of that system. This is achieved by collaboration between the elements of that system that mutually re-enforce each other in ways that creates a harmonic resonance that amplifies the observed outcomes. This is achieved by subtle alignments, enabling the parts of that system to integrate and benefit from the complexity of interactions with other elements of the system that modify the context in which that system operates. This enables resources to be utilised more effectively and energy passing through that system to be slowed and utilised more effectively in constructing stable states of organisation that further moderates the environment of the system and enables each part of that system to operate at increasingly more efficient and refined states.
Resiliency can be described as the ability of a system to resist being destabilised and the elasticity with which it returns to a steady state when disturbed. Resiliency is commonly bench marked within permaculture to determine the outcome of a systems thinking process. Resiliency can be objectively measured by soil carbon, nutrient density of food, diversity of species, or presence of indicator species. These measures could be performed within soil communities, plant communities, or within freshwater species in streams and rivers impacted by the surrounding land use of the catchment of which they are a part.
Regenerative design is where the output of a system improves the health and resiliency of that system over time. This is achieved by positive feedback loops linked to production that function to strengthen that system. The characteristics of a regenerative system are having a functional diversity of inter-connected elements in ways that mirror the communities of plants and animals in ecosystems.
Nature is the ultimate practitioner of developing complex self-sustaining systems over time - that move ecosystems towards more complex and stable states. The emergence of this stability even shifts (on a global scale) life sustaining conditions within the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), lithosphere (land) in ways that benefit life. Such processes have Terra-formed Earth into more climatically and atmospherically stable states - in the process of life evolving into complex self-organised assemblies.
Humans (as part of this great flourishing of life) have the innate design hard-wiring latent within our subconscious – which we can harness to continue this work of life on Earth – making our planet a more rich, diverse, productive and beautiful creation.
To achieve this outcome requires careful observations of what patterns within actions result in the most desired outcomes. These reliably reproduce actions that could be called design principles. Aligning our design-intention to these principles will provide a framework to reflect upon our outcomes and make guided-adjustments that we can refine over time.
Adopting principles is a way of guiding and orchestrating an approach to the design of a system. By analysis of patterns within outcomes, principles can be constructed that provide a predictable guide to expected outcomes based upon prior results. Over time these principles can be refined and simplified to provide benchmarks to guide actions to replicate those predictable outcomes. By combining outcomes, more assurances can be met and more precision in expected outcomes. Undertaking this formal process will also help crystallize ideas, allow for patterns to be more clearly identified and allow for better improvements to be made.
A regenerative system is characterised by its complexity and inter-connectivity that replicates the function of natural ecosystems. To understand a systems thinking processes requires suitable information from a system, a set of principles to base your logic framework upon and a suitable outcome that can be benchmarked for success against a value like resiliency. Two characteristics of applying these design principles are systems-thinking, synergy and resilience.
Systems-thinking is a process of understanding how things influence one another. In nature ecosystems provide a wonderful reference point, where the complex interactions between communities of plants and animals creates a complexity of interconnected relationships from which the health of that system and its stability over time arises. This complexity of interactions enables matter to be effectively recycled within an ecosystem and not only produce no waste, but improve the health of surrounding ecosystems with which they are connected (locally and globally). Biological interactions within ecosystems also acts to slow and dissipate energy moving through that system so that the energy has greater ability to be transferred between species and contribute to constructing stability within that system and resources that can be accessed.
Synergy describes the harmonious relationship between the elements of a system that create outcomes that are greater than the collection of the individual outputs of that system. This is achieved by collaboration between the elements of that system that mutually re-enforce each other in ways that creates a harmonic resonance that amplifies the observed outcomes. This is achieved by subtle alignments, enabling the parts of that system to integrate and benefit from the complexity of interactions with other elements of the system that modify the context in which that system operates. This enables resources to be utilised more effectively and energy passing through that system to be slowed and utilised more effectively in constructing stable states of organisation that further moderates the environment of the system and enables each part of that system to operate at increasingly more efficient and refined states.
Resiliency can be described as the ability of a system to resist being destabilised and the elasticity with which it returns to a steady state when disturbed. Resiliency is commonly bench marked within permaculture to determine the outcome of a systems thinking process. Resiliency can be objectively measured by soil carbon, nutrient density of food, diversity of species, or presence of indicator species. These measures could be performed within soil communities, plant communities, or within freshwater species in streams and rivers impacted by the surrounding land use of the catchment of which they are a part.