Farming For The Future
Natural Sequence Farming
Here at Forage Farms, we're all about regenerative farming. That means running our farm in a way that regenerates it, leaving it better than we found it. To do that, we manage our farm alongside nature instead of trying to control it or work against its natural patterns. That's Natural Sequence Farming.
Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) is an understanding of how a landscape functioned before any human interference, an observation of the patterns and processes already present in the land.
We follow our sister business, Tarwyn Park Training, and the five key pillars they teach for reinstating natural landscape function. Tarwyn Park is where all of this started, Stuart's father Peter Andrews spent forty years there developing and refining these methods, and Tarwyn Park Training now teaches them to landholders right across the country. Same principles, just a different patch of dirt here at Kybong and a different mix of animals.
Our farm is built around three areas: an accumulation area, where fertility builds, a production area, where our animals live and work, and a filtration area, where everything gets processed and recycled before it moves on. Contours run through all three, managing water and fertility, and our animals do a lot of the heavy lifting, moving constantly to build the land instead of wearing it down.
Natural Sequence Farming starts with Water and Plants.
The key to Natural Sequence Farming is that plants manage water; that’s what built the landscape. Plants are the engineers that build everything. And water is the carrier of the nutrients that feeds them.
The Five Pillars of Natural Sequence Farming
At Forage Farms, we implement Natural Sequence Farming through every part of the operation, following the same five pillars taught at Tarwyn Park Training. Check them all off, and a landscape builds. Miss one, and it doesn't.
1. Slow The Flow
Water that runs off fast takes fertility with it. Water that's slowed down sinks in, builds fertility instead of stripping it away.
Every paddock at Forage Farms is shaped into contours for exactly this reason. Ours had to be built a bit differently to most, with smaller banks than you'd typically see, because we needed our chicken tractors to still be able to move through them. Over time, those contours are slowly filling in with organic matter, which is exactly what they're meant to do, and holding water back that would otherwise run straight into the Mary River. That water stays here, rehydrating our land instead.
2. Let All Plants Grow
Plants are the ones doing the actual work, managing sunlight, managing water, building the soil underneath everything else. The more variety, the better. Diversity is king at Forage Farms, and it's not just a nice phrase, every different plant in the paddock is doing its own job, whether we've decided it's valuable or not.
We use time control grazing to make sure of it, matching our stocking rate to what the land can actually carry, and moving animals constantly so no paddock gets hit twice before it's had time to recover. Leave one animal in a hundred acres for a year and it'll graze the same plant back to nothing every time it regrows a centimetre, until that plant dies out and something worse takes its place. That's how good paddocks turn into poor ones. Keep moving, and it never gets the chance to happen.
We've also picked up practices from Total Grazing, a method that pushes animals to eat everything on offer rather than picking favourites, more animals, less space, faster rotations, not unlike enforcing strict dinner table rules on fussy kids: no dessert until you've eaten what's on your plate. It sounds strict, but it's what builds real root depth and real soil underneath it.
The results speak for themselves. This farm started as close to a monoculture of Bahia grass. There are now nearly forty different plant species growing here, most of which we didn't plant, they came back on their own once the conditions were right.
3. Careful Where The Animals Go
Our animals are tools, not just livestock. Moved carefully and constantly, they shift fertility around, change what grows where, and help push the landscape forward. Moved carelessly, they wreck the sensitive spots, wetlands, waterways, anywhere the land can't take the pressure.
That's why our chickens, pigs and cattle are all rotated constantly onto fresh pasture, never left long enough in one place to strip it bare. It's better for the animal, and it's better for the ground underneath them.
We also don't run just one species. Cattle prefer grasses, pigs and chickens go for broad leaves, and everything left behind gets eaten by something else coming through after. Running pigs and chickens over the ground first is exactly what turned tired Bahia grass paddocks into the diverse pasture our cattle graze today. The wildlife noticed too, we've got bandicoots and native birds back on the property now, and a lot fewer cane toads than when we arrived.
4. Filtration Is A Must Know
Nothing should leave a landscape unfiltered. Water, nutrients, organic matter, all of it needs to pass through a filtration area, wetlands, floodplains, anything with plants doing the filtering, before it moves on anywhere else.
Our filtration area is doing exactly that job, quietly, in the background, catching what the rest of the farm would otherwise lose.
5. Return To The Top To Recycle The Lot
Nothing gets truly wasted here. Fertility that ends up at the bottom of the landscape gets cycled back to the top, sometimes with machinery, sometimes with the help of animals and insects doing what they've always done. It's the difference between a farm that needs constant outside inputs and one that just keeps feeding itself.
See It Working Across Australia
Rehydrate Australia
Natural Sequence Farming isn't something that only works here at Kybong. Tarwyn Park Training has spent years teaching these same five pillars to landholders right across the country, from outback Queensland to Tasmania, and the results follow the same pattern everywhere: slow the water down, let the plants take over, and the land does the rest.
Different landscapes, different rainfall, same process. If you want to see what's possible before reading your own land, this is a good place to start.
Forage Farms is a model farm for Natural Sequence Farming
We're not just doing Natural Sequence Farming here to farm better, though it does that too, our customers tell us they can taste the difference, and we believe that extra flavour comes directly from how the land underneath it is managed.
Forage Farms set out to become a model farm for Natural Sequence Farming, demonstrating how these practices can regenerate a degraded landscape while still producing high-quality, nutritious food from its paddocks. We've built that model here at Kybong, and now we're helping other farmers take it up too, in Queensland and beyond.
If you'd rather see any of this in person than just read about it, come on a farm tour, we're an open book.
