At Nomad Farms we constantly strive to improve landscape health. You won’t hear us use the word ‘sustainable’ much. To us it seems a little unambitious and connotes a line in the sand where economics and ecology meet head-to-head. We see it differently.

We think healthy, diverse abundant ecology is the very driver of highly productive farms, that they are very much one and the same, and such systems drive both ecology and economics in a positive direction. This is why we call what we do ‘regenerative’.

So for us to take on a technique, activity or production system, it has to pass our simple test. Does it contribute positively to landscape health?

When we talk about landscape health we mean the big picture stuff. The fundamentals. These include the water, mineral and energy cycles, biodiversity, abundance and beauty. Our aim is for a healthy system, and believe a healthy system will naturally produce favourable and healthy plants and animals. So if we see what some may call a ‘weed’, we try to think about what mother nature is telling us about our management and the state that the system is in, rather than see the ‘weed’ as a problem in itself that must be dealt with combatively.

So we don’t use herbicides, insecticides or really any biocides at all. We believe an unbalanced system is best rebalanced by adding something and increasing diversity, not trying to remove components and simplify the system. After all, systems are not made up of components, they’re made up of connections.

We believe this gives the best opportunity for nature to demonstrate her amazing potential and help our animals and us thrive. Call it agroecology, call it biomimicry, there’s lots of fancy words and we embrace lots of them, but ultimately, we work with nature, not against her.

This was kindly recognised recently by the Landcare community by awarding Nomad Farms as winner of the 2015 South Australian Landcare Award for Innovation in Sustainable Farm Practices.