In my twenties, I worked several seasons between Australia, New Zealand and the US training performance horses. Many of these were played then sold-on into higher level international Polo markets including South Florida, England and even Argentina.
In Australia and NZ we predominantly searched out bloodlines that were naturally easy to train, getting ponies playing quickly and turning them over in just a few months. In the US however the pool of suitable horses we could access was vastly smaller, and I quickly learned that there was much more to “training” than finding “naturals”.
In a husky Texan drawl enhanced by decades of smoking Winny Reds, my employer in Florida (a high goal player at the time) said to me once, “A good horse will make a trainer out of anyone”. This was not meant as a complement- he meant that anyone could make a naturally talented horse into a top performance horse and I had got so used to being able to find naturally talented horses and making them better quickly, that I had become complacent, even arrogant as to the fundamentals of the trade.
As land managers, we get used to relying on our land to heal itself when we do something to damage it. With the seasons we have had since 2020, even the most abused land in our region has, by and large, kept performing. We can’t confuse this natural resilience to abuse in a good season as re-enforcement of a belief that our degenerative land management is working. It’s just that we are fortunate to be in a non-brittle (higher moisture) environment at this time – but that, of course, will change.
So instead of resting on our laurels and expecting the good times to continue; what if we took this once in a lifetime seasonal opportunity to get the fundamentals right with our regenerative land management? What if we ran some “safe to fail trials” on increasing stock density and recovery times by splitting one large paddock into some smaller ones? What if we trialed planting cover crops to compete with weeds rather than spraying them with expensive, unnecessary herbicide (even on roadsides)? What if we actually let succession do its job and allowed some areas to “rewild” – just as a trial, just to see? What if we implemented some water management structures to shorten the next drought and retain nutrients in the next flood? Maybe fenced off a wetland and put a levy across a drain. What about introducing free-choice mineral feeding to our livestock system (including natural parasite suppressing additives like Allicin) before the parasite season gets underway? Perhaps we could even use the favorable conditions to do a mass tree planting to add another layer of nutrition to our system?
This might even be an opportunity to allocate some funds to enrolling in one of the many regenerative farming courses on offer locally. Even if you are an “expert”, any good business should be allocating funds each year to personal growth and training or they stagnate (and degenerate).
In terms of land in the Gympie Region, we’ve hit the jackpot! We’ve got a “good horse”, a “natural”. The “Regen Region” phrase wasn’t coined for nothing! Naturally abundant in biodiversity, water and fertility; if you can’t keep 100% green leaf cover in this environment, you are doing something wrong. This doesn’t mean we are all good trainers though (good farmers). As with my horse training, we can easily become complacent, even arrogant as to our abilities when things are going well and this lack of prior and proper preparation in the “paddock between our ears” will come back to bite us in the next drought.
