I’m filing this week’s story from a shack at the very end of the Bylong Valley, up the Widden Brook in the Hunter Valley.

With me are three visitors from the Blackwood Basin Group, southwest of Perth WA, who have come 5000 Km across the continent to see the work of Peter Andrews and his Natural Sequence Farming. Theirs is not the lush green of the Hunter but rather a dry, parched brown land where little vegetation survives at this time of the year.

As we traipse through the thick riparian jungle Peter has created at Gerry Harvey’s Baramul Horse Stud, the question seems not so much whether Peter Andrews’ ideas work, but rather how long it will take before they are put into practice everywhere. Perhaps some people can look at Baramul Stud and say that there’s nothing special here – anyone could rehabiliate a stream in a fairly fertile region like the Bylong Valley.

So then, why does the stream enter Peter’s system as a mostly dry sand bed and then, seven kilometres down stream, exit his system once again sandy, eroded and most times dry? In between, the part that has had NSF principles applied for the last eight years, it is an oasis of abundant vegetation, fertile floodplains and a babbling flow.

That is what the visitors from the west have come to find out – to see whether the same principles will work in a vastly more arid environment. They know that the first challenge is to get more vegetation permanently in the landscape.

Peter Andrews is sure that plants are the building blocks of the environment. If it’s green and it’s growing, it is doing everything the landscape need to promote fertility. All plants sequester carbon from the atmosphere and covert it into a product we can use. To build up the soils fertility with organic carbon is the best way to make the land sustainably productive.

The basic idea is simple. If water can be slowed as it travels through the landscape it will nourish growth and so create fertility. Biodiversity, the inter-relationship between plants and the environment is the first subject taught to land management students at university. Why then, does the old mindset have such a grasp on our regulatory authorities?

Why are we moving so painfully slowly to rehabilitate the landscape? Could it be that the government is turning a blind eye to new ideas? Have the Catchment Management Authorities still not realised that slowing the water through the landscape means that more water comes out at the end, not less?

Meeting our carbon emission targets will require a two-pronged attack. Less carbon goes up and more carbon comes down. This is what plants do. They’re made of carbon and they feed carbon to the soil. Farmers need more carbon for greater productivity and the atmosphere needs less carbon or it’ll bring an end to life as we know it.

Putting pressure on government and land management bureaucrats to look at the work of people like Peter Andrews would seem to be well worth the effort. The changes we need to make are not that hard. Everybody wins.

Like it says on the box: ‘Just add water’.