Good morning, and welcome to the twelfth edition of our monthly newsletter, Reading Landscapes.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• What’s happening with our weather?

• Managing Lippia

• What to do with Chilean Needle Grass

• What we’ve been learning

🔎 Looking at the Landscape

Like us to discuss a photo of your landscape? Share it with us here. 

The California bushfires last month were disastrous, and unfortunately, they are a growing issue not only in America but also, as we’re well aware, here in Australia and around the globe. I thought it would be worth looking at why these fires are happening, why they seem to be getting worse every year, and most importantly, what we can do about them.

What’s causing these events to happen?

Our landscape is becoming hotter and drier (but also wetter and colder at times) due to large amounts of unmanaged energy.

It centres around how our landscapes manage water through the biotic pump or large water cycle.

The biotic pump discusses how, in functional landscapes, warm, moist air is attracted from the oceans to our cooler forests, creating a wind current that draws in more warm, humid air.

But when our landscapes are hotter than the oceans, this effect reverses. This process is affecting both sides of the weather spectrum worldwide.

In California, the Santa Ana winds blew in large amounts of hot air from the drier inland areas of the country. This hot air was drawn to a mass of cool air, which, in the case of the dry California landscape, was the ocean. This hot wind current created the ideal conditions for one spark in a large, dehydrated landscape to turn into a large, disastrous fire system.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Northern Queensland is currently being dumped with significant rain events. In this case, the landscape of Townsville and its surrounds are cooler than the body of warm, moist air sitting over the ocean and has drawn that mass in, but because inland Australia is hot and dry, unlike what would typically happen with the water body continuing to move inland it is stuck in that one position and just continually raining until the system runs out.

Check out Michal Kravčík’s discussion on the topic.

The solution to both disasters requires looking beyond the impact site to the greater landscape and how we can change the conditions that power these events.

How can we fix the problem?

First and foremost, we must change our management practices. Our current approach to managing our landscapes has not been effective.

Two key areas that need to be addressed are managing our water and maximising our green surface area (the number of green, growing plants actively photosynthesising). Fortunately, these are two areas that we can all contribute to.

Managing our water

We need to rehydrate our landscapes and get our hydrology functioning correctly. This is not simply about getting water into the soil; it is a more significant process of learning to understand hydrology—how water moves through our landscape and how we can restart entire hydrological processes crucial to its functioning.

Discussing the events surrounding fire lately made me think about a demonstration we created quite a number of years ago at a course in Warwick. At the course, we wanted to get people thinking about how a wet, functioning landscape operates compared to a dry, dysfunctional landscape, particularly in the context of fire.

To demonstrate this, we took two bales of hay, soaked one in water, and left the other dry to simulate a hydrated landscape rather than a dry one. Then, we tried to set them on fire.

How do you think they reacted?

As you would expect, the dry one burned, leaving very little organic material, whereas the wet one couldn’t ignite or at least be burned on the edges.

Our landscapes are no different. A functioning wet landscape will not readily burn. Yes, parts of it may, and yes, during dry times, it might, but the crucial thing is not to the extent that we are now seeing fires burn.

Every large fire I’ve seen of late on the east coast of Australia, you hear about it burning further into the parts of our rainforest that very rarely, if ever, burn. Why? Because they are becoming hotter and drier, no longer functioning like they once did and are now prone to bushfires.

If we can change how we manage water across our landscapes and create a new paradigm, that will be a big step in altering the effects of fire we currently see.

That brings us to part two of the solution.

Maximising Green Surface Area

By increasing the number of green and growing plants in our landscapes, we can help them complete their natural role of managing our small and large water cycles.

Like the example below of the Rabbit-Proof Fence in Western Australia, we have farmland with limited green, growing vegetation on one side of the fence. On the other side, we have scrubland with diverse vegetation.

As you can see, the scrubland has clouds, while the other side doesn’t. The green, growing vegetation is changing the microclimate, and once it expands over a large enough area, it can start changing that area’s climate.

This is just one example of how maximising our green surface area can significantly change our climate.

Some of the key ways to bring back our green surface area is looking to;

• Incorporate trees back into the higher parts of our landscape and rebuild our forests

• Focus on having a year-round green surface area to the best of our ability

• Reintroduce our wetlands

• Focus on plant diversity in all areas

• Limit our concrete jungles and get plants back into those environments

If you’re interested in looking into this further, I recommend looking into some of these resources;

• The New Water Paradigm

• The Biotic Pump

• Alpha Lo’s Climate Water Project has a number of great articles on the topic

🌳 Learning from Plants

Have a plant you’d like to discuss? Share it with us here.

Lippia

Common Names: Carpet Weed, Fogfruit, No-man Grass, Phyla, Red Flower, Condamine Couch

Scientific Name: Phyla canescens

Where in the Succession: Mid Succession Accumulator

This month, we will be looking at Lippia or Phyla canescens. Thanks to Sam for sending this one in.

Lippia is a well-dispersed plant being found on every continent around the world except Antarctica and within Australia, being found in every state and territory.

In Sam’s case, it started growing in the waterways but has since spread out to a larger array of soil types.

Phyla cansecens is closely related to the Lippia and Lantana families. It was first brought to Australia in the early 1900s as a lawn ornamental² .

What is it telling me about my landscape?

Lippia is a mid to late succession accumulator often coming into disturbed landscapes as a ground cover - a layer of defence over the soil.

Where will I find Lippia growing, and why is it growing there?

It is most often found growing along waterways and floodplains, preferring clay soils, but it will also grow in loamy and sandy soils.

Lippia most often starts its journey in waterways and actively degrading ones, before spreading further out into the broader floodplain areas.

Landscapes where Lippia is found growing often show some of the following characteristics;

• Low organic matter

• Compact soils

• Overgrazed areas

• Low soil moisture

• Floodplain areas with higher clay content soils

How can we manage Lippia?

Now that we understand the growing conditions that Lippia prefers and some of the attributes of the landscapes it is most frequently found in, how can we change those conditions to improve the succession and better manage the Lippia?

🐂 Change our grazing practices. It is ideal to remove continuous grazing in areas where Lippia is found and instead focus on incoprotating adequate recovery into the pastures. A study in Argentina found a direct correlation between constant grazing and an increased growth response by Lippia³ . Therefore, the implementation of adequate recovery times after grazing an area is crucial to managing its effects.

⬆️ Increase your soil fertility and organic matter. Lippia often comes into environments with limited plant cover. Its sprawling nature is like that of a scab on the human body. It is coming to protect and hold together what’s underneath. We could add organic matter like mulch, compost, manure, or a combination to assist it with this task. This will help add fertility to support higher-order species and hold more moisture, creating an environment for those plants to grow and protect the soil surface.

🌧️ Improve soil hydrology. By focusing on your hydrology and creating systems that promote the rehydration of the landscape, we can create an environment that is more suited to higher-successional species.

🌊 Manage water. Lippia often begins from an actively degrading waterway lacking vegetation and the ability to manage water flow. If we can do our best to manage these environments and not create the ideal growing conditions for Lippia, we can look to stop it from even having to start its role.

How to make the most of your Lippia

🪨 As a Soil Indicator: Low Calcium, Low organic matter levels, Poor soil structure, slightly acidic soils, low nitrogen, low phosphorus

🐮 Livestock: Lippia is typically not favourable when grazed by livestock, with low palatability and nutritional value. This makes sense, seeing as though it often arrives in overgrazed areas as nature’s protective armour.

💊 Medicinal: Lippia has limited known medicinal benefits when compared to its closely related relative, Phyla nodiflora, which has a number of traditional uses³. 

One study in 2002 used extracts from lippia as a measure against the proliferative effects of carcinoma cells. The study found that the extracts were capable of this task³ .

🍽️ Consumption: There are no known uses of lippia as a food source.

🙋 Answering your Questions

Ask the Team! Share your question here, and we’ll answer it in a future newsletter.

💬 Peter Asks:

I am interested to learn how to deal with Chilean Needle Grass in my paddocks on a holistic basis. Spraying poisons is not my thing, and physical removal is not practical.

🎙️ Hamish’s Answer:

Hi Peter, Thank you for your question. Chilean Needle Grass is a tricky one and definitely not a short term fix. Unlike many of our annual weedy friends, being a perennial grass makes it a step above and longer term management horizon, but solutions are available none the less.

The first two steps I would consider are grazing management and fertility. I know of cases where farmers have incorporated high-density grazing with high plant utilisation followed by a long recovery time, which has reduced the amount of Chilean Needle Grass over time and opened up the opportunity for other species to grow.

Increasing soil fertility is another route to changing the succession and promoting our more favourable species. The areas where the Chilean Needle Grass grows may lack the fertility to support higher-order species. To overcome this, you could import fertility from sources like chicken manure, compost, waste hay, and products like that.

I would also look at changing the hydrology in the areas where it is growing and see if increased soil moisture is able to change its growth patterns.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for managing plants like these. However, by looking at the root cause of their existence and implementing practices to manage that, we will start on a path to finding a long-term, manageable solution. Most importantly, we should treat these changed practices as experiments, recording what we do and observing the results over time.

📚 What We’ve Been Learning

A quick list of our favourite things we’ve been watching, reading, listening, and writing.

The Positive Development™ Podcast: Episode 2 (Stuart Andrews and Natural Sequence Farming): Stuart chats with Bart and Dante, discussing all things Natural Sequence Farming, the mindset shifts we need to create, and the longer-term vision for what we can all start to play a role in.

Drought Resilience Grazing with Col & Jackie Clark: Check out what our TPT graduates Col and Jackie have been up to putting what they’ve learnt into practice.

Regenerative Agriculture Beats Carbon Emissions Hands Down: A fascinating conversation around the potential of regen farming and the role that it can play in managing the CO2 that we hear being linked to climate change.

Note: That’s wetlands lost nationally, and in our populated coastal areas, we have lost 90% of wetlands, which play a crucial role in managing fertility and water at the last point of the system before it is lost to the ocean, and now many of those management systems are gone completely.

1  https://www.eol.ucar.edu/content/research-goals-objectives

2  https://weeds.org.au/profiles/lippia-carpet-weed/

3  Macdonald 2008 PhD Thesis

4  Loss and degradation of Australian wetlands