Good morning, and welcome to the 18th edition of our monthly newsletter, Reading Landscapes.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• The magic of water managing itself

• What to do about Giant Parramatta Grass

• What we’ve been learning

🔎 Looking at the Landscape

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

This month, I thought it was worth exploring how Nature manages water. Nature is very good at managing water, and thanks to physics, water always has a tendency to increase its own entropy, i.e., it wants its own energy to be more spread out and less concentrated.

We talk about water using six key processes to manage its own energy, these are;

• Find its level

• Spread out

• Move through steps

• Sit perched

• Water on Water

• Recharge and Discharge

We will briefly touch on these in this piece, but the way they work is that, regardless of your location, you will always find water attempting to complete the same patterns and processes, regardless of the landscape.

I think this image ⬇️ is a perfect example of how water naturally manages itself.

This image is a perfect example of water being managed by plants and organic matter. Forced to slow down, spread out to remove its own energy and hydrologically recharge the landscape around that site.

You can see each of those six processes happening in this image, as I’ve illustrated in the image below.

Why is each of these processes happening?

Thanks to the laws of physics, water is always seeking to increase its entropy (water "wants" to reach a state where energy is more evenly distributed and molecular arrangements are less ordered) until stability is achieved. This process is why water is always looking to find its level and spread out.

The first two processes, when combined with plants and organic matter, create an ideal environment for the subsequent processes to occur. The water level will rise behind the organic wall of material, creating a perched pond of water sitting below the area. This pattern will repeat over and over down a landscape, creating a stepped appearance, and it will allow for hydrological recharge to occur at the perched ponds of water, followed by discharge in the area below.

And finally, water on water happens by the next step down, creating a pond back to the previous one, so that if and when water goes over the bank of the top step, it is falling into an existing pond of water and removing its own energy, following the rules of physics once more.

I really find this entire process amazing, particularly the fact that the whole system works together to recreate the same repeating process over and over again. And this is exactly what we do when implementing Natural Sequence Farming across a landscape - just that we are doing it on a larger scale, as we want to have a faster and more significant impact than what these small examples are having on the landscape.

We want to step in and lend a hand to Nature to initiate the process, with the intention that in the long run, we will have created an environment for the plants to take over the management role, as they have always done before we intervened.

🌳 Learning from Plants

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

Giant Parramatta Grass

Common Names: Giant Parramatta Grass, Smutgrass, Bloomsbury Grass, Rat-tail grass

Scientific Name: Sporobolus fertilis

Where in the Succession: Low Fertility Exploiter

Thanks to Ruben for sending in this month’s plant species - Giant Parramatta Grass.

Giant Parramatta Grass is a summer-active perennial grass species. It is native to the sub-continent of India as well as eastern Asia. It thrives in tropical, subtropical, and warm-temperate landscapes, with a preference for higher rainfall regions, but is quite adaptable to drier environments.

Interestingly, Giant Parramatta Grass is one species within the Sporobolus family; another is Giant Rat’s Tail Grass, which is also causing significant issues. In total, there are 26 species in the family, and overall, they are challenging to distinguish, with many requiring an expert to accurately identify the specific species.

What is it telling me about my landscape?

Giant Parramatta Grass is a low-fertility exploiter.

I believe this is our first exploiter plant species in the newsletter. A quick refresher on exploiters - exploiters are plants that grow as a result of fertility produced by an earlier grown plant, often our accumulators. In the case of a low-fertility exploiter, when dominating a landscape, it is often because the soil lacks essential nutrients and the balanced microbial activity to support higher-order or more favourable grass species. Check out our What is a Plant Succession post for the full details on exploiters.

Where will I find Giant Parramatta Grass growing, and why is it growing there?

Giant Parramatta Grass appears to be an opportunistic plant seeking situations with limited competition to initiate its growth and establish dominance wherever possible. We will often find it growing or starting its journey in landscapes with the following conditions;

• An overgrazing event that opened up an opportunity

• Limited to no organic matter

• Degraded soils, lacking fertility

• Compacted soils and/or poor soil structure

How can we manage Giant Parramatta Grass?

Giant Parramatta Grass, being a perennial plant species, makes it different from most “weeds” that people have to manage. With most weeds being annuals, it opens up the opportunity when the season changes to assist the weed in completing its life cycle and welcoming in the next stage of succession. However, a perennial plant species makes this even more difficult, especially in a grazing scenario, which is likely why we are now seeing more of these grass weeds take on the mantle of key weed species being managed.

🚜 Use mechanical intervention. With low palatability, it can be challenging to achieve great results by trying to graze livestock on it. Instead, we can look to utilise machines to open up opportunities for other species, such as slashing or mulching the material. Cultivation is another option, but one that I would recommend caution around, as it will remove the plant, but it will affect your soil life as well as open up the opportunity for the seed bank of thousands of plants to have an open opportunity to take up residence across the entire area. If you are looking to use cultivation as a tool, it really needs a strong strategy for how you are going to introduce other species and have them outcompete the Giant Parramatta Grass.

🐄 Alter our grazing. If overgrazing and selective grazing created the environment for Giant Parramatta Grass to start, we need to look to avoid keeping those conditions being continually available. Moving towards a more time-controlled grazing system will help in this regard. Additionally, like using mechanical intervention, you could utilise your livestock by increasing stocking density, supplementing with a feed source, and using the animals to impact the Giant Parramatta Grass, thereby opening up the opportunity to introduce the desired species by sowing or spreading seed on the site.

⬆️ Increase our soil organic matter. Giant Parramatta Grass often prefers environments with low organic matter and soil humus, which aligns with its role as a low-fertility exploiter in these lower successional environments. To assist in moving it to the next stage, we can consider increasing our organic matter by promoting more material onto the surface of our landscape or by bringing in external sources of organic matter to supplement the system.

🍄‍🟫 Increase our soil fungal levels. There is the thought that Giant Parramatta Grass has a preference for bacterially dominant soils and that its growth further pushes for a bacterially dominant system. Whereas, it is thought that our grazing land should have more 1:1 bacteria to fungi, if not more leaning towards a fungal dominance. To help promote healthy soil fungal levels, we could consider feeding them. Fungal foods include complex sugars, complex proteins, fish hydrolysate, biochar, humic acid, and carbon sources such as wood, paper, or cardboard.

🌿 Increase plant diversity away from just grasses. Focusing on incorporating other plant families, such as legumes, brassicas, and herbs, can be a great way to help alter the environment that the Giant Parramatta Grass is creating, as well as to promote the bacterial-fungal relationship we discussed above.

🍄 Fungal bio-control. The government has researched a naturally occurring crown rot fungus, Nigrospora oryzae, which has been successful in reducing the crown size of plants over time¹.

How to make the most of your Giant Parramatta Grass

🪨 As a Soil Indicator: Very low Calcium, High Magnesium, Little humus, Low moisture, bacterially dominant soils, low soil fertility

🐮 Livestock: Low palatability for livestock. Cattle can be trained to graze it down, but generally not willingly. Interestingly, the fertility/quality status of the plant can be observed by how readily livestock will consume it. Much like the succession changing, it will change within plants at different points, making them more or less palatable.

💊 Medicinal: There are no documented medicinal uses for Giant Parramatta Grass; however, some uses in traditional medicine have been reported for other species within the Sporobolus family.

🍽️ Consumption: No documented uses of Giant Parramatta Grass being used for food, but other species of the Sporobolus family have had their seeds used as a food source when needed.

📚 What We’ve Been Learning

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

It’s Not the Cow, It’s the How: I liked this tweet from John Kempf.

How Fast Can You Regenerate a Farm?: Another excellent video from Tim. This time, he’s visiting Martin and Phoebe. You get to see what 30 years of implementation can create, as well as the quick turnaround that Phoebe has achieved over just three years.

Exposing Why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds: An excellent video from the team at Veritaseum (who create excellent science YouTube videos, if that’s up your alley) exploring Monsanto with an in-depth historical look at the company and its products.

Soil Health in the Paddock: Nicole Masters' Quick Tests That Work: Tim has been busy releasing excellent regenerative-focused videos of late. Just over the weekend, he dropped an in-depth chat with Nicole Masters on all things soil that was filmed at our farm. Well worth watching to get an introduction to all the things happening beneath our feet.

Reconnect: A FARMER HEALTH & WELLBEING RETREAT: Blair and the fantastic team from Farmer’s Footprint Australia have their Reconnect - Farmer Health and Wellbeing Retreat coming up. Farmers are invited to step off the farm and into three days of restoration, reflection, and practical learning. These in-person gatherings are offered at no cost, and we encourage farmers seeking a pause, a reset, or simply a space to breathe to apply. There are only a limited number of spaces available for farmers interested. I recommend reaching out to the team at Farmer’s Footprint.

1  Nigrospora crown rot for biocontrol of giant Parramatta grass

2  The biomass distribution on Earth | PNAS