Good morning, and welcome to the 19th edition of our monthly newsletter, Reading Landscapes.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• Time to start Building Landscapes

• Blackberry, sweet and thorny

• What we’ve been learning

🔎 Looking at the Landscape

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

Last week, we hosted our very first advanced Natural Sequence Farming course - Building Landscapes. This course has been in development for a long time. As landscape managers, we are constantly learning, understanding new landscapes, and designing what works best for each context, which is why this course has been in development for a long time - until now. But we were extremely pleased with our first course and the fantastic group of graduates we welcomed back, who arrived at “Marloo” from NSW, QLD, VIC, SA and WA to spend the four days with us.

This course was all practical, with four days spent in the paddock reading landscapes and implementing. We were busy building gully ponds, connecting contours to dams and ponds, constructing leaky weirs with rocks, logs, and earth, and building a large stock crossing with a Pelicans Beak™ pipe.

It was an in-depth dive into reading a landscape, planning what can be done, and then beginning the implementation process. I thought it might be worth sharing a bit this month about some of the key considerations we keep in mind when designing and building our landscape implementations.

🔝 Start at the top

We always want to start as high up in the landscape as possible. We do this for a few reasons.

1. At the top of the system, we are trying to manage the smallest volume of water on our property, which makes it easier for what we implement to manage the water it receives. It is also the best spot for us to learn from when we are early in our journey.

2. Starting at the top yields the most significant benefit for our landscape. By managing water early, we can reduce its erosive forces and hold it for longer at higher points.

3. At the top of the system, we want to find a way to connect the largest area of our landscape, rather than doing little bits and pieces all over the place. By connecting the largest piece at the beginning, it allows us to make the most significant impact over the largest area, having a combination of economies of scale for your bank account, but also by connecting as much of the landscape together as possible, allowing for more water to be managed and more fertility to be spread, resulting in greater results.

🪜 Find the steps

We always look to build on what we call the steps in a landscape. These are hard to explain in written words, but to put it simply, steps are areas of a landscape where the gradient flattens slightly before falling again. They are the easiest to see on slopes.

They are what was created over a long period of time, as a result of water being slowed and dropping the sediment it carried, which builds up a level area. What started the process varied - whether it was plants or a natural block, but it changed how water was managed and created the areas we now call steps.

It is at these steps that the water was slowed; it could begin infiltrating into the soil, and this allowed the landscape to undertake the process of hydrological recharge. It’s for these reasons that we seek to recreate this process using the same steps. By starting to manage the water on a step again we can recreate the recharge process that was always occurring.

🌊 Manage the water

And finally the other thing that we always consider, and often the most important, is how are we going to manage the water - we are always about managing water, as we cannot control it, no matter what we think, we do not know what nature is going to give us and therefore when designing all of our works we are always thinking about how is it going to handle an unlimited capacity of water.

To work around this, we think about the water entering our landscape works as well as the water exiting them, and we ensure we design them so they remove and manage as much of that water’s energy as possible, limiting the erosive nature of unmanaged water.

🌱 Design for plants

We always aim to design our works so that, in the long term, plants will take over their management. We do this because we will not always be there to ensure everything goes to plan, and our natural systems were never designed to have us continually manage them - plants served that role. We set about ensuring that all our designs follow that as well, either by creating an environment for plants to come in on their own or by planting alongside the works we implement.

By working around these four concepts, we can ensure we are working alongside nature and recreating a system that was once operating and now designed in a way that we are not required, given time, nature and plants will once again take over the process and continue the management long into the future - creating a natural system that will long outlive all of us.

Rehydrate Australia

We’re excited to officially announce a project that we have been working on for a while. What started as a mission to share the amazing work our community of graduates has been implementing in their own landscapes after attending one of our courses has now grown into a full-blown documentary - and with that, we’re excited to introduce you to Rehydrate Australia.

Something special is happening on farms across Australia.

Farmers are rising up to take on increasingly severe cycles of droughts, fires and floods.​

Come on a road trip to find out how Australian farmers are leading the world in landscape rehydration.​

Over the past year, we’ve travelled across the country to visit the farms of our graduates and document the incredible work they're doing with Natural Sequence Farming.

We've seen restored water cycles, rehydrated landscapes, and farmers who are genuinely rebuilding resilience into their land. And we wanted to share their stories with the world.

This documentary isn't just ours - it belongs to our graduates.

The farmers and land managers who have put in the hard yards to implement Natural Sequence Farming on their properties, who opened their gates and welcomed us in, who shared their wins, their challenges, and their hopes for the future. This is their story, and we're honoured to help tell it.

We also couldn't have done this without the incredible support of Friendly Farms, who believed in this project from the start and helped bring it to life.

The trailer is live today.

We're releasing it to you first, our Reading Landscapes community.

The full documentary will be released on December 26th 2025, but over the coming months, we'll be sharing individual stories from the farms we visited - real examples of what our graduates have been achieving across the country.

Watch the trailer below and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with every release.

Introducing our NSF Champions

And with that, we’re excited to introduce and share our first NSF champion - Charlie Arnott. Come and visit “Hanaminno” and see the work that the Arnott family have been putting in to restoring their landscape and starting to Rehydrate Australia!

Peter Andrews OAM spent his life trying to show people that there's a better way to work with the landscape. This documentary continues that mission — and it's proof that the work is happening, right now, all across Australia.

Let's Rehydrate Australia — together.

We'd love to hear your thoughts after you watch the trailer and our first NSF Champion story. Hit reply and let us know what resonates with you.

P.S. If you know someone who needs to see this — a farmer, a land manager, a council member, a friend who cares about the future of our landscapes — please share it with them. The more people who understand Natural Sequence Farming, the more landscapes we can help restore.

🔗 Subscribe to the channel: Tarwyn Park Training

🌏 Learn more: rehydrateaustralia.com

🌳 Learning from Plants

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

Blackberry

Common Names: Blackberry, Bramble, European Blackberry, Shrubby Blackberry, Wild Blackberry, Bramble fruit

Scientific Name: Rubus fruticosus

Where in the Succession: Early to Mid Succession Accumulator

What is it telling me about my landscape?

Blackberry is an Early to Mid Succession Accumulator.

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

Blackberry is the epitome of a pioneer species, especially in landscapes like Australia, where it is classed as an invasive species. It is in these degraded areas that it will quickly take up residence and colonise disturbed sites, whether that is landscapes that have been cleared, overgrazed, burnt or abandoned or mismanaged agricultural land. And in most cases, the landscapes where it finds itself taking up residence would have once been timbered or forested at some point in history.

The common trend across the landscapes we tend to find Blackberry dominating includes;

• Limited organic matter

• Degraded soils often suffering from erosion

• A landscape where its hydrological function is not intact

• Mismanagement that opened up the opportunity for Blackberries to enter

• Landscapes that were once forested, and depending on management, take on the opportunity to start the ecological succession back to forest, with Blackberry kickstarting the process

Interestingly, as we discussed at the start of the newsletter in our Building Landscapes course, we implemented a number of structures in an actively eroding gully, and at many of the sites we called steps, blackberries were already growing. Now, whether that was just a coincidence, I tend to think not, as it is common to see blackberries actively trying to stabilise those eroding sites and manage water in those areas for nature.

How can we manage Blackberry?

🐐 Use livestock intervention. Goats have proven to be an excellent management option for blackberries with their ability to readily consume their biomass. Blackberry is palatable to goats thanks to its high digestible dry matter, mineral content and their preference for a diet of more coarse materials compared to other ruminants. Cattle will also consume blackberries, but not to the extent of goats and for them it fits better as part of a mixed diet. Now, with the knowledge about goats, there are people running businesses taking goats onto people’s properties to manage blackberries, which can work great for people not wanting to take on another enterprise or for someone like me who refuses to run an animal like a goat (for fencing reasons!).

🚜 Use mechanical intervention. With low palatability, it will be difficult, especially in very dense populations, to use livestock entirely, even goats, so that’s where machinery comes in. You can slash or mulch blackberries to remove their biomass, or for greater intervention, you could use a tool like a stick rake to take them out completely. In each of these situations, it will take continuous management, as they will all reshoot and start growing again. That’s where incorporating this method with the following two will lead to greater results in the long run - otherwise, you will just have to keep coming back in with machines over time.

🐄 Alter our grazing. Blackberries are often entering into a landscape to try and start the process of moving succession back to a forest and in a grazing situation this can be triggered most often by removing or changing grazing to being very light where young blackberries get the chance to take off or by overgrazing followed by a break where there is an open opportunity for the blackberry to take advantage of limited competition and no animal impact.

In both situations, we can continue using animals in the system, but we need to realise that our management created the opportunity for the blackberry to start, and we need to manage in a way that doesn’t promote it. We can do that by implementing a time-controlled grazing system, managing the impact we create in an area and ensuring we have an adequate recovery period before grazing it again.

We can also use the animals in areas where blackberries are dominant to increase impact by increasing stocking density, whilst managing their performance by supplementing them with an external feed source and using them as tools to create impact on our key blackberry management sites.

🌿 Increase plant diversity. As we discussed earlier, blackberries often return to a landscape to initiate an ecological shift back to a forest. In this situation, why not work with nature and make a compromise to support the reintroduction of trees, shrubs, and other forest-type species into specific areas alongside our pasture species, creating a more diverse mix of plants? We could do this in combination with installing contours to manage water, and then plant our forest-type species along the bottom of the contours.

Additionally, we can look to increase our fungal-to-bacterial ratio in the soil, which is often more on the bacterial end in these landscapes. We should aim for at least a 1:1 ratio.

⬆️ Increase our soil organic matter. In most cases, the soils where blackberries are dominating are low in soil organic matter, hence why the blackberry arrives with its incredible ability to grow a large amount of biomass in a short period of time and then starts dropping that material alongside its relationship with the soil to start building up a much higher volume of organic matter. We can work alongside nature in these areas by bringing in external sources of organic matter to help build up the soil, or in many cases, the blackberry has done enough and needs some assistance to remove it and move to the next stage of the succession for that site, as well as our continual management to ensure that area continues to aggrade.

🍄 Fungal bio-control. Blackberry Rust Fungus (Phragmidium violaceum) was first released in Australia in 1991, and since then it has received mixed results some of the best seeing¹;

• 56% and 38% reduction in total biomass, respectively, after 10 years of rust infection

• 96% reduction in daughter plant production (vegetative reproduction)

However, this has not occurred everywhere, nor with every variety; there has also been the issue of preventing the fungus from affecting the cultivated varieties. There is ongoing research into additional fungal strains and potential insect management methods.

How to make the most of your Blackberry

🪨 As a Soil Indicator: Very low Calcium, Low Potassium, High phosphate, High Magnesium, High Manganese, High Iron, Very little organic matter. More abundant on fertile soils²

🐮 Livestock: Blackberries can provide a moderate level of nutritional value for livestock. Studies have recorded crude protein levels of between 8-10% with moderate digestibility³. Additionally, it has been found to contain higher levels of calcium, phosphorus, and potassium³. As part of a mixed species, it provides year-round green forage and means that it can be managed long-term with livestock, especially goats, as we mentioned above.

💊 Medicinal: Blackberries have a long history of traditional uses⁴;

• A poultice made from its leaves for treating ulcers

• A tea made from its roots for relieving labour pains

• Leaves to stop fungal infections and abscesses on the skin

• Leaves used as a gargle or mouthwash

• Plus, it can be used as a remedy for diarrhoea, dysentery, cystitis and haemorrhoids

Plus a whole heap more.

In modern medicine, it is being researched for its antioxidant, anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and antiviral properties⁴.

🍽️ Consumption: Well, of course, you get the delicious fruits, which can be eaten fresh, or they can be frozen or preserved as syrups, jams or jellies - very versatile. You can use the young leaves in herbal teas, and you can also eat them. And the young shoots can be eaten raw and used in salads. For more foraging tips, check out this article from Diego Bonetto.

📚 What We’ve Been Learning

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

Embracing continuous learning - Nicole Masters Soil Masterclass: A blog post I wrote following attending Nicole Masters three day event in QLD, which was a great few days full of information that I tried to simplify into a few key take home messages.

The New World: An extremely in-depth article from Jeremy Stern about Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream. I really enjoyed reading about Josh’s journey, backstory and the process behind creating Thrive Capital.

Exposing Why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds: This was a really interesting video created by the Veritasium team that I think is well worth a watch.

1  Blackberry: treading a prickly path to effective biological control in Australia

2  Weedy Wednesday – Blackberry

3  WASTE FROM THE SUMMER PRUNING OF BERRY BUSHES SUITABLE FOR FEEDING BEEF CATTLE

4  Rubus Fruticosus L.: Constituents, Biological Activities and Health Related Uses