How the soil really works...

A few of the highlights within the book include:

About the Author, Ewan Campbell

Ewan Campbell, an award winning farmer, researcher, patent holder, certified Brookside Soil Consultant, author and lifetime farmer. Ewan has been featured in Cuisine Magazine for innovation and excellence in meat products and a winner in the Carter Holt Food awards – Meat Fish and Poultry Section.

Ewan’s father and grandfather brought 500 acres of tea tree-covered peat swamp in 1952, and set about making a farm. They certainly succeeded and that pioneering spirit – the willingness to utilise whatever resources were available to get what needed to be done – was certainly not lost on Ewan. In today’s world it would seem beyond belief that it was positively encouraged to expand the productive land of this country. It’s what he was brought up with and he found it absolutely normal to continue to improve on what you’ve got, with whatever resources you could lay your hands on. 

On all farms, the foundation is the soil, and peat in its raw state is pretty sterile. The unfertile land needed to be cultivated and drained. As this took place, observation was the most critical part of the operation because they found what worked and what didn’t work. Most of the time they acted on what was observed and kept expanding on those foundations and it was that early learning that paid real dividends when Ewan bought his own farm in Waihi. Here, the experimentation started from the first day he set foot on the farm. 

What follows is his story of discovery, as time after time nature showed it’s true beauty, coupling his farming experience with the use of science and continual experimentation. The picture filled itself in like a never ending jigsaw which just got better and better. Sometimes you could lose a few pieces only to find a whole lot more that you never knew existed. 

Most of Ewan’s experiences came about while looking for answers to the causes of problems, not utilising the “farming industry” that only deals with symptoms. The general rule is, if industry can’t sell you anything for your problems, then it’s not a real problem. Industry cannot give you answers to causes because that would do them out of a job. The evidence of this arrives every week in the farming magazines where there is a continual bombardment of farming, market, environmental issues and more – without any solutions. They state only that farmers will have to change, which will involve bureaucratic controls, and continued use of particular products etc, etc, etc. 

Ewan took no preconceived ideas into his investigations to find what he needed to know about, how and why certain things work and what he could do about it. Usually, very simple and practical answers came to the fore. 

This is when you have to trust yourself because the issues that happen on most farms are very similar to the issues we have faced and the answers are usually really simple. They have possibly been staring you in the face for years and it’s just a case of making sense of what you observe and learning the steps required when no one else seems to know, or doesn’t want you to know.