WHEN The Land visited George and Erica Gundry at Tarago in 2009, they were reaping the rewards of sensitive land management in some of the toughest back-to-back seasons experienced in the Southern Tablelands.
Later that year, the Gundrys began to enjoy something even better: the fruits of sensitive land management in a run of outstanding seasons.
George Gundry died unexpectedly earlier this month.
He had, however, seen the best of times and the worst of times. In both phases, he made the health of the land a priority, and the land gave back in kind.
Mr Gundry stepped off the conventional path in the early 1990s, another time of drought at "Willeroo", the Gundrys' 2000 hectare property at Tarago.
Unhappy with what he saw as downward spiral of the farm's productive capacity, he attended a Resource Consulting Services (RCS) course that introduced him to the pasture management principles of short graze, long rest. He began to split up paddocks and box sheep into larger mobs, adjusting management to support grass growth.
Soon afterward, he was introduced to Allan Savory's book "Holistic Resource Management" by Bruce Ward, who with Brian Marshall introduced Savory's ideas into Australia.
(Mr Ward, who introduced an estimated 10,000 people to holistic decision making, also died earlier this year.)
Holistic Management embodies "triple bottom line" thinking. It teaches that no-one can make sound decisions unless they consider a decision's personal, financial and environmental consequences - and that means the person making the decision needs a "holistic" understanding of what they value in life.
The logic of this idea hit Mr Gundry hard. In the early 2000s he went to the United States to undertake training as a Holistic Management educator.
On "Willeroo", he had already made a profound change in response to his new perceptions of his relationship with the land. In a traditionally strong sheep area, he got rid of his sheep, because they grazed pastures down to the ground, and moved wholly into cattle.
The Gundry's management became fluid, adjusting to prevailing conditions, mindful of the water cycle and the natural succession of plants under different grazing regimes and shifts in soil fertility.
The spread of serrated tussock, which once threatened to smother the property, was halted "and we may have even beaten it back at bit with competition", Mr Gundry said.
In 2004, in the grip of acute drought, he made an ever bigger change. Going into a dry winter, he got rid of all his cattle, trucking off decades of genetic development to preserve groundcover.
It was the first time the Gundrys had taken such a drastic step to protect their resource base. Once the cattle were out of sight, though, the main sensation was of “enormous relief—a great emotional drain”.
“We sold in late May, early June, and we kept our groundcover while dust blew in over us,” Mr Gundry recalled in 2009. “Later in the year, we were able to buy back better cattle than we sold.”
When The Land visited "Willeroo" in 2009, after another two hard seasons, the property was still carrying about 10,000 DSE on its own resources, including two mobs of agistment cattle.
Had their management been unchanged from the early 1990s, Mr Gundry said, they would have been digging a deep debt hole trying to feed stock.
The Gundrys' daughter, Charlotte, said that when drought broke in late 2009, followed by a succession of good seasons, "Willeroo" blossomed.
In times of heavy rainfall, the water rushing off the property was perfectly clear - a gift to the watershed.
Although conditions have dried off again, Charlotte said the property is now carrying as many breeding cows - nearly 500 - as it ever has.
Erica Gundry, and Charlotte and her brothers Edward and Henry, are now working out the details of the family partnership so they can continue to manage "Willeroo" along the same lines Mr Gundry put in place.
Charlotte said her father's passion for the land and its generous abundance under good hands was evident on his laptop computer where, after his death, she found "hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of grass".
Mr Gundry was uneasy about claiming to have found answers to the challenges that preoccupy farmers, but at the same time he felt that he really had found some valuable ways of thinking and working.
During the last few years of his life, he overcame his qualms and become a highly-regarded teacher of the ideas that had turned around his own life and land.
For instance, he told The Land in 2009, “A drought is a drought, but the really negative effects usually come about through a drought of decisions.”
He believed that the greatest gift the holistic management process had given him was trust in his own judgement.
“It gives you the confidence to step forward knowing that you’ve arrived at a conclusion that is right for you—even if it isn’t right for someone else,” he said.
“In this game you can never get comfortable because nature is throwing something new at you all the time. But you can stay fluid and ride through those changes if you have a process that you can trust for making the decisions you need to make.”
