Peter Andrews (born 1940) is an Australian racehorse breeder and grazier from Bylong in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales. He is known for his pioneering work in landscape regeneration.
Andrews is the inventor of the Natural Sequence Farming method. [1] He is acknowledged as having converted his degraded high-salinity land at Tarwyn Park into a fertile, drought-resistant estate. His techniques run counter to prevailing accepted practices, and for 30 years his techniques were rejected by government authorities. [2] Peter Andrews is the author of a best-selling book on his methods, entitled Back from the Brink: How Australia's Landscape can be Saved. He also has written a book called Beyond the Brink that further explains his theories about water movement in the Australian landscape with the additional subjects of global warming and GMO usage and how this affects soil and the environment.
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from "permanent agriculture", but was later adjusted to mean "permanent culture", incorporating social aspects. The term was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to modern industrialized methods instead adopting a more traditional or "natural" approach to agriculture.
Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular method of agriculture, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming".
Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. In 1981, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture".
Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable, plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers to build a woodland habitat. Forest gardening is a prehistoric method of securing food in tropical areas. In the 1980s, Robert Hart coined the term "forest gardening" after adapting the principles and applying them to temperate climates.
No-dig gardening is a non-cultivation method used by some organic gardeners. The origins of no-dig gardening are unclear, and may be based on pre-industrial or nineteenth-century farming techniques. Masanobu Fukuoka started his pioneering research work in this domain in 1938, and began publishing in the 1970s his Fukuokan philosophy of "do-nothing farming" or natural farming, which is now acknowledged by some as the tap root of the permaculture movement. Two pioneers of the method in the twentieth century included F. C. King, Head Gardener at Levens Hall, South Westmorland, in the Lake District of England, who wrote the book "Is Digging Necessary?" in 1946 and a gardener from Middlecliffe in the UK, A. Guest, who in 1948 published the book "Gardening Without Digging". The work of these gardeners was supported by the Good Gardeners Association in the UK. No-dig gardening was also promoted by Australian Esther Deans in the 1970s, and American gardener Ruth Stout advocated a "permanent" garden mulching technique in Gardening Without Work and no-dig methods in the 1950s and 1960s.
David Holmgren is an Australian environmental designer, ecological educator and writer. He is best known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison.
The organic movement broadly refers to the organizations and individuals involved worldwide in the promotion of organic food and other organic products. It started during the first half of the 20th century, when modern large-scale agricultural practices began to appear.
Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture based on pseudo-scientific and esoteric concepts initially developed in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). It was the first of the organic farming movements. It treats soil fertility, plant growth, and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks, emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives.
A songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land within the animist belief systems of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia which mark the route followed by localised "creator-beings" in the Dreaming. The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional song cycles, stories, dance, and art, and are often the basis of ceremonies. They are a vital part of Aboriginal culture, connecting people to their land.
Organic horticulture is the science and art of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants by following the essential principles of organic agriculture in soil building and conservation, pest management, and heirloom variety preservation.
Seed balls, also known as earth balls or nendo dango, consist of seeds rolled within a ball of clay and other matter to assist gemination. They are then thrown into vacant lots and over fences as a form of 'guerilla gardening'. Matter such as humus and compost are often placed around the seeds to provide microbial inoculants. Cotton-fibres or liquefied paper are sometimes added to further protect the clay ball in particularly harsh habitats. An ancient technique, it was re-discovered by Japanese natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka.
Fire-stick farming, also known as cultural burning and cool burning, is the practice of Aboriginal Australians regularly using fire to burn vegetation, which has been practised for thousands of years. There are a number of purposes for doing this special type of controlled burning, including to facilitate hunting, to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area, weed control, hazard reduction, and increase of biodiversity.
Keyline design is a landscaping technique of maximizing the beneficial use of the water resources of a tract of land. The "keyline" is a specific topographic feature related to the natural flow of water on the tract. Keyline design is a system of principles and techniques of developing rural and urban landscapes to optimize use of their water resources.
Ehrenfried Pfeiffer was a German scientist, soil scientist, leading advocate of biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophist and student of Rudolf Steiner.
William Leonard Gammage is an Australian academic historian, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU). Gammage was born in Orange, New South Wales, went to Wagga Wagga High School and then to ANU. He was on the faculty of the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Adelaide. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and deputy chair of the National Museum of Australia.
Sustainable landscape architecture is a category of sustainable design concerned with the planning and design of the built and natural environments.
Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) is a method of landscape regeneration devised by the Australian farmer, Peter Andrews, in the 1970s.
Natural farming, also referred to as "the Fukuoka Method", "the natural way of farming" or "do-nothing farming", is an ecological farming approach established by Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008). Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer and philosopher, introduced the term in his 1975 book The One-Straw Revolution. The title refers not to lack of effort, but to the avoidance of manufactured inputs and equipment. Natural farming is related to fertility farming, organic farming, sustainable agriculture, agroecology, agroforestry, ecoagriculture and permaculture, but should be distinguished from biodynamic agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil.
Iloura Reserve is a heritage-listed public reserve on the site of a former timber yard at 10-20 Weston Street, Balmain East, Inner West Council, Sydney New South Wales, Australia. Following the resumption of the timber yard for public space in the 1960s, the present reserve was designed and laid out by landscape architect Bruce Mackenzie and constructed in two stages: stage one in 1970 and stage two in 1981. It is also known as Peacock Point and Illoura. The reserve is owned by the Inner West Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 29 November 2013.