Sydney-born Judi Earl was intent on becoming a vet when she enrolled in Rural Science at UNE in 1990. At 28, while working at a racehorse stud, she had resat HSC subjects and her eyes were firmly set on attending the University of Sydney.
“That was the original plan, until I got my HSC marks,” Judi says. “Someone at Sydney’s vet school told me that UNE’s Rural Science degree was one of the most well respected in the state and recommended I complete first year and then reapply to the University of Sydney.”
Judi already had an Associate Diploma from Hawkesbury Agricultural College and soon began excelling in her UNE studies. Then came Honours, a PhD in livestock cell grazing, and an influential encounter with Holistic Management guru Allan Savory.
“He gave one of his introductory lectures at UNE when I was starting my PhD and what he spoke about in terms of pastures and soil health and sustainable management … I thought it was the way to implement all I was learning in my agronomy lectures,” Judi recalls. “His was a controversial approach at the time but I had managed farms for 10 years prior and it resonated with me.”
Today, Savory’s philosophy has been widely adopted as regenerative farming sweeps the world, and Judi is a pasture ecologist, Holistic Management educator, widely respected presenter and grazier of 454-hectare Glen Orton (known affectionately as The GO), at Coolatai in northern NSW. For more than 20 years she has advised hundreds of people on the role that livestock can play in land regeneration, restoration and productivity, applying principles that date back to her UNE days, when Judi conducted some of the first studies of the benefits of planned grazing to Australian pastures.
“The New England graziers were a progressive lot,” Judi says. “I was in a good spot at UNE and, working as a research assistant to Christine Jones [then a UNE Research Fellow and now an internationally renowned soil ecologist], I was seeing what farmers were achieving.”
Her consultancy work now sees Judi espousing the benefits of sound grazing management across a range of environments. “There are no set recipes or dogmas, just stocking appropriately and not over-grazing and degrading the landscape,” she says. “It’s really rewarding to see the lights come on, when people learn how the whole system is coordinated.”
Buying her first “pretty rundown” property at the age of 50 to implement the principles she’s taught everybody else, was “a big decision”. Then the weather conspired against her. “It was over 1,000 days before I got reasonable rainfall during the recent drought and I had destocked almost entirely,” Judi says. “The diversity of plant species and critters around today … it’s been a joy to see the landscape recover.
“The uptake of regenerative agriculture nationally is growing, but there’s still a long way to go. Carbon is now front of mind for most graziers and they recognise how important soil biology is. People are becoming much more aware of the natural processes and the interactions between animals and the landscape and how that effects what happens beneath their feet.”
