Riverina grazier new president for VicNoTill

December 11, 2024

Fifth generation Riverina farmer Michael Gooden is stepping into the president’s role of one of Australia’s leading farmer-driven groups during a time of considerable change and enthusiasm for improved food quality on a large scale.

VicNoTill appointed Michael in the role during its annual general meeting. He replaces Dan Fox, who has been president for a three-year term. Dan remains on the board. Other board changes at the meeting were West Wimmera farmer Tara Hindson and Marrar farmer Brendan Pattison stepping down from the board, and two new members joining –  Carol Fitzpatrick from Waitchie in the Mallee and Stewart Kings from Toowoomba, Queensland.

“When I attended my first VicNoTill event I saw the tagline, farmers helping farmers, and I signed up as a member straight away,” Michael said.

“Not too long after that I put my hat in the ring to join the board. I have worked in natural resource and land management for a long time, as well as being a fifth-generation farmer, and I’d never come across a farming organisation quite like it.

“The way VicNoTill is structured as a not-for-profit group puts us in a unique position to be truly independent, which is really important and also extremely practical.

“I’m proud that VicNoTill is here for our members. We don’t have any other vested interests apart from wanting to improve agriculture and the condition of our soils.”

Michael said VicNoTill was escalating change in agriculture through its practical, down-to-earth, farmers helping farmers approach.

“VicNoTill is on the ground and at the coalface of where we are going to see landscape-scale changes, which is what is needed in the current environment. Our network ranges from market gardeners and small farms through to larger family farms with value-added enterprises to people in corporate agriculture managing 50,000-plus hectares. VicNoTill has a lot of opportunity to make a real difference and I’m proud to be part of that.”

Soil biology

Outgoing president Dan Fox attended his first VicNoTill conference in 2018 and joined the board in 2020. Dan’s family have been cropping in the Riverina for five generations. He farms with his wife Rachel, their two children Hugo and Georgie and Dan’s parents David and Cathie.

Dan said VicNoTill had introduced him to thinking about soil biology, rather than just focusing on the physical and chemical properties of the soil.

He said his knowledge had escalated considerably during his three years as president.

“With the opportunities to meet new people and learn from them, I have been able to understand our climate and soils in far greater detail than I would have been able to otherwise,” he said.

“With this understanding combined with some hard truths learned along the way in my own farming journey, I feel we are definitely on the right track to soil and food production improvements.”

Dan said his commitment to improving Australian agriculture remained as strong as ever.

“I am continuing my passion for VicNoTill by remaining on the board and am always free for a chat about farming systems and what I have learnt so far along my journey.

“The beauty of our great organisation is our mantra of ‘farmers helping farmers’.  Soil health is a lifelong endeavour, not an overnight fix. But it is an endeavour that can be shared together.”

  • Read more about Michael Gooden and his family’s mixed farm and cattle stud below.
  • You can also tune into Farmers Helping Farmers, The Podcast, for a great conversation between outgoing president Dan Fox and Michael Gooden, where Dan steps you through the changes he’s made to his family farm and how VicNoTill has helped progress his farming system to where he wants it to be.

VicNoTill board at the 2024 conference. Back from left Tom Briggs, Erwin Van Den Berg, Michael Gooden, Angus Ingram, Callum Lawson and Dan Fox. Front from left, Tara Hindson, Brendan Pattison and business manager Amy Burgess.

Joining the dots for a bright future

  • Michael and Heloise Gooden, children Jude, Sally and Margot
  • “Willowlee”, 70km east of Wagga Wagga
  • Fourth generation Riverina farmer
  • Mixed farm and cattle stud, flood irrigated off Sandy Creek
  • Farming & Grazing for Profit – RCS
  • Holistic Management with Bruce Ward

Michael, Margot, Jude, Heloise and Sally.

Having grown up on his family’s mixed cropping and livestock Riverina property, Michael always aspired to return to the farm where his grandparents settled in the 1940s and he grew up with his parents Mark and Robyn and siblings Mandy, William and Chris.

He left school and went jackarooing in the Riverina before going to Marcus Oldham College, Geelong. His mid-year prac placement was at Murroa Angus Stud in Western Victoria near Hamilton, which had over 600 performance recorded cows as well as 10,000 Crossbred ewes.

Michael idolised and learnt a lot from his employer Simon Gubbins, a high-end producer who passed on extensive knowledge on matching stocking rates to carrying capacity and understanding animal production requirements.

It was a high input farming system with relatively high animal metabolic issues, including lamb abortion and pregnancy toxemia. It took several decades to join the dots; Michael can now reflect upon the animal disease and performance impacts of a system with high rates of phosphorus and nitrogen fertiliser and poor soil health.

He says the business model itself was good, but with a system that was ‘lacking’, it wasn’t working as it should.

“Fixing one problem then getting two more was the way we did things in farming back then – looking for bandaid solutions rather than addressing the root causes of the problems. It just wasn’t in our vocabulary to address the root causes.”

A major turning point in 2004 got Michael asking several key questions: How do you aspire to be ‘the best’ farmer, how are you measuring ‘the best’ and what’s the definition of ‘the best’?

He returned to the Riverina into the family partnership with his parents and brother, where they were mixed farming; 50% cropping and 50% livestock with a self-replacing merino flock and some cattle.

“We had subsoil acidity, herbicide issues and physical constraints from a cropping perspective. The farm business itself was going okay, even if things felt out of balance, so it wasn’t too much of a concern.”

Michael had come across holistic management but it didn’t fit with their ‘modern, progressive agriculture’ model.

In 2008 Mark and Robyn retired and as part of the family’s succession plan Michael took over one part of the farm and Will took over the other. They were on the back end of the millennium drought, which ran from 2002-2009 in the Riverina. The worst years were 2004 and 2006, and when Michael took over ‘Willowlee’ he knew something had to change.

In 2010 he did a holistic management training course but it felt isolating because he was going against the way his parents, brother and neighbours farmed.

The real turning point was when he joined eight families, which has now grown to nine, to form a holistic farming group. Some had been farming holistically for 20 years, others were new to it, others had been doing it but not all that well.

Regenerative agriculture, biological farming and holistic management weren’t as accessible as they are today, making this support network even more critical.

“Joining that group has been really influential, it has been so important to be part of this big support network. I don’t think we would be where we are today without it.”

In 2016 Michael and his wife Heloise established their cattle stud, Old Man Creek. “Our focus was to run a profitable business but we wanted to take it further by improving our grazing management, groundcover and the resilience of our land.”

In hindsight he can see they should have managed it better, rather than going completely cold turkey with synthetic inputs for example, because after about five years everything plateaued.

“I love the saying ‘you’ve got to earn the right to go biological’. We just went biological full stop, and although we weren’t doing any harm, we could’ve improved the way we did it. Things like, we should have introduced more diversity and grown multi-species pastures a lot earlier.”

He joined VicNoTill in 2018 after attending a conference.

“The first thing I noticed was their motto ‘farmers helping farmers’. I signed up as a member then and there.”

Michael became more involved with VicNoTill events through his former role as a Regional Agriculture Landcare Facilitator. At one of their events, feedback from a 70-year-old farmer inspired Michael to tune into VicNoTill even more.

“He said it was the best workshop he’d ever been to in his 50 years of farming. He was planning to sell the farm but after this workshop with agroecologist David Hardwick, he convinced his children to come home and manage it. From just this one workshop, their whole family and their farming future has changed.”

Michael says the motivation to join VicNoTill’s board stems from one of his favourite quotes by UK playwright and novelist Charles Morgan – as knowledge increases, wonder deepens.

“The board members all have enquiring minds and a ‘dare to be different’ mindset. They also present a realistic picture of making changes to your farming system. It’s really important to be able to share that not everything you try works. It’s an important part of the learning process and in some ways you need to make those mistakes to really learn.”

Michael says one of the pitfalls of modern agriculture is that it’s a ‘prescription’ where an agronomist hands you a bit of paper to say you’ll get this result if you do that. This suits some farmers, but in a regenerative system that’s not how it works.

Knowing where to go for information is one of the biggest challenges for farmers who are just starting their journey.

“If you rock up to your local agricultural branch and say ‘I want to go regenerative’ where do you go from there? You can go onto the internet and watch a video with one of the farmers in the US who started down this path a long time ago like Gabe Brown, and it sounds so easy.

“But to really get started you need to find like-minded people, which is why VicNoTill is such a great place to start. You get to talk to farmers who are making changes in their paddocks, and you get to go down all these rabbit holes of soil health, soil biology, carbon and all these different things.

“It becomes really empowering because you see that you can make your own decisions, be responsible for your own actions, and you get into this spiral of wanting to learn more. For me the continual reinvigoration comes from the more you know the more you realise you don’t know.”

Michael says the future of agriculture is where things start to get really exciting.

“I don’t want to paint this utopia and not be realistic with what we’re doing. I have made a lot of mistakes early on. It’s part and parcel of learning but now we are in a lot better position ecologically, financially and me as a person. I know a lot more and we are more confident in what we’re doing.”

Their holistic approach also helps them with more personal decisions, helping Michael answer those key questions he started asking when he was in his 20s about how to be ‘the best’ farmer.