A Bit About Me.
Hi, my name is Tim Cornwall and I am a regenerative farmer in Gippsland, Victoria. I manage my family beef farm Blackwood Valley and run a business called Soil to Market which aims to help farmers to implement regenerative grazing practices on their properties. This piece is going to be an introduction to my journey into regenerative agriculture over the last three years and how I’ve come to start this business helping people to build resilient farming systems.
Hi, my name is Tim Cornwall and I am a regenerative farmer in Gippsland, Victoria. I manage my family beef farm Blackwood Valley and run a business called Soil to Market which aims to help farmers to implement regenerative grazing practices on their properties. This piece is going to be an introduction to my journey into regenerative agriculture over the last three years and how I’ve come to start this business helping people to build resilient farming systems.
To give some prior context, although I grew up in Thorpdale on a 30-acre property and spent a lot of time at Blackwood Valley, the 463-acre family farm, I wouldn’t say that I had a “farming background”. Growing up in Thorpdale and being relatively bright, I was always encouraged to pursue higher aims than agriculture. It’s a common story for those living in the regions, even if you do live on a farm. When I finished high school, I went to university and studied an Arts degree, before transferring to a Science degree, before deferring entirely to spend 2020 reading as many politics and economics books as I possibly could, unsuccessfully trying to make it as a writer. By late 2020, I had tired of the tribalism and negativity of political commentary. No one ever seemed to have any practical solutions. Then, I was exposed to regenerative agriculture, an apparent solution to climate change while also conferring a whole bunch of other benefits.
From early 2021 when I moved back to my parents place, I have been implementing regenerative agriculture on our family’s farm Blackwood Valley. This is a 463-acre property, of which about half is bushland and half is pasture. In other pieces, I will go into detail on exactly what we got done on Blackwood Valley, how we made all of those decisions and what we plan to do next. In short, we had to do a lot of fencing and water infrastructure builds to allow the intense rotational grazing of the stock, and adjust the grazing system so that we had more cattle in less mobs to achieve a longer rest period. We (when I say we, it is mostly myself and my dad) also did a lot of fencing to enable better rotational grazing at the 30-acre property closer to Thorpdale.
While implementing these changes, I decided to go back to university. I completed a Bachelor of Science (Regenerative Agriculture) and Southern Cross University between 2021 and 2023, while also completing an RCS Grazing Clinic, Regrarians REX Farm Planning and Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web Foundations course. In more recent times, I’ve also completed the KLR Marketing School and Tarwyn Park Training’s Learn Natural Sequence Farming course. In between all of these courses, I’ve also been reading as many books as I can and learning as much as I can throughout whatever means possible.
In the last ten months, since mid-2023, I’ve been working at Kilcoy Global Foods in the finance team. This was an opportunity that came up through a family friend and, always wanting to learn more about finance and business, I decided to go for it. In June 2024, however, I will be moving away from that role and starting my business as a regenerative agriculture consultant.
At Soil to Market, my aim is to help as many people as I can to implement regenerative agriculture on their property. How do I define this? I define regenerative agriculture by a single word, “resilience”. In all my consulting work, I aim to build resilient soils, plants, animals, people and farm businesses. I believe this can be achieved using tools like rotational grazing, multi-species forage cropping and natural sequence farming to build landscape scale systems that can persist through the droughts and flooding rains that characterise our continent. When our landscape systems are resilient, our farm businesses will be, too. For this reason, I also see regenerative agriculture as the most profitable farming system in the long-term.
If you or anyone you know would like to implement regenerative agriculture on your property but aren’t sure where to start, or would otherwise like to chat about regenerative agriculture and how it might benefit you and your farm, please feel free to reach out.
Tim Cornwall Soil to Market 0431132244