Short term popular practices that lead to lowering soil structure and fertility, although expedient and relatively cheap – like using weedicides,have been proven to create a long-term loss of profit. In fact, any practice that reduces plant cover minimises taking advantage of the free sun energy and your chance of building up a healthy soil that is able to store water and carbon.This is particularly important in times when times are tough. Rod is following all the steps to build his soil health and that will establish a very good foundation for generations to come. Right now Rod needs to have the confidence to stick with what he’s doing and the knowledge to know that what he’s doing is in fact creating a long term benefit, although this is very challenging and at times crushing when you just don’t see the results coming through. The aim of our visit to Rod and Caroline Fiedler’s farm with Colin Seis is to tap into Colin’s experience with perennial cover cropping to see where someone like Rod would start. Rod has shown interest in pasture cropping and already plants his oats into lucerne.For our Farming Secrets members we want to start Colin’s training from scratch as research shows that perennial cover cropping is the best system for cropping. We therefore would like all our members to be presented with the ‘how to’s’ of this type of farming.We are aware that many of you would like to practice pasture cropping and cover cropping but can’t maintain cover in summer which is required to practice cover cropping.