An EcoFarmer’s Discovery – As a Book Or Audiobook

Product Overview

How the soil really works…

Within the pages of An Ecofarmer’s Discovery, you’ll uncover practical, repeatable (and at times challenging) approaches to farming that are gaining traction across the global farming and horticulture industry.

Blending advanced thinking with accessible, on-farm inputs, the book explores how soil function can be improved to support more productive, resilient, and efficient farming systems.

It also brings together the issues, discoveries, and insights behind many of today’s farming challenges – explained in clear, practical terms – and how these directly impact day-to-day farm performance.

A few of the highlights within the book include:

• Documented results from our Waihi farm, including an increase of 14.25 tonnes of carbon per hectare measured over a 12-month period, demonstrating what can be achieved under the right conditions.
• A detailed look at the Brookside Laboratories S007 soil test, and how it helps uncover what’s really happening in New Zealand soils, particularly volcanic ash and pumice soils often associated with elevated aluminium.
• Insights into the role of silica in supporting soil and plant systems, including its influence on plant strength, resilience, and overall performance.
• A practical, easy-to-understand explanation of soil fertility, and how working with it can shift outcomes on farm.
• Real-world examples of how low-cost inputs, such as seawater extracts, have been used to support improvements in soil condition, plant growth, and animal performance.
• An introduction to the natural processes involved in carbon cycling, including how carbon can be drawn from the atmosphere into the soil through biological activity.

About the Author

Ewan Campbell, an award winning farmer, researcher, patent holder, certified Brookside Soil Consultant, author and lifetime farmer. Ewan has been featured in Cuisine Magazine for innovation and excellence in meat products and a winner in the Carter Holt Food awards – Meat Fish and Poultry Section.

Ewan’s father and grandfather brought 500 acres of tea tree-covered peat swamp in 1952, and set about making a farm. They certainly succeeded and that pioneering spirit – the willingness to utilise whatever resources were available to get what needed to be done – was certainly not lost on Ewan. In today’s world it would seem beyond belief that it was positively encouraged to expand the productive land of this country. It’s what he was brought up with and he found it absolutely normal to continue to improve on what you’ve got, with whatever resources you could lay your hands on.

On all farms, the foundation is the soil, and peat in its raw state is pretty sterile. The unfertile land needed to be cultivated and drained. As this took place, observation was the most critical part of the operation because they found what worked and what didn’t work. Most of the time they acted on what was observed and kept expanding on those foundations and it was that early learning that paid real dividends when Ewan bought his own farm in Waihi. Here, the experimentation started from the first day he set foot on the farm.

What follows is his story of discovery, as time after time nature showed it’s true beauty, coupling his farming experience with the use of science and continual experimentation. The picture filled itself in like a never ending jigsaw which just got better and better. Sometimes you could lose a few pieces only to find a whole lot more that you never knew existed.

Most of Ewan’s experiences came about while looking for answers to the causes of problems, not utilising the “farming industry” that only deals with symptoms. The general rule is, if industry can’t sell you anything for your problems, then it’s not a real problem. Industry cannot give you answers to causes because that would do them out of a job. The evidence of this arrives every week in the farming magazines where there is a continual bombardment of farming, market, environmental issues and more – without any solutions. They state only that farmers will have to change, which will involve bureaucratic controls, and continued use of particular products etc, etc, etc.

Ewan took no preconceived ideas into his investigations to find what he needed to know about, how and why certain things work and what he could do about it. Usually, very simple and practical answers came to the fore.

This is when you have to trust yourself because the issues that happen on most farms are very similar to the issues we have faced and the answers are usually really simple. They have possibly been staring you in the face for years and it’s just a case of making sense of what you observe and learning the steps required when no one else seems to know, or doesn’t want you to know.

Who is this book for?

Farming
Any farmer, be they dairy, cattle, sheep or other livestock farmer who is serious or even curious as to how they can improve their farm production without applying harmful chemicals.

Horticulture
Horticulturists and market gardeners seeking learn more about enhancing the soil fertility, growing higher nutrient quality crops, achieving greater production per hectare, and those who care about their environment.

Soil Fertility
Those seeking to learn more about soil fertility, how it effects crop nutrients and production, animal health, water retention, carbon sequestration and so much more.

Home Gardener
The home gardener who wants to understand how they can have the most magnificent home veggie garden and the best looking lawn in the neighbourhood.

Carbon Seekers
People interested in increasing the carbon levels in the soils.

Water Quality
Those seeking answers on how to clean up the waterways. This book provides a detailed explanation on how Ewan dropped the nitrate levels leaving the farm from 0.71ppm to undetectable.