A Business with a Difference
People - Food - Farm
Our Story
I spent 25 years running school camps across SE Queensland, hosting roughly 5,000 students a year on this property at Woodford. I knew the land, I knew the buildings, I knew how to feed 180 people in a commercial kitchen. What I didn't know was what was happening in the soil under my feet.
That changed when I started studying under Dr Elaine Ingham through the Soil Food Web School. For the first time I understood that soil isn't just dirt holding roots in place. It's a living system and most of what we've done to it over the last 70 years has been killing it. That one idea rewired everything for me.
From there I kept going. I trained with Graeme Sait at Nutri-Tech Solutions, learning how mineral chemistry and base saturation drive plant health. I studied with Matt Powers on regenerative soil systems. Along the way I studied Permaculture, Biodynamics, Syntropic farming, Natural Sequence Farming and Holistic Management. What I ended up with is a combination you don't see very often: microscopy-based biological analysis and chemistry-based mineral balancing, working side by side. Most people do one or the other. I do both, because the soil doesn't care about disciplines.
After 25 years of building courses, training facilitators and making education engaging for young people, I refocused all of that into this property. The result is a training centre and demonstration farm like no other in SE Queensland.
The Property
The Regenerative Training Centre sits on 60 acres at Woodford, about 90 minutes north of Brisbane. It started life as a school camp. Today it's a working demonstration farm with a market garden, aquaponics, large-scale worm farming, Johnson-Su composting, an in-vessel composter processing café food waste, biochar production, timed-grazing sheep paddocks, a ribbon mixer for dry mineral blending, compost extract brewing and a 30-acre conservation reserve. We have accommodation for 40 people, a commercial kitchen and a large undercover dining and training hall that seats 150 theatre style.
Everything we teach, we do here. Everything we sell, we make here. The property is the proof.
Two Businesses, One Property
We run two businesses from the same place under the same entity.
The Regenerative Training Centre operates the property. It runs Regenerative Ag school excursion programs, farmer workshops, adult education courses and facility hire. The property is the product.
Better Biology makes and sells biological soil amendment products and provides soil health consultancy to farmers across SE Queensland. The dry blends are mixed in our ribbon mixer. The liquid extracts are brewed from our own compost and worm castings. Every product is made on site and demonstrated in real conditions on the property.
Same people, same land, different purposes.
The Regenerative Training Centre acknowledges the Jinibara people as the Traditional Custodians of this land. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.