A year into running a mixed farming operation in Canterbury, Sam Lang is committed to merging the best of science with farmer observation, enquiry, experience and innovation. And within his role at Quorum Sense, he’s always pushing for questions to be asked from a farmer’s perspective.

Throughout his travels as a Nuffield Scholar, Sam was inspired by farmers defying what he thought was possible in the world of ‘conventional’ farming. Now farming himself, he's acutely aware of the need to balance idealism versus realism versus risk.

The importance of a support network also rings clear in this conversation, for not only himself with his team and family focus, but for all farmers around the world.

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“Look at root exudates…liquid carbon pathway root exudates driving the entire soil microbiome, nutrient cycling. All that kind of stuff and the impact of plant diversity, and grazing management, and nutrition, and all these different things on how these root exudates work, and it literally drives the whole ship.

“And science discovered that. You can observe it, but the way that I think about it is an observant farmer can make a whole lot of really powerful observations and connections between things that happen and it takes them to a certain insight and a certain place. And then what science can do is amplify that understanding and observation to a whole new level which then further refines how you might farm based on that understanding.”

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