Sam Vincent was a twenty-something writer working in Canberra when he gets a call from his mother: his father has got his hand caught in a wood chipper. When Sam returns to the family farm to help out, it is the beginning of a process that leads him to think differently about the farm, his father and his relationship with both.
Sam’s farming apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit but gradually Sam moves from farmhand to custodian of the land, and along the way he finds himself embracing the idea of regenerative farming. The result is a not only the introduction of new methods of farming but a continuation and development of his father’s ideas about how a farm should operate.
My Father And Other Animals’ is an affectionate, funny and surprising memoir, deeply rooted in the notion of regeneration – of land, family and culture.
In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Sam Vincent about how his father didn’t quite fit the profile of the archetypal Australian farmer, the moment when Sam’s life took a new and unexpected direction, and how learning to work with the land and the idea regenerative farming became a passion.