As you can imagine I read many thousands of words all the time in my job but there are always some that your remember. This is one of them: “I consider myself a grass farmer, and a water and sunlight harvester.”

It’s a great example of the sort of innovative thinking that is coming out of regional Australia, thinking that is particularly groundbreaking. And who spoke these words ? Charlie Arnott, the winner of Country Style’s Top 30 People and People’s Choice Awards, said this to our writer Claire Mactaggart as he explained how he noticed by chance an ad in his local newspaper for a course called Profiting from Drought. He decided to go and it completely changed the way he thought about how he ran Hanaminno, his 2143–hectare property near Boorowa on the South West Slopes of NSW. Dairy farmers Sue and Mat Daubney are another example of great innovators. At The Creamery, the state-of-the-art milking facility they built in 2018, the cows — or “the girls” as Sue and Mat call them — stroll into the shed to be milked whenever they feel like it, attracted by brushes that massages them as they wait to be milked. “I tell my husband that’s typical of all women — they just want to do things in their own time, without being bossed around!” says Sue with a smile. Turn to page 108 to see just how contented these cows look. I went to Glen Innes Show a few years ago and was so impressed by the town — and the beautiful showground, and I have seen a few of them as I spent many years going to one every weekend to compete with my horses — that we have returned this issue to profile the New England town on page 102. And finally, A Day in the Country, a column beautifully written by Annabel Hickson over the last couple of years, will be welcoming a different writer each month — in this issue novelist Eliza Henry-jones takes the reins. Enjoy the issue,