When David Swallow rang and asked if l would present this paper my first thoughts were &quote;Why would you pick on me?&quote; I'm 54 years old, nearly as old as my farm. I'm flat out looking after my own health let alone my soil. Then it occurred to me that there are a lot of similarities in maintaining soil health and the way I go about maintaining my own health. The soil is a living organism, just like me, so if you want it to perform, you must be prepared to spend some money and time on it. When I purchased Mayfield some 21 years ago it didn't take me long to realise that it was in pretty bad shape. It was one of the first farms in the area to use ground water for flood irrigation. For some 35 years this was its only means of irrigation. I built the first dam on this property in 1984. At that time I basically knocked everything down and, starting from scratch, redeveloped the farm so that all fields could be watered and drained quickly and all run-off recycled back to the dam. Now we could mix some overland flow water with the high sodium salt ground water. This eased the burden of salinity in our soil. Over the next few years we could see our soil structure, with the help of gypsum, was improving. Our heavy box clay soil was more like &quote;chewing gum&quote; now- a big improvement from &quote;araldite&quote; which is the word I had previously used to describe it. Unfortunately the price of gypsum today in the Dalby area has made this option less attractive than it was some years ago. Gypsum works well but, unfortunately, economics also comes into the story of maintaining soil health.