HOW are farmers restoring and conserving their soils? That’s the question that Soils for Life seeks to answer by collating outstanding land management practices from around Australia.
Soils for Life was developed by the former governor-general, Major General the Hon. Michael Jeffery, out of his concern that Australia’s productive soils are not being universally well managed.
General Jeffery has since been appointed the National Advocate for Soil Health.
The Soils for Life project aims to identify land managers who are working successfully with their soils, and provides a platform through which those practices can be picked up by others.
At the heart of the platform is a series of comprehensive case studies that explore why leading land managers choose to work in the way they do, how they work, and the results.
A joint project between Soils for Life and the Rotary Club of Sydney has produced the Western Division Resilient Landscapes Project. Its focus, the Western Division of NSW, has some of the nation’s most degraded landscapes. The semi-arid environment, with its low, highly variable rainfall, is also difficult to restore to a functioning state once degraded.
However, this is exactly what the managers of two enterprises, Wyndham Station and Gilgunnia Station, have managed to do.
Gus and Kelly Whyte reconsidered their program on 12,500ha Wyndham Station, near Wentworth, when they acknowledged that despite working six to seven days a week, they were getting little financial return and the station’s ecological function, already impaired, was declining further.
Instead of focusing on the station enterprises - sheep, cattle and opportunity cropping on ephemeral lake beds - they switched to thinking about how to support the landscape for maximum ecological health.
That change of mindset has delivered change in every aspect of the Whytes’ operation.
By asking how they needed to manage to encourage ecological health, they improved the land’s natural productivity. Over 10 years, that in turn supported a doubling of livestock carrying capacity, from 55 to 100 Dry Sheep Equivalents (DSE) days/ha/100mm rain.
Along the way, they increased gross margin returns from $8/ha to $12/ha.
Soil was the ultimate focus. By changing grazing management practices so that the station’s shrublands got brief pulses of intense grazing, followed by up to 300 days of rest from grazing, the Whytes encouraged a mulch of plant litter to accumulate on the soil, protecting it from the drying effects of the sun, minimising evaporation after rainfall, and supporting the soil’s natural nutrient cycling processes.
Stocking decisions are based on the goal for individual paddocks - whether a paddock has been rested enough, the trigger points of desirable plant species, or if the land requires heavier stock density at certain types of year in order to disturb the soil and provide the condition for optimum germination, establishment and growth of perennial grasses.
At Gilgunnia Station near Cobar, Ashley and Carolyn McMurtrie have had a similar focus on supporting the soil.
The couple arrived on the run-down station in 2005. Not a single paddock could hold stock and the property was overrun by goats and kangaroos. After 150 years of virtually continuous grazing, sizeable areas were degraded to the point of being unable to support vegetation.
They trapped goats to fund a fence capable of excluding goats and kangaroos from 1000ha, and then set about developing rotational grazing infrastructure - water, fences - on this block.
This test of rotational grazing principles proved a profound success. As the McMurtries got control of stocking rates, they where able to better manage vegetation growth and development of groundcover. As land health increased, the vegetation response to each rainfall event improved, accelerating the recovery cycle.
As they increased economic resilience and the capacity of the property as a whole to handle seasonally dry times and multi-year droughts, the McMurtries had the capital - and the courage - to expand on their initial 1000ha.
They have achieved a four-fold increase in productivity, running 900 DSE on 2000 hectares of their property, in comparison to the initial assessment by Livestock Health and Pest Authority of a 1400 DSE carrying capacity on the then 13,000 hectares (ie, 2.2ha/DSE compared with 9.3DSE/ha).
“The process we have undertaken over the last nine years has taken our business from a struggling opportunistic feral goat harvesting business that was completely exposed to seasonal conditions to a business that is far more resilient,” Mr McMurtrie has said.
“Without the development and success of this model we would have remained in a financially static position, with no domestic stock and still completely exposed to seasonal rainfall variation.”