Sustainable Farm Practices

 

The Australian Government has committed to building on the success of the National Landcare Program to encourage the adoption of on-farm land management practices that continue to maintain and improve production and deliver ecosystem services for the whole community. 

 

 

Fencing to landtype
Landtypes or country types are areas of land grouped together based on commonalities in soil, vegetation, and landform. Within the Southern Gulf region the country has been broken up into 17 landtypes, each of which have been given names that are as descriptive as possible and that people on the land can relate to, example: ‘Hughenden Rough Country’.

 

 

Detailed information on each of the landtypes in the Southern Gulf region has been compiled by the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries as part of the MLA ‘Grazing Land Management’ training package.

 

 

Local knowledge as well as the landtype sheets can then be used to identify the differences between landtypes existing on a property and sometimes even within a paddock. When there are landtypes with different pasture composition and/or fertility within the same paddock, cattle will often preferentially graze one landtype over the other, resulting in overgrazing, degradation and erosion while the other landtypes are hardly touched. This costs the grazier in loss of production through longer term degradation, and through underutilisation of other parts of the paddock.

Yambungan Station Owners Tom and Wendy Smith applied to SGC for funding in 2007 to fence black soil plains from red soil country. The family has just completed 20 kilometres of fencing and will install additional water points in the near future.

 

 

Landtype fencing will provide the Smith family with the tools to manage the current over utilisation of the more favourable black soil country and under utilisation of the neighbouring red soil. “This fence will assist us to manage the long term viability of the black soil country and allow us to spell the black soil country to let it regenerate before it is used again” says Tom Smith. Tom and Wendy Smith commented that they wish they had heard about funding earlier as they would have done the project years ago.