• Home
  • News
  • Subscribe
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
ANU Sustainable Farms
  • Demonstration farms
      • Sam and Claire Johnson
      • Paul and Rachel Graham
      • John and Nicole Hopkins
      • Tony and Vicki Geddes
  • Field Days
  • About Us
      • ANU Research
      • Partners
  • Resources
  • Search
  • Search
    • Search form

  • Larger text
  • Smaller text

ANU Research

Working with our partners

Podcasts

Projects to improve natural assets on farms

Improving  natural assets on your farm provides benefits, not just for the environment but for farm production and farmer wellbeing. The projects described below will improve natural assets and ensure they remain healthy and productive for future generations to come.

Farm Dam Enhancements

Farm dams are essential infrastructure for many farming operations, including for livestock and irrigation. Healthy farm dams can provide higher quality drinking water for livestock, improve your farm’s productivity and provide habitat for a wide variety of native wildlife.

Revegetation for Biodiversity

Environmental assets such as wetlands and native vegetation can provide a range of social, environmental and financial benefits for farmers. By restoring and maintaining the health of environmental assets on your farm, you can add to the value of your property while also protecting native frog species.

Native Shelterbelts

In the past, shelterbelts have primarily been established to serve as a windbreak: by reducing wind speeds, reducing moisture lost from the soil (which improves pasture and crop yields) and protecting livestock from wind chill.

Rocky Outcrops

Well-managed rocky outcrops support a diverse number of native plants and wildlife that boost farm biodiversity and contributes to the provision of ecosystem services, such as crop pollination, and water and soil nutrient cycling.

Scattered Paddock Trees

Scattered paddock trees are a familiar feature across rural Australia. These trees are important for maintaining agricultural productivity and are critically important for the conservation of wildlife. However, due to old age, stress from agricultural production, fire, and a lack of continuous replacement of old trees, we are rapidly losing these iconic trees.

Riparian Restoration

Watercourses and their associated riparian areas — the vegetation corridors along streams and rivers — hold enormous value for farming operations and are important assets for production and biodiversity, not to mention the significant carbon storage capacity of riparian areas.

Subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest information

Subscribe

Stay connected

Meet our demonstration farmers 

Like all farmers, there’s a history for why you’re here [on the farm]. You’re really just the next custodian. If you take that into account, you look after the land better as the next custodian.

Paul and Rachel Graham
Read more

Without the treelines, with a nude landscape, if you get out here on a hot summer’s day, it gets pretty oppressive; or a freezing cold winter without some form of shelter across the landscape, you look at it and think, that’s pretty oppressive.

Tony Geddes
Read more

I was moving stock the other day and I came across a flock of zebra finches. Ten years ago we didn’t see any. When you never used to see them and you’ve got a flock of about seventy of them and they’re flicking around on the ground in front of you, well that’s a bit of fun.

John and Nicole Hopkins
Read more

We tend to go in with the opinion that we haven’t got everything worked out but somehow it will work. It just may not work how we thought it would but we can just change and it will all work out in the end.

Claire Johnson
Read more

Latest news

Browse news

2021 calendar - hot off the press!
  Each year we create a calendar highlighting nature on farms. For this year’s calendar we asked farmers in our project area to share a photo and story about Read More
Sustainable farm financing: discussion summary
In an era of climatic uncertainty and increasing droughts, farm improvement projects that restore degraded land, enhance natural assets and improve drought Read More
Passing the baton in the ecology team
This week our senior field ecologist, Dr Mason Crane (pictured above checking a nest box), leaves us to join the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust, marking Read More

Support sustainable farming and help to conserve Australia’s unique biodiversity

Donate

Primary Sponsors

  • List links
  • Edit menu
  • Configure block
  • Home
  • News
  • Subscribe
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Footer main menu

  • List links
  • Edit menu
  • Configure block
  • Field Days
  • About us
  • Resources

Contact us

Sustainable Farms

sustainablefarms@anu.edu.au

(02) 6125 4669

Subscribe to our mailing list