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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Our Demonstration Farmers have good examples of these projects on their farms. At Sustainable Farm Field Days farmers can see practical applications of these suggested works, and hear from the farmers and researchers about the benefits of these projects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Demonstration farms have been selected to showcase excellent natural asset management.
Sustainable Farms launched with four Demonstration Farms in 2018.
If you would like to nominate your farm to become one of our Demonstration Farms, or in would like to work with Sustainable Farms to make improvements to natural assets on your property, please email us at: Sustainable.Farms@anu.edu.au
Join Sustainable Farms and our partners throughout August and September as we host a series of free field days focusing on farm dams and native shelterbelts. Come to learn about the latest science and management practices from farmers and scientists, and how managing them for biodiversity can benefit your farm productivity. Stay for lunch and a chat.
Speakers will include...
