Earlier in the month Tracee took a small group out to Robbie Watt’s place in Canowindra to look at his farm dam. This is a storm dam designed to slow the water down when big rain events happen. These days it’s also bird heaven, surrounded by a beautiful array of shrubs, grasses and trees. Our team are just about to start our ‘better bush for birds’ project, a project that spans the central tablelands and will see us working across the landscape to design and plant habitat with birds at front-of-mind.

We had our first training session at Charles Sturt University in June where we learned something that Robbie has clearly known for a long time – birds need landscape architecture! We’ll definitely be making sure our plantings have low, medium and high level coverage provided by a variety of plants so there’s always somewhere to hide, somewhere to call home and somewhere to eat.

But Robbies dam is also a great example of how improving natural capital on farm also pays off for your livestock – it’s not just nice to have, it adds value. Here’s some happy campers to prove the point at this prime lamb and merino enterprise.