Mid Lachlan Landcare
supporting sustainable agriculture and restoring the environment
Ian Cooley & Family – Recognition & Thanks
During our Christmas get-together we took the opportunity to surprise Ian Cooley with a plaque and thank you speech from Andrew Wooldridge.
“Ladies and gentlemen of Mid Lachlan Landcare, my job tonight is to say a few words to acknowledge and honour Ian Cooley. Those of you who know Ian would agree that to truly honour him I will be brief and to the point and I will speak with total honesty.
I want to talk about the visitors to the Cooley Farm ‘Westville’ –
- We started counting tour groups that visited Westville in 2000
- Since 2000 there has been 4802 people who have walked around Westville with MLL volunteers and staff.
- Westville has hosted 236 different groups
- Most groups are between 10 -20 people
There have been –
- 23 agency groups made up of mainly public servents
- 10 training groups who made studying Westville part of formal technical training
- 33 community landcare groups from across Australia
- 21 university groups of staff ,undergraduate and post grad students
- 159 visits from 38 different schools from across NSW and ACT.
Most schools have multile visits –
– Bede Polding College has sent student groups every year for 21 years
– Nicole Evans is a high school ag science teacher from western Sydney. Nicole has bought groups from the 3 different schools she has worked at.
It takes a special rare person to open their farm their home, and business to so many complete strangers with such generosity.
What do all these people come to see?
They come to see the Westville landscape. A vision for how the Australian Landcape can produce healthy food and support families and communities.
How we can learn from the past, design a different future and make it happen!
They come to see sophisticated land management practises and a revegetation program which manages soil erosion, water quality salinity, biodiversity and animal welfare….all done by one family over a period of more than 25 years.
They learn that this thing some people call Landcare farming or natural resource management is called business as usual at Westville. It is part of the yearly farming program. Not a special one off project.
Ian has taught me many things about land management –
- I know that if your children/workforce are complaining about the weather during a tree planting job you motivate them by putting the warm dry ute at the far end of the tree row.
- I know that if those same workers are being swooped by magpies while putting on tree
guards you issue them with special protective headwear – that looks a little bit like a plastic
ice cream container – and the job must go on
Ian Cooley You are a leader in our community – You have taught us to get on with it
Ladies and gentlemen – it should be done, in can be done, the Cooley family are doing it.“
Jayden Gunn – Recognition and Thanks
At our recent Christmas get-together we asked Jayden to speak to the group about his work with Intrepid Landcare and before he sat down we surprised him with the following speech by Tracee Burke and a thankyou plaque.
“I believe Jayden’s first introduction to Landcare was back when the fantastic Vanessa Cain was our co-ordinator and Jayden volunteered to help her monitor Squirrel Glider nest boxes over near Crowther. How old would you have been then Jayden? (turns out he was about 14 yrs old)
And then in 2017 he contacted us and sent through some gorgeous pictures of Glossy Black Cockatoos he had taken up in Conimbla NP and asked if there was anything he could do with Mid Lachlan Landcare. We were planning some bird surveys with Kangarooby Landcare and so I asked if he wanted to come along and help us do the surveys as we weren’t very good at IDing species at that stage but had lots of fun trying.
I believe he took an annual leave day off work to come and help us and I remember everyone being blown away by his knowledge and photography skills. We enjoyed having him along very much.
After that an opportunity came along for MLL to put on a part time person to do some pest animal co-ordination and Jayden applied. He secured this role and committed to doing this along with his already full time employment. He did a great job and it was then in 2018 he got the opportunity to travel up to the Gold Coast and attend his first National Landcare Conference. I think it’s safe to say he loved the experience and the new people he met and connections he made especially with the younger Intrepid Landcare members.
Since then Jayden has gone from strength to strength and we were really so happy for him when in 2020 he secured a full time role with Birdlife Australia. It has been only 4 years since he attended his first National Landcare Conference and this year he attended again but what a difference! This year Jayden was a huge part of the conference participating in the opening and closing panel of the conference and is now on speed dial with Costa if ever he wants to speak with him 🙂
He was also integral in making the ‘2022 NextGen Landcare Youth Forum’ such a huge success with over 90 schools from across Australia registering to attend.
It has been such a pleasure to watch your achievements over this time and I want to thank you for always following your dreams and doing everything in your power to turn them into reality. You are now working in your dream job with Birdlife Australia and through your volunteer work with Intrepid Landcare you are inspiring other people both young and older (like me) to take opportunities where we can to do good things for our environment and to look after each other as well.
On that note we would like to present you with this plaque to say thank you and recognise the wonderful work you are doing.”
If you want to find out more about the Nextgen Landcare Youth Forum you can find the summary and videos here.
Thanks for your Feedback
In November we are asking you all for a bit of feedback to help us plan for the future. Thanks so much to everyone who has replied so far. We have had feedback via email and also at our AGM. Here are some of the comments so far. Please keep the feedback coming.
In regards to Mid Lachlan Landcare :-
Question 1) What has been the most valuable to you in the last 5 years?
Tree planting native species.
The social aspect – it has been really wonderful these last few months to attend the social gatherings and have such interesting, friendly, welcoming and motivated people to talk to
Growing the Grazing Revolution program and the support it gave during the drought, it really helped make the hard decisions.
Support for paddock tree plantings on farm to address habitat for rare and endangered species, plus shade and shelter for livestock
Farm visits and hearing people’s journey of change, their successes and also things that went off track and what they learnt from those experiences.
Networking, farm visits, collaborations with soil carbon & other projects, group brains better than individual .
CIBO Labs and Pasture key biomass satellite monitoring workshops and dung beetle breeding
The opportunity to mix, talk and share ideas with like minded good people.
And so many other great answers to this question. We really appreciate this feedback!
Question 2) What should we do in the next 5 years?
I would love to see something on Bees and keeping one or two hives (even better Kenyan top rail hives), propagation of native trees and how we can do even better at maintaining productive pastures along side regenerating native vegetation.
Some stuff on environmental markets/ecosystems services/natural capital- and how to measure the value of these access these markets?
Projects around the planting of trees on farm and the associated benefits are great, the best ways to plan and execute the plantings (identify suitable places on farm that perhaps may otherwise be non-productive anyway?).
It shouldn’t be all about change, stay with the good stuff
Could landcare push the healthy pasture story. Trees and habitat are of course also vital but healthy pastures can lift productivity and pull carbon into the soils. They can be very beneficial to birds, and insects as diverse feed sources
Erosion, streambank slumping and loss of trees along our creeks and rivers – loss of old >100yo trees with habitat hollows.
Funding opportunities to encourage landholders to value the ecological aspects of the land they caretake are encouraging and important.
If you haven’t supplied us with any feedback as yet we would love to hear from you. Please email us your answers midlachlanlandcare@midlachlanlandcare
It doesn’t look like Landcare are going to run out of things to do anytime soon 🙂
Wattle Day – 1st September
There were a few of us who could not make it to the formal Wattle Day event at Mikla and Wayne’s property in Grenfell earlier in September and Mikla kindly offered to host another event for us that somehow we manged to have on the official Wattle Day – 1st September which was wonderful.
A very informal affair, with a bring your own everything plan, Mikla and Wayne were fantastic hosts explaining the various projects they have been involved with on their farm including planting thousands of wattles across the property.
Mikla took the time to explain the changes they have seen on-farm and why wattles are such an important part of our landscape. They are heroes of Box Gum Grassy Woodlands!!!
Weddin Landcare have created a really informative article on wattles, their history and their roles in our landscape ‘Wattle – The heart and soul of Box Gum Woodlands’ It is well worth a read.
We all had a great time exploring the farm and lunching among the wattles in Mikla and Wayne’s back garden. A big thanks also goes to the Weddin Community Native Nursery for gifting everyone a local wattle to take home and plant.
You can also see the article that ABC has written about the formal Wattle day event at Mikla and Wayne’s ‘After planting thousands of wattles, farm goes from bare paddocks to teeming with wildlife’
Thanks so much to everyone that came along. What a special day it was.
Cowra district graziers use satellite technology to farm plan
Over the past five months, 15 Cowra district properties have been trialling the use of satellite technology to measure pasture growth rates on their individual properties, helping graziers with the management of grass budgeting and stock movements.
Mid-Lachlan Landcare (MLL) has partnered with CIBO LABS Operations Manager, Nik Henry and Senior Extension Officer, Wendy Gill to run a series of workshops for participating properties.
On August 24, MLL is offering everyone from across the Mid-Lachlan Landcare district an opportunity to attend a workshop. ‘This workshop will enable the group to share the experiences and knowledge gained through the program’, says MLL grazing facilitator Peter Davis. ‘It’s another tool to help with fodder assessment and management’.
Within the grazing industry, there has been an ever-increasing interest in rotational and timed grazing, and therefore, grass budgeting.“Our satellite assisted forage budgeting systems provide graziers with weekly satellite maps showing the variability in pasture biomass and ground cover for every paddock on the farm. This information provides objective data for planning rotational grazing, match stocking rates to carrying capacity and managing land condition”, says Henry.
CIBO LABS also offer clients a groundcover report based on 30 years of satellite history. From this, clients can see their individual property landscape health and pasture growth rates with regional comparisons. This can be useful when telling a story about historical management, drought management and pasture improvements over time.
‘We have the ability to look backwards and are able to quantify and marry data with stories about how new management has impacted or improved landscape,’ says Henry.
Livestock corporations in Northern Australia have been using this program effectively since 2018,’ says Henry. ‘The satelite images encompass the full range of shrub and tree cover, grass growth and weeds. Some of the satellite images of weeds and other unpalatable vegetation can be misleading. To compensate, the technology improves as data is fed in by agronomists and pastoralists to ground-truth the satellite images.’
Since 2020 ,the southern landscape has seen ground truthing of pasture biomass (which comprises a completely different species to the north). MLL participants have been working with the satellite data, using apps, taking photos, taking pasture cuts and measuring growth rates to add to the biomass library for visual calibration of the southern data.
MLL’s Peter Davis explained this program has been funded through a grant from the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal through the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund – a program to build drought resilience. ‘This program is helping farming businesses to plan for future weather events such as the next dry spell,’ he said.
Growing the Grazing revolution (GGR) Update
Peter Davis – GGR Grazing Officer
Unfortunately the latest round of funding for this project, as part of the Australian Government’s ‘Smart Farms Small Grants’ program, finished at the end of June. We have been searching for other opportunities to be funded over the last 8 months but there hasn’t been a suitable option for us yet. Don’t worry we will continue searching and if anyone has any ideas feel free to contact us.
The Mid Lachlan Landcare Committee met to discuss this issue and voted unanimously to keep the project running using our own funds and reducing the workload until further funding is secured. The project board then met to discuss the best use of resources.
Just prior to this meeting our Grazing Officer Peter Davis put through his resignation as of the end of August so he could spend more time on the farm. We are all very saddened by this news as Peter is a great asset to the team and has worked so well with Scott over the last 4 years. We aren’t losing Peter though which is wonderful. He has accepted a postion on the GGR board and also on the Mid Lachlan Landcare committee so he will still be a big part of Mid Lachlan.
The board has worked with Scott and developed a plan. For the next six months he will be working one day a week. We will not be running any of the cluster group meetings but will likely hold a few events on farms which will be open to all members of the GGR cluster groups. We will also work to hold one big field day/event before the end of this year based on feedback from all of you but we will have to make it cost neutral which we are sure you will all understand.
This project has been running for over ten years now which is a huge achievment and looking back on the last two years, under this recent funding, it has achieved so much and supported so many people through some really tough times. Thanks so much to Scott Hickman who has been a driving force throughout the whole 10 years and also the entire GGR board. We hope to continue to be there for you all for a long time yet.
Photo’s from our recent grazing meeting in June 2022 at Wendy Bowman’s property near Canowinda
Community Purchase – Amulla or Winter Apple
Thanks to everyone who got behind our trial Box Gum Grassy Woodland groundcover purchase. I hope your groundcovers grow well and reproduce for the future.
It was awesome of Oz Plants and the Weddin Community nursery to try growing these to order for us. As anticipated there were some unsuccessful germinations but recently an extra 2 species have started coming up and these should be ready late Winter/early Spring. Overall we ended up with 7 of the 11 species growing.
You can check out all the species we tried here in our original post. It includes links to descriptions of each species which are all important species in our Box Gum Grassy Woodlands.
I thought we might focus on Amulla or Winter Apple (Eremophila debilis) in this post. My first introduction to it was when I was out exploring a TSR (travelling stock reserve) and it really struck me. It has these bright pink fruit during the Winter months that must be important to plenty of native species. Now that I have had it planted in my garden for a few years I have noticed the Eastern Rosella’s and even the odd King Parrot that look to be feeding on the fruit.
This plant is frost tolerant and is described as drought hardy. I haven’t given mine any extra care and they are spreading well and have even germinated a couple of new ones.
They are edible but I find them a bit on the bitter side with quite a large seed and not much flesh. They are described as ‘Small green fruits approximately 8mm in size that appear in autumn/winter either turning white or pink when ripe. The fruit has an appearance of a tiny apple with a similar crispy texture and sweet taste.’
I purchased about 30 of them during this community opportunity and I am in the process of planting them in some of my revegetation sites on the farm. Can’t wait to see how they go.
Apparently Amulla is not unpalatable to stock and can be heavily grazed at times even with it’s low growth-habit. It is not a common species but this could be due to the fact that it is palatable and has now been grazed out of many sites where it may have previously grown. Each plant can live for 10-20 years, which is amazing, and one plant will cover an area of about a square meter in a couple of years.
The Weddin nursery propagated 243 of these Amulla which are in the process of being collected and planted across 16 farms in our region.
All up including the Amulla 964 plants have been successfully propagated with a further 250 coming up now. If you haven’t already collected your order from the nurseries don’t forget. Please let me know if you are having trouble getting to either of the nurseries to collect and I’ll see if I can help.
We would love to hear how your plants are growing and where you have planted them so please let me know and send us some pictures 🙂
Mycology May – Fungi surveys – Box Gum Grassy Woodland – Cowra
On Saturday the 21st May we held our first ever Fungi Surveys of Box Gum Grassy Woodlands on 2 sites around Cowra. One site was the Chiverton TSR on the Grenfell Rd. and the second site was in remnant woodland on the farm of one of our Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Habitat on Farm projects.
It will be wonderful to start gathering data on the fungi in our woodlands. We set up 4 teams on each site and collected 101 fungi specimens that have all gone to the Orange Ag Institute for official identification and recording.
In case you needed a bit of extra encouraging to love fungi, Alison Pouliot reported in this FungiMap BLOG about the fungi of Central Victoria’s Box Gum Woodlands and I am sure the same would be said for our local woodland here :-
Hundreds, possibly thousands of species of fungi inhabit Central Victoria’s Box-Gum Grassy Woodlands and Derived Grasslands. Although rarely a focus of biodiversity management, fungi are vitally important to the health and resilience of these ecosystems.
Many fungi may be threatened by processes that have resulted in widespread destruction or deterioration of these woodlands, especially as they are now largely restricted to isolated remnants.
It is so important for us to learn more about the fungi of these Woodlands to help us protect them into the future. The fungi are just as vital as the trees, understory, forbs, fallen timber and everything else associated with the woodlands. Interestingly it was noted by Alison that there was quite a difference in species when comparing the two sites. The species at our farm remnant site were very much colonising fungi species and although we found many fungi, it was not as diverse as the TSR (Travelling Stock Reserve) site. The TSR site also contained a greater variety of understory and groundcover plant species.
It really helped to tie the day together having some of the Biodiversity Conservation Trust team along to talk about the Box Gum Grassy Woodland remnants we were surveying in.
I am truly blown away everyday at how much everything links up with everything else. We still have such a small knowledge of this interconnectedness around us. They say Fungi is the Forgotten Kingdom but we are working to change this across the Central Tablelands. I can’t wait until next May!!!
The CSIRO did a study published in 2009 ‘Fungus diversity in revegetated paddocks compared with remnant woodland‘ in the area around Holbrook which is an interesting read if you wanted to have a look at it.
You can also check out this article recently produced by The Conversation ‘Beyond Flora and Fauna: Why it’s time to include fungi in global conservation goals‘ which further discusses the importance of fungi in our ecosystems and life.
Special thanks goes to all the partners who helped to make this event possible. They include Central Tablelands Local Land Services, Saving our Species, the Environmental Trust and also the Biodiversity Conservation Trust.
Listening to the Lachlan
By Trudi Refshauge (Note: this BLOG does not cover all conference topics and issues)
Listening to the Lachlan was a two-day conference, held in Forbes, 21st and 22nd June 2022, exploring social, economic, ecological, and cultural issues currently connecting to the Lachlan River.
Stakeholders from the Upper Lachlan (Reids Flat) to the lower Macquarie Marshes, joined irrigators, ecologists, engineers, graziers, first nations peoples, politicians, and government agents, offering facts, feelings, reports, and concerns about the Lachlan River.
Central West Lachlan Landcare, Mid-Lachlan Landcare, Lachlandcare and Hovells Creek Landcare sent representation.
The Issues (The following conference questions revealed several key issues)
Do more dams make more water? Is raising the Wyangala Dam wall robbing Peter to pay Paul? (e.g., will downstream farmers gain water security while upstream farmers lose their productive grazing lands?
Does Raising a Dam wall make sense, if it means drowning a critically threatened Grassy Box Woodland? (NOTE: 1 % of this ancient Eucalypt ecosystem remains in the Central West, having cleared most woodlands for agriculture).
The proposed Wyangala Dam wall upgrade will require a vehicle movement about every 33 seconds during the build, and every second vehicle will be a heavy truck. 875,000 truckloads of earth and gravel, equaling one truck every 18 minutes for four years. How will this effect local roads, or the people, livestock and native fauna that share the road?
Will irrigating from the Lachlan River become more expensive than irrigating with bottled water? (A $2 billion upgrade = $30,000 per mega-litre).
Can the dam be managed for both flood and drought mitigation (meaning it will need to be kept full but have air-space at the same time)?
The Lachlan River’s catchment is disconnected from the Murray-Darling Basin. Has it missed out on critical funding for water efficiency programs and largely been forgotten by government?
How do we value ducks and native fish populations opposed to irrigation production systems?
How can The River’s connected flood plains and wetlands be maintained in a hotter, drying climate?
Country is currently and noticeably drying from the bottom up (small and medium size flood/flow events have stopped and major flow events are now smaller). The downstream floodplains have dried out since the 1971 raising of the Wyangala Dam wall, so what will happen if the wall is raised higher?
What effects has the decline of 71 % of water coming into the Great Cumbung swamp had on water birds (as water birds eat grass-hoppers, does bird loss contribute to pest plagues and ecosystem decline?
Has ‘The River’ become a (turbid and sand-clogged) pipeline for irrigators and towns as opposed to a once sacred common, offering clear water, food, and access to all?
Has the introduced system of trading water moved all the power to the high-end user and is this fair?
Australian National University researcher discussed Forbes railway line as contributing to existing flood problems for Forbes and suggested their were engineering solutions to mitigate this issue.
Cultural issues????
The Solutions
- Transfer costs of building Wyangala Dam wall to invest in alternative water security measures;
- Develop systems that both utilize groundwater and allow for full aquifer recharge
- Instill water treatment plants for towns to reuse and recycle storm and waste water
- Support irrigators to update and improve their water efficiency (e.g. pipelines)
- Allow more flows to flood plains allowing waterbirds and other native species to flourish
- Control all land erosion sites that contribute to the existing and growing sand slug
- Protect and restore a long-term water plan supporting people and food security as well as indigenous culture and ecological diversity (particularly protecting water bird and native fish breeding habitats).
Key Facts
- The Lachlan River is the 4th longest river system in Australia.
- It is the only river with a decreasing channel capacity, that terminates inland (into the Great Cumbung Swamp).
- There is a complex system of governance aligned to the River and its wetlands (independent rules exist for irrigators, towns and each of the following systems; Lake Cowal, Lake Brewster, The Great Cumbung Swamp, the Macquarie Marshes).
- There is currently an expanding 150-kilometre-long sand slug moving downstream from Wyangala Dam, filling and suffocating fish breeding holes, causing localized flooding beneath bridges, and becoming problematic to irrigators.
- Since 1971 (construction Wyangala Dam wall 2), Macquarie Marshes has flipped from being a wet, constantly flooded system to a dry, occasionally flooded system.
Concluding statement from Macquarie Marshes farmer Garry Hall
“Climate change is real and it’s here and we all need to Listen to the Lachlan to help it survive.”
A huge congratulations to Pennie Scott (a Canowindra local) who organised this special conference.
Mid Lachlan Landcare 