More and more farmers are choosing to combine conservation with agriculture and the benefits are paying off.
Helen Huggins is back on the once mighty merino sheep station in the southern Riverina, near the New South Wales-Victoria border, that she used to call home.
"This runs through my blood, this property. All good memories of a lovely and happy childhood."
She and her brothers used to ride horses through the paddocks of Savernake Station, touching the tops of the saplings.
"We just used to go flat out through all these trees like you do when you're young. I was a bit like a tomboy. I just went into nature, and I'd ride my pony and take in all this."
"But things have changed. The trees have gotten bigger. You could bend some of them over [then] but you wouldn't be doing that now," she says.
Other things have changed too.
Huggins is one of a growing number of Australian farmers opting to combine conservation with agriculture, and dedicating a portion of their land to save Australia's threatened biodiversity.
Conservationists before their time
Savernake Station is renowned for its pastoral history, but also for its large white cypress pines and other old trees.
These provide habitat for about 80 species of birds, including vulnerable species such as the diamond firetail and dusky wood swallow.
The woodland survives because previous generations of her family, the Sloane family, fenced off part of the property in the early 1900s.
They appreciated the bushland and understood that the sandy soils of this section of the property made it less suitable for grazing.
"We wouldn't have had any sheep or cattle here for over 100 years. So [we're grateful for] the foresight of my previous generations to have locked this area up.
"They were conservationists before their time, especially my father, who put into all his children that we looked after the country and the country looked after you," Huggins says.
She took his words to heart. In 2018, she signed a conservation agreement with the New South Wales Biodiversity Conservation Trust to protect her portion of Savernake Station. She has registered the protection of 355 hectares on the property's title, setting the arrangement in place forever.
The agreement with the trust requires the land be preserved as woodland, and weeds and feral animals like rabbits and foxes must be controlled.
In return, Huggins receives an annual indexed payment.
Her current home, Woodpark, is 90 kilometres away from Savernake Station. In 2018, she and husband Owen introduced a similar, in-perpetuity arrangement on their merino stud. They've fenced off a quarter of their 7,600-hectare property for conservation and the results are impressive.
Saltbush, butterbush, boree trees and river red gums are regenerating, and the calls of the critically endangered plains-wanderer have been heard on Woodpark.
A devastating bushfire in January 1987 marked a turning point for the couple and their approach to farming on the property.
"A lot of the stock were removed. We had no real rain till June that year. As late as May, there was still clouds of black, swirling dust and loose sand. Rain eventually came and what we began to see was how the land could recover if we let it," Owen Huggins says.
After thinking deeply about how a conservation agreement and lower stock numbers may impact the income and land value of Woodpark, they agreed that the benefits outweighed any reservations.
The environmental benefits have flow-on effects — the merino wool produced on Woodpark has just been given sustainable certification by New Zealand Merino and will be sold into the premium market. They also receive a premium price for their beef cattle.
Nature-based solutions
The ANU's Professor David Lindenmayer is a leading expert on forest ecology and conservation science.
He supports paying farmers who are willing to protect habitat on their property, provided there's strong monitoring and transparency about what's happening on the ground.
"Approximately 55 per cent of Australia's land mass is private land that's used for agriculture and grazing. Those areas have enormous opportunities to restore the vegetation cover in part [and] better balance agricultural production [with] biodiversity," he says.
There are also opportunities for carbon capture and storage, he adds.
Professor Lindenmayer cites Australia's stark record on biodiversity loss as a reason for trying new approaches. There have been 34 mammal extinctions since colonisation and there are big declines in frogs and reptiles. One in six Australian birds are now threatened.
"And beyond that, some species are occupying only a tiny part of their former range, like the greater bilby which once lived across vast areas of Australia," he says.
Recent research led by a University of Queensland team has found that 48 per cent of Australia's threatened species' distributions occur on private freehold land – and that conservation on farmland is critical to threatened species' recovery.
Professor Lindenmayer says it's paradoxical that there is so much emphasis on putting trees and shrubs back into the landscape, while legislation still allows large amounts of land clearing, especially in New South Wales and Queensland.
"Most people don't realize that there's still an enormous amount of land clearing going on in Australia. Land clearing directly removes habitat [and] animals can't survive without access to habitat."
Improving and protecting habitat on privately owned land in Australia's farming districts is essential and he says there are increasing benefits for farmers.
"There's an understanding that the loss of biodiversity is as equally serious as rapid changes in climate and that they go together.
"People are starting to talk about what we call nature-based solutions to the climate problem that have co-benefits. That's conserving biodiversity, storing more carbon, reducing carbon emissions. So these things go hand-in-glove," he says.
How carbon farming should work
Brendan Fletcher frowns as he checks the weed growth in the paddocks of Thornhill Station.
Fletcher is an Indigenous ranger for the Gidarjil Development Corporation in Southern Queensland.
The Indigenous group owns three former cattle stations all about an hour's drive inland from Bundaberg, near Gin Gin and Bulburin National Park.
All three properties have been returned to the traditional owners, the Meeroni people.
But the upfront costs of revegetation are a major barrier to restoring land, says Gidargil's business development manager Angela Huston.
So Gidarjil is taking part in the pilot of an agricultural stewardship scheme that opens new revenue sources for farmers interested in conservation.
The stewardship scheme, designed in part by Professor Lindenmayer and his ANU colleague Professor Andrew Macintosh, includes a carbon and biodiversity pilot program.
And under the pilot program, Gidarjil received an upfront payment of just over $200,000 from the federal government to revegetate part of one of their properties, Thornhill Station.
This funding, along with income from other sources, has allowed them to remove cattle from the properties and the group no longer needs to rely on revenue from cattle agistment.
“The vision now is to continue to restore the open paddocks to forest,” Huston says.
Fletcher, who is also a traditional owner, will do a cool winter burn on Thornhill Station to get rid of weeds and prepare the small but significant site for tree planting.
Because each project in the pilot is registered under Australia's Emissions Reduction Fund, the trees will earn Gidarjil carbon credits. These should increase as the trees grow.
Carbon credits are units representing carbon reduction that are bought and sold like stocks. Companies like airlines buy them to offset their carbon footprint.
The ANU's Professor Andrew Macintosh, who recently exposed the rorts in Australia's carbon market, says the Gidarjil project is best practice – it's how carbon farming should work.
"[The tree planting] is likely to generate positive benefits for biodiversity because the plantings must be established and managed in accordance with biodiversity planting protocols," Macintosh says.
Huston says the opportunity to earn money from carbon farming and habitat creation shifts the dial for Indigenous landholders.
"It changes dramatically. It allows our people to be on country doing what we do best, looking after country, making it healthier. That in itself is a reward.
"But to be able to gain an ongoing revenue stream from that is important, it means that there's less reliance on any government funding."
Fletcher can't wait to start planting out a diverse range of species to create extra habitat for locally threatened species such as the long-nosed potoroo and the silver-headed antechinus. He'll also continue working to control feral pigs.
"I love getting up in the morning coming to work. It is what I do. It's my drive, it's my passion to manage country."
A better use for the land?
Greg Rummery farms dryland crops on the flat, clay floodplains of the Namoi River near Walgett in north-western NSW.
His 1,000-hectare farm is small by local standards, but in 2019 he decided to retain about a quarter of his property for conservation.
The fenced-off area forms a corridor of green along the banks of the river, with a mix of older trees and newer regrowth.
The river red gums and coolabah trees still bear the high-water marks from the 2021 floods.
Rummery says a common practice in his district would be to farm crops like wheat or lentils on the flat floodplain and run beef cattle along the river, providing farmers with two sources of income.
"But rather than trying to generate a dollar out of that by running stock in there and having them graze down to the waterline on the river and using the river as the boundary, I thought there's got to be a better way."
When the Biodiversity Conservation Trust called for expressions of interest from landholders in the Walgett district in 2018, Rummery says it struck a chord.
"Maybe there's a better use for [that land] than trying to farm it or trying to flog it with stock. You know, that's the bit that needs incentivising," he says.
Rummery's annual payment of just over $20,000 requires him to allow regrowth to continue, control weeds and keep on top of fox and wild pig numbers. The agreement runs for 15 years.
After extreme drought conditions between 2013-15 and again from 2017-19, Rummery says the benefits of diversifying income became clear.
"Effectively, in those drought years, we didn't have any farm income. So the income from the biodiversity agreement was valuable. It's only a small contribution, though."
The idea is catching on, Rummery says.
He also works as a consultant agronomist and he has helped six other landholders sign similar conservation deals.
"It was a bit left field when I first signed up. There was a bit of scepticism. Let's move beyond that. And let's encourage all private landholders to look at their landholding and go, 'You know what, that bit down there is interesting or important.'"
"It's putting a dollar value on conservation. It's saying conservation is a real land use."
There's a new focus on the role of private land conservation — the federal Threatened Species Strategy Action Plan for 2021-26 promotes working with land managers and includes targets such as increasing the area managed for conservation by 50 million hectares.
And key players in the on-the-ground conservation sector, including Bush Heritage, Landcare and Australian Wildlife Conservancy, have recently formed the Australian Land Conservation Alliance.
One of the Alliance's aims is to encourage commercial models that fund conservation and land restoration.
Whether these goals will be enough to stop ongoing habitat loss and Australia's growing list of threatened and endangered species remains to be seen.
But their future hangs in the balance.
ABC RN's Shifting Cultures series is a co-production with the BBC World Service. Listen for free on the ABC listen app or search for Earshot on your favourite podcast app.
Credits:
- Reporting, photography and video: Belinda Sommer for Shifting Cultures
- Additional photography and video: Sophie Kesteven and NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust
- Editor and digital producer: Alexandra Spring
- Video production: Sophie Kesteven
- Series supervising producer: Claudia Taranto
