Demonstrating productive, regenerative Burdekin grazing practices

Summary

Historical grazing management in the Bowen, Broken, and Bogie River (BBB) catchment involved large, set stocked paddocks with opportunistic wet season spelling, leading to declining land condition and increased dominance of Indian couch, which impacted pasture quality and animal production.

To address these challenges, regenerative graziers adopted sophisticated grazing management, business, and production approaches. A project supported three regenerative graziers in the BBB catchment to improve their operations, with a focus on broader application in the Burdekin Dry Tropics. Remote sensing data showed that regenerative grazing practices resulted in comparable or better land condition and ground cover outcomes than set stocking.

Stations like Strathalbyn and Glenalpine saw increased stock numbers and productivity, while Dartmoor Station used larger mob sizes for rotational grazing. ProfitProbe data from Glenalpine indicated improvements in production and business metrics. Overall, regenerative grazing practices proved to be as effective or better than set stocking, benefiting the wider industry in the Burdekin Dry Tropics.

Objectives

By February 2025, in the Broken, Bowen and Bogie River Catchments (the BBB) of the Burdekin Dry Tropics:

1. Four grazing operations will demonstrate that planned livestock grazing programs, aimed at increasing soil biological activity and stimulating the production of high quality pasture, are as good as or better than traditional set stocking practices across a range of performance measures (including kg red meat / Hectare)

○ in a range of grazing environments and at both a paddock and whole of property scale
○ by varying the frequency and/or intensity of grazing events
○ ensuring adequate pasture recovery & maintaining appropriate end of dry season ground cover
○ undertaking simple measures of pasture production (e.g. forage budgets) and utilisation (e.g. stock days/ha/mm rainfall), improved comparative ground cover (e.g. VegMachine), land condition (Patchkey) and soil health measures on comparative sites.

2. Evaluate herd performance and profitability (e.g. kg of production/ha and gross margins) of the demonstration practices against set stocked paddocks and through benchmarking against established regenerative grazing operations.

3. Produce three case studies outlining the outcomes of the demonstrations at a range of scales i.e. site, paddock, and property.

4. 75% of the core businesses will adopt relevant aspects of the grazing practices and an additional 5 producers will trial the practices.

5. Conduct a total of 5 field events, including an annual field day and other extension activities to showcase the demonstration site results.

6. Through the field events, print and social media releases, interactions with the broader regeneration grazing network across the region, promote and encourage adoption of key practices by 50 attendees participating in the project activities.

Key findings

Remote sensing data indicated that land condition and ground cover outcomes for regenerative grazing practices were comparable to set stocked paddocks. At Strathalbyn and Glenalpine, stock numbers and productivity increased with new grazing management practices, while Dartmoor used larger mob sizes for rotational grazing without a decline in ground cover or land condition.

Key grazing management observations included:

• Increased paddock numbers and water point distribution led to better pasture utilization and reduced preferential grazing.
• More paddocks provided flexibility for herd and pasture management, aiding recovery and increasing pasture biomass.
• Weed management and pasture improvement enhanced forage availability and nutrition.
• Forage budgeting and planned grazing improved herd management and pasture use, allowing stock adjustment based on rainfall patterns.

ProfitProbe data from Glenalpine showed:

• Consistent meat production per hectare and improved efficiency in converting rainfall to beef.
• Steady increase in margin per kg of beef sold, reaching $2.01/kg in 2023.
• Lower cost of production compared to other producers since 2016.

Grazier attendance and feedback highlighted the importance of practical projects and extension in advancing grazing industry practices.

Benefits to industry

The regenerative grazing practices being utilised on the demonstration properties, and across properties within the Collinsville region regenerative grazier network, were demonstrated to be as good as or better than previous set stocking practices on those properties, across a range of production and business measures.

The practices can be broadly adopted as indicated by the changes of practice observed at the many field events (across seven local properties) and by the widespread adoption of regenerative grazing practices across the three core and another six project network properties.

Discussions with owners and managers of the regenerative grazing properties suggested that there was no simple “formula” or approach taken to regenerative grazing practices. There was emphasis on a range of principles which were applied to decision making. The main grazing management principles to emerge (and the actual practices being implemented) converged on the following:

• Increasing the distribution of watering points, in conjunction with fencing out smaller paddocks around each watering point.
• Planned rotation of cattle mobs. Size of mobs and duration of graze in each paddock needs to be based on forage budgeting while pasture “rest” (or recovery) periods tend to be much longer than a 1-2 month wet season spell.
• Retaining sufficient ground cover and pasture integrity to allow triggering of ongoing growth cycles e.g. through repeated short duration grazes.

MLA action

MLA continues to deliver the Producer Demonstration Site (PDS) program, supporting livestock producers working in peer-to-peer groups to pursue new skills, knowledge and management practices applicable to their own commercial livestock production systems.

Future research

The project team identified that the related CSIRO research project found a dearth of scientific literature on regenerative grazing practices despite widespread adoption of regenerative grazing practices in Australia and the observed strong interest in the Burdekin region.

The recommendation from the CSIRO research project is relevant to the MLA PDS, and illustrative of the need to further investigate regenerative grazing practices in the Burdekin Dry Tropics, and more generally in northern Australia. “Although there are indications that regenerative grazing can lead to improvements in land condition, this study (the CSIRO project) does not enable us to conclude whether regenerative grazing will accelerate improvements compared with other best practice grazing land management approaches, and further research on the social and economic dimensions of regenerative grazing is needed.”

The recorded production and business benefits of this PDS provides strong evidence that more detailed research on regenerative grazing practices in northern Australia should be undertaken.