Demonstrating productive, regenerative Burdekin grazing practices
| Project start date: | 25 February 2020 |
| Project end date: | 28 February 2025 |
| Project status: | In progress |
| Livestock species: | Grass-fed Cattle |
| Relevant regions: | Queensland |
| Site location: | Collinsville QLD; Bowen QLD |
Summary
This Producer Demonstration Site aims to demonstrate that regenerative grazing practices result in improvements in soil health, pasture production and diversity, and herd performance in the Collinsville region of 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.
Progress
The Demonstrating productive, regenerative Burdekin grazing practices project is managed by NQ Dry Tropics NRM, through project coordinator Rod Kerr. The project aims to assist the Collinsville Region Regenerative Grazier Network to develop and progress their current regenerative grazing practices to the next level. This project is working with a demonstration group of three regenerative graziers in the Collinsville region of the Burdekin catchment, north Queensland, to support the development and improvement of their regenerative grazing operations, with emphasis on suitability of application for the Burdekin Dry Tropics. Technical consultant Dick Richardson, Natures Equity, is providing 1:1 and extension support to the graziers. Project results from ProfitProbe analysis indicate very significant production and financial benefits post implementation of new practices on one of the core project properties.
