Woolgrowers embrace green and gold

The findings from a five-year, $40 million research project in the Australian wool industry show woolgrowers see a green future for their golden fleece.

Land, Water & Wool, a collaboration between Australian Wool Innovation and Land & Water Australia, was the wool industry’s biggest ever research project into natural resource management.

The program’s final report released this week, titled Managing for Sustainable Profit, identified new ways in which woolgrowers can increase profits and productivity, while at the same time managing the environment to ensure the industry remains sustainable.

The project collated grower case studies and scientific input across six specific areas – sustainable grazing on saline land, native vegetation and biodiversity, rivers and water quality, managing pastoral country, climate risk management, and future woolscapes.

It identified the potential to earn more and farm sustainably through:

* The use of improved climate management methods such as seasonal risk assessments [__SRA__] that assess the likelihood of rainfall at particular times of the year and help growers match livestock numbers to probable feed availability with greater confidence. SRA’s were shown to increase profits by 60 cents/ha or $17,000 for a typical Queensland pastoral property. They can also be used to set ‘trigger points’ to decide when to de-stock or buy in supplementary fodder;

* The planting of new salt-tolerant pasture species to recover saline land. Land, Wool & Water research has identified productive options for about half the 1.2 million hectares of woolgrowing land affected by salinity. Whole farm modelling in the southern WA wheatbelt shows that saltland pasture can yield around $4000 a year extra on a 2000ha farm, based on revegetating 50 ha of moderately saline land. However establishment costs and returns on saltland pastures vary greatly from farm to farm.

* The development of new technologies to assess environmental health on farm, including satellite imagery in remote pastoral country to monitor pasture conditions, and an online ‘health check’ to enable temperate zone woolgrowers to measure their farm’s performance against regional biodiversity benchmarks;

* Improved grazing methods for native pastures. In Victoria, deferred grazing and intensive rotational grazing strategies on hill country were most likely to result in extra profits (after an initial capital investment of about $30/ha, returns generated up to an extra $27/ha/yr.) These strategies can be applied to more than one tenth of the area grazed by sheep in south-eastern Australia.

Land, Water & Wool also brought together leading growers and technical experts to explore what the wool industry might look like by 2030, taking into account potential new uses for wool, the changing face of the consumer, environmental and animal welfare pressures and new technologies. The resultant scenarios describe four very different worlds.

Tom Dunbabin, Chair of the wool industry’s Sustainable Wool Advisory Group, says as custodians of the land, woolgrowers are aware of community expectations, and take pride in how they care for it.

“Most growers are keenly aware that the regulation of animal welfare and natural resource management is becoming stricter and more intrusive, and the wool industry wants to ensure high voluntary standards of resource management as a way of minimising external interference.”

A cost benefit analysis of Land, Water & Wool estimated that the program had delivered results leading to improvements in woolgrowing productivity in the order of $156.08 million dollars.