Land and Water Link
December 2004
Betting the farm future
The communities that are part of CSIRO’s Heartlands program are
putting their land where their hearts are in a series of projects designed
to improve the sustainability of agricultural landscapes.
‘We get pretty excited about this,’ says Heartlands
farmer Stuart Hulme, ‘because it’s about change, about doing
something a little different to the mainstream, having a bit of vision.’
A fifth generation farmer in the New South Wales Holbrook
area, Stuart and his wife Leanne run the 470 hectare ‘Binginwarri’,
one of the more than 270 properties involved in land use change projects
through Heartlands.
Heartlands – a partnership between CSIRO, the Murray-Darling
Basin Commission, state agencies, catchment management authorities
and local landcare groups – links scientific research to long-term
landscape change projects in four focus catchments in Victoria and New
South Wales.
Investing in revegetation, the Hulme family has four separate
trials running on their cropping property. A ‘re-birding’
site boasts native revegetation they are hoping will improve biodiversity,
and prevent the tree die-back prevalent in the area. Resources have also
been committed to a long-term hardwood farm forestry trial, with the planting
of 41 hectares of hardwood natives.
 Stuart
cites the value of biodiversity, as well as a boost to their property
value, as major incentives for such long-term investment. ‘But if
Heartlands hadn’t come up with the support for it, we probably wouldn’t
have taken the plunge’, he says.
In addition to the scientific merit of the forestry trial,
the plantation has other flow-on benefits for the farm and Billabong Creek
Catchment. ‘We’re assuming this site is helping recharge local
groundwater systems’, Stuart explains. ‘So if we get the trees
here to send down some nice deep roots they’ll soak up some of that
excess rainfall that’s causing salinity discharge downstream into
the Murray system.’
CSIRO Land and Water scientist Dr Hamish Cresswell says
there is a range of motivations for landholders to get involved in Heartlands.
‘Many are driven by a land stewardship ethic, leaving the farm better
than it was when they took it over,’ he says. ‘So, while lots
of people see farm forestry as being their superannuation, the motivations
behind trying new ideas and methods aren’t just financial.’
During the early days of Heartlands, Dr Cresswell recalls
spending hours ‘sitting down over the kitchen table with these landholders
and just listening to their thoughts, their visions, their concerns’,
to ensure the science reflected the needs of the Heartlands communities
as well as those of the other stakeholders.
This level of engagement has encouraged great community
interest in the CSIRO research, with initiatives like mosaic farming,
which looks at better matching crops, pastures and trees to landscape
and soil properties, and in multiple objective catchment planning to better
target land use change.
Hamish Cresswell hopes that Heartlands will ‘give
a clearer understanding of how you can influence groundwater systems,
surface hydrology and the native ecosystems – and how you can do
all this in a way that compliments and supports agriculture.’
‘We are providing a stronger scientific basis for
investment in land use change in the catchments and a better targeting
of investment, but it’s too early to be able to measure clear catchment-scale
environmental change from our programs.’
Barry Oswald is the Heartlands program manager for Goulburn-Broken
Catchment Management Authority in Northern Victoria’s Honeysuckle
Creek Catchment, and is responsible for focusing investment ‘on
the ground’ in that catchment. He acts as the link between CSIRO
and the catchment’s 480 landowners, helping to source and target
the nearly $250,000 in annual grants that go into high priority issues
around the catchment, including dryland salinity, enhancing water quality
and increasing biodiversity.
Barry Oswald says the Heartlands program has strong local
support, with CSIRO’s science instrumental in achieving more effective
investment in land use change. He adds that Heartlands attracts many visitors
to the area each year for a first-hand look at the work. These include
universities, Landcare and tree-growing groups, and international delegations.
‘We’re turning things around’,
he says of the Honeysuckle Creek Heartlands catchment. ‘There’s
a better understanding of the environment now than there was just a few
years ago, and a willingness to try something new.
Further information:
www.clw.csiro.au/heartlands/
CSIRO contact:
Dr Hamish Cresswell
Ph: +61-2-6246 5933
By Cris Kennedy
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