LDC welcomes new leader Jesse to the helm

Welcome Jesseca Carver, Project Manager for the Landholders Driving Change project:

Hello! 

I’m Jesse and I’m excited to join the NQ Dry Tropics team as the Project Manager for Landholders Driving Change (LDC) that is rolling out in the Bowen, Broken and Bogie (BBB) region. 

I’m a North Queensland girl — born and bred — and come to the team with a background in natural resource and spatial planning. I like to see the big picture of the landscape but also have an appreciation for the finer details that can make the vision happen. I also believe I have something to learn from everybody I meet, so I am looking forward to meeting you all. 

I decided to jump ship when I read about the exciting and forward-thinking work the Landholders Driving Change project had designed and developed during the past five years.

It was encouraging to see the initiative of the BBB community to engage in a vision of making positive landscape change. Let’s be honest, change starts with ourselves first and with you (the landholders) as the drivers of the change, along with the right support to help facilitate change, great things can happen.

I have spoken with a few graziers who have implemented practice change with their grazing management and are now reaping the rewards. It’s evident that they: 

      • had a vision of the extra potential of their properties;
      • had a growth mindset and took opportunities to find out and apply the latest information available to them;
      • accessed co-investment to help wear some of the risk in making the practice change shift; and 
      • had support and check-ins along the way provided by the LDC project.

Through this they were able to keep their valuable soil resources, rehydrate their paddocks, increase their pasture yields and, as you can imagine, they had positive flow-on benefits to their business, well-being and families… almost like getting an extra property!

If you like the idea of having the productivity potential of more property on the same patch, get in contact with the NQ Dry Tropics Grazing Team in the Bowen office.

They can sit with you and work through opportunities available to you this year and next year. They can also help determine if there are any gaps they can help bridge in terms of funding and training. 

I’ve only been in the role for two months and it’s been big shoes to fill. It’s also been a very busy time formulating a draft Regional Program Plan to inform how NQ Dry Tropics will deliver the $23 million investment by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF), for water quality outcomes.

This plan will support LDC’s Grazing, Land Remediation and Other Land Managers activity areas. We  look forward to sharing this with you in the coming months.

 

Reef regulations - grazing, standard conditions

  1. For land in good or fair condition (more than 50 per cent ground cover at 30 September), continue using measures to maintain land condition.
  2. For land in poor condition (less than 50 per cent ground cover at 30 September), steps must be taken to improve land condition.
  3. For land in degraded condition (less than 20 per cent ground cover at 30 September), steps must be taken to improve land condition OR prevent areas from further degrading or expanding.
  4. Keep records of measures taken and also of agricultural chemicals, fertiliser and mill mud or mill ash applied to land.
KEQ #8

KEQ #7
KEQ #6

KEQ #5

KEQ #4

The LDC project monitors four gully sites (represented in this table) with gold standard equipment and analysis, carried out by CSIRO.

Results have been compiled in a preliminary report from Bartley et al (2020), with the final report expected to be released by the end of 2020. The preliminary report shows all four sites have indicators of improvements, notably the Strathbogie and Mt Wickham sites.

KEQ #3

*The Exploring New Incentives activity area has provided an opportunity for graziers to adopt improved land management practices through a range of activities. For some of these properties, it was the first time they signed contracts for on-ground works.

KEQ #1

Figure 1. Total fine sediment reduction by project type and erosion source. Inset shows the proportion of the total project area for each project type.

These estimates have been calculated using two methods: 

1) The pollutant reduction component of the Alluvium/Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF) investment tool for hillslope and streambank erosion management projects; 

2) The Reef Trust Gully Toolbox method for gully erosion management projects. The LDC Water Quality Report 2020 (Waterhouse et al., 2020) highlights that a number of assumptions underlay these calculations, therefore these figures should be treated as the best available estimate of sediment reductions to date.

Preventing sediment from reaching the Great Barrier Reef

Each wet season sediment is washed into local waterways and out to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). 

Most sediment is very fine, and can stay suspended for a long time and can travel great distances. Valuable topsoil is lost from production, and increased concentrations on the reef can be harmful to seagrasses and corals. 

Landholders in the BBB have completed 69 on-ground water quality practice changes, and it is estimated that these have contributed a fine sediment reduction of 6,154 tonnes per year from reaching the GBR. 

Of this, approximately half of the sediment savings are attributable to grazing land management changes on hillslopes and streambanks, and the other half as a result of gully remediation treatments across a broad range of scales, as shown in the graphs above. 

The table below also highlights the relatively small area of intervention in the gully management projects compared to the large sediment savings that these can achieve - 60 per cent of the sediment savings over only 4 per cent of the project area.

Table 1. Estimated sediment reductions (tonnes) from projects completed in the LDC Project to date.

KEQ #2

*GLMWW = Grazing Land Management Wire and Water

Published by four titlesCirculation - 8,780

Published by four titlesCirculation - 8,780

Published by four titlesCirculation - 8, 780

 

Published by two titlesCirculation - 4,006

Published by four titlesCirculation - 8,780

 

 

 

 

Published by one titleCirculation - 7,207

 

 

 

Published by two titlesCirculation - 9,965

 

 

 

Published in The Northern MinerCirculation - 2,041