Cattle graze on grass cover interspersed by brigalow shelter belts on Essex, Middlemount in Central Queensland.
Central Queensland cattle producing families say they couldn’t be happier to share the stories of how they manage their land, trees, grass and water with the world.
But, despite being at the centre of an ongoing land management debate being led by environmental activists, academics and corporate food giants, they fear their voice is the only one not being heard at all.
Last week Beef Central spent four days visiting cattle producing families across Central Queensland.
Each has been managing their properties for decades, and in many cases for multiple generations.
Management practices that work against nature don’t tend to stand the test of time, they point out.
Ian McCamley, Lowesby, Rolleston.
“Increasing productivity and having better environmental outcomes go hand-in-hand,” Rolleston cattle producer Ian McCamley observed as he drove along a fence line separating dense ‘whipstick’ brigalow trees on one side and a paddock of knee-high grass interspersed with large shade trees on the other.
“Our management has given us better ground cover and deeper-rooted plants,” he explained.
“We are going to get more moisture in the soil which basically turns a drier environment into a less dry environment, and then you get better species following along.
“It is just a big cycle and if we’re allowed to keep the deep-rooted trees and get rid of the shallow-rooted ones which are causing erosion, that is a great environmental outcome and an economic productive outcome.
“I think so much of the community doesn’t get that.”
Conservation groups argue that the loss of any tree is a bad outcome for the environment. But from the perspective of someone who has worked closely with and studied the landscape for his entire life, Ian believes that view is way too simplistic.
“There are good trees and bad trees,” he says.
Shallow rooted regrowth that grows thickly and scavenges all surface moisture from grass, preventing the establishment of groundcover, versus deep rooted trees around which grass grows clearly have different environmental outcomes.
As a legume, brigalow has symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its roots. Many of the landholders pointed out that brigalow trees have followed a pattern over time of being razed by fire and growing back again. This natural cycle has re-fertilised the quality agricultural soils of the brigalow belt over eons.
Josie Angus and David Hill standing in remnant brigalow scrub.
“Fire governed this nation, that was just the reality of it, everyone knows it, no one disputes that as science,” Josie Angus from Kimberley Station north of Clermont explained.
“We’ve now got a bunch of different tools that allow us to create that circulation but with a little bit more finesse than a wildfire used to.
“So we can go around the dear old Bottle Tree and we can make a choice to leave a strip or a clump, we can choose which trees we leave, all of these things mechanical tools give us the ability to do, while still generating that natural cycle that land needed or wanted.”
In that regard brigalow is the “goose the laid the golden egg”, she said.
“We’ve got this great native tree that happens to be a legume. We might grow that paddock of bio-fertiliser for 20 years and then no matter what you do to it comes back.
“But the great part is that it does come back.
“So we’re one of the only agricultural systems on the face of the planet where most of us are not using inputted fossil fuel fertilisers.
“The brigalow tree affords us that.”
300km further south at Rolleston Ian McCamley makes the same point: “We now have the ability to target specific areas of regrowth,” he said.
“Rather than the old blanket approach, what we can now do is more targeted, just the pick the regrowth where you’re losing groundcover around trees and just take those out,
“It is just an ebb and flow to maintain good ground cover.”
Lydia, Elizabeth and David Hill, Clarkwood, Clarke Creek.
Maintaining year ground cover is simply non-negotiable, David Hill at Clark Creek, about 200km northwest of Rockhampton, maintains.
“I won’t cop bare ground,” he says.
More than 50 percent of his second-generation family property Clarkwood is remnant vegetation.
The remainder has been developed and sown to improved pastures including deep rooted legumes to maximise productivity.
But the Hills also plan to plant more trees on their open grass paddocks. “Cattle do better in paddocks with trees,” David notes.
About 60km further west at Middlemount, Peter Quinn flies us over his 16,000ha (40,000ac) aggregation in an R44 chopper.
Essex, Marlborough.
From the air the scenes that unfold below are of dense grass covering every paddock, bordered on each side by extensive brigalow shelter belts.
What becomes quickly apparent is that the only visible bare dirt is on the ground directly underneath the brigalow stands in the shelter belts, where little sunlight can penetrate.
Later, back on land and walking through the same paddocks, “ground truthing” reinforces the same story.
Knee-high grass mixed with deep rooted legumes such as the Desmanthus variety Progardes blankets each paddock.
The retained brigalow scrub in some of the shelter belts has not been touched for up to 30 years and is back to what could be considered close to its natural state.
As this video shows there is little but bare dirt between trees.
“Trees are seen by some as the be all and end all but I would argue in some cases we get more environmental damage from trees,” Peter says.
Peter Quinn pictured with grass finished bullocks on Essex, Marlborough. Earlier this year the Quinns were named Most Successful Exhibitor in the Beef 2024 Commercial Cattle Championships.
“Virgin scrub ground is erodible, with breakaway steep little gullies and erosion, which can lead to lower water quality entering the reef.
“But in the grassed areas those gullies are not like that.
“Water quality is a lot better when we have groundcover like we have across much of this country.
“Flying over our dams you can see two feet deep into the water. Our dam water is as clear as the Great Barrier Reef water.
“The ground cover means water retention, better soil health and microbial activity in your soils, the difference is unbelievable.”
Josie Angus says the circularity of brigalow management can be equated to a long-term rotational graze.
“You pretty much go from a 100 percent agricultural system, which is when you have got it nicely grassed off (following a clearing event), and then over a period of the next 25 years you go back to almost zero in terms of agricultural use, and that is just that life cycle.
Breeders in a grass paddock on Clarkwood, Clarke Creek.
“There is no time mandate on it, and probably the longer the rest and the longer that cycle takes better the better the ultimate outcome.
“But it is no different really than rotational grazing – it is a rotation and a cycle.
“But that is where people don’t realise that this discussion around deforestation and mandates on time and all the rest of it is actively discouraging people from using trees in their landscape.
“Even rewilding rules require active management of vegetation, such as coppicing and selection of species. It is not lock it up and walk away.”
Ian McCamley says that while a lot of people look at cattle and other things when they drive around, he looks at ground cover.
“To me, if we sat down in a room and you included green groups and people from the middle of Sydney, it doesn’t matter, I think we would all agree that best the ground cover we can get is a good thing.
“The key limiting factor in this environment is water in the soil.
“I didn’t say rainfall, I said water in the soil.
“Because you can have rainfall and it all runs off, but if you have ground cover and can keep it in the soil and if there is any runoff it is clear, then that is going to build everything and off we go.”
It occurs to me that the undertone throughout this article is that the landscape is all the better off having been flattened with a chain and blade ploughed into a near monoculture of buffel grass.
Only once, as a backhanded sidenote in the Essex video, was the landscape referred as habitat.
Mature trees ARE the habitat. With all their dropped limbs and imperfections they harbor innumerable species. Even old Brigalow. These have been removed. The habitat has been removed from large swathes of beef production landscapes.
The birds and the bees do not live in a water cycle or ground cover. They live in the 100 year plus aged trees. I’m not saying ground cover and water cycle are not important, I’m saying they are not enough.
The ‘birds and the bees’ is the very phrase the western world uses as analogous to fertility. If you remove the habitat for, and therefore the actual, ‘birds and the bees’ from a landscape, how long does that system last before it collapses? I’ll give you a hint…..it’s not indefinite. As stated in the article this ‘little’ experiment has only been running for 70 odd years. A geological nanosecond. Enter stage left, die back. To which the answer so desperately sought after by we grazier’s is, ‘what can we kill to fix this problem’. I digress.
By continuously ‘maintaining’ suckers, in a broad scale indiscriminate fashion and not allowing a large number of trees littered across the landscape to grow to maturity we are ‘maintaining’ the landscape in a degraded state. From the perspective of Habitat, this is an objective truth.
From this perspective the SLATS report is a measure of landscape being ‘maintained’ in a degraded state albeit a very broad brush assessment. To brush the SLATS report aside out of hand as rubbish is ,in my opinion, a great way to ensure we are not taken seriously as an industry.
The beef industry in Australia is responsible for habitat destruction on a stupendous scale. As an industry we need to acknowledge and ‘own’ this objective fact if we want to be taken seriously.
In saying that, I believe that outside ‘social media land’ the broader community is rational and will accept that what is done is done and that we can’t rewind the clock and replace an 800 year old box tree overnight.
As a grass fed beef industry if we start thinking, speaking and acting through the prism of Habitat restoration instead of the combative ‘nothing to see here, leave us alone’ stance, perhaps our voice will be heard.
Disclaimer- I, Ben Groat, am guilty of all the practices that I have denigrated in this letter. My life goal is to restore the habitat I am fortunate enough to be the custodian.
Very interesting report. I noticed that most of the properties mentioned are in the east to mid-west of the state, the black soil area. Does this principle work in the west of the state, in the red soil mulga country where there is very little or no brigalow country?
Bevin it is my experience that implementing the principals of good grazing management, including the ability to control thick multi stemmed shallow rooted regrowth, will successfully improve ground cover no matter what the region. A key principal is being able to ‘destock’ and rest paddocks to allow plants to recover to grow leaf volume and root mass. Just as important is the ability to ‘restock’ to graze the paddock again before it is over-rested meaning plants have become moribund, lignified and are shading and suppressing vital new growth. People who aren’t actively involved in grazing management sometimes advocate for the lock it up and leave it approach. Just as with any living thing the un-grazed old rank unhealthy growth is prone to attack by diseases and pests. The locked up and left, unmanaged and regressing ecosystem also becomes prone to being completely razed to the ground by extremely hot fire. It is my opinion that decision makers have an obligation to challenge the confirmation bias of some and realise that the lock it forever approach is actually harming the environment and Australian communities.
In Queensland we are hammered by legislation surrounding wild rivers, sediment run-off, tree clearing, etc. As Ian pointed out- “Moisture Retention” is the ultimate goal. More tree cover equals less ground cover equals more sediment run-off equals problems with adherence to Reef Regulations and harsher droughts. More ground cover equals more moisture retention equals cleaner run-off equals surviving longer into a dry spell without rain, also higher carbon capture. The cyclical nature of tree’s in our environment means that we will always have a certain amount of re-forrestation.
Great article – love to hear the perspective of the producers.
It is sort of ironic that those that get rewarded the most are those that did the most clearing. I am sure in Europe/UK all the forests were clear felled centuries ago and all regrowth was removed until now nothing will regrow. That heavily cleared land is all good and nice apparently.
In the areas where the article talks about, it was massively deforested in the 1950-1990’s with dozers and chains and those producers have been rewarded handsomely with amazing property values and access to high value markets because of the high fertility of the soil.
Meanwhile those areas that did not get cleared are now essentially worthless. While big companies talk about ESG and biodiversity, at the end of the day they are not going to pay someone with a rough heavily forested block a brass razzoo for the poor cattle that come from those areas even though those heavily forested areas are what their ESG carries on about. They do not pay a premium for trees.
Any producer would be crazy these days for not trying to get rid of every bit of regrowth they can. You can keep your shelter belts and cattle camps, but once the regrowth elsewhere gets up a couple of feet high, producers would be well advised to knock it all down again. Simply as time goes forward, more and more “land management experts” located in inner city areas will dictate to producers how to manage their land and the big multinational companies are clambering over one another to get that marketing edge that costs them nothing.
Hi Paul,
You will note that in the article it mentions that our place is over 50% remnant, I can assure that I understand that the trees have no value, we have done the current carbon calculator, zero!
I could go on, but can I get you to wait and see what else is to come, it will be worth it I can assure you!
Sorry David, but I will believe it when I see it. Large and/or multinational companies like McDonalds, JBS, Teys/Cargill joint venture, Woolworths, Coles, etc do one thing. They make money. They generally do not care how they make money, so long as they make money.
They will use lots of tricks and gimmicks to try to get people to buy their products. Look at Coles and their HGP stance, it is nothing more then a gimmicky marketing campaign. Look at the various “grassfed beef” schemes where leucaena is apparently a grass when it isn’t, but oats, which is a grass apparently must not be. Same with all this Angus stuff. It is all just marketing to get people to buy their product to make money.
I am sure that somewhere some big companies will pay some landholders for remnant vegetation so the big company will be able to market themselves, saying look how good we are. But I cannot see it happening on a grand scale. Just look at how quickly some businesses went from supporting the voice referendum to total abandonment of it. Look at how quickly in 2022, climate change was a big election issue. Now consumers are more concerned about other things, like the price of things impinging on their lifestyle.
As an aside, I see on the Qld government QldGlobe website the state government now has all what they call “high value regrowth” fully mapped for all land regardless of the PMAV status. It is under the layers Biota –>> Regional ecosystem mapping –>>High Value Regrowth. It might be an eyeopener for some thinking their PMAV is sacrosanct and down the track they will still be able to prune the regrowth..
Thankyou for showing your down to earth land and Brigalow trees. Cattle are thriving too and there is plenty of shelter for cattle and sheep.
Nothing like some scrub to cover the land. In Far North Qld there is abundance of ground cover and we never flooded.
Excellent Presentation…Luv your Work.. This I hope will engage more Producers to share their Positive Views on Managing our Property environment and ecosystems…
Responsible Landholders owning our Rights and preserving our Landscape Future Prosperity … Thank You Beef Central for putting this together and Sharing 👏😎
A refreshing read full of wisdom from the families farming the country.
City slicker enjoyed the education.
Look in our own backyard at our trees where no ground cover grows. Just makes good sense.
Rob