A QUEENSLAND beef industry leader says it is time for the Government to allow the industry to focus on producing food from agricultural land and stop letting “quasi conservation” overlays limit production.

Josie Angus is one of a group of Central Queensland beef producers who recently met with Beef Central, trying to navigate a series of “deforestation-free” pledges coming from key markets.

Her vertically-integrated family business has cattle stations, a feedlot, a beef processing plant and exports beef across the world – including to Europe which is set to ban the import of goods linked to deforestation in the coming years.

Josie Angus

The pledges have sparked a debate over definitions of what is and what is not deforestation, with the industry’s peak body Cattle Australia saying it believes deforestation is the illegal clearing of land that meets forest thresholds. 

While Ms Angus largely welcomed the Cattle Australia document, she said the problem is with Australia’s official definition forest, because it does not exclude land that is predominantly under agricultural use.

Australia is different from most of the world for not having exclusions for existing agricultural land in its definition of forest, with the internationally-recognised United Nations definition making the distinction. Ms Angus said it was a problem that was blurring the lines between food production and conservation.

“For the good meaning people that believe that they are locking it up for conservation purpose, if you actually stop trying to overlay quasi conservation over the top of agricultural land use, you free up more room for land to have a predominant use – whether it is indigenous, whether it is conservation,” she said.

“Then let the market and the owners decide how much goes into each basket.”

Ms Angus said there needed to be a fundamental agreement that some land needs to be producing food.

“For those people who don’t agree with that concept you’re in the terrorist class because you don’t believe in humankind,” she said.

With plenty of discussion this year about how the industry was going to navigate the deforestation-free pledges, Ms Angus said she feared that some within the cattle industry had bought the narrative that producers would clear all trees if they were allowed. She said when she had discussed the idea of excluding agricultural land from deforestation policies it had received negative reactions.

“There are people that actually went, ‘if we wrote that on a piece of paper there is going to be two bull dozers start at the tip of Cape York and not stop until they get to Canberra’, she said.

“If you think about it, Qld is 87pc remnant vegetation. Vegetation management laws came in 2000, so the reality is that in all of that time, this includes cropping, urban use and everything else, we only ever cleared 13pc of Qld.”

Historical context needed in land management discussion

The properties Beef Central recently visited were part of the “Brigalow Development Scheme” of the 1960s, where land was broken up into parcels and balloted out.

Families who were successful in the ballots then obtained a grazing lease and were made to clear, stick rake and plough paddocks for cattle production.

According to former Qld Department of Agriculture senior principal scientist Bill Burrows, the purpose of land assigned for agricultural use by the State Government was commonly stated as being for cropping and/or grazing. Dr Burrows said there was good reason for the clearing.

“Land cannot be farmed or grazed profitably or sustainably if it is covered by dense woody vegetation,” he said.

“This is why clearing land systems such as on brigalow blocks was a ‘condition of lease’ to hopefully make them a ‘living area’.

“The UN’s FAO definition of forests, also accepted by the EU’s EUDR, are lands of more than 0.5 hectares, with a tree canopy cover of more than 10 percent, which are not primarily under agricultural or urban land use.

“Therefore Qld’s (and Australia’s) agricultural land does not qualify as forest land in the FAO/EUDR sense, any clearing of woody vegetation on such land for management purposes is not deforestation.”

Dr Burrows provided this map from the Climateworks Centre.

A map of Australia’s agricultural land use.

Land clearing conditions heavy handed in some cases

The conditions for clearing the land were reasonably heavy handed and in some cases the landholders were made to clear more land than they wanted to.

David Hill.

One of them was Clarke Creek producer David Hill whose family was made to poison iron bark trees with Tordon in the 1980s. He said newspaper articles more than a century-ago, when the land was in its natural state, had described the area as already productive land.

“There were large areas of open iron bark country tordoned under the lease agreement, it was considered to be fattening country as far back as the late 1890s,” Mr Hill said.

“It isn’t just about the brigalow country. We now have to manage regrowth on land that should never have been touched.

“My father maintained that it would have been better to leave it as it was and spend the money on establishing seca stylo (legumes) which had recently come onto the market.”

The Hill family has successfully established stylo legumes in the forest country. The focus on management to improve land condition has also seen the return of native legumes.

Environmental outcomes still part of agricultural land

The properties Beef Central visited last week had all been managed for decades, with a focus on keeping groundcover, maintaining deep-rooted trees and legumes and targeted clearing of areas of thick, shallow rooted trees, with limited groundcover.

Ian McCamley, Lowesby, Rolleston.

Ian McCamley from Lowesby Station near Rolleston has kept what he believes is a healthy mix of trees and grass on his paddocks. He said although there were perceptions that Qld cattle producers will just clear all trees on land they are allowed to, the reality was different.

“I have taken people through these paddocks before and told them it was Category X (allowed to be cleared) and they are always surprised I haven’t cleared it all,” he said.

“I have this saying that there are good trees and bad trees, don’t talk to me about ‘trees’ I want to know which sort of trees – it is like talking about people as it they are all the same when some are wearing ankle bracelets and some are holier than thou.”

All of the producers Beef Central visited maintained that without good land management practices that prioritised a healthy tree/grass balance, it was hard for a modern Central Qld cattle business to survive – which had now survived decades and, in some cases, generations.

Mr McCamley said these days the industry was on the cutting edge.

“We are embracing tools that were never envisaged half a century ago, such as high-definition imagery and computer modelling of ground cover over time,” he said.

“It has evolved into a modern, educated and aware generation with a full toolbox who understand that we must work with mother nature to both feed the world and to nurture the environment.”