Southern Queensland producer Grant Maudsley is the chair of AgForce’s vegetation management committee. Mr Maudsley is formerly a general president of AgForce.
AgForce is extremely disappointed, but not surprised, that the agricultural industry has become the intended ‘scape goat’ for Australia’s emissions target yet again.
Former AgForce president Gant Maudsley.
Landowners who manage the 173 million hectares of Queensland are facing a common predicament where they can’t see the grass for the trees. Whilst this may sound like a one-liner, the reality is that the vegetation thickening processes that are occurring across Qld are an absolute threat to the floristic integrity and sustainability of Qld.
Only 19pc of Qld is exempt from formal clearing approval processes, or another way of saying that is 81pc of Qld’s vegetation is highly regulated.
Most producers are shaking their heads in disbelief at the continual focus by environmental groups and a government with an apparent anti-farming agenda, when landowners should be proud of their achievements in managing native fauna on their properties.
What the environmental groups and media companies, including our national broadcaster, the ABC, won’t explain when referencing the vegetation management occurring in northern Australia, is that the north is quite underdeveloped compared to the south. However, the north desperately needs to develop in line with southern Australia to create more productive operations.
Development in the north means that landowners can grow and sustain their own local products including grain and hay so they do not create a further carbon footprint by having to transport these commodities long distances and can help maintain food security for the world’s growing population.
Let’s once and for all clear up the headlines of the story-hunting environmentalists that every beef producer in Australia is a recreational tree clearer. The fact is that landowners are unable to and don’t randomly clear vegetation. In fact, landowners in the reef catchment zones are unable to meet their obligations under the Reef Regulations to decrease sediment run-off due to the strict vegetation management laws preventing vegetation clearing to increase grass ground cover.
AgForce has maps showing the unmanaged exponential increase in the density of vegetation in areas which were once native open grasslands and now do not have any grass cover due to the thickening process.
Good management practices would allow landowners to clear these areas of encroachment to prevent further loss of pasture, which would result in decreased carrying capacity, extremely inefficient operations and sometimes a complete loss of biodiversity, which actually increases emissions.
Woodland thickening is not measured properly in Qld by the SLATS report. AgForce will formally request that comprehensive analysis of satellite and vegetation data is undertaken so government and community can fully understand what is actually happening on the ground.
Let’s ensure proper vegetation management can occur to allow essential biodiversity outcomes to be met.
Federally, the major shortcoming of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is this lack of understanding by government departments of the threatening nature of vegetation thickening because of reliance on incomplete data.
After all, the payment of carbon credits that are being generated in semi-arid woodlands in South-West Qld and North-West New South Wales are completely reliant on woody thickening processes, it is essential for the longevity of our ecosystems that the government look more deeply at the realities of vegetation thickening not only in Qld but across the country.
The recent articles by the environmentalists show how desperate these ill-informed groups are to discredit the land managers in this country by quoting themselves as a source, using wild assumptions, inaccuracies and loose use of the truth by so-called ‘environmental scientists’. How dare they scrutinise the true land managers of this country when these supposed ‘environmentalists’ sat silent when a subsidiary of Glencore had proposed to pump industrial waste into the Great Artesian Basin, if that doesn’t clearly show their loss of legitimacy then what will?
These recent misleading articles, including one by the ABC, did not distinguish whether any of these areas were cleared for renewable energy projects on grazing land, in which case the environmentalists become silent; or whether it is for essential vegetation and biodiversity management.
The notion that renewable energy developers can unobstructedly clear thousands of hectares of remnant vegetation that is critical koala and glider habitat without leaving a single tree is permissible but when landowners manage vegetation for essential food production and protection of biodiversity they will be persecuted, is quite frankly absurd.
The Australian Conservation Foundation says it’s confirmed all of the supposed clearing is happening on beef properties that supply the domestic market, how on earth they have confirmed this is unclear and almost impossible to do.
The notion that deforestation hotspots showing up on a map due to a beef producer successfully managing his ecosystems, be it remnant or otherwise, and that then drives his eligibility to market access on the other side of the world, or domestically, is completely ignorant of on-ground realities and driven by poor data and completely misses the heart-felt intent and pride of the whole food supply chain in Queensland and Australia.
This madness has the potential to affect all agricultural industries and commodities – if soybean producers or the like are to be faced with the same deforestation outcry it will be quite difficult to fulfil the daily amount of soy latte and vegan lunch orders in inner-Sydney as all of these inputs have been produced from ‘cleared’ land.
A very good opinion piece @Grant Maudesley and some very good comments.
Acclaimed woodland scientist Dr. Bill Burrows always wrote that there were 50-60m ha of forest in Queensland, most of it open forest. When SLATS methodology was changed in 2018-19 the area of forest embedded in the calculations, though not stated was 97m ha. Where did the extra forest come from?
It was not counted as regrowth or encroachment but rather just stolen by the government and added to their baseline so that the environmental groups, who are only focused on beef cattle and not true environmental harm, can bolster their funding streams.
The influence they are trying to bring to bear in the EU with their misinformation and hyperbolic language is, quite frankly, disgraceful.
Well the acclaimed Dr Bill Burrows made what is called “an estimate”’. Hence the 50-60Mha range. Then relatively recently, the industry groups wanted a better baseline and regrowth also to be cakculated, more than just land clearing statistics which was the original 1990s government task. This clearing only task had stood through various administrations till a few years ago. Then the acclaimed remote sensing scientists with new higher resolution imagery and better techniques recalculated all this. Which has been published in international journals and reviewed by external agencies including previously international experts. All is published online including the data. The areas are woody vegetation with density definitions. There are a wide variety of motivations in the mainstream Australian green movement; some wish to shut the beef industry down and rewild everything; some wish to influence consumer sentiment; others just want all land clearing to stop. If impartial professional government scientists do not calculate these numbers then environmental groups will hack their own estimates from satellite imagery now available widely on the internet. It’s the 2020s. Nobody can hide from space satellites. Society is changing and expectations moving. Industry can make a more sophisticated response.
G’day, I feel your pain about the Conservation movement making bold statements about the clearing of land for grazing. Trouble is these photos are hard to refute. I feel instead of shooting the messenger , a better way might be to accurately explain what we are actually seeing so the conservationists haven’t a leg to stand on and then get the refutation published. Generally farmers try to do the right thing but we consumers also have a right to know that the food is sourced without degrading the environment.
Cheers
Bill Cameron
Our industry though RDC’s must promote facts on veg. Nobody talks about scientific measure of carbon emissions. The Dec National Greenhouse inventory says the LLUCF sector(mainly us) achieved 20.3% REDUCTION in emissions,
Well restated Grant.
The PMAV system has shown to be a highly creditable program with Govt and Regulators – we must not let those with fixed mindsets overtake the commonsense and sustainable land management practices in place
Queensland – cows, coal, clearing, coral, carbon, cockies, corporates and conservationists. After 30 years, the land clearing debate is still going. It seems industry organisations are eternally unhappy, from 1990s spies in the sky alarmism to now wanting better higher resolution woodland thickening spies in the sky. So on the last round of complaint, Agforce wanted regrowth and statewide woody extent assessed as well as land clearing. So SLATS complied. In the never ending story, it seems industry now wants woodland thickening. Which is a much more subtle effect occurring sometimes over decades.
And who’s to blame for the thickening. Is it not the result of lack of burning in natural fire-mediated sub-climax ecosystems which are our woodland savannahs. Trees and grass in eternal competition. Thickening from lack of grass fuel from overgrazing and reluctance to burn due to fear of drought. The tropical savannas CRC identified a range of granivorous birds requiring grass seeds from native grasses in more open woodlands. At risk from tree thickening. Ecological subtleties lost on our activist conservationists. The rare Golden Shouldered Parrot documented as threatened by too many trees
However it’s really all about having the biodiversity species data to support continued social licence and keep the EU eco-warriors at bay. The Australian Conservation Foundation might have some clearing maps but do they have the biodiversity data? Not models please. Industry and government might natural capital rhetoric but do they have any data either? Industry can claim a well managed sward after clearing will erode less into the reef lagoon than thickened trees, but are the cleared areas then really well managed for ground cover. Empirical evidential data are where?
Industry needs better patterns of maintenance land clearing (strips?) not wall-to-wall clearing and ecosystem tracking through time. The conservation movement needs to “science up” and latch onto the major ecological problem of woodland thickening.
Progress is a rethink with better data. And it will need to be high resolution data with fauna and flora identification, terrestrial laser scanners, lidar and drones. But despite SLATS having latent capability, our once great Queensland government science is suppressed by draconian staff caps, policy wonks and innovation crippling administration. And who knows what the LNP will do. Both Queensland political parties seem very keen to clear the crown jewels biodiversity of the great Queensland Great Dividing Range wilderness for useless ecocidal wind farms with serious biodiversity and rare species at stake. An issue that the Australian conservation movement is conveniently asleep at the wheel regarding. The grazing industry and government needs to get the science defence pipeline flowing and some new tree management techniques. A $6B beef export industry is at stake.
There has been no consideration of invasive, exotic woody weeds across northern Australia by SLATS land clearing methodology, Reef policy, nor the debate on the new buzz word “deforestation”. As per Qld Biosecurity Act, good land management, EPBC Act and EPA Act – there is a regulatory requirement to contain, manage, prevent exotic, non-native, woody weeds such as lantana, rubber vine, chinee apple, Parkinsonia, bellyache bush, Mimosa pigra, Siam weed, prickly acacia, etc. All this satellite hype about land clearing cannot distinguish between native woody vegetation and exotic woody weeds. Land managers and producers – on the ground do distinguish weeds from natives.