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.