Aligning nature conservation and livestock production: An Australian perspective

An endangered Golden-shouldered Parrot returns to its termite-mount nest on a beef grazing property in Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. A partnership between graziers and conservationists is restoring the habitat of this threatened species. Photo Credit: Patrick Webster

Whilst there are wonderful examples of biodiversity co-existing with sustainable grazing, like the platypus mentioned earlier, livestock production in Australia is linked to some of our largest natural resource management problems. Land clearing to establish pastures throughout the forested regions of Australia is a major driver of biodiversity loss, carbon emissions and poor water quality outcomes, and in the northern savannas hotter, larger fires and overgrazing has degraded the condition of land and impacted ecosystem functions.

So how can we address these problems, whilst supporting the business of food production? First, we need to look for ‘win-wins’, where biodiversity conservation goals can be achieved without compromising production. I’ve had the privilege of visiting many grazing properties, and learning about how beef producers, from small, family-owned operations to immense corporate businesses managing over six million hectares (an area roughly three times the size of Wales), can manage their land to support biodiversity alongside beef production.

Whilst enhancing biodiversity on farms is essential, minimising or avoiding yield losses is also critical, as numerous studies are beginning to highlight the risks associated with ‘leakage’. Leakage is where yield reductions in one region are compensated for by an increase in another if there is no associated change in demand. With 60% of Australia’s red meat production exported to markets like the US, China, Japan and South Korea, and with demand set to increase in some of these markets, pursuing domestic conservation policies that markedly reduce yields could simply see environmental impacts exported to other beef-exporting countries like Brazil. Win-wins minimise this risk of leakage, and can also fast-track adoption of conservation strategies, as they do not rely on subsidies or payments for ecosystem services that can take a long time to be implemented and are expensive.

These win-wins look different depending on which beef producing region you are in. In Central Queensland, it might mean retaining some of the native forest as shelterbelts that provide shade and shelter for cattle and habitat for wildlife, whereas in Northern Australia savannas, it could involve managing stocking rates and utilising fire to prevent woody thickening, a process where the density of trees and woody shrubs increases in native grasslands, causing conservation and production issues. What is common between them is that they recognise and leverage the value that nature can provide for beef production. To date, the value of many of these contributions has been overlooked, often leading to the degradation of nature and reinforcing the old adage ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’. Recognising and measuring the value of nature to agriculture is an essential first step in moving towards more sustainable systems, but it is yet to have occurred in many of the globe’s agricultural regions, with Australia’s grazing lands no exception.

Implementing and managing appropriate fire regimes is essential for enhancing production and biodiversity outcomes on Northern Australian pastoral properties. Photo Credit: Patrick Webster

In Central Queensland, our research team from the University of Queensland is looking at how intact areas of native forest on grazing properties can support biodiversity, whilst also enhancing animal productivity and welfare outcomes. This is a region in which land clearing to establish pastures throughout the second half of the 20th century reduced the amount of brigalow (a species of Acacia) forest to less than 12% of its original extent, pushing many species like the Bridled Nail Tail Wallaby and Painted Honeyeater to the edge of extinction. Brigalow forest has the unfortunate habit of growing on the best soil and supporting very high biodiversity, however, it was preferentially cleared and is now very poorly represented in our protected area estate. It also represents the conundrum that has plagued conservation in agricultural areas: typically, more marginal areas are set aside for conservation, despite the best biodiversity commonly occurring on the better soils. This means you end up with a skewed protected area estate dominated by national parks with shallow, sandy soils or high slopes, but often missing the biodiversity-rich ecosystem types that grow on areas with better soils, like former floodplains. Implementing win-win management strategies on these better soils has the potential to increase the amount of the now rare ecosystems that used to exist on them, whilst minimising foregone production and leakage risks.

Despite some beef properties in Central Queensland being almost completely cleared, there are others that maintain 20-40% of their property as brigalow forest and continue to support endangered species. Our research team are using GPS collars on cattle to compare heat stress risk and grazing behaviour between paddocks with minimal tree cover, and paddocks where over 30% of the forest was retained as shelterbelts. Given that heat stress could cost global meat and dairy production over $14.9 billion USD per year by the end of the century, with impacts especially pronounced in tropical regions, understanding how tree cover affects heat stress risk, grazing behaviour and pasture utilisation could help the industry adapt to these challenges.

Critics of on-farm conservation are rightly concerned that it may only serve to increase the abundance of relatively common farmland species, instead of the threatened, fragmentation-sensitive species we are so worried about. Whilst intact, well-connected protected areas will be essential in stemming current biodiversity loss, it is imperative that we complement them with agricultural landscapes that also provide habitat value and allow species to disperse across the landscape. That’s why our research team is complementing this production analysis with on-farm bird surveys that are looking for the presence of declining and threatened bird species that rely on intact forest within the retained vegetation (being conscious, of course, of other creatures, including mammals, reptiles and insects).

From this work, we hope to determine the amount of forest that is required to support populations of these declining species on farms and recommend how graziers can best manage the forest to enhance its conservation value. This is especially important given that natural forest regeneration on Central Queensland farms provides us with an opportunity to strategically increase the amount of forest within over-cleared landscapes, without the expensive exercise of tree-planting.

Brigalow forests (pictured) support unique and endemic biodiversity but have been reduced to less than 12% of their original extent. Supporting graziers to retain natural regeneration of this forest is key to enhancing conservation outcomes. Photo Credit: Brodie Crouch 

By combining conservation and agricultural science within actively operating farms, we can identify whether the native forest cover required for good production outcomes aligns with the amount required for the survival of threatened species. If not, appropriate incentives could be designed to account for opportunity costs (whilst being mindful of leakage risks).

Encouragingly, another project carried out by the research programme Farming for the Future identified that on-farm natural capital was positively correlated with gross margins, production efficiency and farm resilience in southern Australia’s livestock regions. They suggested this was because enhanced natural capital acted as a substitute for more expensive and volatile farm inputs like energy and bought-in fodder. Again, their approach teamed up ecologists with agricultural scientists, economists and industry representatives to make holistic assessments of natural capital and what this meant for farm performance.

As important as such collaborations are, to increase the uptake of conservation actions on farms and accelerate the food system transition, we also need to convince politicians and the private sector that this is a worthy cause to invest in. For many conservation actions, we lack an understanding of how they also benefit other public goods, including enhanced water quality, carbon storage and flood mitigation. This is where ‘True Cost Accounting’ and frameworks like the Global Farm Metric become so important; they allow us to visualise and value why nature-friendly farming is a worthwhile pursuit, beyond the intrinsic value of biodiversity and the benefits it provides to food production.

Drawing on my conversations with farmers, graziers, policymakers and academics, I believe there are three key things that need to be prioritised, if we are to address the triple threats of biodiversity loss, climate change and food security:

1. Conservationists work in partnership with agricultural scientists, economists and social scientists to identify win-win scenarios that minimise leakage risks and are likely to be adopted by farmers.
2. We value public goods influenced by on-farm conservation interventions.
3. Workshops and decision-support tools are provided to farmers and graziers to help them decide upon and implement context-specific conservation actions that work for their production system.

There’s a lot to be excited about in the biodiversity and livestock grazing space at the moment, and I think we have good reason to be cautiously optimistic. Livestock production can co-exist with wonderful biodiversity, I’ve seen it firsthand. But there is much to be done to support a transition to make these cases the rule rather than the exception.

Featured image courtesy of Brodie Crouch.