People are pretty pragmatic out in the pastoral country.
It’s big country which can have big problems – but also big rewards.
Where no day, season or year is ever the same.
Right now at Wyndham Station, on the anabranch, north of Wentworth, it’s another one of those years – in the north of the aggregation the season is OK, in the south it kind of sucks.
Owners Kelly and Gus Whyte, and their son Mitchell, are running a little more than 31,000ha – so they’re far from the biggest in the outback – but it’s plenty for them to handle.
And way more than enough for all the extra work they are putting into their country to ensure its improved performance and long-term sustainability.
Barely a year ago the Whytes home was only accessible by boat – but Gus said at the time they could have done with some rain, just somewhere else on their station.
They have made a significant investment in a rehydration project, which targeted 300ha of their combined 31,500ha across two stations (Wyndham is 12,500ha and they have had it since 1998 and Willow Point’s 19,000ha have been in the family since 1920).
Water ponding is a strategy to repair and rehydrate rangelands country.
Gus said described water ponding as a mechanical intervention, appropriate on gentle slopes, to slow the flow of water across the landscape and encourage water infiltration into the soil.
This approach is used to reclaim scalded country and rehydrate rangeland landscapes.
At the same time, the Whytes also have some genuine concerns about the long-term management of their type of country, even all farming country.
“We attended a regenerating rangelands conference in Cunnamulla recently, for example, and we have certainly been looking at the potential, or otherwise, of creating farm carbon accounts, which is a significant part of the four-year Rangelands Living Skin project, which we have been part of through Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA),” Mr Whyte said.
“And that means helping participants – like us – establish a baseline from which to identify and embrace opportunities for farm greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions improvements.
“So yes, we have looked at it, and still are, and we have done a carbon account, but we still want to know a whole lot more on what opportunities really do, and don’t, exist.
“Some people in similar situations are telling us for the money paid they are not seeing too much.
“At the regenerative conference they were talking about reforestation in rangelands – that means you need somewhere between 30 per cent and 50 per cent tree cover to be a forest.
“That would rob every drop of moisture out of the soil, and we don’t really see that as a positive.”
Mr Whyte said in his part of the world he believed there was “significant ability” for well-managed livestock to put carbon back into the soil and into the carbon cycle.
And at the same time increase the volume of carbon being used.
However, he said with the rangelands work it hasn’t been able to generate enough money to do the research to better understand the whole process in that environment.
“What is really getting up our noses is the way some of the ‘planners’ making the big decisions look at country like ours – they tend to write us off as low value,” Mr Whyte said.
“As far as we are concerned, running a bloody great powerline through farming land is a low-value project.
“Just because part of our yearly program is to plan for a drought doesn’t mean this is low value country – we are connected to this land, we have been here for generations and to us it is the most valuable land there is”
The four-year Rangelands Living Skin (RLS) project, which kicked off in 2021 with a core group of four producer families, including the Whytes, and a team of scientists and other collaborators, is now entering its final stages.
Mr Whyte said they were still working on their conclusions and together they were evaluating cost-effective practices – chosen by the producers – which focused on regenerating the NSW rangelands to support production now and into the future.
Rotational grazing, ponding, ripping, multi-species plantings and biological soil amendments are just some of the management practices being trialled.
The project was designed to create an evidence base for encouraging widespread adoption of practices which will benefit soil, plants, animals and people – the living skin of the rangelands. The project is funded by MLA and led by the NSW Department of Primary Industries.
The four core producers involved in the project are:
Mr Whyte agreed attending a Resource Consulting Services (RCS) Grazing for Profit course in 2001 was a turning point for his family’s sheep and cattle breeding and trading enterprise.
Which this season also had one of those rare moments when it was also a cropping enterprise.
Well, more accurately an opportunity cropping program.
And that’s another world altogether, moving the Whytes from small farmers/big farmers to (very) occasional farmers.
“You can’t factor it into your planning, but when it does come along you don’t want to miss out,” Mr Whyte said.
“The cropping land, as we refer to kit, is contained in three separate lake beds that, after a flood, can be farmed under permit.
“We have no control over when the lakes dry out, so we need to be flexible on what we plant, while we prefer to grow cereals, if they dry out in spring a summer crop like sunflowers might be suited.
“With all the rain we had in the past year or two we had been planning to crop the lakes and this season we did.”
So how occasional is opportunity cropping out Wentworth way?
Well, before the crop just harvested, the last time the Whytes raised one was 2012/13, so it’s more a decade decision that an annual business plan.
Mr Whyte said their involvement in projects such as Living Skins was brought about by their increased frustration with the increasing degradation of the landscape.
He said their low-level set stock management regime did seem to not be helping and following the Grazing for Profit course they began creating smaller paddocks to facilitate rotational grazing and to match stocking rate to carrying capacity.
By changing to rotational grazing, moving the animals became less labour-intensive, and there has been greater plant growth and diversity, as well as reduced erosion.
While they continue to manage holistically to drive productivity, profitability and landscape health, the Whytes are also interested in the potential co-benefits of ecosystem services markets.
These emerging markets, such as soil carbon and biodiversity, offer the potential to better compensate producers for the work they are doing to improve the landscape.
They have been working with Dr Jessica Rigg from Select Carbon to understand their farm emissions and create a ‘farm carbon account’.
“A farm carbon account is useful to benchmark and understand your farm emissions, by accounting for sources and sinks of greenhouse gases within a farm business,” Dr Rigg said.
“If you know where you are starting from you can determine strategies to reduce emissions and identify opportunities to store more carbon in soil or trees. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
Mr Whyte said there had been upsides from their involvement in the project and they know they can lift their average returns to above average by refining how they look after the landscape.
“We are all learning to change in tune with the landscape, if you do that, and do it better, everything will go better as a result,” he said.
“Which means you have a more profitable business, but more importantly, you and your staff feel and do much better as well.”
