What is Peter Andrews' take on flat, degraded arid rangelands in places like Charleville and Longreach in Queensland? I was talking to someone in the area who was saying how in principle NSF would work, but he seemed to be implying that the problems of slow-flowing irregular rivers, aridity, irregular rainfall, including floods, very thin soils, and camels and hoofed grazers, take the task into a non-human time frame.
I would have thought that you could start fairly small and work from the watercourses outwards.
Are there some tricks - like fencing off half of a waterhole to protect plant growth and using bore water in the short term?
Surely it is also possible to employ the swale, contouring method to collect dew and encourage weed growth. 'Woofers' (touristic farm labour) and local labour, subsidised by government grants might assist a transition.
What is the take on prickly pear and using it as mulch after a wet season? Is prickly pear absolutely impossible, or could you slash it after a wet season and use it as a very thin mulch, perhaps .
It seems to me that some issues would be the possible need to massively destock the areas you wanted to rehabilitate. How long would you need to do this? Perhaps you would also need to destock your best land because that is the only land that might rehabilitate.
Would you segregate pasture land from reconstructed native habitat land? In that case, how would you segregate those areas?
Business-wise a destocking to much lower herd sizes of the whole of the rural rangeland landscape could only advantage farmers in a farmer-controlled market by improving (through reducing production/increasing quality) the farmer's bargaining power. At the moment big agribusiness, mining, international transport companies and supermarket suppliers etc and the upstream bankers etc benefit from an oversupply of food. They can buy it up cheap and resell it at exorbitant prices. In the mean time, the farmers destroy their land to meet the 'demand' and because they make so little out of their sales.
Sheila Newman
NSF in central Australian rangelands?
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NSF in central Australian rangelands?
Sheila N
http://candobetter.org/sheila
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