RSNR-403-503 was originally issued in 2008. The University of New England is licenced by the Trust to deliver this module as part of its formal curriculum. . The version here is the same as that produced in 2008.
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This topic provides an introduction to this unit ‘Sustainable Agriculture and Catchment Management’. The purpose of this introductory topic is to introduce to you the concept of sustainability and the issues related to sustainability that are currently being faced by Australian farmers. It will also provide an introduction to key sustainability principles, and the important organisations and policies that assist Australians to move towards a more sustainable future.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
As outlined in Topic 1, ‘sustainability’ is the capacity to continue indefinitely. However, the concept has assumed more in the environmental, resource management and development literature than its literal definition would imply over the past three decades. The environmental concept had its genesis in the World Conservation Strategy (Anon. 1980) that promoted the need for the simultaneous productive use and conservation of natural resources.
At the end of this topic you should be able to:
‘Today’ – at the beginning of the third millennium – the agricultural output and input subsidies are largely gone and in Australia, as in other countries, the community demand for environmental services has been growing.
As incomes have risen, particularly in the developed countries, people have been able to meet their basic needs for food etc. with a declining share of their incomes. The result is that there has been enough ‘spare money to go around for the environment’.
As part of the growth in demand for environmental services, the community at large has claimed increasing ‘ownership’ of environmental resources. In Australia, landowners are now likely to be called stakeholders and to face increasing controls over use of the environmental resources they once commanded largely at will.
On completion of this topic you should have:
Sustainability and sustainable development are regarded as being synonymous. They are also regarded as being a process or a journey, rather than an end point. Thus they are elusive goals. Sustainability is generally considered as being ‘development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the abilities of future generations to meet their needs’. Sustainability is viewed as having a triple bottom line quality, that is, it has social, economic as well as environmental dimensions. While maintenance of natural capital is the general requirement for ecological sustainability, and economic growth (and profitability) is the requirement for economic sustainability, the characteristics of social sustainability have been less clear.
On completion of this topic you should have:
This topic commences with a definition of sustainability and examines the question of why it is important, what scale we might assess sustainability on and highlights the great difficulty that human society has in striving to achieve the goal of sustainability.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
In agricultural systems, an adequate level of economic return from animal production is the final objective but economic sustainability will not be attained if ecological (or environmental) sustainability declines. This topic will emphasise the ecological sustainability of sheep production enterprises from the point of view of soil health. Soil health, or quality, has been defined as ‘the capacity of a soil to function within ecosystem boundaries to sustain biological productivity, maintain environmental quality and promote plant and animal health’ (Doran & Parkin 1994). Soil health has three main aspects, all of which interact with each other. The three aspects are chemical, physical and biological. Of these, it is the soil biota (organisms, other than plants, living in the soil) which perform vital functions that help to sustain both the chemical and physical fertility of soils. Without soil organisms, organic matter would not decay and release plant nutrients and chemical fertility would decline. Without soil biota, soils would also have poor physical structure and water and air transmission into and through soil would be impeded. Hence the emphasis of this topic will deal with roles of soil biota in pasture ecosystems and how management can affect their function, and thus sustainability.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
Adequate quantities of water of appropriate quality are essential to raising livestock. Where water quantity (e.g. during a drought) or quality (e.g. as a result of salinisation) is compromised, the farm fails. Therefore, water quality and quantity must be sustainable in a production sense. We now recognise that ecological processes underpin much of the sustainability of water quality and quantity, and this module focuses on how to maintain the ecological processes that maintain water sustainability.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
This topic discusses how the plant ‘layer’ contributes importantly to sustainability. Plants are the primary means by which we capture the sun’s energy. All of our fossil fuels (e.g. coal, oil and gas) have come from energy captured by photosynthesis over millions of years. Currently, humankind is attempting to harvest fuel from a single year’s photosynthesis (e.g. ethanol from grain or sugarcane) and hence the sustainability of this practice will depend very much on its energy efficiency.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
Remnant native vegetation occurs in all sorts of shapes, sizes and types and has a range of values associated with it. It is the vegetation that remains after broad-scale clearing, which has largely occurred in southern and eastern Australia. In this topic we will examine the values and benefits of native vegetation (focusing on ecosystem services), its extent and condition and the threats and pressures on remnant vegetation. A number of principles for managing and monitoring remnant vegetation will be presented in the context of sustainable farming systems, as most remnant vegetation occurs on private land.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
Profitable animal production systems are largely based on converting rainfall into grass and then grass into either food or fibre. If only it were that simple! Inherent within any animal production system is the need to balance an array of factors so that the enterprise is ‘sustainable’ in the longer term. For example, while animal production may be able to be increased significantly in the short term by increasing stocking rates, such a strategy on its own may also degrade the resource base and impact negatively on animal health or product quality, especially in a tough year.
The primary focus of this topic is on sheep production systems and examining the balance required to maintain the sustainability of the production system and that of the business enterprise.
At the end of this topic you should be able to:
This topic on ‘Sustainable Biophysical Systems’ (SBS) aims to integrate the conclusions reached in Topics 6 to 10. Integration is built on inter-connections and these are presented within an ecosystem context. It is clear from Topics 6 to 10 that the challenge for management is to accommodate both agriculture, with its human need for food and fibre, and the protection needed to sustain the off-farm landscape.
This topic starts with a simple statement and an arrangement of the ‘drivers’ of SBS. Climate and management are imposed and largely external to the ecosystem, the first being largely outside man’s control and the second being substantially within his control. Climate and management function conjointly with the internal ‘drivers’, which are plants, grazing animals, decomposer biota, and soil function (physical and chemical).
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
Natural resource policy covering areas such as water usage and water quality, native vegetation, catchment management, salinity, Landcare and biodiversity has developed rapidly over the last decade. For many involved in agriculture, it is a struggle to understand what changes are occurring and why. In addition, natural resource policy often has biophysical, economic and social components and impacts which add to its complexity.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
The need for Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) has been demonstrated by the rising levels of land degradation and escalating resource deterioration of soil, water and vegetation in Australia. This topic deals with ICM as a philosophy, a process and a product, and summarises the guiding principles that underpin catchment management as it has been adapted across Australia.
In the future you may find yourself as a land manager or natural resource professional seeking funds from or working in a catchment management organisation, depending on your position. It would be useful to understand the following and be able to:
Property planning allows farmers to use farm financial information to develop management systems that utilise their natural resource base in a sustainable way to achieve their long-term personal goals.
On completing this topic, students will be able to:
Topic 15: Measure/Monitor/Benchmark
While Measuring, Monitoring and Benchmarking can be important processes on farm, they must be seen as only one component of the complex mixture that goes into farm decision making. Farms are complex businesses and it’s easy to invoke the old saying ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. In this topic, we examine the concepts behind measurement, monitoring and benchmarking; some of the motivations involved; review some examples; and finally, examine the discrepancy between what we as technical experts think should be monitored, measured and benchmarked on farms, and what actually happens.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
In this topic the main components that could influence the sustainability of grazing systems will be considered along with consideration of how they could interact and then what might be useful management solutions. Management solutions using a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach should mean that more comprehensive information is available and the resultant decisions are more robust. However, part of the objective of this topic is to consider if that is the case.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
In this topic we will consider a broader vision for sustainable grazing systems and explore how common management criteria can be used to manage production, ecosystems and the environment. The relationship of animal and ecosystem needs to people management will also be discussed.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
The objectives of this case study are to briefly review the Northern Tablelands environment and farm structures before analysing the key sustainability issues facing the region’s graziers. The topic concludes by looking at what the future holds for Northern Tablelands graziers.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
The southern aspect of Western Australia was largely cleared of perennial native vegetation, mostly forests, from early in the 1900s until 1980. At that time a generalised ban on clearing was implemented, after which any removal of native vegetation was strictly controlled under permit.
The changes in soil characteristics and soil hydrology associated with this change in vegetation have progressed to the extent that many of the farming systems and practices in common use are now considered unsustainable. The ability of land to permit plant growth has been severely compromised over wide areas of the state, and the profitability of agriculture considerably reduced. Not only farmland is affected, but also native vegetation and urban areas.
Many of the specific causes of problems are now well understood; much of past practice was perpetuated in ignorance. The current state of knowledge and awareness is such, however, that remediation is possible, and certainly continued farming will depend upon changes in many areas.
In this topic a case study for a farm in the ‘South Central’ zone is presented.
At the end you should understand:
Australia’s wheat/sheep belt encompasses the country’s most productive agricultural land, with major agricultural practices ranging from grazing of sheep and cattle on native or improved pastures, to dryland and irrigated cropping. It stretches in a broad band from the south-east of South Australia, inland of the Great Divide to south-east Queensland. The wheat/sheep belt coincides largely with the eastern parts of the Murray-Darling Basin, which supports the relatively fertile soils of the region. Because of the large area covered by the wheat/sheep belt, the agricultural practices and major sustainability issues vary throughout the region, most notably from north to south.
This case study will focus on the part of the wheat-sheep belt that lies to the north of Coonabarabran, New South Wales, and extends into south-east Queensland. This area is termed the northern wheat/sheep belt.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
This topic focuses on the southern wheat/sheep belt, which runs through the Murrumbidgee Catchment Area (MCA). The MCA covers from Cooma in the east, Balranald in the west, Temora in the north and Henty in the south. It includes the major centres of Wagga Wagga, Canberra, Hay, Griffith and Yass, as well as many smaller towns and villages.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
The rangelands of Australia cover over 75% of the continent, and include a variety of ecosystems such as tropical savannas, woodlands, shrublands and grasslands; 53 of Australia’s 85 bioregions include rangelands. The rangelands extend across the low and variable climatic zones of the continent characterised by high year to year variability in rainfall and land use is dominated by extensive grazing of native pastures with little broadscale cropping or cultivation undertaken. High rainfall variability produces, in turn, high variability in plant growth, provision of nutrition for herbivores, and the capacity to undertake necessary land management actions such as fire management.
The rangelands are a strong element in Australian culture, historical discourse, social imagery, and social history, and have significant cultural and heritage value, for both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. The rangelands also support diverse cultural and social structures at the individual and community level, as well as a diverse range of business and economic interests’.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
Australian agriculture will need to adapt rapidly to the pressures of global and national changes, which are predicted for this century. These include climate change, global population increase and its attendant poverty, competition for markets, profitability, our problem of distance from international markets and the need to stabilise or even to enhance our national environmental resources.
On completion of this topic you should be able to:
This topic summarises all topics covered in the Sustainable Agriculture and Catchment Management unit. It covers the sustainability issues challenging Australian farms especially across southern and eastern Australia.