I was recently asked to talk at a Landholders Driving Change project team meeting about change and grazier engagement. For us, to be at the forefront of success in our industry, we need to be exposed to new learning and engage in it. What enables us to cement change is that we have created our statement of purpose. This ensures that all new learning is conducive to our ethos.
What we have to be mindful of though, is that every grazier is from a different school of life. When graziers are approached to take up a project funding opportunity, they are asked to change either a grazing or business practice. They are being asked to change their behaviour, but to truly change behaviour, you need to change your identity. If you change your belief about who you are, you will change for good.
So, when these projects approach graziers they are actually asking them to change their identity. This may be ok for graziers open to change as they have a greater purpose for their change. However, for some graziers, their greater purpose is the foundation upon which they were raised. Their life on the land is their identity.
So how do we expect these graziers to change their identity? There needs to be a statement of purpose. Then their actions are working towards something of meaning and those actions are improving their water cycle, ground cover, pasture height – improving profitability and reducing erosion. Successfully achieving sustainable change in our community will come from graziers wanting to change, and they can only do this if they have a statement of purpose, which in turn links back to their identity.
The Landholders Driving Change project is providing our industry with the opportunity to shape how we can implement government funding for gully erosion control, and reduce sediment impact on the Great Barrier Reef. As an industry, this is quite an empowering position to be in and with it comes a big responsibility to ensure that we look beyond the gully erosion to the source.
In our industry, gully erosion has negative connotations and graziers just don’t want to go there. However, it needs to be addressed and we have an opportunity to do so with funding support. If we can address the source, then we can work our way through to healing the gullies that have resulted as unintended consequences of our behaviour.
It is important that this project has a statement of purpose. We need to paint a picture of positive behaviours, not of the negative things that our graziers see every day. The positive behaviour will inadvertently heal the negative unintended consequences of past behaviours.
Leanne O’Sullivan and husband Barry successfully used cattle to restore an eroded gully on their Glenalpine property, near Collinsville. They manage their property through the principles of Holistic Management.