A NORTH Queensland grazier is restoring degraded land on a river front at her 20,000 hectare property.
Amelia Downs grazier Jane Weir took over management of the Charters Towers district property from her parents John and Prue in 2014.
Since then, she has focused her energies on not only improving the family's cattle business, but also improving the land.
Ms Weir has been remedying a large and long-standing erosion problem in the 1250ha Bottom River paddock, which includes about 10km of the Basalt River.
While there was some damage to the banks of the watercourse, the main concern was an area that had been preferentially grazed, leaving a scalded area at the head of a gully system on the northern side of the river.
Ms Weir said she believed a different soil type had produced sweeter pasture, which was always first to be grazed by cattle. Their preference for that stretch of ground destroyed it.
Ms Weir got involved with the Linking Landholders to Frontage Country project and with NQ Dry Tropics senior project officer Jaymie Rains, they devised a plan to address the problem.
The solution they came up with is three-fold: fencing, a watering point and grazing management.
They decided to fence along both sides of the river, using about 20kms of three strand fencing, to divide Bottom River paddock into three separate areas, enclosing 250ha, 700ha and 300ha.
The river, and the problem area was enclosed in the large centre paddock.
Ms Weir plans to use a mob of cattle, confined by temporary fencing, in that paddock for a short, high-density graze to knock down the gully walls with hoof impact and to provide a biological start for regeneration in the area.
Other than that, the paddock will be rested and only lightly grazed to manage what pasture there is and to reduce any fire risk.
Installing a watering point in the 300ha paddock will allow her to implement a grazing regime to better manage pasture and reduce pressure on the problem areas across all three paddocks, while at the same time giving her the tools to be able to regenerate the degraded land.
The watering point is the next step of the project and analysing results from soil analysis in the paddock containing the scalded area.
"It will be interesting to see if there is a special or particular mineral in the soil that the cattle are craving and whether a management change can provide that elsewhere to protect the scalded ground," Ms Weir said.
The project includes a monitoring component to measure the impact of the groundwork and practice change on the condition and extent of groundcover and on the soil.
