O'Brien and Lanzarin families on pioneering rotational grazing in the NT

Moira Lanzarin and her parents before her, Mike and Clair O'Brien, say it came naturally to them.

Ms Lanzarin grew up on Craig's Pocket Station, basalt country between Greenvale and Mt Garnet where the Burdekin River rises, which her grandfather won in a ballot in the 1960s as a virgin block.

It was here that the Coodardie Brahman stud was born in 1976, which became the foundation that bred the herds for Mike and his siblings, who branched out to Essex Downs at Richmond as well as Sugarbag, The Brook and Glendhu in the Mt Garnet area.

However, Ms Lanzarin said her grandfather had always had an attraction for the Northern Territory, a desire to develop land that he passed onto his son Mike.

"We were trucking bulls over for sale to the Northern Territory and in to the Kimberley and they decided it made sense to bring the whole herd over to the Territory, and establish a home base there," she said.

The O'Briens, their four children and 2500 head of cattle moved to the 40,470ha Carmor Plains, situated beside Kakadu National Park, in the early 1990s, where they were faced with the challenge of renovating country that had been hammered by buffalo.

"Most floodplain properties stack the plains from July to September and remove their cattle to the high country, 26m above sea level, in the wet, but that has no guts in the grass," Ms Lanzarin said. "We spent eight years at Carmor and the seasons flipped - five of those years were a record wet."

As well as finding it difficult to re-establish pasture and keep cattle contained in an environment where steel posts rusted quickly and termites munched through timber, Ms Lanzarin said it was hard to showcase the potential of their cattle and so they moved a couple of hours south to Mataranka in 2001.

They were the successful tenderers for the 500,000 square mile Numul Numul Station, an Aboriginal pastoral lease, backed up with the purchase of 2000ha of freehold land at Mataranka, described by Ms Lanzarin as a blank canvas.

"We had become involved in Landcare while we were living in North Queensland, looking at ways to manage erosion, and we carried property management planning on to the Territory, which we were told was an important reason we were chosen as the successful tenderers by the Traditional Owners," she said.

"Numul Numul was huge. There was no permanent water when we went there but after 14 years we had 52 paddocks watered and fully boundary fenced."

The family had heard about holistic management in a number of different forums through the years but it was when they moved to Mataranka that they explored it more fully, enticing holistic management educator Brian Marshall to the Coodardie property in 2005.

"Suddenly we had a language to put around some of the things that we were thinking, and we learnt a whole swag of tools and techniques that could further progress what we were wanting to achieve but simply didn't have the knowledge or skills at the time to do," Ms Lanzarin said.

"The biggest change was from set stocking to planned grazing, and for a stud operator with small breeding herds, that was a massive mindset, but there was huge benefit in actually boxing.

"We could run our stud operation as a boxed mob as opposed to select breeding groups."

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While living at Carmor Plains and being closer to Darwin, Ms Lanzarin was able to do short courses for things such as preg testing, semen testing and AI, which she put to good use in many ways, including working with Alf Turner to use DNA analysis for sire verification after multi-sire matings have taken place.

"We are more of a mindset of letting nature have a little bit more say, so we're then using science as well, using DNA testing to know who the sire is," she said.

The benefit of combining the animals to a large mob and moving it through the landscape meant they were always able to have fresh feed ahead of it.

"We used our stud animals first and foremost as environmental tools, reinvigorating the virgin block here at Coodardie, knocking down old dry feed," Ms Lanzarin said.

DNA testing, hair patterns and bone shape are just some of the linear measurements that they undertake.

"We were one of the first studs to semen test in the Mareeba days," Ms Lanzarin said.

After the initial regenerative training, which some neighbouring families also participated in, they hosted further training courses every six months for a number of years, gathering interested people from across Australia as well as the NT.

"What was quite effective was that you were on site with small numbers, so we had brilliant access to our educator, Brian Marshall, who was one of the foundation trainers in Australia," Ms Lanzarin said.

In that time a number of acknowledgements came her way - the NT Young Cattleman of the Year in 2011, the NT Rural Woman of the Year runner-up in 2009 - to add to her award as the NT Young Australian of the Year in 1998.

She said she had been taught as a child that she had no right to complain if she wasn't prepared to do something about a problem.

"We were all given a gift of our voice, and an opportunity to make a difference," she said. "You just had to be prepared to do something."

She added that her work, including as the inaugural secretary of the Top End branch of the NT Cattlemen's Association, was her social life, saying she wasn't a campdrafter and sitting on a beach didn't appeal.

She said the issues in the Top End at the time, in the mid-90s, were very different to anywhere else in the Territory.

"Before the Top End branch there'd only been Alice Springs, Katherine and Barkley branches," she said.

"The floodplains were moving from a buffalo base to a cattle base and so, with the live export getting stronger, you had a whole heap of cattle people in the Top End who weren't represented, operating floodplain properties.

"They had their own special concerns and issues, and the time was right."

Changes to their business model saw the family give up the lease on Numul Numul in 2015, selling just shy of 3000 head of cattle, keeping 500 to run at Coodardie.

Terrible seasons for the past three years has seen that number halve, meaning that all horned females have been sold.

Ms Lanzarin said she was working towards an ideal of all bulls being PP, adding that a reduction in the herd size to 200 head had made a massive difference to their country, which was bouncing back nicely.