How Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law solved crisis at family farm

Alasdair MacLeod sits on the back deck of a humble farm cottage at Wilmot cattle station near Armidale, morning cup of coffee in hand, looking out over green pastures and talking about the importance of enhancing nature, rather than fighting it.

It’s a far cry from the global boardrooms and newsrooms of News Corp, where MacLeod, who is Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law, has spent much of his professional life.

Alasdair MacLeod at Wilmot cattle station near Armidale.Credit: Janie Barrett

But Wilmot is where he can pursue an interest in repairing agricultural land that was forged during a terrible drought on the Murdoch family farm, Cavan, 20 years ago.

“I wasn’t a farmer, I was a newspaper publisher, so farming was completely new to me,” MacLeod says of how he got into farming at the Murdoch sheep property during the Millennium drought. He had three young children at the time and the family would regularly head down to the farm near Yass to get out of Sydney.

“I could see that what we were doing was all wrong, in that the land was being destroyed, the business was being destroyed, there were animal welfare issues all over the place ... and everyone at the farm was stressed,” MacLeod says.

“So that’s when I got involved and I went, ‘Well, if this is the wrong way to do it, what does the right way look like?’”

Wilmot has embraced regenerative farming, where cattle are moved between pastures daily.Credit: Janie Barrett

MacLeod says he got “increasingly sucked in” to the regenerative farming movement, which aims to improve ecosystems and soil health, and that led him to Wilmot. Macdoch, the private company he chairs, bought the property in 2008, and MacLeod and his business partners began applying the lessons they had learnt at Cavan, positioning the farm as a key player in regenerative agriculture.

Here, black Angus cattle are moved daily between paddocks to retain ground cover, and animals are sold off before dry times like winter to take the stress off the land, even if it means having to pay more to build the herd up again when rain returns.

The idea is that this type of grazing helps the land recover from historic over-farming, which makes it more productive. The extra plant growth also captures carbon and channels it into the soil, which is providing a lucrative new income stream for farms, including Wilmot.

“As the whole story about climate and biodiversity increased, that’s the moment when I realised that actually what we were doing here could be of significance way beyond agriculture,” MacLeod says, as 350 farmers gather nearby to learn from Wilmot and other landholders at the property’s annual field day.

Farmers at the Wilmot Field Day learn how things are done at the property.Credit: Janie Barrett

MacLeod wants to create a giant “carbon sink” out of Australia’s agricultural land, where farmers would change their land management practices and suck up so much carbon into their soil they could offset their own emissions, as well as those of other businesses. Macdoch’s latest enterprise, Atlas Carbon, advises farmers on how to do that, and will manage their projects – for a commission.

Wilmot made headlines in 2021 when it sold $500,000 worth of carbon credits to Microsoft on the back of carbon it had built up in its soil. The deal stirred up controversy among scientists, who questioned the farm’s reported carbon findings, but the money involved made farmers sit up and take notice.

Scientists agree soil can store carbon, but there is heated debate about how much it can hold and how to test it accurately to ensure any gains leading to carbon credits are the result of land management, rather than natural processes.

The federal government also believes farmers need to do more than just offset their emissions – they need to cut them too. The sector is responsible for about 18 per cent of Australia’s emissions, largely through the use of nitrogen in fertilisers and the production of methane from livestock.

MacLeod says offering soil carbon credits is a way to get farmers on board with regenerative agriculture and to change farming practices, regardless of the many unknowns in the area, and addresses emissions by saying technology will eventually work that one out.

Charles Sturt University professor in applied ecology Geoff Gurr says agriculture in Australia is not sustainable, and fixing the ecosystems upon which farmers rely is a “no-brainer” – for the environment and for individual businesses.

“It’s a thing that we must do,” he says. “Where it starts to get complex is that regenerative agriculture means different things to different people. And the other layer of complexity is that many people, and especially landholders … have a sense of stewardship and pride in the way that they practise their agricultural management.

Stuart and Amber McWilliam with their children Hendrix, Nix and Amber, travelled from Laggan, near Crookwell, for the field day.Credit: Janie Barrett

“It might be using methods handed down through the generations in that family, or it might be that the landholder has gone to university and studied agriculture, and they are practising what they perceive as still state-of-the-art management.

“So when you talk to people about regenerative agriculture, passions can run hot and people can get a little protective of what they’re doing.”

The farmers at the Wilmot field day, however, are largely the converted. Laggan beef farmer Stuart McWilliam, who drove 10 hours with his wife and three children to attend the event, says most of his neighbours near Goulburn are still farming traditionally, but he was eager to embrace the regenerative methods championed at Wilmot when he started out four years ago.

“The mass use of chemicals in agriculture, and the mindset that you’ve got to spray a paddock out to kill everything to grow one specific thing, didn’t sit well with me,” he explains. “There’s a way to farm incorporating the environment, not trying to control it.

“I was an arborist for 10 years – I spent 10 years cutting trees down. This is my chance to correct things and do some good for the environment.”