Bacchus Beef boosts biodiversity from the ground up
Soil care has been a game-changer for a West Gippsland beef farm after fire devastated the property. How did they recover?
RECOVERING from the devastation of bushfire is a mammoth task in of itself.
Producers often take months — sometimes years — to rebuild not only their farms and businesses, but the mental resilience to go on.
When Ingrid and Robert Green were faced with the task of rebuilding after their 158ha beef farm after the West Gippsland region was razed by fire in 2019, the couple viewed the blank canvas before them not as an onerous task, but an opportunity to regenerate in more ways than one.
The Green family, who produce grass-fed beef under the Bacchus Beef banner, are focused on farming in a regenerative way, being both conscious of and sensitive to the environment.
They run a mixture of Angus and Hereford cattle, with some black baldy stock, across the property at Tonimbuk, after relocating the family’s Hereford breeding stock from Bacchus Downs in Queensland.
Bacchus Beef run 150 breeding females and weaner cattle, a mixture of Angus and Hereford.
The choice of cattle breed is important to Ingrid, who said the farm would move back towards Hereford cattle in coming years, as they tolerated the weather conditions of West Gippsland better than Angus.
She said the focus was beef production, but in the past couple of years regeneration of the soil had become important.
“Life cannot continue as it is,” Ingrid said.
“In the past 30 years our number of dry years have doubled, and our wet years have halved. We’re trying to capture every drop of rain that comes.
“You can see it just shedding off of the hills, which means soils can’t capture that water.”
The Greens have been farming at the Tonimbuk property for about 20 years.
In that time noticeable changes in weather and climate had resulted in a change of attitude when farming the land, Ingrid said.
“We’ve noticed we seem to have more and more dry years.
“This last summer, I can’t remember one as soft as this,” she said.
“Someone picking up our cattle recently, he said that in 55 years of farming he’s never seen a year like this. Never seen so much hay.”
COSTLY CLIMATE
THE increasing volatility in weather played out in the most harrowing way in March 2019, when bushfire tore through the Greens’ property.
“We were absolutely smashed … it really wiped us out,” Ingrid said.
“We lost an extensive amount of infrastructure including three sheds, and 50km of fences, and are still in the rebuilding phase … and the devastation that was our farm fuelled the passion to do as much as possible to restore and regenerate the ecosystem.”
They sold some cattle and sent about 100 cows and 90 weaners away on agistment.
Some injured cattle on another farm were treated and, with no grass and no hay available, Ingrid was forced to supplementary-feed them to increase their weights.
“You’d just look at it, and it was just black,” she said.
“There was nothing there.”
In Ingrid’s book, a healthy farm that works in conjunction with nature — not against it — starts from the ground up.
And being a grass-fed beef producer, the pasture growing on her property is a top priority.
By employing a system of locking up paddocks, the biodiversity of the soil is gradually built up, creating a lush place for cattle to graze.
It also enhances the quality of soil, which at present is “extremely shallow and acidic”.
Cattle are strip-grazed and moved at least once every 24 hours.
Multispecies pastures are planted using the Soilkee built by Neils Olsen.
The Soilkee system is a form of minimal tillage with minimal soil disturbance, in an attempt to preserve and enhance soil health and biology.
“So you can go into your pasture, you can sow over it, but you don’t destroy your pasture that is there, and it enhances all of the biology.
“It’s basically getting the biology going, getting the fungi going, and also planting multi-species pastures,” Ingrid said.
“The best combination is you have the five groups working together synergistically, and they create the best environment for growth above the ground, such as the grasses, grains, brassicas, legumes and more.
“The stock just love it,” Ingrid said.
“We have only been using (Soilkee) since 2019 however the difference is easy to see.
“Even the colour of the paddocks is a standout and the cattle are very contented and grazing time is trebled.”
WORK OF ART
INGRID said they had since locked up a third of the farm on rotation.
“We left this for 11 months, and we then fed it off. It was incredible,” Ingrid said.
“We had peas growing, vetch … we had dairy farmer friends come and visit and one said she could almost pick a bunch of flowers from the paddock.
“It’s like a Monet garden.
“Normally this would be brown and crackly.
“We’re really looking forward to what happens in 10 years’ time.”
Ingrid said she had noticed how relaxed and content the cattle were in the paddocks.
“The grazing time was less, because they were chewing their cud, they were full and satisfied, and instead of being in there for two days, they were in there for seven,” she said.
“They would just lay there, chew their cud. They looked so contented. So happy. Yeah. And instead of two days, they were there for seven days. Fantastic.
“I was just like, ‘wow’, that blew me away.”
It’s this level of care and compassion that extends from paddock to the plate.
Ingrid has a visible passion for her livestock.
She said she rarely had to use the working dogs to muster the stock, but rather would walk into the paddock and simply call to her cattle.
They come to the sound of her voice as she moves calmly through the paddocks.
And while the recovery from bushfire is still ongoing — a number of fences and yards still display fire damage — Ingrid’s emphasis on a wholesome, healthy future is evident.
The farm’s set of scales was lost in the bushfires, but Ingrid said she had noticed a difference in the cattle since deploying the regenerative system on farm.
“We have just started reweighing again, but daily weight gains are far better on regenerative pastures rather than on lease country that had previously been set stocked,” Ingrid said.
Other benefits include a decline in parasites due to rotational grazing and rest time.
“With the longer rest period between grazing there has been an increase in perennial grasses and decrease in annuals, especially undesirable annuals such as thistles, and barley grass marshmallow,” Ingrid said.
Low productive species such as couch grass are disappearing.
Unproductive hillsides with some erosion issues from farming in the 1970s now have a topsoil developing and are covered with lovely pasture.”
It’s these long-term benefits, Ingrid said, that give her pasture resilience in dry periods and quicker recovery time when rain does eventually fall.
TREE REBUILD
THE Greens are in the middle of planting about 3000 trees on their home property, and an additional 1000 this autumn on another property.
“The fires devastated shelter belts, and stock have had no wind and sun protection since,” Ingrid said.
“The extensive birdlife just disappeared, and the silence without their calls post-fires was quite shocking.
“Those tree belts are designed to link remnant grandfather trees and provide pathways for native wildlife, among other ecological benefits.”
Decisions on farm are always made with soil health in mind, Ingrid said.
“We are being proactive rather than firefighting and reactive.
“We lost our cold room and shedding in the fires, and have not replaced then,” Ingrid said.
“The high cattle prices at the moment are giving us time to rebuild infrastructure before resuming the intensiveness of a direct paddock to plate business.”
Ingrid said the journey to farming regeneratively was “a lifelong process”, but she is excited to see what the future brings.
“I think this whole thing has a big effect on your mental health.
“Losing your whole life in the fires, it smashes you really hard.
“So you come out, you see the pasture looking great, it really makes you feel good,” she said.
“You see the cattle are healthy.
“You’re not going out there to kill anything, you’re asking, ‘how can I enhance life?’
“Every farm is different, and every year is different.
“It’s quite symbiotic. It’s completely symbiotic. And everything in nature is symbiotic … mankind just gets in the middle.”
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