Permaculture swales help return Woodlands Station profits
A North Queensland farming family have converted a tired cattle station into a profitable grazing business and thriving environmental haven. Here’s how they did it.
Resilience.
It’s a key word for Mark and Sharon Yensch.
Since purchasing Woodlands Station at Bowen, Queensland, 18 years ago, the couple has purposefully created resilience in every aspect of their grazing business from soil, water, pasture and stock to marketing, environmental sustainability and even life balance.
By doing so, they have transformed their 2350ha “dreadfully run down, overgrazed headache” into a profitable farm business and thriving ecological oasis.
They started with infrastructure improvements.
The entire station was re-fenced, paddock numbers were increased and laneways installed to enable a high level of herd rotation and strict pasture management for year-round ground cover.
They installed solar and wind turbine systems for self-sufficient off-grid power – a “game changer” during cyclone season.
New undercover cattle yards were built with a pneumatic crush for low stress stock handling and to ensure workers had shade, shelter and low impact conditions in the extreme tropical climate.
But the biggest and most influential change has been the installation of permaculture swales and gully bungs to capture water and slow run-off from torrential downpours.
LARGE SCALE REHYDRATION
When the Yenschs first moved to Woodlands Station, they were hit with enormous floods during the wet but within three weeks of the season ending, had little water left on the property.
“When we saw how much rain fell and how much run off there was to the (Great Barrier) reef, we had to do something. It was blatantly clear,” Mark said.
They began to place “a great deal of importance” on water rehydration, participating in permaculture courses and learning how to best build swales on a large scale.
Swales are a trench dug along contours to prevent water draining in one direction. They help spread water evenly on slopes and allow it to soak in, reducing erosion, improving soil quality and extending water-use efficiency.
“When you get big rain events, you have to arrest the fast water so the swales are created high in the catchment making the water walk not run and it makes a massive difference,” Mark said.
The Bowen climate is considered dry tropical with an average annual rainfall of 700mm. However, Mark said of that, only about 400mm was effective rainfall that “stays on your place”.
“I describe it as three floods and a very long dry season. We have eight to nine months of dry but we can have a rainfall event of 300mm and that is what led us to put swales in,” he said.
“You get better utilisation of the rainfall. It is not rushing to the ocean. It is no value out at sea.”
CONVERTING THE LANDSCAPE
The swale benefits have reached far beyond what Mark and Sharon anticipated and while they have so far installed 30km, they aim to reach 200km of swales in the next few years and continue creating them as part of a yearly program.
Cattle are able to graze along the swale banks and can easily access water for drinking.
Birdlife, frogs and insects have multiplied exponentially.
“We are converting the landscape. It is not just about the livestock,” Mark said.
“I am blown away by the volume of birds that weren’t here before. We used to have millions of cane toads and now we’ve hardly got any. We think the birds are cleaning them up.”
A financial audit conducted as part of a grazing management course the Yenschs participated in, returned an economic value for their swales.
“For every dollar we spent building swales, we got out $3 in grazing alone, not to mention the new plants and wildlife,” Mark said.
“Australia could benefit enormously from swales being implemented nationwide.”
Mark and Sharon install the swales themselves with machinery, starting high at the watershed point and working downwards on two metre elevation spacing.
It takes six to seven years for a swale to saturate the landscape so the older they get, the more water stays in them.
The Yenschs now have water left on the property at the end of each dry season, including green grass in paddocks from their successful grazing management regime.
RAISING THE BOTTOM LINE
Sharon runs a strict grazing chart to keep track of their four cattle mobs, recording how many days are spent grazing in each of the 35 paddocks, and how many days the pastures are rested.
They run 420 Greyman cows (Murray Grey-Brahman) plus replacement heifers, selling seven to nine month old calves, weaned and weighing 280kg to 320kg, direct to finishers.
The four mobs include heifers and two separate cow mobs – one serviced by Murray Grey bulls and the other by Brahman bulls. One cow mob has a fixed joining period over four months and the other has bulls in year-round.
There is a separate bull mob too – part of the Yensch’s side hustle selling 60 Greyman bulls a year to repeat clients.
The crossbred hybrid vigour of the Greyman cattle has added as much as $120 a head in value to the Yensch’s bottom line because of the high fertility, muscle and marketability in local and southern beef markets.
“If you have straight Brahmans, there is resistance to where you can market them. These (Greymans) finish so much quicker. It is a no-brainer as far as market is concerned to have a cross of some kind,” Sharon said.
Pastures are mostly native and are regularly tissue tested to determine what, if any, nutritional elements are missing in the paddock. These elements, such as phosphorus, calcium, copper and protein, are now added to a lick formula and fed directly to cows.
“We were wasting $20,000 a year by not using science to formulate the lick and we were missing the mark because it wasn’t actually needed,” Mark said.
“We changed to mixing our own licks rather than using manufactured ones and it has resulted in better condition of cows and they are utilising the feed better.
“We don’t fertilise our country anymore – we put our phosphorus directly into our cows and they fertilise the paddocks for us.”
ECOLOGICAL WARRIORS
While investing in education and innovation has paid off for Mark and Sharon, thinking ahead and planning well in advance has also been a key component of resilience building in their business.
They have fencing equipment, roofing iron, cement and fuel on hand to counteract cyclone shortages should they arise and also have forward selling stock contracts to minimise risk.
Their bulls are all sold for $3300 each so they know exactly what the program is worth every year.
“We set ourselves up to be resilient no matter what,” Mark said.
“While others are seesawing on the weather, we can progress along steadily without major changes.”
The couple, who have both suffered health battles in recent years, have tried to make the property as easy to manage and maintain as possible and more regularly factor in holidays and time away from the farm.
“We are committed to what we do but we are learning how to have a work life balance,” Mark said.
They host regular field days via local support network groups including Reef Catchments and Dry Tropics and have recently invested in a bus to begin tours of the station with school groups and other interested parties to showcase their ecological achievements.
“We don’t like to be called environmentalists but we are coming around to making the property as good as it can possibly be,” Mark said.
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