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Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050

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University of Western Australia

Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050

69 notes

The Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050 Course is based on a clear vision: imagine best practice farming for 2050, start to implement these strategies now, all the while making sure it will still be profitable. At UWA we're doing just that with the Future Farm 2050 Project, set on a mixed-enterprise farm in Western Australia and we want you to learn how it can be done in your part of the world. Although this course is based on agriculture, it's not only about farming. It is a multi-disciplinary course that addresses a wide range of issues confronting the industry, including rural communities, rural infrastructure and conservation of biodiversity in agriculture. By completing this course you will understand that feeding and clothing the planet requires a multi-disciplinary approach and upon completion you will be able to explain best practices of sustainable farming and apply them in new contexts.

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Introduction to the Course

Welcome to "Discover Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 2050". In this first week you'll be introduced to the UWA Future Farm 2050 Project, an initiative by UWA in agricultural R&D and regional engagement. The project is centred on agriculture but you'll discover that feeding the world needs a mutli-disciplinary approach, and there are a wide range of issues confronting the agricultural industry which must be addressed if we are to cope with population projections for 2050.

Professor Graeme Martin - Welcome to the Course and Introduction to Best Practice Farming for a Sustainable 205020:09

360 Farm Tour8:11

Introduction to Ridgefield Farm Manager - Mr Steven Wainewright4:18

Rencontrer les enseignants

Graeme Martin
Professor
School of Agriculture and Environment

Welcome to the Future Farm 2050 virtual tour.

Here we are in the middle of a large plot of shrubs,

small bushes that are native Australian plants.

These green shrubs provide many benefits making them superstar plants.

First, they provide a valuable alternative feed source.

As you look around you will see that they are bright green, yet

most of the landscape is yellow.

At this time of the year in this part of the world,

the normal pasture plants are dead, with very low energy concentrations and

very low digestibility, and they provide little nutritional value for animals.

The second benefit from the shrubs is that they reduce the production of methane,

a major greenhouse gas.

So ruminant livestock consuming them are going contribute less to global warming.

The third thing they do is to combat gastrointestinal worms.

Worms are a major problem, not just in Australia, but around the world

because they have become resistant to the medication we have been using for

the past 50 years.

The fourth important benefit of these shrubs is their very deep roots which

allow them to lower the water table and thus help us to control salinity,

a serious problem in many agricultural landscapes.

The fifth advantage of these shrubs is that they are fairly tall.

So animals can get down behind them when it's cold, wet, and windy, and

therefore avoid getting cold.

This is particularly important for newborn lambs.

The loss of lambs soon after birth is a really big problem,

especially when they're born on a cold, wet, and windy day.

By bringing our pregnant sheep into these shrubs,

we've reduced our lamb mortality to very, very low numbers.

Finally, these shrubs are native Australian plants.

They are beautifully adapted to this environment,

and they're also part of our management of biodiversity in our landscape.

The native birds and animals like these plants and

can make use of them as well as the sheep do.

This is a major dam on the property.

Very early on in the development of the Future Farm Project, we made a commitment

to protect ourselves against drought years with respect to water supply.

The reason for that is very simple.

We had long term plan for

breeding of sheep of very high quality that are suited to this environment.

It takes years and years and years of breeding to get the sort of animals

you need for profitable and sustainable livestock production.

We didn't want to be in a situation where after, say, 30 years of genetic selection,

we suddenly had to sell all of our animals because we had a drought year and

therefore not enough water.

We had to protect our investment in the genetics of these animals.

So we constructed this dam.

It's been designed around some very simple principles.

First, it had to be able to supply enough water for

the sheep during the two predicted driest years in 100 years,

the frequency of serious drought years we expect in this part of the world.

The second principle was that it had to last for 100 years.

In other words, the construction of the dam had to be of sufficient quality

that would last for 100 years without us needing to build another dam.

The third principle was that we would not allow sheep to walk on the dam walls and

cause them to degrade.

If you look at the far side of the dam, you will see solar powered pumps.

We use these to pump water to the highest point on the farm, from where

we use gravity to distribute water to the fields where the sheep are kept.

Here we are in what is almost the geographical center of the farm and

certainly the highest point.

We've placed two major resources here.

In the distance is a weather station which allows us to interpret the results of our

experimentation and anything we do test in terms of cropping and

livestock management.

The other machine is a GPS station which allows us to have a very precise

map of the farm.

In fact the whole farm, all 1,600 hectares is mapped into 4 centimeter squares.

As a consequence we have accurate knowledge of the areas involved in our

activities.

Which areas are being used for

which land use, exactly how long our fences are, and so on.

When we want to put in a water pipeline for

example, we know exactly the distances and what the cost will be.

This is precision agriculture and landscape management on a grand scale.

The site you see here is where we are doing some serious ecosystem restoration.

In this part of the world only about 15% of the natural bush has been left behind

after the creation of farmland after colonization.

And so, as a consequence, we're losing our biodiversity, the wonderful animals and

plants that are unique to Australia.

Maintenance of biodiversity is an important part of the Future Farm Project,

and in fact, restoration of the biodiversity in some parts of the farm

is core business in the project.

We begin with parts of the farm that are not very productive for either crops or

for livestock.

They can be restored without having any major effect on profitability.

This part of the farm is like that because the soils are shallow and very rocky.

Here we are making a connection between a piece of native

bush on the top of the hill here where you see these magnificent grass trees,

then going down through the valley to join the trees in the valley below.

On the other side of this little road you can see some trees which are 3 or

4 meters tall that were planted in 2010.

We chose the trees very carefully.

The people who do this sort of work are specialists in ecosystem restoration.

They do a survey of the plants that normally live in this area,

the bushes the trees, the grasses.

They also try to recover some information about what was here

before it was cleared away for farming.

Our ecosystem restoration scientists discovered that there are hundreds of

species normally in this area.

I don't know exactly how many there were here initially, but

it would be in that order.

But we can't really restore hundreds of species.

It's just simply too complicated.

So what the ecologists do is create what they call nutrient subgroups,

mixes of species that go together to help manage the fertility of the soil.

These plants help each other.

So we planted 12,000 trees here of 14 different species, and

we're now looking at how they're growing and how they're developing.

As you can see, they've grown very well.

We're also looking at how much carbon they take out of the atmosphere and

store in their root systems as well in their trunks and leaves.

So this part of the Future Farm Project has two benefits.

It has the restoration aspect which is about recovering biodiversity and

preventing biodiversity loss, and it also has a carbon farming aspect

where we are using trees to try and reduce the carbon load in the atmosphere.

We think that this is a major way that farmers can help us to control

atmospheric pollution.

What we need to do now is understand the value of this restoration project for

the native wildlife.

So our future plans include measurement of the number of animals

that have returned to this area.

We can't have any data right now, but listening and looking tells us that

there are a lot more birds here than they were before we introduced these plants.

An important part of the Future Farm 2050 Project is people.

You'll be hearing about the people side of the project on several occasions during

the course in relation to infrastructure, to buildings, and

in relation to community interactions.

Let's focus briefly though on this particular building which is a farm

manager's home.

As you can see it's a modern building and very nicely designed, but

an important fact about this house is that it is independent of external supplies for

water and electricity.

All of the rainwater is collected from the roof and stored in two large tanks, and

this easily supplies enough water for the whole family for the whole year.

Then we have solar panels, and they are supported by a battery system.

So the house produces enough electricity for all of its needs for the whole year.

These two things are really critical if farm houses are to be self-sufficient and

independent as we move into the future.

The aim of the Future Farm Project is, in fact, for

every building on the farm to contribute to independence for energy and water.

This is the small town of Pingelly, our local rural community.

The town has about 700 people, and it's almost entirely dependent

on the agricultural industries for its sustenance.

The town itself is part of the Future Farm Project

where we deal with the people issues in the development of modern agriculture.

In this course,

you'll hear about infrastructure projects that we're working on with the town, and

you'll hear that eco-social work where we're helping people to come to grips with

the big issues confronting agriculture as we move towards 2015.

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