"Birds tweeting"
You know back in its day back in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s
it would have been some of the choice country
in the district
until it went saline.
[Music]
This is the house that we're currently in
These are the sheds that are just down there.
You can see this big massive stand of timber
that's all gone from salinity.
Salinity has completely wiped that out.
In like, say around the ‘90s, the salinity
had really shown up
there was a lot of areas that were completely bare,
the wind was damaging it more and more,
it was no good for sheep feed,
it was no good for cropping,
it was pretty well useless.
We knew we had a big problem with salinity,
we were trying to work out how to combat it,
we were trying to plant a few trees
and all that,
the size of our problem was
so huge that we'd realised we couldn't
just plant trees because
it would just take us forever to cover the area.
We got in touch with Ashley Lewis who
was working through Kimseeds,
he said our place would be perfect for direct seeding.
So we gave that a shot in ‘94
and we got some really good results.
"Music"
We probably did another 40 hectares
the next year with Ashley
and then after that we bought our own seeder
and we collected our own seed, and from then on
we've just been doing it ourselves.
So this is the seed here, in these wool packs here,
In this one here we have
river saltbush
["grain pouring"]
the saltbush seed's supposed to go into there but
the saltbush seed is too light
so it won't distribute properly.
So instead
we mix the saltbush with the vermiculite
and we put it in this main box here
and that just drops out
about a cup full on the ground every 1.5metres.
We've probably got 450 to 500 hectares
of saltbush in now and we probably will still do
probably another 100 hectares
over the next you know five or so years.
Before we'd say that this dam stayed
pretty well full
so the water level has dropped I'd say
at least a metre and to a metre and a half
Which is enough to keep everything like at bay
and to let the annuals and that establish,
it's a lot more productive now.
We can just run more sheep than
what we used to before,
and you know especially at these current prices,
like sheep's quite a good enterprise.
The sheep you know sort of complement
the cropping systems too because
we can get in there,
we can like run the sheep on them we can get an
economic return off it
and still clean it up for the cropping system.
The good thing about those areas is that
it doesn't seem to matter how hard you graze them,
unlike a normal conventional feedlot,
they generally don't blow.
So areas like this they weren't actually seeded,
this has just come in like
off the stuff that's seeded.
So as you can see there's a lot of the
volunteer Old man saltbush.
If you look closer to the ground
you'll actually see there's a lot of clover
germinating in this area,
so there will be a reasonable stand of
clover here for the sheep at a later date.
They come back better after a good hard graze.
If we had done nothing about salinity
I'd be thinking the house might be in a fair bit of trouble
right now.
We wouldn't be able to run
anywhere near….
well we could run the same amount of livestock but
we would have to crop a hell of a lot less
We'd be back to sort of
cropping sixty percent of the farm
instead of eighty percent of the farm
and we may have actually lost more country to salinity.
You're farming for the next generation.
So you know I'm the third generation,
so my kids will be the fourth generation.
You're saving that country
and you're getting the return off country
that you like generally returns zero,
so yeah it's definitely worthwhile doing
[Music]