NQ Dry Tropics is focused on its people and building cross-program collaboration to work towards a common goal – to partner with the organisation’s stakeholders to create connected and functioning landscapes. Recently, 16 staff across three program areas – Sustainable Agriculture, Strategy and Partnerships and Landholders Driving Change  – attended a masterclass with industry specialists Brian Wehlburg (Inside Outside Management), Dr Christine Jones (Amazing Carbon) and Dick Richardson (Grazing Naturally).

NQ Dry Tropics is working with landholders in the Upper Burdekin catchment to find ways to manage grazing pressure to maintain productive frontage pastures and minimise impacts on waterways and wetlands. The Linking Burdekin landholders to their frontage country for vegetation, and soil quality gains project, funded by the Natural Resources Investment Program, is taking a ‘ground-up’ approach that combines landholders’ knowledge with the latest scientific research to develop and trial solutions designed to remove social, financial and technical barriers to practice change.

PREVENTING runoff makes good business sense for cane farmers in North Queensland’s Lower Burdekin region, and with internationally significant wetlands and the Great Barrier Reef on their doorstep, it makes good environmental sense too. NQ Dry Tropics’ Connecting Burdekin Cane Farmers To Their Local Wetlands project supported a group of farmers located near Lilliesmere Lagoon, Ayr, and Horseshoe Lagoon, Giru, to monitor their runoff and improve their irrigation and nutrient efficiency.

THE best tool to develop a fit for purpose grazing landscape was the animal for which the pasture was intended, according to renowned regenerative grazing expert Dick Richardson. Speaking at a workshop designed to coach graziers in pasture management and grazing planning, Mr Richardson said nature provided the tools to “inoculate” land with desirable pasture, and those tools were the same animals that were going to be grazed there.

FRESH from conducting soil health workshops across the region with a range of primary producers from graziers to market gardeners, agroecologist David Hardwick will share his knowledge with Burdekin cane growers at the end of the month.

A LEADERSHIP program, developed specifically for graziers in the Bowen and Collinsville region, has kicked off. Thirteen local producers have signed up to the program that has been designed by NQ Dry Tropics’ Landholders Driving Change (LDC) project.