Rangeland describes land that is expansive and that hasn’t experienced a large amount of change from European settlement.
Australia’s outback is mainly rangeland country – that’s 80 per cent of our landscape – while more than 90 per cent of the area within NQ Dry Tropics is rangeland that’s privately owned or leased for cattle grazing.
North Queensland agricultural property owners are improving the way they doing things.
One farmer is using the backyard method of composting to replace fertilisers; others are fencing off riverbanks, modifying machinery and finding unusual ways of killing weeds.
It’s all to improve the quality of water going into the Great Barrier Reef.
Property management plans act as business plans and are useful for keeping track of natural resources on properties, property design and management practices.
The Delbessie Agreement is a new arrangement of leasing land in Queensland.
Most grazing properties throughout the state are leased and the leases used to be renewed automatically every 30 years. The Queensland Government wants to reward good landholders by offering longer term leases to those who met environmental and social benchmarks.
In 2007, it signed an agreement with rural lobby group Agforce and the Australian Rainforest Conservation Society on a Hughenden property called Delbessie, cementing a new leasehold strategy.
The rivers and streams of the NQ Dry Tropics region drain a tremendous diversity of tropical landscapes: semi-arid dry lands, wooded grasslands, mountainous tropical rainforests, coastal plains and wetlands.
