James Boland, Big Ampi Station, NSW: Integrating data and science with experience and wisdom
JAMES BOLAND: Thanks very much. There are a couple of sentiments I'll open with before I get into the body of the presentation, if I may. The first one is that our view is that data viewed in isolation, without the appropriate context wrapped around it, can be misleading.
And you'll see a few slides when we get further into the body of the presentation where, viewed in isolation, they'd make a very nasty headline. But when you wrap some context around what that data is telling us and you've got the whole story, it's actually a success story. The second sentiment that I'll ask you hold dear is that our experience has been that data doesn't replace wisdom or experience or the crusty, old property manager driving around in his Land Cruiser.
It merely augments that expertise and experience. That's also been something that we've seen when we've laid very technical analysis on what's traditionally been done. Sometimes the results are remarkably similar.
So who we are and what we are, we are western land leaseholders in the Western Division of New South Wales. We've got two sites, one near Menindee, and another site over near Khobar. We're semi-arid. We've got a fragile environment, so we've got an inherent responsibility to look after the natural resources as well as trying to eek a profit out of our enterprise.
About 18 months ago, we embarked on a very aggressive capex plan. And part of that capex plan involved significant investment in infrastructure. We committed to trying to gather as much data and as much technology as we could to make sure that our capex plan was responsible.
We were spending our dollars in the best possible way. We were going to drive the best productivity returns. We were going to be able to protect the environment that we occupy. And the fourth one, which doesn't get mentioned so much, is would our capex plan, would the way that we're occupying this landscape, allow us to rehabilitate landscapes that have been degraded by previous land managers? And we'll see a few examples of where we're trying to use technology to patch up some damage that well-intended, perhaps clumsy people caused before us.
So our search for better digital tools, 18 months ago we started down this path. And we found ourselves looking at a range of different digital tools. Pretty much everything that we needed was freely available in the public domain. But we didn't find a way that we could successfully layer all those digital resources on top of each other and form a comprehensive plan other than to have six screens available and be jumping from one screen to the other and trying to do a visual representation of how the data overlaid.
And then we came across, via our local land service extension officer, a product that we were confident in at the time, and it's proven to be successful. It was going to be able to give us all of the data that we were accessing from those various sources and put it into one place in a layered structure so that we could turn it on and turn it off. And we could look through various layers to see what we were achieving.
To change anything, of course, there's going to be challenges. And we had a quote about change just a moment ago from Darwin. And my favourite quote about change, I think, is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi about if you cannot change, you cannot change anything.
We went on a programme of trying to rewater, refence, reorganise extensive range lands in Western New South Wales. We didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, but we didn't want to be tied to convention. Maybe a fence line was aligned because 50 years ago they didn't have the heavy equipment to move the vegetation that needed to move to put a fence where it logically should have gone.
So we might have found the water sources were somewhere that it was convenient to put water. And maybe we're now pushing water through one-inch poly with an old windmill. That's as far as they could push it, so that's where they put the tank and the trough.
Now that we're running two-inch PVC in variable-rate pumps and we've got mains powering our property, we can do different things with water. So we didn't want to be tied to the legacy condition. So in our strategic decision making, we were prepared to challenge those conventions.
We also wanted to be able to use the spatial data for our tactical decisionmaking, so how we went about running the property once we'd set up all of our infrastructure, things like how we'd spell a country. The fourth point down is one of my personal favourites. It is how we're going to monitor the effect of our presence on the landscape and have a look.
How long have we been here? What effect have we had? And then project that. What effect are we likely to have on this fragile landscape if we keep doing what we're doing? And spatial data is a key tool to being able to do that for us.
The NRM Spatial Hub, it got mentioned yesterday a couple of times, in fact, at presentations that I listened in to. The NRM Spatial Hub is a tool that we came across that enabled us to do all of this. The NRM Spatial Hub, as you can read for yourself, is a collaboration of all the states and territories. And I am led to believe there are 700 existing users, of which we're the most prominent and the most famous.
The NRM Spatial Hub, what it does for us, we don't use all aspects of it. There are grazers in the far north of Queensland that will use aspects of the NRM Spatial Hub to do things that we simply don't need to do. And I'm sure that we're doing things that dairy producers in Gippsland wouldn't be interested in.
But the things that we use the NRM Spatial Hub for are on the list there. And I'll go through and give you some practical examples about how they look out in the paddock. The mapping infrastructure, this one's a bit of a no brainer. There are multiple platforms available that you can create a farm map with.
So there's no secret on what farm mapping looks like using digital tools. Oops, sorry. And this is just a narrow shot of the Big Ampi Homestead Complex, the airstrip. We were able to use the mapping tools and to build up a series of layers.
The things that we like about the mapping features of the NRM Spatial Hub are the exports that we can take. We can take GPS exports for field use. We can run a series of what-if scenarios. We can do cost analysis of assets, a range of things that the other commercially available mapping platforms didn't allow us to do.
But let's get to some of the environmental things that we can do with this mapping platform. That's what it looks like after we've populated the various layers with all of the infrastructure around that Homestead Complex. He's an example of using that mapping application to try to recover some previously degraded land.
We recently picked up a block next door. That block next door had some significant scalded areas are around that, which is an old, decrepit set of sheep yards with a crutching shed which used to be a shearing shed. And over the last 100 years, there's probably millions of sheep stand around that facility. And their hooves have trampled the vegetation out of it and compacted the soil and left the landscape with those ugly scars.
We can see that with the high-resolution digital imagery. We can plot those scars as a polygon. We get a perimeter, an area. And we get GPX coordinates for all of those places. And we can also put a profile tool over it and see what the gradient is of that scar.
We've got our own dozer and grader. We can go out there with our own equipment and do some remedial land works and see. If we haven't done it yet, we'll see if we can recover the scalds. So that's a work in progress. That's an example of using this sort of spatial data to maybe fix up the ills of the past.
Profiling water lines, I spoke about using that profile tool just a moment ago. Another thing that we use the NRM Spatial Hub for is to profile water lines. And then we can take some of this data out into the field. We don't need to engage a surveyor to tell us how our water lines are going to lay, what the elevations are going to be, what head pressure we need to push over a hill, for example.
But there is also an environmental aspect of being able to build a three-dimensional map of a water line, and that is drains and erosion. You notice how I'm going from the commercial side. And then I go to the environmental side.
And we're using these digital tools hand in hand. We've formed a view that commercial enterprise and environmental concerns need to cohabitate. And if they get out of balance and we focus just on commercial, or we focus just on environmental concerns, well, that's probably to the detriment of the other factor.
There's a Commonwealth stock route-- oops. I keep pushing that. I'm sorry. There's a Commonwealth stock route that goes through our property, Big Ampi. And those dams would have been built by the architects of the CSR. And the architects of the CSR built drains along this embankment to fill this water supply for the drivers as they'd go through, pre trucks and trains.
We see a lot of erosion along that bank line. Using the NRM tool, I was able to zoom into a high resolution and actually map individual drains. And that red line is a particular drain. And then I can calculate what the gradient is of that drain.
And not surprisingly, what's causing the erosion, the drains are five times steeper than we would put a drain in. We've got a gradient that we would carve to. And these drains are simply aligned incorrectly.
But they were put that why probably in 1910, 1920, by folks who didn't know any better. We've got an opportunity now to recover that. And we're adamant that we will be able to realign these drains and over time recover that badly eroded hillside.
Mapping land types, as part of our total grazing management plan, we need to understand what the underlying soil is, what the underlying land type is. Once we have done that, we can identify our key perennial species. We've done feed surveys at different growth cycles of those key species, so we know what we're producing as far as energy and protein.
And then because the mapping tool allows us to measure areas of land type by paddock or by polygon or by area that we define, we can come up with some very accurate feed budgets. And if the nannies are lactating, we know that their protein demand is going to go up. And then we know we can move them on to some different country that has a Chenopod species that has more protein in it. We know all that because we understand our underlying land type.
It might sound pretty obvious, but across 300,000 acres there's a big range of land forms and land types. So it becomes an important part of our management tool, that where we move things and how we arrange our livestock. Another thing that we do with this land type mapping is identify areas that we can responsibly crop.
Now this is nowhere near Menindee, before anybody has a heart attack and thinks that we're cultivating in 260 mills of rain country, this is on another block that we've got near Khobar. And we can see that there is a strip of cropping within our boundary down there. And that's the colour that correlates to the Australian land and soil capability class 3, which has got minimal restrictions.
So the land form is suitable for cultivation. We wanted to see on this 64,000 acre block where there was some more of that country that was logistically going to lend itself to cropping. There's a road that goes down through there, and there's another stripe through there which is the same land type.
So we can submit an application for a cultivation consent based on some science and some logic. We can get access to it. We can measure the gradient, and we know what the land type is. We can look through the layer and see that we don't have mally underneath it. So that's another example of using these sorts of digital tools to make strategic decisions.
Plotting distance from water, hopefully most people in the room are familiar with this technology where you put range rings, depending on the class of stock, depending on how much moisture is on the ground and moisture in the forage, you can put range rings around it to determine the carrying capacity. We've taken this one step further.
This technology isn't particularly new. But what we were keen to be able to do with it was experiment with moving waters away from fence lines and away from corners and also establishing new waters. The block that we've got, because it was watered before Manx Power was there, most of the water points are in the corners of paddocks. And you can imagine what the traffic load is like and what the biomass looks like within a kilometre of the trough.
Now that we've got the capability of pushing water further and more efficiently, we wanted to push the water out in the paddocks. And we can put a dollar value to that using this tool. So here's an example.
This paddock that we've just fenced in, we wanted to assess if we put water there, which is about 2 kilometres into that paddock, it would recover this area as a grazing opportunity. We can translate that into the carrying capacity. Now we know that a trough on the fence and a tank on the fence will cost us almost the same as a tank or a trough out there.
2 kilometres of poly, in our scale that's next to nothing. We can run 2 kilometres of poly out there and open up a whole bunch of country and pick up x amount of dry sheep equivalent per annum. So we can translate that easily to a cost and figure out that's the way that we're going to do it.
Ground cover, I mentioned earlier about looking at the impact that we have on the landscape and having a look at whether we are behaving responsibly. When we look at land cover, we look at an absolute value of land cover-- ground cover, I should say-- which is the bottom graph. And the top graph is relative to an area that you define.
And in this case, we've got the perimeter of Big Ampi, which is the shaded area. And then we've got a 20-kilometre boundary around Big Ampi that we're comparing ourselves to. And that there is where we bought Big Ampi, about where the red dot is, so that we can see that since we've purchased Big Ampi we haven't driven the country backwards relative to the neighbours.
Now it's important that you can define what you're comparing yourself to. You can compare yourself to everything, or you can just pick a high-performing neighbour. Or you can pick a paddock. Or you can pick a land type to form a comparison and say, how are our activities affecting the landscape compared to X, Y, or Z?
So what we can see here is that since we've been the custodians of Big Ampi and relative to 20 kilometres radius all around us, that we've got more relative ground cover than everybody else. And absolutely, we haven't heard anything as well. I'll go on to some pest management initiatives.
I'll skip just that one. Pest control fencing, we suffer from kangaroos and feral goats. We like goats, as long as they're behind fence and we're controlling their husbandry. But the feral goats we don't like. We chop their heads off.
So we've put pest-proof fences around this paddock. We put that in in August last year, March last year. So you can have a look at the absolute ground colour and then the relative ground cover.
That dot is when the fence was completed. When we put the fence in, we put a new water in. We introduced nannies that weren't there before, but they were managed nannies with approved genetic supply. And we've now got more ground cover, absolute and relative, with more livestock in the paddock because we've excluded the pests. So people talking about exclusionary fencing could be using this tool to prove their case.
The last one that I wanted to run through, and I said in my opening comments about single-source data can be misleading if you don't have the backstory. We suffer from invasive native scrub, so undesirable, woody weeds in fairly large areas. This polygon is 2,500 acres of invasive, native scrub, predominately turpentine and narrow leaf hopbush that we pulled, a couple of dozers and a 700-foot chain, under a property vegetation plan.
We pulled that country in September 2015. And you can imagine the mess that you make when you pull country to destroy an invasive, woody weed. That's unavoidable unfortunately. But the solution is if you leave the invasive, woody weed there, it keeps invading. And then all the perennials eventually die out.