Sheep farmers are helping save Tasmania’s native grasslands: ‘We’re better off working together’

When Tasmania’s lowland native grasslands were first recommended for national listing as a critically endangered ecosystem in 2007, mistrust between farmers and conservationists was high.

“We walked out of a stakeholder meeting in the Ross pub,” says Simon Foster, whose family have been farming on the Midlands since 1823.

Four years later, Foster and a small group of other local farmers had come around.

“We’re better off working together than taking an adversarial approach,” Foster said.

They facilitated the formation of the Midlands Conservation Partnership (MCP), a collaborative agreement between landowners, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy and Bush Heritage Australia, founded in 2011 to conserve native grasslands on private property via stewardship agreements.

Temperate native grasslands are threatened all over Australia, and much of what remains is degraded and fragmented.

Tasmania’s Midlands are a biodiversity hotspot, listed as a “priority place” in the federal government’s Threatened Species Action Plan 2022-32. However, this listing does not guarantee protection.

“Only 30% of original vegetation on the Midlands survive and only 5% of the native grasslands,” says the MCP’s project coordinator, Pierre Defourny.

Defourny says a “mere 20%” of the remaining native grasslands in the Midlands are protected, half of which –about 1,624 hectares (4,011 acres) – is covered by the MCP’s stewardship program. Fourteen farmers have signed up, and are paid $45 a hectare by the MCP to maintain the grasslands.

It’s colloquial wisdom that the wealth of colonial Australia was built off the sheep’s back, but it is seldom acknowledged that the vast natural grasslands graziers depended on had been culturally managed by Aboriginal people for more than 30,000 years.

Disturbance caused by traditional burning and frequent digging for edible tubers, alongside digging by small marsupials, created the spongy soils and extraordinarily biodiverse ecosystems taken for granted by early settlers.

As the colonies developed, the native grasslands and their complex beauty shrank to remnants on private land, where merino sheep thrived on the biodiverse diet and in sheltered woodlands. Their grazing helps provide the disturbance the grasslands required.

“It was after the 1989 wool crash, when farmers had to diversify, that a lot of the grasslands were lost to ploughing and pasture improvement,” says Diana Cameron.

Her late husband, Andrew Cameron, was a Midlands farmer and MCP coordinator from 2011-2021.

“Andrew was a conservationist,” she says. “He knew the farmers, so he could talk to them about the importance of the grasslands and how the stewardship program would work.”

The origins of the MCP are in the work of University of Tasmania plant geography professor Jamie Kirkpatrick, who began developing relationships with farmers in the 1980s and 1990s. Kirkpatrick, who died in October, mapped remnant grassy ecosystems in cemeteries, tips, parks and roadsides, as well as on farms.

“The Midlands has a population that loves its landscape,” Kirkpatrick wrote in an article on the natural history of the Midlands in 2003, recognising the vital role of landowners in conservation.

In 2006, Louise Gilfedder OAM, a conservation ecologist who worked with Kirkpatrick, received a Churchill Fellowship to investigate partnership models in the US that encourage farmers to incorporate biodiversity conservation into farming practices.

“I wanted to find models that were driven by the landowners,” Gilfedder says. “At our meetings, farmers were saying, ‘conservation’s got to be on the balance sheet, it’s got to be part of our enterprise, we need to get some financial reward.’

Foster says Louise helped establish ecological indicators, “while we modelled a farm economically, using stewardship payments rather than conservation covenanting”.

Under the MCP, farmers receiving the stewardship payment must meet certain requirements, including lodging an annual report, reducing weed infestations and maintaining or improving the ecosystem. The results are monitored by Bush Heritage Australia ecologist Matt Appleby.

“The MCP empowers farmers to manage sustainably, putting the environment at the forefront,” says Julian von Bibra, MCP farmer and chair of the Tasmanian Land Conservancy. “The model works – aligning the needs of farming and environment, keeping farmers relevant as land managers and in step with the community.”

Wildflowers thrive among native tussock grasses on farms managed under MCP principles, which include reduced stocking rates, seasonally resting land, weed control and caging regenerating woodland saplings. The model shares principles with regenerative grazing, with the scientific underpinning of formal conservation monitoring.

Four species of threatened orchids have their largest populations on MCP properties.

“We waited three years to see the rare black-tipped spider orchid flower in one of our protected paddocks,” Von Bibra says.

The grasslands are also a stronghold for rare marsupials including the Tasmanian bettong, eastern barred bandicoot and Tasmanian devil.

Some farmers have been able to leverage their involvement in the program to sell a premium product. Merino farmer Simon Cameron sells the superfine wool from his farm, Kingston, to Australian tailors M.J. Bale, who spruik the environmental credentials of their single origin merino wool suits on their website.

While monitoring shows positive conservation outcomes, Defourny says a lack of funding is limiting MCP’s growth.

“Eighty per cent or 11,000 hectares of Tasmania’s critically endangered lowland native grasslands remain unprotected,” he says. “New properties want to sign up. Every $100,000 donated to the fund ensures the conservation of another 90 hectares of grasslands.”

Defourny says managing for conservation is the only way to ensure the tiny flowers and shy creatures survive, while sheep turn grass into superfine wool.

“Once the grasslands are gone, they are lost forever,” says Defourny.