Turning Salt lands into Productive Pastures | DPIRD

you know back in its day back in the 40s 50s would have been some of the the choice country in the district until it went salon so [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 standard 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 but the size of our problem was so huge that we'd realised we couldn't just plant trees because we just would take us forever to cover the area we got in touch with ashley lewis who was working through kim seeds 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 we probably did another 40 hectares the next year with ashley and then after that we bought airline cedar 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 this one here we have river the river salt bush [Music] the subwasher seed's supposed to go into there but the sodish seeds too light so it won't distribute properly so instead we mix the salt bush 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 1.5 metres we've probably got 450 to 500 hectares of saltwush 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 light 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 and to let the annuals and that establish it's a lot more productive now we can just run more shape than 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 we can get in there we can like run the sheep on them we can get an economic return off it and and still clean 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 um so as you can see there's there's a lot of the volunteer old man salt bush 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've done nothing about salinity i'd i'd be thinking the house might be in a fair bit of trouble like 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 one of my i'm the third generation so my kids will be the fourth generation you're saving that country um and you're getting the return off country that you like generally returns zero so yeah it's definitely worthwhile doing [Music] you

Channel: Dept of Primary Industries & Regional Development

Views: 21,430

Keywords: agriculture, western australia, government, DPIRD, saltland, farming systems, using perennial pastures, managing salinity, salinity

Id: 3x-Gd-1ttL8

Length: 5min 32sec (332 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020