Alice Springs Rural Review
Northern Territory. Department of Resources
Alice Springs Rural Review; E-Journals; PublicationNT; Alice Springs Rural Review
2010-12-01
Alice Springs
Made available via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).; This publication contains many links to external sites. These external sites may no longer be active.; Includes : Pastoral Market Update November 2010; Arid Zone Research Institute; AZRI, Alice Springs
English
Agriculture; Alice Springs Region; Periodicals
Northern Territory Government
Alice Springs
Alice Springs Rural Review
V 44 (9-12) December 2010
application/pdf
0813-9148
Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Northern Territory Government
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/227332
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/676011
ALICE SPRINGS RURAL REVIEW, Page 4 of 20 Northern Grazing Systems Project Sally Leigo (DoR Alice Springs), Dionne Walsh (DoR Berrimah Farm), and Mick Quirk (MLA) Local pastoralists in the Alice Springs region would have recently received an invite to attend a Northern Grazing Systems (NGS) workshop. For some this may have been their first opportunity to learn about the project and for others the opportunity to follow some more information about the project and where it is at currently. The NGS project is a major collaborative research and development project coordinated by Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) to increase the value from previous research around on managing grazing in northern Australia. The NGS project has identified four land management approaches which offer the most potential for improving land condition and enterprise profitability: 1. Infrastructure development; 2. Stocking rate management; 3. Pasture spelling; and 4. Prescribed burning. As the success of each of these practices varies from region to region MLA has asked a team of researchers in consultation with local pastoralists, researchers and facilitators to identify the practices that will have the greatest impact in the central Australian region. The first workshop was held in Alice Springs in April to collect information from local pastoralists, researchers and facilitators on local management practices, land types, herd structure and performance, business costs and cattle prices received. This information allowed the team of researchers to develop a representative property and the parameters to test how this property would have performed over the past 30 years. This representative property data was then fed into two models: GRASP (for pasture growth, land condition and live weight gain) and Enterprise (for performance) then modelled over the climatic data collected for the past 30 years. In October the team of researchers returned to Alice Springs to present some of their model results, based on the information provided from the first workshop. The presentations focused on findings about the impact that different stocking rates has on live weight gain, land condition and total beef produced/ha. Participants at the workshop were asked to provide feedback to these presentations and whether they thought the results reflected their own experiences. Figure one and Table one on Page 5 are examples of some of the results provided at the second workshop. PHOTO: Attendees at the first NGS workshop catch up during one of the session breaks.