AS ORGANIC beef producer Glenn Morris drives through last season’s tall yellow grass on “Billabong”, near Inverell, a fallow deer buck bounds away, holding his fine antler rack high.
We had just seen an extensive patch of feral pig rootlings, and a pod of kangaroos.
To Mr Morris, the fact that so many pests want to exploit the fertility of “Billabong” soil is a sign of success.
When he and wife Katrina arrived there seven years ago, pest animals gave the badly degraded property a wide berth.
Even his small flock of killer sheep kept escaping for better neighbouring pastures.
Mr Morris wasn’t deterred: he had already restored one degraded property into a highly productive enterprise, and he aimed to apply the same principles to “Billabong”.
The first property was “Wilton Park”, near Grafton, which Mr Morris began to manage for small family company Nattai Investments 15 years ago.
In the subtropical summers, the property could get storm rain of 100-150 millimetres at a time – but Mr Morris watched the water tear off the land into the adjacent river.
Meanwhile, what had once been perennial streams stayed dry.
He began to investigate how he could retain that rainfall in the soil profile.
His reading led him to humus, a subject that so absorbed him that he subsequently did a Masters degree around it.
Mr Morris had been building the farm’s capacity with conventional high-input methods, but figuring out how to build humus in “Wilton Park’s” soils introduced him to new concepts.
He began to use planned grazing and organic fertilisers, and cut chemical use.
When he arrived at “Wilton Park”, the property carried 7 DSE (dry sheep equivalent) per hectare.
A few years of building a high-input, high-energy pasture system bounced that figure to 12 DSE/ha.
But since Mr Morris learned to manage the property as an ecological system, one that made maximum use of rainfall and cycled its own fertility, carrying capacity has lifted to 21 DSE/ha.
When Nattai Investments bought “Billabong” as a cattle finishing property, Mr Morris thought he would repeat the same process.
“I had no idea how degraded the soils were, and what a long road back it would be,” he said.
It wasn’t just “Billabong’s” overdrawn soil bank that made the road long.
Mr Morris thinks he put too much faith in the restorative powers of good grazing management.
In hindsight, he thinks, putting on some medicinal applications of minerals would have helped get the nutrient cycle moving faster.
“Since we got here we’ve also been having the longest warm spells on record,” said Mr Morris, who is deeply concerned about the effects of global warming on agriculture.
“A stable climate should be regarded as an essential foundation for successful agriculture, that’s why every farmer should be managing for better weather conditions, as one of their highest priorities.
“Last year we only had a six-week growing season, and this year wasn’t much better.
“Through all that, you have to try and balance the need to return as much plant growth to the soil as possible, to build fertility, with the need for productivity.”
Bare ground – a feature of “Billabong” seven years ago – is biologically inert.
Even a weed is an improvement.
A weed captures solar energy and transfers it to the soil through root exudates, supporting the microbes that are essential to soil fertility.
As fertility builds, more desirable species succeed the weeds, pumping ever more energy into the soil.
It’s a process that Mr Morris likens to starting a heavy flywheel moving.
After years of anxiety, he’s now confident the flywheel is turning on “Billabong”.
Stocking rates haven’t changed – tough seasons and Mr Morris’s determination to return plant matter to the soil have been a factor – but he’s now confident that when it rains, “Billabong” captures most of it, and the property’s soils have the energy to convert the moisture to productive pasture.