Before bush fire consumed half their feed, Wilmot Cattle Company were weathering the dry through carefully managed rotational grazing but that all changed on black Friday, September 6, when a great pall of smoke and tongue of fire leapt out of the Guy Fawkes gorges and over the Hernani plateau, leaving behind a mosaic of blackened paddocks.
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On the Saturday morning, manager Stuart Austin picked up the phone and rang Ebor Beef Marketing Consultant Sam Ditchfield, who uploaded all of Wilmot's Angus breeders onto AuctionsPlus. Cows returned an average $1140 and Mr Austen was happy with that early decision.
"With that fire we were plunged into an instant drought situation," said Mr Austin. "We had brought those breeders from our Walcha property and they were only keeping down rank grass, which we lost. We knew that once you start feeding it's hard to stop. We didn't want to do that so there was only one thing to do."
The loss of land on which to trade cattle is a more immediate impact on cashflow, and the enterprise will run lean for the next 12 months.
Fortunately, Wilmot will bounce back; of that Mr Austin remains confident, considering the fair effort that has gone into building a resilient system.
Carbon sequestration through rotational grazing started at Wilmot in 2012 and five years later the soil at nine test sites revealed a doubling of organjc carbon to five per cent.
Clearly a regenerative farming approach to beef was working to improve soil and rainfall holding capability. But Mr Austin wanted to make the system more efficient.
Mr Austen and his wife Trish and their baby Harry arrived in 2016, with the job of managing 3000 head of trade cattle and good grass country at Hernani, on the Upper Nymboida.
From the start they relied on objective data to steer the enterprise in a profitable direction.
"What we don't measure we can't manage," he says.
Central to the property's turnaround has been a system involving resting paddocks prior to intensive grazing.
Certainly inputs like lime during the first few years helped to increase pH and decrease the impact of inherent aluminium while unlocking ample phosphorous. Compost with traces of zinc, boron, selenium and copper also add a boost while cattle now have easy access to a free choice supplement trailer containing Himalyan pink salt and its various nutrients, with elemental sulphur, copper sulphate, kelp and dolomite.
"We live by the mantra that if we don't measure we can't manage it. There's not many parameters we don't record and this is all about creating self sustaining biologically functional soil."
- Stuart Austin, Wilmot Cattle Co
As weeds serve the function of covering bare grounds there were plenty of them at the start, but within 12 months, as soil health improved, things like thistles went away of their own accord.
"Instead Wilmot ended up with desirable perennials," said Mr Austin, "with plants like cocksfoot and phalaris."
Getting to that point involved an invasion of scarab beetles and subsequent predatory birds scratching up the soil to get at them. Some 60 days later there was fresh growth from a seed bank and the crop of Phalaris shot up.
"Cattle nearly bloated," Mr Austin said. "Clearly this was an indication of ecological change."
In fact, the grass species was not new to the property, with real estate agent Graham McDougall from Uralla providing proof in the form of a photograph taken in the 1950s when he was a child at Hernani showing Phalaris growing from under a parked truck and reaching up to the cab.
"This sort of pasture is returning to the property with better soil health," said Mr Austin.
Other learned people like Geoff Bassett, Dorrigo and Inverell, were brought on board as consultants with Mr Bassett bringing a biological focus, after learning about cell grazing 30 years ago.
"He's one of these people with a wealth of knowledge, who digs up dirt, smells it, plays with it, checks out root depth and records its Brix with a refractor and pH with litmus paper." said Mr Austin.
"We live by the mantra that if we don't measure we can't manage it. There's not many parameters we don't record and this is all about creating self sustaining biologically functional soil."
