Alejandro Carrillo’s Aussie Tour – Southern Rangelands Station Visits

In 2023, Alejandro Carrillo toured WA’s Southern Rangelands, offering observations and recommendations for reversing land degradation and improving productivity & profitability across the stations he visited. You can read the full report, produced by Rangelands NRM, here.

Alejandro noted things like….

• Native trees dying due to lack of perennial grass stands, which regulate soil temperatures, capture more rain, and create a more inviting environment for native trees to thrive.
• Land degradation has a direct impact on pastoralists’ bottom lines, forcing the, to replace natural ecosystem services with costly inputs.
• WA pastoralists are having to lower their carrying capacity to adjust to land degradation.
• Many grasses are oxidised due to lack of intentional animal impact (well-managed grazing).
• Much of the region is either overgrazed or undergrazed.
• The size of rangelands stations presents a huge opportunity for restoring local water cycles, thus bringing more rain to the area.
• Rotationally grazing livestock will enhance biology to create conditions required for existing native perennial seeds to germinate and thrive (through improved soil fertility, water cycles, and increased movement by livestock and wildlife).
• Grazing animals are required to maintain healthy grasslands – the more diverse, the better.
• Pastoralists should trial different grazing practices each year – i.e varied grazing densities, longer rest periods, more frequent moves, smaller scale paddocks.
• Run trials on stations most productive areas first.

The Southern Rangelands Regional Node Lead is engaged through Rangelands NRM and supported by the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub, through funding from the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund.