Continuous improvement by identifying the weakest links

Continual improvement is all about picking the weakest link in the chain, putting a plan in place to improve it, then sticking to it according to grazier Fran Lyons.

And a Grazing Resilience and Sustainable Solutions (GRASS) Action Plan fits right into that annual sequence at Basalt River Station that she and husband Damien took over in 2017.

“With our GRASS plan, we picked some under-performing, bare areas, some overgrazed areas, we put photo monitoring sites in and we planned how we were going to manage those paddocks specifically to address the problems in those areas,” Fran said.

“So the sequence never really goes away. Rather than a bare area, it might be an under-grazed area, a pest plant coming in…

“That’s the key… the whole process of identifying a problem and putting some steps in place to fix it.”

It wasn’t always like that.

Damien and Fran were eager to make changes when they assumed management of the property in April, 2017. They just didn’t know exactly what changes to make.

They started with the RCS Grazing For Profit course which was followed up with mentoring through the RCS Next Steps and then Executive Link programs.

RCS taught Damien and Fran the importance of wet season spelling and pasture budgeting.

“While wet season spelling was a very important piece of the puzzle and we were blown away by the result, the “light bulb moment” really occurred once we started pasture budgeting — we quickly realised by how much we had over-stocked the property,” Fran said,

“Wet season spelling (some areas for the whole wet season, other areas for part of the wet season…as the cattle have to be somewhere) certainly allowed us to grow more grass without having to significantly reduce stock numbers, but the critical factor was learning to estimate pasture yield, then applying some simple maths to calculate how many mouths we could run in a particular paddock for a particular time.”

But lofty ambition couldn’t sidestep simple practicality.

“How can we put twice as many cattle in a struggling paddock while we spell another paddock?” she said.

Fran said it was a matter of “just make a start”. 

“The wet season spell in one paddock makes up for the short-term increase in grazing pressure in the other paddock.  Then you swap the cattle over to the spelled paddock and give the grazed paddock a spell for the rest of the wet,” she said.

They continued to take small steps and once started, small successes (and enthusiasm) built their own momentum.

They drew up grass budgets working out how many stockdays per hectare was available in each paddock. By reconciling the actual with the planned, they developed their accuracy. And they joined programs like GRASS to help them decide the next point of focus.

Fran said they started by wet season spelling one paddock in 2017, when 100 per cent of the property was grazed all of the time.

Five years later, they were grazing about 20 per cent of the property at any one time allowing for all of the property to be rested at some point during each of the wet and dry seasons.

“It took five years to put a few key fences in, mob cattle up and gradually free up paddocks so they could be rested,” Fran said.

“We felt it took us a long time… we had small children. I think it’s important to do it at your own pace.

“There’s no set recipe. You do what you’re capable of doing.”

Fran said the whole concept of pasture budgeting, moving cattle, planning a “grazing regime” and continuing to increase the number of paddocks could be daunting.

“Yes, there is definitely time involved with planning, grazing, and doing pasture budgeting,” she said.

“But because you are growing more feed and thus more kilos [of beef] and you are improving land condition, meaning you’re going to be more resilient across variable seasons, you get a really significant return on that time you invested, a real dollar value return.”

Fran and Damien use the annual land cover maps provided by NQ Dry Tropics as a kind of annual check-up.

“They’re like a rudder, I suppose, ” Fran said.

“They steer our direction in a gross once-a-year sense, but on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, there’s a lot of jumping on a quad bike or a horse and eyeballing, ground-truthing what those plants are like.

“Are they in production? Have they got green shoots on them?”

Fran said the whole philosophy fed into every aspect of pasture management.

Weeds, for instance, were far less likely to establish if a healthy sward of perennial grasses was competing for available moisture, sunlight and bare soil.

The GRASS program also highlighted the usefulness of establishing monitoring sites — and being diligent about continuing to take photos on schedule.

Fran said they set up five monitoring points throughout their RCS training and added five more when they drew up their first GRASS plan in 2020.

Twice each year, she makes a habit of photographing all of the monitoring sites.

The grazing plan is just as organised. Mapped out on a hardcopy spreadsheet are the mob sizes, the stock days (of feed) in the paddock, when the cattle went into a paddock, when they’re coming out, and how many days they’re in there.

“So, at a glance, I can see where the cattle are, when they’re due to be moved,” Fran said.

“We record the total grazing days removed from each paddock annually, so we are able to keep track of any increase in grazing days yielded (once we relate it back to annual rainfall, importantly) — the number of grazing days we harvest per 100mm of rainfall is the real indication of whether we are having a positive impact on land condition and business profitability.”

It’s all part of the plan…

The GRASS program is funded through the Queensland Government’s Queensland Reef Water Quality Program helping graziers meet their obligations under the reef protection regulations to maintain land condition, reduce erosion, and ultimately protect the Great Barrier Reef.