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Junior Landcare Grants Program
Get your school or youth group involved in Landcare with the help of a Junior Landcare Grant.

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Albert Park Primary Builds Frog Habitat
A Mitre 10 Junior Landcare Grant has enabled students at Albert Park Primary to build a frog habitat.

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Back to grass roots
Glen Innes, on the NSW northern tablelands, is predominately a grazing district producing beef cattle, sheep for wool and fat lambs for meat. Some farmers grow grains such as corn and buckwheat, and a few have moved into niche markets like garlic and wine production.

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Brine shrimp turn a salty liability into a resource
Western Australia is the state most affected by salinity, with more than 7000 farms and 1.2 million hectares of agricultural land showing signs of salinity, of which nearly half cant be used for production. The cause of dryland salinity is the clearing of native vegetation and its replacement with shallow-rooted crops and pastures that do not use as much water. Unused water leaks down into the water table and raises it, bringing the salt stored in the soil to the surface.

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By Goji! What a berry!
Goji berries are making an impact as one of the newest super foods in the health food industry, thanks to their high nutrient values and antioxidant content. However most commercial crops are grown only in China and the United States and most of the products are sold in their dried form.

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Chasing parthenium
A creeping menace is finding its way into the grazing country around Calliope near Gladstone in Queensland. Parthenium weed, which has gained a strong foothold in central Queensland, is creeping into the Boyne Calliope catchment in isolated pockets and along waterways. Its presence poses a serious risk to the region’s beef cattle and cut hay industries.

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Creating a waterproof farm
Ninety kilometres south of Adelaide, the Southern Fleurieu Peninsula enjoys a temperate climate with relatively high rainfall. It’s a district that produces beef cattle, dairy products and prime lambs. Deep Creek Conservation Park attracts some 30,000 visitors a year, and some of the swamps of the Fleurieu Peninsula are listed as critically endangered ecological communities.

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Graziers protecting waterways
Extending from just above Surfers Paradise in the south to Caloundra in the north, and just 19km from Brisbane, Moreton Bay is an iconic coastal area of Queensland containing 360 islands, numerous island villages, three national parks and a marine park and is listed by the Ramsar Convention as wetlands of international significance.

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Hanging on to soil moisture during drought
From alpine areas to semi-arid rangelands the massive Murrumbidgee region covers them all. Across this diverse landscape farming activities include dairying, broadacre cropping, intensive agriculture and horticulture.

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Healing the soil with native pasture
The Balonne Shire in southern Queensland’s Darling Downs is home to a diversity of farmers producing irrigated cotton, rockmelons, watermelons, onions, pumpkins, wheat, wool, fat lambs and cattle. But in the past three years the district has been ravaged by drought, leaving bare ground vulnerable to wind and water erosion. In addition, many of the soils were worn out from years of intensive production.

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Learning from the past to tackle drought
North East and Central Victoria have suffered severe droughts in 1994, 2002, 2006 with an ongoing poor season in 2007/08. On average Seymour Wool Marketing Group members are now running at only 70% of their normal stocking rates and are still trying to look after their farms to avoid long-term damage to pastures.

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Managing soils through drought conditions
Australias farming country has been left in a degraded state by the drought, with little soil structure, aeration or life and the loss of the soils ability to hold water, says Peter Tremain, chair of the Sustainable Nyngan Agricultural Group (SNAG).

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More than a 'stab in the dark' to measure soil moisture
While irrigation farmers have been using sophisticated tools to measure soil moisture for some time, their dryland counterparts have made do with the manual method of pushing a steel probe into the soil and seeing where it stops then estimating the depth of soil moisture.

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Protecting large paddocks from drought
Many years of low rainfall have taken their toll on the farmers of the Eyre Peninsula. Extra cash reserves have been exhausted and many of the districts 1500 landholders are in survival mode, especially in the lower rainfall districts of the peninsula and those that have lighter soil types more vulnerable to erosion. By 2006 some paddocks, especially those with lighter soils, were already bare and damaged.

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Quality assured meat helps farmers through drought
Gippsbeef members are spread across the Gippsland region, covering a variety of districts and rainfall conditions. But drought has hit most farmers in the past three years according to Jenny OSullivan, a director of Gippsbeef.

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Regenerating native pastures
Gunnedah, Australias koala capital, is located in the Liverpool Plains district on the north-west slopes of NSW. Its one of Australias most fertile and productive areas due to its heavy alluvial soils, producing cotton, wheat, beef, sunflowers, maize, soybeans, sheep meat and wool.

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Restructuring dairy operations
Bega Cheese is the largest employer in the south coast region and the dairy industry is one of the most important industries in the area. However, five years of drought have severely affected the performance and viability of local dairy farms, with a resulting 14% drop in productivity across the region.

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Sandalwood may save the day
Trayning Shire, 240 kilometres west of Perth in the Western Australia wheat belt, had an ugly problem. Highlighting the district’s three-year lack of rain, wind erosion and salinity, a large block of land adjoining the town had been badly degraded. The 4.5-hectare site was barren, wind blown and infested with weeds. It was a microcosm of problems being faced by the region’s sheep and wheat farmers.

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Sheep's playground pays off
Sheep farmers and farmstay operators John and Wendy Gee produce wool and meat in Tasmania’s Westbury district, as well as delighting their interstate and international visitors with down to earth farm holidays. But declining rainfall in recent years has been threatening the precious pasture they have worked so long to establish. The Gees decided to use their Woolworths Sustainable Farming grant to protect their pastures by building drought feedlot areas where sheep could be hand fed during dry times, as well as extending their stock watering system to protect the local creek.

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The world's first no-emission commercial crop
The first thing most people notice about Michael Inwood’s new farming practices at ‘Toulon’ near Bathurst in the Central West region of NSW, is his car. The four-wheel drive Mitsubishi Triton ute is emblazoned with signs proclaiming how it runs on power from the sun. Michael uses it as an attention-getter at field days and farming events. Once people come to have a look, then he tells them about his project to engage nature in all aspects of his farm production including cropping, grazing, pumping water, preserving natural vegetation, preventing erosion through building rock structures and reducing the farm’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Michael’s ‘engaging nature’ plan is a major effort to build true sustainability for his wool and cropping enterprise over the next five years. He used a grant from the Woolworths Sustainable Farming Program to help spread the word about his work.

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Trialling new fodder shrubs for sheep
When sheep farmer Rob Grylls experienced yet another drought in 2007, he knew he had to take steps to protect both his land and his sheep. His sheep and wheat property Newcourt Farm at Bencubbin, about 300 kilometres from Perth in the north-eastern wheat belt of Western Australia, was suffering from bare soil and wind erosion. His sheep had little to eat during extended dry periods.

Rob applied for a Woolworths Sustainable Farming Grant to trial the native rhagodia plant as a solution to both problems.