SoilFutures can help you better understand your soil resource, and how the right pasture system for your situation can change the condition of your soil from a degraded and unproductive state to healthy land with highly productive soils. Potentially, your soils could store up to ten times more water by changing from unsuccessful practices. With increasingly erratic climatic conditions, land managers aim for greater resilience to drought and we want to assist you to achieve this.

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With shortening periods of adequate rain and an increase in drought cycles, many traditional pasture systems in Australia are beginning to fail, even with good management.  As a consequence of history, much land has been cleared initially for cropping, but turned over to pasture as productivity has declined.  Many native pasture systems, or temperate improved pastures are failing when it comes to prolonged drought.  Despite the intention to manage pastures with high cover rates, drought has seen poor cover management abound in recent years and poor grazing returns.

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Principal Consultant of SoilFutures Consulting, Dr. Robert Banks, has been studying and working with the best land managers using improved tropical pastures for over 20 years. Dr. Banks has become so engaged in these land practices that he undertook extensive research in this topic for his PhD with the University of Queensland.  

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Poorer soils in NW NSW have a history of being difficult to manage in grazing, and are often in a degraded state with erosion and soil structure decline contributing to and compounding poor grazing quality.  Often these soils are considered poor, however an examination of the whole soil profile as part of planning for tropical pastures often shows that almost all of the components of a good, highly productive soil are present, but they are not accessed by most native species and many temperate improved pastures.

 

SoilFutures can help you understand your soil resource, and how tropical improved pastures can explore much more of the soil profile, storing up to ten times more water than other pastures, resulting in much greater resilience to drought and greatly increased returns in well managed grazing systems.  

 

In the longer term, ten years of tropical pastures improves both topsoil and subsoil structure significantly, and the increased biomass (feed) production results in much higher soil carbon levels, and healthier soils. This in turn keeps feeding back to higher production and increasing resilience to drought.