Media Interest
CROSS-BOUNDARY FARMING
Story by Margrit Beemster
A WAY of collaborative farming in the Middle Ages could well help farms in Australia, particularly smaller farms and holdings, become more sustainable.
In that era farmers didn’t have individual titles over land but instead farmed collectively on common property or “commons”.
“An example of this is the New Forest Commons, in Southern England, which is owned and managed by about 300 ‘commoners’ who have various rights of access and use of resources,” said Prof David Brunckhorst, director of the Institute for Rural Futures at the University of New England.
“It’s been going for over 1000 years and is surprisingly sustainable.”
Elsewhere in the world there are other examples such as water irrigation and forest commons.
“Common property resource management allows for pooling of knowledge and resources, and sharing of ideas and labor,” said Prof Brunckhorst, a key presenter at an up-coming free “Cross-boundary Farming Forum”, hosted by the Institute for Land, Water and Society at Charles Sturt University in Wagga on September 7.
“It provides combined social and ecological resource resilience for these systems.”
Prof Brunckhorst said the modern-day trend to “chop up landscapes into little square blocks to be managed by a single owner or family” had created problems in managing our resources sustainably at the larger scale across which ecological resources operate.
“Along with this we have entrenched a very narrow view of individual property rights and have forgotten there are other forms of property rights which can work equally well and perhaps be better suited for Australian conditions,” he said.
Prof Brunckhorst, also the co-director of the UNESCO Centre for Bioregional Resource Management, helped establish the “Bookmark Biosphere reserve” in South Australia’s Murray Riverland in the 1990s. This land management conservation project involved collaborations across 9000 sq kms of grazing and public land representing nine different tenure types. It led to a similar project in the US in Idaho and Montana.
During the forum, which will look at the opportunities and pitfalls of cross-boundary farming, Prof Brunckhorst will talk about the experimental Tilbuster Commons project near Armidale. For this project, which ran from 1999-2004, four families on adjacent properties agreed to pool their land into a ‘commons’ of a privately owned land resource to rotationally graze livestock across their properties for shared benefits.
Prof Brunckhorst said one of the challenges in setting up the project was to work out a way that let people retain their individual title to their property but at the same time collaborate at a more intense level to manage a resource base across the multiple properties.
“There are many ways of doing this but we wanted to set up a structure that was acceptable and that rural people would be comfortable with,” said Prof Brunckhorst.
So a private company was set up with all the landholders directors of the company. “In essence, the company leases the resource base from the land holders who then run the enterprise, but of course all the landholders are making the decisions together,” he said.
Prof Brunckhorst said one of big advantages of the project was that it “freed up time” for farmers.
“It was more important for the landholders in our project that it freed up their time rather than large financial gain,” he said.
However the venture did produce better financial returns than when the properties were run as single entities, especially through a period of drought. Initially the project was a three year research project funded by Land & Water Australia. However the landholders continued to collaborate after the main experiment finished and did so for another two years until a change in personal circumstances for one of the participating landholders.
There were also environmental benefits, especially in light of the drought conditions, because the grazing rotations decreased the pressures on all the properties. Combined the properties totalled 808ha with the largest 404ha, the smallest 40ha. The group also attracted Landcare funding for rehabilitation and conservation works.
“This way of farming is definitely not a panacea and it’s not for everyone but it is a way of conserving good agricultural land,” said Prof Brunckhorst who has guided small landholders in two other towns set up a similar but more informal scheme.
According to Prof Brunckhorst the concept had potential in other areas.
“For example, I’m involved in two large scale projects with ranchers and public land owners in Idaho and Montana, in the USA, which also involve wetland restoration and wolf reintroductions”, he said.
In Australia, useful applications might include “sorting out potential issues in the National water plan where water can be sold out from a local community” and the establishment of a wild harvest kangaroo industry.
For better water management, Prof Brunckhorst suggested small irrigation/community water management groups could be set up at the small sub-catchment scale.
“The local landholders and local town would be the collective owners and managers of that water and they decide on the allocations,” he said. “They then would become members of the next scale up, at the next broader level of water management.
“That way you would be retaining ownership and decision making at the right levels, at a community level, rather than having individual water rights.”
For a wild harvest kangaroo industry he said the institutional structure would need to be at a large regional scale with multiple landholders co-operating together.
“Often you get large mobs of kangaroos sheltering in woodlands but you would harvest them down on the plains which may not necessarily be owned by the same person,” he said. “A cross-property wild harvest kangaroo industry would be a more appropriate and profitable use of marginal lands.”
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