It’s been a while since the last FATE newsletter, but this is more a reflection of the ongoing growth in the size and scope of FATE’s projects rather than a lack of activity. Since the last newsletter, the Choosing Kangaroo project has reached its conclusion, the Barrier Ranges Sustainable Wildlife Enterprise Trial has passed the one-year mark and a number of other projects continue to spring up and grow at a frantic rate. With Spring being a time for renewal (not to mention Spring-cleaning), we’ve overhauled the FATE website to reflect these new developments - so for more details on any of the projects discussed here, have a look around at www.fate.unsw.edu.au
The final touches are currently being put on the Choosing Kangaroo project report by FATE’s Peter Ampt and UTS School of Marketing’s Dr Kate Owen. This project set out to find who is eating kangaroo, who isn’t and what might influence their purchasing patterns in future. The specific focus was on assessing the market for smaller cuts of kangaroo in mince, pies and deli products to complement the growing markets for kangaroo fillet and steak in supermarkets and restaurants.
Twelve months, three focus groups and over 1500 online surveys later, some fascinating results have emerged on where the opportunities (and barriers) lie in increasing consumption of this sustainable and healthy meat. For example, would you have predicted that 72% of meat consumers surveyed believe that kangaroos are farmed or grazed in a manner similar to sheep or cattle, rather than harvested from wild-ranging populations? Or that kangaroo mince would be a preferred first-choice over lamb, veal or organic beef mince?
Further results, as well as the aims and methods employed in this project are detailed on our Choosing Kangaroo page. We’ll also keep you up-to-date on the release of the full report on the website of the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC), who funded the project.
FATE’s Barrier Ranges Trial passed the one-year mark recently, with some strong progress being made in the development of business structures for a kangaroo enterprise and negotiations between landholders, kangaroo harvesters and meat processors. Getting the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change to see the value of engaging landholders in the kangaroo industry so that they can manage their land for the sustainable production of kangaroos and protection of landscape health has been an ongoing challenge. However, the Trial’s Steering Committee has been able to press ahead with working out sustainable kangaroo harvest levels, harvest patterns across the participating properties, cost structures for the various roles involved in the industry and steps involved in ensuring consistency of kangaroo supply and quality.
The project has also involved training landholders in the use of Landscape Function Analysis, or LFA, as a means of rapidly assessing the health of their landscapes and deciding what management approaches or interventions might be required. After a couple of delays (including a massive thunderstorm that brought much-needed rain to the Barrier Ranges in May), the final training session was held in August, with around 20 landholders and other natural resource managers being trained with the assistance of Western Catchment Management Authority funding.
The next steps in the trial include holding a major workshop for landholders, kangaroo industry representatives and government agencies in October to get the landholder-based business model off the ground and setting up a cross-property monitoring regime based on LFA allowing landholders to compare their paddock health to benchmark sites. For more details, check out the trial newsletters put together by local project coordinator Katrina Hannigan.
The arrival of a spectacular storm over the Barrier Ranges brought about a premature end to an LFA training trip in May with a frantic dash back to Broken Hill to beat the flooding creeks and roads.
In a similar vein to the Barrier Ranges Trial, Dr Rosie Cooney, FATE Research Fellow, has been working on a project developing a Sustainable Wildlife Enterprise trial in the Mitchell District, western Queensland. RIRDC has been supporting the Mitchell and District Landcare Group over recent years to get landholders, working with harvesters, involved in the kangaroo industry. This project has made strong progress recently with negotiations with processors underway and a purchase of a chiller box by landholders planned for the near future. Rosie has been working with landholders and project officers on institutional models for such landholder involvement. This includes both developing operational models for how landholders would work with harvesters and processors, organisational models for the group of landholders and harvesters, and developing analyses and proposals for how government policy and regulation could support and enable this initiative.
Rosie has also been examining the barriers in policy and regulation to carrying out many of the kinds of sustainable use activities that FATE and others have proposed in order to create incentives for conserving species and habitats. This work has also been funded by RIRDC and a final report should be published shortly. Check out the FATE website for more details.
The Blue Mountains Western Edge Native Farm Forestry project has continued to morph and grow as new partners come on board. The latest developments have revolved around Oberon, where the local council, landholders and business leaders have expressed a strong interest in developing an industry based on native forestry plantations. The area already has substantial plantations of exotic radiata pine, but future directions are less certain due to concerns about the economics of pine plantations, environmental impacts and changes in land ownership with an influx of “tree-changers” moving onto rural subdivisions. Plantations of native species may offer new economic opportunities as well as improved outcomes for biodiversity, salinity and water quality and buffering against the impacts of climate change. Much work still needs to be done on the possible uses of native species plantations (such as for timber, biomass energy and carbon sequestration), as well as the integration of such plantations into the landscape (such as the mix of species used and the creation of linkages and corridors for biodiversity and riparian health). For further details, see the Call for Community Comment or contact p.ampt@unsw.edu.au
In the past few months FATE has also started working on a UNSW property at Wellington, in Central West NSW, on a community project bringing together schools, TAFE, corrective services, indigenous stakeholders, Wellington Council and the University. This project, Wellington Working Farms, focuses on sustainable community-based land-management through strategic grazing, the development of a native grass-seed nursery, landscape rehabilitation using harvestable tree and shrub species and monitoring combined with education and training opportunities. A property management plan is currently in the process of being developed for the project under the NSW Government’s Forging Partnerships program.
Some of the partners in the Wellington Working Farms project, which will breathe new life into this aging UNSW property through community education and management.
Of course, the work doesn’t end there. Amongst other things, FATE have also been helping to conduct LFA training with the Central West CMA, using LFA to assess the health of land under orchards with the Blue Mountains World Heritage Institute and working as part of Australia 21 to integrate the concept of ecosystem services into the mainstream of Australian government, business and land management. In addition to this, the FATE team have presented a series of seminars, conference papers and posters during 2007 which we’ve now made available for download from the FATE website.
As always, if you want to know more about any of these activities, you can contact FATE Program Manager Peter Ampt via p.ampt@unsw.edu.au. This newsletter and previous versions can be found at www.fate.unsw.edu.au/news/index.htm
Last Updated 17 September 2007
