Practices and Strategies

Livestock management is ‘the greatest tool’

Once Ian made the decision to transform Alaringa, he put his focus on improving ‘water and wire.’ He applied his understanding of the water cycle to prevent runoff and to minimise evaporation, and to improve how water moved through the landscape, increasing ground cover and improving mineral cycling. This all came back to grazing management and working with fencing because as Ian sees it, ‘livestock is our greatest tool.’ 

Improving grazing management at Alaringa was critical. Ian focused on addressing issues resulting from poor grazing practices and applied the information he had given to other farmers for many years as a consultant. He notes that ‘the majority of degraded land in Australia is understocked and overgrazed,’ so coming out of the drought in 2020 Ian knew he needed ‘more density’ and to allow his grasses to recover during the growing season. He began dividing Alaringa’s paddocks into smaller cells in order to rotationally graze his Dorper flock. Ian increased the number of paddocks from 12 to 35 across 100 ha, ‘getting his numbers up’ and only grazing a paddock four or five times a year for short periods, while making ‘sure we had enough paddocks to move around, and prioritising rest periods based on the season and grazing numbers.’

‘Overgrazing happens from staying too long in the paddock or coming back too soon during the growing season.’  Ian Moss                                  

Ian summarises his management practices now as, ‘keeping living roots more of the year, reducing paddock sizes and mobbing up, with minimal or nil use of herbicides or pesticides.’ He has a sound understanding of soil science and the key drivers of soil health, and has commissioned soil testing at Alaringa in 2013, 2018 and 2023. With the decision to change his management practices, Ian began paying closer attention to his own soil data and refined his approach to the flow of water and use of fencing across the property. The soils at Alaringa are inherently fertile and there has been very little fertiliser used on the farm over the years. However, like many other farms in the region, a lot of carbon has been lost at Alaringa due to past poor management practices. Ian believes it is ‘frightening how low the carbon levels are in soils in the centre of the Darling Downs – supposedly some of the best “country” in the state.’ 

Working with neighbours to improve outcomes

In 2021, Ian purchased an adjoining 56 ha block, which amalgamated the original dairy farm. Now Ian and his neighbour and colleague, Craig Foreman, have partnered up to maximise the potential of grazing across their farming properties. Craig and Ian have developed a close working friendship and once Ian decided to improve management at Alaringa, they began to co-join grazing rotations. Now ‘we just treat it as one farm, and that’s what we want to do.’ Their partnership supports the health of livestock and the landscape and has led them to develop a new business proposition that they are currently trialling in the region, bringing together small landholders to create better opportunities to regeneratively manage small blocks of land.

A shift to multispecies

Ian already had a regenerative approach prior to the drought, but it was directed towards other farmers through his agronomy business. The business was ‘one of the earliest ones in Australia to work with farmers on multispecies forage and multispecies covers in cropping scenarios.’ F.A.R.M focus on crop sequences, paddock rotations and ‘the big levers and the low hanging fruit’ to improve soil and get better at capturing more rainfall and nutrient cycling.

Ian notes that incorporating a multispecies base ‘is a big one’ and that it has made a significant difference for his farming clients and now at Alaringa. In 2020 Ian started growing forages and perennials into what had been predominantly monoculture paddocks, and put an old seeder into action to sow the various blends and mixtures of forage crops.

‘Where traditionally all the neighbours would be planting oats, we would be planting an 8-way mix and bits of that are perennial. We are in a pretty dry spell now, but I’ve got green in most of my paddocks, which are the deep tap rooted lucernes and chicory.’ Ian Moss

A ‘change between the ears’: Respecting and valuing the land 

Looking back, Ian recognises that a change in his own perception was key to driving change in his own farming practices, alongside the farms he works with through his business. As he sees it, ‘the change had to happen between my ears first.’ He knows this may be a bit cliché now, but for him ‘it’s a fair thing,’ and meant that he ‘had to respect and value the land, and have a pretty good idea of what I wanted this place to look like in the future.’ As a consultant, Ian has worked closely with farmers for many years at the ‘kitchen table’ level to help them become clearer on what they want their farm to look like in the future and strategies to help them get there, but he hadn’t done the same for his own property. 

Another driver shifting Ian’s focus and perception was a major health scare he had eight years ago that left him questioning his priorities. It led him to ‘take it all more seriously; watching the land and the animals and trying to understand.’ Ian began to apply the same long-term thinking, utilising RCS and Holistic Management principles in his own management. He recently set up a healthy landscapes Facebook group with a local farmer to encourage landholders in the local area ‘to think a little bit more outside their boundaries and about landscapes as well,’ and has been running informal ‘farm walks on a Saturday morning, inviting people to walk around the farm and talk about what we’re doing.’

Expanding monitoring practices to include land productivity

Informed by the work of Allan Savory, Ian understands that ‘ecosystems are never static. They’re either degrading or regenerating.’ Ian’s general approach to regenerative agriculture is informed by the Savory Institute, and he applies the same basic principles to Alaringa and to other farms through his business. Ian is working to keep track of his ongoing actions and inputs, and knowing ‘when we have stock in paddock and when we don’t, when we plant what we plant and trying to quantify the productivity of the paddock.’ He notes that most graziers are very good at knowing animal productivity – what their weight gains are, etc – but he likes to encourage them to think about their land productivity and the concept of knowing what a stock day is worth, which he believes feeds into building a more holistic picture of productivity.  

Ian does his own regular on-site infiltration tests which supplement the three rounds of lab tests he has done over the last 10 years. He uses photography and video to monitor changes to landscape function and keeps track of paddock performance via MaiaGrazing, FarmLab and AgriWebb, but notes there can be a bit of frustration, because ‘no one thing does everything that I’d love it to.’ 

While Ian uses a mix of formal monitoring tools, he often ends up putting the data he needs into his own spreadsheets to generate the specific information he is looking for.

For example, he has recently been crunching numbers on his grazing data in order to calculate what a grazing day is worth economically and to better understand the productivity of his paddocks. Ian notes that ‘at the moment one DSE grazing day is worth about 15 cents’ at Alaringa. He believes that having this knowledge is very powerful for a number of reasons. He can look at differences paddock by paddock and make more effective decisions on specific trials. 

‘… so this paddock has created twice as much income as that one. What’s the difference? Well you can start to drill down and also do trials more effectively. That’s been pretty powerful, and it’s a great discussion point with people.’ Ian Moss

Another observation tool that Ian now uses to track the health of the soil comes in conjunction with making the farm more ‘rain ready.’ He can observe the responsiveness of his paddocks after rain and claims that they now show signs of green in ‘literally less than 24 hours.’

Image 3. A view of the farm at sunset. Source: Ian Moss

Managing challenges and risks

One way that Ian addressed risk in the first phase of his own transition was by focusing on livestock rather than cropping. Much of the land around him has been cropped for a long time and he knew he could crop the country he is on, but shifting to grazing was ‘a deliberate choice and a way to manage risk.’ But Ian also notes that there are always risks involved in farming decisions, and managing these is an ongoing challenge. Even when there is supposedly a ‘right strategy,’ it doesn’t always work because of the many variables. Ian offers an example from South East Queensland, which has high summer rainfall, ‘there may be 400 millimetres of rainfall in summer, and the best farmers keep 100 ml of it.’ While farmers will try to grow groundcover in spring and maximise that moisture to get better ground cover, ‘that strategy fails if we don’t have the late summer rain. So there’s definitely that risk aspect.’ 

According to Ian, more and more people are worried about the long-term profitability of farming land. This is due to declining land health, along with the volatility of commodity markets and the impact of extreme weather events. A big ‘wake up call’ Ian faced a few years back (and which he now equates with managing risk), was to fully reckon with ‘the risk of not doing something.’ He could see that if he continued as he was, ‘capital value would deteriorate, and the ability to generate income would be less and less, so I really saw the risk as the opportunity cost of not farming regeneratively.’ 

These days there are a growing number of farmers from diverse farming contexts looking for assistance from Ian to confront the opportunity cost of not addressing fertility and management problems on their farms. They want information on regenerative methods that will help them build resilience into farming systems.

‘The phone calls I get now are often multi-generational, larger cropping and livestock farmers. They are calling and asking … Can you help me? I don’t know what I need to change. I just know I need to change something.’ Ian Moss