31 July 2008

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry - Tony Burke
Lilydale dairy farm owners - Graeme and Katrina Arnold

Tony: G’day its Tony. I’m in Tasmania at the moment in Lilydale and I’m here on a dairy farm owned by Graeme and Katrina Arnold. Thanks for letting me come onto your property. You’ve had a chance to show me around a whole lot of the natural resource management work that you’ve been doing here, could you give us a chance to explain some of the work you’ve done.

Graeme: Yeah certainly, basically we found out about the natural resource management tools that we had and the funding we had available and we thought (inaudible) we’d better take advantage of it and we fenced off the rivers that we have and did some revegetation and upstream water ponds and it’s been great.

Tony: Ok, so how much time would you have invested into that sort of work?

Graeme: Basically to do the fencing, revegetation, probably about 400 hours I reckon.

Tony: Ok.

Graeme: That’s all-up with other people helping too. But it’s made it a lot easier, you don’t have cows going missing in the creek and stuff like that now.

Tony: How often did you have that?

Graeme: Oh, they used to manage to disappear and go into another paddock every now and then which made grass management a little problematic sometimes.

Tony: Ok. And Katrina have you seen it make much of a difference to the overall property, that sort of NRM work?

Katrina: Yeah it’s been good, like Graeme said, especially with the cows, managing them and getting them in and they’re not somewhere they shouldn’t be and it’s tidied it up.

Tony: Ok, and there was mention of 60 per cent of something, what’s that?

Graeme: This is we did some natural remnant bush fencing off, that was done with wallaby wire to keep the wallabies out from the pasture and in the first year I’d conservatively say that we’ve probably harvested 60 per cent more grass off that pasture that’s been fenced off.

Tony: 60 per cent?

Graeme: 60 per cent.

Tony: That’s an extraordinary figure.

Graeme: Yeah, it’s just phenomenal.