Central Australian Self Herding (CASH)

Summary

To demonstrate the range of benefits that Self Herding can bring to grazing management for Central Australian pastoralists including better drought resilience, expanded feed base and improved animal production and welfare outcomes.

Objectives

By March 2025 across 10 properties in the Alice Spring region of the Northern Territory:

1. Demonstrate and validate in Central Australian pastoral conditions that greater production and improved landscape impacts can be achieved through redistribution of grazing using the application of self-herding techniques. Financial (productivity, labour costs etc) and environmental (ground cover, pasture utilisation) benefits will be obtained from a combination of:

a. Visitation to grazing areas not previously utilised by livestock
b. A change in the directional travel of livestock grazing patterns
c. A reduction in habitual overused areas associated with water points

2. 80% of the core producer and 50% of the observer producers will have adopted self-herding techniques leading to demonstrated changes in grazing patterns (data collected on livestock visitation and observed effects on soil surface and vegetation). Presence or absence of grazing effects before and after interventions (pasture utilisation, physical disturbance and deposition of nutrients) will be the observed factors collected during the project.

3. 100% of core producers and 80% of observer producers will have increased their knowledge and skills in relation to self-herding techniques.

4. A range of extension and communication products will be developed by NTDPIR staff with input from the project partners, to increase awareness across other pastoral areas including case studies, producer guides and stories for MLA publications.

5. Production of a cost/benefits analysis of all concomitant and ancillary benefits versus time, effort and variable costs incurred in the establishment of self-herding techniques.

Progress

The Central Australian Self Herding (CASH) project has effectively introduced the concept of Self Herding to producers in the northern and southern Alice Springs pastoral districts, laying the groundwork for subsequent years of the project.

Self-herding is a behaviour-based livestock management approach, which provides livestock managers with strategies and tools to positively influence grazing distribution, and help livestock adapt to new surroundings. Based on behavioural science, nutrition, physiology, and ecology. It is simple and inexpensive to apply, with success depending on the approach. The project facilitators, Bruce Maynard, and Lakota Taber, have conducted all consultation, education, and the initiation of Self Herding activities across the region.

Producers are adopting and adapting Self Herding tactics to suit their individual needs such as the retention of livestock on newly installed water points, the transition of cattle moving to a new property and developing a positive change in human animal interactions.