Station vegetation regrowth a focus for Gawler Ranges carbon project

Buckleboo Station in the Gawler Ranges has had a carbon project in the works actively since 2021 - when it was first registered - but the stations managers are hopeful they can have this backdated to when the changes were made in 2017.

Paroo Pastoral general manager James Wright, whose domain includes Buckleboo Pastoral, said they had started looking into the project a little more than three years ago but found it very hard to get the information they needed.

"We knew there was an opportunity, because we could see that the property was growing some vegetation and, once we educated ourselves a little bit about what the carbon project is, we knew we had potential," he said.

"You can still register a project yourself and enlist the support people to set up a project where you don't have a partner as such.

"But we preferred - and it is probably the most done method - to find an aggregator or a broker.

"For a percentage of the project, the aggregator will register the project, do all the baseline surveying, communicate with the government and all the different stakeholders on your behalf."

Mr Wright said the project at Buckleboo Station was registered under the human-induced regeneration method.

"Which basically means that by us changing something on the property, it's allowing the regeneration of the vegetation that was otherwise suppressed," he said.

"We are changing from a set stocking program, where we had unmanaged goats to now we manage our goats really well.

"We are basically removing them and rotationally grazing the property that's allowing the woody vegetation, the scrub, to get ahead, which would otherwise be chewed back and suppressed by those animals."

Mr Wright said any wild goats that still came onto the property would be trapped and sold as they found them.

"We don't see a place for the goats in our environment at all," he said.

"They are quite counterproductive when you have a project like this because they eat the very carbon you are trying to let grow.

"We are not planting anything - this is all just vegetation that is naturally occurring and would have been growing if there wasn't stock, constantly grazing it.

"We run 5000 breeding Dorpers fairly consistently and it has been ran like that for the last 15 years."

He said there was quite a bit of research that went into deciding whether to carry out a carbon project.

"It was very hard to get information from people because it was fairly new," he said.

"There weren't heaps of people promoting that they've done a carbon project.

"We spoke to three different aggregators and we got information from each of those.

"By the third aggregator we spoke to, we started to feel like we understood what the project was, what the pros and the cons of a project were and future potential loss."

They chose to partner with AI Carbon for the project that covers about 30 per cent of the 101,171ha pastoral lease on Buckleboo Station.

Mr Wright said there was a "mosaic" across each of the paddocks with hundreds of "little polygons that make up the project area in each paddock", adding up to about 100 monitoring areas across the property.

"When the stock are in a paddock, we are really monitoring what they're doing to that vegetation - are they starting to graze it, what is the feed looking like underneath, do we still have good grass cover, ground cover?" he said.

"We're really hot on the grazing aspects and really observing it.

"We put stock in to graze and rotate the paddock every three months.

"We have six paddocks so the vegetation gets a break for about 12 to 18-months - give or take."

He said by the time the stock return to that paddock, there had usually been either a winter or summer rain, allowing a bulk of feed on the ground separate to the woody vegetation that allows their carbon storage to grow.

"It sort of perpetuates the positive grazing land management outcome," he said.

Mr Wright said they were hoping to intersect the project with their company to account for their own emissions from their livestock and create increased resilience.

"We are more aware of the future market forces with net zero coming into play in the future," he said.

"But we hope it will create resilience when we have a drought or a dry year, we don't have to be relying 100pc on our livestock.

"We can reduce stock numbers and just basically idle away through the drought.

"One of the things that we've noticed in the last drought was with the stock out of an area, even though we had very low rainfall, the vegetation was still benefiting from those five and 10 millimetre rainfall events."

He said depending on the management practices, adopted carbon projects could be backdated.

"Our project is likely to be backdated to 2017, which is when we had a major destocking of goats and we had a rainfall event, which must have triggered a germination event," he said.

The Carbon Series was produced in collaboration with the Australian Science Media Centre with support from the META Public Interest Journalism Fund administered by the Walkley Foundation.