About this Guide

Farmers and land managers, alongside Landcare and natural resource management agencies have been actively revegetating and restoring land for over 30 years now. The development of regionally specific revegetation guides in the late 1990s was critical to the success of the last 25 years of revegetation, and there is now a network of skilled and knowledgeable practitioners who have learned their craft on the back of the hard work of the original authors and contributors of the South West Slopes and Riverina revegetation guides and practical experience with farmers. These guides are still relevant and valued resources in our regions and will always be recognised as the first of their kind in the state.

Bringing together the collective experience of practitioners everywhere has been very rewarding and many people have been very generous in offering up their knowledge and experience to create a resource for the region.

We now approach a new era of revegetation practice. The focus on including and listening to First Nations voices is also increasingly important. Ensuring the voices of First Nations communities is heard is a vital part of creating the abundance and future thinking required to live with challenging and changing landscapes. To restore and sustain what is left requires us to harness the wisdom of the many generations who have cared for Country and who are tuned into nature’s rhythms and needs. This careful and gentle management has founded the current ecosystems, it meets their current needs and offers many solutions. A trajectory that squarely includes First Nations’ close cultural affinities and practices is the reset that our fragile soils, fine scale vegetation and fauna interactions, and climatic parameters will respond to.

Influenced by global trends, revegetation opportunities are increasingly being driven by farmers and farming businesses to meet the needs of consumers and the industry frameworks for sustainable farm reporting, as well as opportunities for participating in environmental markets.

Further, drought and farm business resilience for the industry is contingent on the need to adapt revegetation practices to the realities of climate change and make sure our recommendations are keeping up with the latest research to ensure plantings will contribute to landscape restoration for the coming decades. Through support from the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund, we have been able to review the content of this revegetation guide, update it to accommodate these changing times and make it more accessible to everyone via an online portal, as well as printed resources.

This revegetation guide can help farmers and their advisors understand the complexity of managing and increasing vegetation on the farm, help the planning process and ultimately result in more restored landscapes. The guide doesn’t, however, replace getting good, on-site advice from practitioners, ecologists and experts in Landcare and natural resource management agencies, and we hope that farmers continue to use these people in conjunction with the resource.

Contributors

Claire Birch, Boorowa Landcare, Lou Bull, Michael Bull, Geoffrey Burrows, Mal Carnegie, Becky Chambers, Annika Colenso, Steph Cowley, Mason Crane, Janette Crew, David Crew, Tom Deery, Sandy Dellwo, Tina DeJong, Martin Driver, Nioka Dupond, Kylie Durant, Kelli Glass, Dick Green, Darren Grigg, Brittany Hicks, Katrina Hudson, Peter Jobson, Kylie Kent, Judy Kirk, Natasha Lappin, Kathie LeBusque, Fin Martin, Leigh Matheison, Nick McGrath, Angus McNab, Nan McNab, Jessie McPherson, Meredith Mitchell, Pat Murray, Julie Roberts, Sue Rose, Georgia Rowland, Meg Rowland, Peter Rowland, Paula Sheehan, Nella Smith, Fleur Stelling, Kathy Tennison, Michael Tweedie, Tom Reid, Bernadette Walker, David Walker, David Waters, Janene Whitty and Pinky Wittingslow.

We also acknowledge the generous and valued assistance of the ANU Sustainable Farms team, Australian National Botanic Gardens, Nenad Bartonicek, Nola Hancock, Letetia Harris, Shane Herrington, James Ingram, Stuart Lucas, Rod Martin, Carla Sgro, Mark Wilson, and all who responded to surveys and questionaires during the planning phase of this project.