Managing the Multi-Functionality of Grasslands--An Antipodean View.

Grazing lands occupy over 400m ha (~70%) of Australia. These lands vary from desert to high rainfall (> 1000 mm p.a.) and tropical to temperate (with short-term snow cover). Since man first arrived on the continent (possibly 100,000 years ago) there has been the continual challenge of how to manage this diverse and highly variable landscape. Australia is the driest inhabited continent and the one with the most variable rainfall. When Europeans arrived 200 hundred years ago they rapidly over-used the available resources, but during the last century much progress has been made in better management. The recent extensive (6-7 years) drought was typified by the maintenance of much better ground cover than previously. While much of the landscape is used for grazing, most animal production (beef, wool, sheep meat, dairy products) comes from the higher rainfall and irrigation areas of eastern Australia, where introduced species are a major part of grazing systems. Grasslands not only support livestock production, but are also vital in crop rotations to restore fertility and in managing water (quantity and quality), salinity, soil erosion and biodiversity and will also become increasingly important in carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas mitigation and potentially for fuel production. In semi-arid areas tourism is now generating vastly more income than livestock production. The genetic resources within Australian grazing lands have barely been touched. Grasslands are now managed for multiple goals and the proportion of use for livestock production is likely to slowly decline relative to the provision, and hopefully payments for, ecosystem services. Australian agriculture has effectively no subsidies, which means that resolving ways of managing grasslands for environmental and other values needs to be done within a sustainability and market context. Fortunately taking a long-term view often coincides with longer-term economic viability. As the true costs of additional management criteria e.g. maintaining the integrity of the landscape, are included in animal production this has the net effect of reducing economically optimal stocking rates. To develop a multi-functional approach to managing grasslands will require longer-term R&D with multi-disciplinary teams. In Australia this has been a feature of more recent industry-funded programs.