Yeah, well this productive use
is from the Saline Lands project, has been
going now for about 10 years, Chris, and I
guess from our perspective we have got a lot
of good, very good data out of it. I guess
from your perspective you probably made quite
a few observations and might have some comments
about those?
Well I have. It's been a fantastic result
the growth, the outflow of salt dramatically reduced,
water usage and just this grazing.
We've had 450 sheep here for over five weeks
now you can say they've, well, they really
haven't hammered the saltbush much at all.
Wonderful feed resource at this time of the
year, just before the break, and sheep do
really well on it. It's good cover. As you
were aware, it was just barley grass nothing
here before.
Well this bit was bare completely wasn't it?
And this has taken up beautifully by itself
and it's great cover, food resource.
We couldn't crop it anymore because
we were losing around
30 per cent of the affected area through salinity
so this is a really, really good result - very
happy.
This started as a, about a 25 hectare block,
you’ve look at that over the years, how
much saltbush would you have planted in the
valley surrounding this now.
There is probably nearly 100 hectares here
all up. There are two 25 hectare plots. One
was a control and this was planted initially
in 2005 and this had not quite 700 stems per
hectare and the other sides got a thousand.
The other areas have been planted at varying rates
but these two sites in the ones that
we really wanted to develop, because they
have the flumes that measure water out goes.
Yeah and you planted the year before last,
you planted the control sight.
We did.
So we will watch the result of that, on water
flow and salt.
Yes we had a really good take-up of all the
clover varieties and we planted over top of
them with old man saltbush and that actually
looks really good.
The sheep seem to prefer it.
They do. No that is really good very encouraging
that site.
And you changed your design a little bit over there to
didn't you based on what you had
seen here.
Yep. We put four rows, so we planted to close
together with them just slightly further apart
instead of just the two and the three that
were here. So they look really good.
Yeah, it does, it looks great.
Sheep do very well on it, so that's probably
the premium site now believe it or not.
Yeah, yeah, the under story is really good.
CSIRO started this in 2003. They carried on
the main thrust, of the data gathering until
2008 when the Department of Agriculture and
Food came back into it in a more comprehensive
way and continued on the monitoring of the
surface water flows and the groundwater using
loggers.
And it is a wonderful result for a valley
floor that's heavy grey clay, going saline,
to see what it is now and it's been a wonderful
partnership with the department, but look
at it now it's just tremendous.
