INTRODUCTION

Landscape regeneration involves managing the landscape as a living ecosystem and focuses on restoring its natural hydrology (water flow), ecological health (plant, insect, animal and microbe), soil health and plant health. The regeneration will recreate a living soil ecosystem that balances the chemical, physical, and biological properties of the soil.

Photosynthesis and Vegetation - Key to Landscape Regeneration

Maximising photosynthesis is the energy base for all regenerative agriculture and can only work if the landscape contains a biodiversity of vegetation and groundcover. Photosynthesis is the basis for generating soil organic carbon, maximising the water-holding capacity of the soil, improving the water/carbon cycle and feeding the microbial diversity of our soils.

Restoring vegetation will improve photosynthesis and enable a diverse range of life forms and ecological processes to deliver the ecosystem services that provide the life support systems for the planet. Vegetation and microbial processes form the basis of all life sustaining food chains (web of life), produce oxygen, protect water quality and quantity, store carbon, maintain soil fertility and stability and cycle nutrients. A biodiversity of vegetation can be improved and even restored through revegetation activities, supporting natural regeneration and using regenerative techniques such as planned grazing programs. Managed landscapes provide the major opportunity for revegetation and sequestration of carbon back into the soil, subsequently restoring natural hydrological cycles. Establishment or re-establishment of pastures, crops, trees and other plant life through regenerative land management practices is achievable across degraded landscapes.

Some of the regeneration techniques listed on the "Soils For Life" website include:

• increased production from paddocks with regenerated stands of trees and bushes than those that had been cleared
• productive pastures and crops can be maintained simultaneously
• planned grazing can be used to increase perennial pasture cover
• innovative techniques for revegetating large numbers of native trees
• the use of revegetation to capture rainfall higher in the landscape to lower the water table and subsequently reduce salinity problems

 

For more information, contact Mick Alexander on 0438 395 255 or email mick@grazingbestpac.com.au