Janelle Schafer is an extension officer for the Lismore Node of the Southern Queensland Northern NSW Innovation hub, based at the Living Classroom in Bingara, on the northwest slopes of NSW. This is what she’s been up to over the past 12 months:
September 2023
We supported Gwymac by hosting the first Introductory Field Day for the Mulloon Institute’s Community of Practice (CoPP), looking at the water systems at The Living Classroom. The CoPP which was held over five regions between June 2023 and June 2024. This CoPP is partnership between Gwymac Landcare and North West Local Land Services. We learnt about landscape rehydration and patterns and processes in the water cycle.
Another highlight in September was visiting the Amarula Dorper Stud in Gravesend owned by Leroy and Justin Kirkby. This event was put on by the University of New England Legume project, which is funded by the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund. It gave me a great opportunity to meet a host of local farmers and graziers, and it was particularly exciting seeing the work being done by the Kirkbys at their Dorper Stud.
October 2023
In October I organised the three-day Holistic Planned Grazing Course with Brian Wehlburg of Inside Outside Management, at The Living Classroom Bingara. Holistic Planned Grazing is an excellent planning tool for graziers in managing livestock. It enables forward planning, and costings for feed on hand. By allowing adequate recovery of grasses before grazing again, and the disturbance and deposits of fertilisers from the cattle, the paddocks recover with the best grasses intact, and water penetration and storage enhanced. The event was supported by the SQNNSW Innovation Hub and the FDF.
November 2023
On 7th November , The Living Classroom Community Nursery got off to a grand start. This project has been funded by the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR), under the Community Impact Program. Ali Bigg of the Northern Slopes Landcare Association Inc. is leading the program. I am supporting this initiative with my botanical skills. The aim is to produce plants and sell them, sharing the knowledge on how to grow vegetables and native trees, but it is also about community connection.
I then headed south to Launceston, Tasmania to take part in the Australian Pacific Extension Network (APEN) biennial conference. It was so good to meet up with extension officers across the country and the Pacific region. Each part of the nation faces different challenges at different times. It was great to meet experienced extension officers from the Victorian Dairy industry. We shared views on dryland salinity, and how it has disappeared from the public consciousness in the Eastern Sates as compared to Western Australia. It was also interesting to hear the Victorian dairy farmers views on hay being shipped from Victoria, and the effect it had on availability and prices in that state.
December 2023
In December I contacted the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation and was introduced to some local graduates of their Rural Leadership training. I met some dynamic community Leaders from both Warialda and Bingara. This was the start of planning for a series of Community Leaders Round tables, held both formally and informally in Warialda and Bingara.
January 2024
The Living Classroom Community Nursery activities continued through January. We planted veggies to sell at the monthly Lions Market stall and also local trees for windbreaks and urban gardens. Jo-anne Skewes provided vibrant local Kurrajong seed, which is both a fodder and bee attracting tree.
I organised and Cr. Tiffany Galvin, now the Gwydir Shire Mayor, facilitated, the inaugural Leader’s Round Table, where we presented the key themes of the Gwydir Shire Draft Resilience Plan. The leaders attended a Conversation Café type event, and we then whittled down the ideas for helping spread drought resilience to a few key themes. The two outstanding themes were financial and business planning, and a bus trip to farms which had gone through the drought and survived well.
February 2024
I organised a ‘Train the Trainer’ in best practice for Landcare and LLS staff at the Living Classroom. Michelle Young (Project Director) and Eleanor Lang (Ecologist) of Sustainable Farms, a research and extension initiative of the Australian National University, led the workshop. The facilitators presented strategies and skills to share on Enhancing Farm Dams in Box Gum Grassy Woodlands. We heard the results from the Sustainable Farms research on dams, looking at the water quality, water persistence, biodiversity and associated productivity gains. A key thing that I learnt is that birds are key indicators in ecosystem health and that on-ground biodiversity counts are essential for measuring biodiversity for Natural Assets Credits.
March 2024
In March we ran the second of the Leader’s roundtables in Bingara. The Second Bingara Leaders Round Table set an Action Plan for the rest of the year. Topics were voted on by poll from the ideas generated in the First Roundtable. Key areas were supporting farmers with their business planning, mental health and wellbeing, and organising a bus trip to two farms run by experienced and successful local graziers.
A highlight was meeting up with our colleagues from the Southern NSW Hub at the Advance NSW – 2024 Forum in Dubbo. It was an excellent exchange of ideas on innovations that had worked from some exceptional people. I particularly liked Jillian Kilby’s talk about setting up the regional coworking space ‘the Exchange’ in Dubbo and Narrabri. I had a chance to drop into The Exchange Narrabri in June, and it’s an inspiring coworking space. Jill’s ideas on design thinking and cross-pollinating ideas between diverse projects, teams and countries was an inspiration. I also loved the reclamation of old buildings such as the old Faulkner’s Iceworks in Narrabri as a community space. What a beautiful venue at the Dubbo Zoo, and a range of really inspiring and interactive presentations.
April 2024
We had Armidale Node Manager Lu Hogan over to Bingara to present the Ag360 online tool for cattle managers to some of our local graziers. The Whitlow graziers found it a really useful day.
We also held a Plant ID day with Dave Carr, which was organised as part of the FRR funded Living Classroom Community Nursery. This saw us all walking up a through a remnant of dry rainforest on the Bingara Creek, practicing our Plant Identification skills with the expert guidance of David Carr, a local botanist.
May 2024
Time to breathe. May saw the culmination of three months’ work applying for a grant and organising the Just Breathe program in Bingara, Barraba and Manilla. Karen Bishton of Selah Yoga ran workshops concurrently across the three towns for eight weeks, in Sit and Stretch and Men’s Stretch. This program was part of a suicide prevention program funded by the Primary Health Network, Hunter and Northwest NSW. These workshops brought and great sense of life to the towns. The Sit and Stretch program was held in the beautiful old Roxy Cinema in Bingara and I was delighted to see the attendees drinking tea and socialising together in the Roxy Café before classes start.
The GWYMAC Landcare / Mulloon Institute Boots on the Ground day was a great success. This was the first Boots on the Ground day for the FDF funded bootcamps and mentorships throughout five regions of Australia.
We all learnt a lot about installing the water infiltrating structures which we had been designing in our individual mentorships. It was great to have the practical wisdom of Peter Hazell, Mulloon Senior Landscape Planner for the day. Peter also visited my community property over near Nimbin, and helped us with design suggestions for stabilising landslips, and converting a gully very high in biomass to a regenerating landscape stabilised with some simple flow-through structures, which are great for collecting silt, and reversing erosion.
June 2024
I was lucky enough to be invited by the University of New England to meet with the participants of the FDF funded Legume program. A group of 25-30 farmers visited the farm of George Avendano ‘Towri’ near Boggabri, and adjacent to the Pilliga Scrub. These farmers have been trialling different legume mixes in pastures throughout a broad climatic range in NSW Qld, and the northern territory. It was inspiring to hear that in 30 years George Avendano and his family have brought the property back from an exhausted cropping property, with low pH, low phosphorous and sulphur to 100% groundcover growing digit grass, legumes and a biodiverse groundcover.
July 2024
Farmers and small business owners attended a very informative planning workshop at Bingara this week. Most people also said it would help them prepare for a future drought or other unplanned event, by giving them the skills to develop cash flow forecasts and manage loans and debt differently. It was great to hear that attendees were already thinking about changes they could make to their farming or business operations.
Naidoc Week Moree – how lovely of some Gomeroi friends from the Social and Emotional Wellbeing Unit of Pius X to drive me down to the march in Moree. This was a day to remember. I also visited the sites of the old town camps and heard much of the history and changes which have happened within these women’s lifetimes, in and around Moree.
August 2024
Late July into early August I headed off to the Mulloon Institute Professionals Intensive to hone skills in Landscape Rehydration. I am particularly interested in the Western Australian perspective as there is so much dryland salinity over there. I think it also relates to saline soils in the eastern States. Officers from Water NSW and LLS, have both told me about the issues in the NW Slopes, and have shared their mapping with me, so I want to be careful not to exacerbate this problem.
The Living Classroom Nursery had another successful market outside the Roxy Theatre.
The Pius X Social and Emotional Wellbeing unit manager, Kristie Turner found out that I had some skills Eco printing, so I trained her into the technique so that we could run a Workshop with Community Elders in Moree in October.
September 2024
I attended another great Native plant ID day in September. This time at ‘Warrama’ at Croppa Ck, and facilitated by Wendy Hawes, a local ecologist from Inverell. We were introduced to some wonderful bush food plants, holding up in one of the last remnants of natural bushland in the midst of one of Australia’s most fertile wheat cropping area. It highlights the wonderful opportunities our local farmers have to incorporate natural capital values back into their properties.
October 2024
Another busy month!
The Living Classroom Community Nursery hosted a school holidays activity for the Bingara Library holiday activities program. The team showed the children how to plant seeds, pot up a tomatoes, and to play a guessing game to see what different seeds turned into e.g. a fruit or vegetable, oak tree or eucalypt tree.
Dr. Raelene Ward, the Hub’s First Nations Knowledge Broker, came to visit two local Cultural groups. We had a great catchup with Gregory Livermore, CEO of the Anaiwan Local land Council at Tingha. Then back to Bingara to see some scar trees at the burial site of Cobbara Bill a Murri/mari man whose ancestral remains had been taken from Country by the employees of the Australian Museum in the past, but were returned as part of a ceremony on December 1 2017, a partnership between the Anaiwain LLC, Gwydir Shire Council and the Department of Environment and Heritage. Cobbara Bill was a Wirraayaray person of the broader Gomeroi Nation, of important cultural standing born in the late 1700’s. The tree carving was for a Coolamon for the reburial.
I headed down to Moree to run a workshop with Kristie Turner for the First Nations Elders on Eco-printing. They had such a good time. We all felt like we could do this week after week. It was so lovely to meet such a dynamic group of older women. Some into their 80’s and were just so dynamic and creative. A wonderful community.
Northern Slopes Landcare and the local Biodiversity Group Gwydir Ark, also put on an evening Platy party at a property on Elcombe Rd, on the Gwydir River. These events are run by the Australian Conservation Foundation, and the ecologist researcher Dr. Gilad Bino, gave us the full rundown on what the latest research is regarding platypuses in this part of the world.
The month ended with a wonderful tour of Mitiamo at Pallal, a locality near Bingara. It is the home of Jason and Breanna Mack and Don and Gay Mack live in the neighbouring property Berrybank. The 3000-hectare farm has been in the family since the late 1880’s with the Homestead being built in 1920. Over this time the farm has been used for cropping for wheat, also sheep grazing, and now solely for cattle grazing. We looked at some very productive tropical pastures.
November 2024
At last, after 6 months planning, the University of New England post-graduate researchers came down to Bingara. They were representing the Rader Community Ecology Lab, a unit set up by Professor Romina Rader of the University of New England. ‘Our research focuses on observing flower visiting insects in crops and assessing their efficiency as pollinators’. It was such a fun and information packed day. The participants all enjoyed the day immensely.