Sustainable pastoral systems

Our focus

The Sustainable pastoral systems group applies understanding of the plants, animals and environments that make up the pastoral systems of the Northern Territory and Asia to provide research for sustainable pastoral systems now and into the future.

Our main research interests include:

• Improving food system sustainability
• Pasture systems, pasture agronomy and plant nutrition
• Improving animal health and welfare
• Linking of soil and plant nutrition to human, animal and environmental health

Importance of this research

The pastoral industries bring millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to northern Australia, and are stewards of millions of hectares of land. The Sustainable pastoral systems group provides research to help ensure that producers in northern Australia and Asia can sustainably produce meat and other products now and into the future

Current projects

Impact of wind direction and wind speed on the grazing patterns of sheep and the associated behaviours around watering points

Grazing behaviour of livestock is important to understand for managing grazing, improving grazing management and making informed decisions about infrastructure such as watering points. This project will support an Honours student to use GPS tags to look at the effect of watering point and wind direction on grazing behaviour of sheep in the South Australian arid zone.

This project is supported by the South Australian Arid Lands Landscape Board.

Optimising feeds to support ecosystem-based aquaculture

This project aims to assess the global and local consequences of changing feeds in aquaculture by developing a new interdisciplinary sustainability assessment framework. The project expects to generate new methods to understand and predict local farm-to-ecosystem changes and global environmental footprints under contrasting feed and climate scenarios by integrating field data with novel experiments, modelling techniques and global mapping of terrestrial and marine feed raw materials and their impacts. Expected outcomes include new methods to assess ecological, social and economic trade-offs under different feeds to inform decision making in support of an ecosystem-based approach to aquaculture spanning global to local scales.

Funded by the Australian Research Council Grant, Biomar Ltd and the University of Tasmania.