Healthy Landscapes
The Macedon Ranges Shire Council, along with the City of Greater Bendigo and other partners, has a program, Practical Regenerative Agricultural Communities, which aims to help farmers and landholders to identify and implement practical land management practices to improve grazing, productivity, soil health, biodiversity, and waterway health.
They offer individual, free on-farm advice, webinars, workshops, and field days (I’m a big fan of these), a Holistic Grazing Management short course, and farmer discussion groups.
Managing Pastures
Pasture Cropping Pioneer, Colin Seis, came to Huntly from his agricultural property, Winona, in New South Wales, to talk to landholders on how they too can benefit from regenerative farming practices.
Pollinators on Farms
The webinar “Pollinators on your farm” was followed by the “Promoting pollinators on your farm” farm walk in Sedgwick. It was fantastic to see some pollinators in action, and identify a few of the species during the farm visit, and learn about ways to make it more habitable for pollinators – like leaving mounds for insects to bury themselves into.
Before the farm visit, some traps were placed to get a picture on what species might be there. The traps were brightly coloured for insects who see in ultraviolet light and might find them attractive – there were blue and yellow traps. It was also interesting to see the differences between those two colours – some insects may be drawn to one, and not the other.
Pollinators identified on the day included bees, like the native blue-banded bee, reed bees, and also some feral honeybees that had made their home in a Yellow-Box Eucalyptus, robberflies, march flies, a grass blue butterfly, flower wasp, pin-tail beetles, and many more. It was brilliant to see the diversity.
Dung Beetles
Dung beetles are important to the ecosystem, and beneficial on farms. I attended a workshop to find out how, and looked up close at a few different species.
Cultural Heritage
A Cultural Heritage information session was held in Lauriston, and was led by Dja Dja Wurrung clan members, Jackson Dunnolly-Lee and Jason Kerr.
This session allowed attendees to identify cultural heritage, artefacts, and living heritage, such as trees, food and fibre; find out what to do when you have identified cultural heritage and the different ways it can be protected; and the role of fire in the landscape.
