Grassroots Movements

13 years ago Dan Chapman came to northern Australia for what was supposed to be a six month sojourn. He had just left university and thought the north, with its wide open spaces, wild country, and unique characters would be a fitting place to think about the next steps in his career.  

13 years later, Dan is still in the NT, now calling Darwin home. “It’s probably the freedom and the wide open space,” he said when asked about what keeps him here after all these years. “The reality for me is that we don’t know everything in this environment and it’s just such a great opportunity to be able to discover.” 

As Rangelands and Nature Manager for AACo (Westholme’s parent company), knowing “everything” is a big ask. All told they look after 16.5 million acres of land spread across 20 properties, or stations, dotted between the roughly 3,500kms separating Brisbane (QLD) and Darwin (NT). The rangelands team at AACo is a diverse group of scientists and agriculturists tasked with “land management,” a modest description for work that encompasses everything from protecting endangered species habitat to ensuring the health of native grass pastures.

The average Westholme cattle spend nearly two years nourishing on our rangelands, roaming at will within expansive paddocks in small cohorts. These groupings stay together for their entire lives and forage freely across grazing country that, depending on the time of year, offers a buffet of native grasses, herbs, and legumes. Not only do Westholme cattle need to eat a lot but a varied diet is also essential for their overall mental state.  

 Dan and the rangelands team works to ensure a healthy balance between the needs of the Westholme herds and the needs of the land. Westholme is a Wagyu beef producer firstly but without healthy, fertile land it would be impossible to nourish a robust herd. As Dan puts it, “basically every year we go around and make sure that we’re not impacting the health of our landscape and we’re actually trying to actively enhance and improve that ecological health over time.” Put more simply, everyone at Westholme is working to produce the highest quality Wagyu beef and improve the health of the land at the same time. 

To better understand land management in the north, we’ll need a quick geography lesson.  

Northern Australia is a unique part of the world home to many species of plants and animals that are only found here. This area is defined as sub-tropical and accordingly, has two distinct seasons—wet and dry. The rainy season, also known as “the wet”, extends from November to April and is the primary growing period for all of the forage (edible grasses, herbs, and legumes) for the remainder of the year. The dry season lasts from May through to November/December and is known for its droughts, fires, and soaring temperatures. “You get 8 to 16 weeks where you get a good growing season. The soil temperatures are right, the rainfalls right, and you get good recruitment of your perennial grasses,” Chapman says. “If you’re out on the ground in April what you’ll notice is a really diverse swatch of pastures. You’ll have a bunch of annual and perennial grasses and legumes and a lot of diversity.”  

Grazing cattle in the north revolves around the Mitchell Grass Downs and specifically the Barkly Tableland, which are defined as a tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublands ecoregion. Within the expansive Mitchell Grass Downs is a 23 million acre stretch known as the Barkly Tableland, a loosely defined area marked by swaths of naturally treeless land, cracking clay soils, and Mitchell Grass—the dominant native grass species of the area. 

While preserving the health of native Mitchell Grasses (there are four different varieties) is important, what the team really strives for is biodiversity. And when Dan describes the variety of plants Westholme cattle are eating, the  term “grass-fed” seems like a misnomer. For one, cattle aren’t fed. They forage freely and independently, finding and choosing their favourite things to eat. And they don’t only eat grass. “Mitchell grasses will tend to be the dominant species in a Mitchell grass downs environment but they’re complimented by a suite of other native grasses and legumes.”

The native legumes in these pastures help fix nitrogen and remediate soil health along with being very palatable to cattle. Dan specifically called out Neptunia, Sensitive Plant, and Rincozia as important legumes in our environment, while adding that “Verbine, which is the dominant species around our inland lakes on the Barkly, is a critical native legume for its productivity and palatability.” 

This diversity is reflected in the flavour of all Westholme Wagyu products, but is especially heightened in their grass-fed program, Forage, which pairs purebred Wagyu animals with a foraged diet of native grasses and legumes. The resulting product has a lot of the characteristic richness you expect from Wagyu, owing to the genetics, but is buffered by an unsurprisingly earthy and much more dynamic flavour profile. 

It would be natural to think that the best way to preserve these lands would be to simply leave them alone but the rangelands team has evidence to the contrary. “A lot of these plants actually grow better with a defoliation event, whether that’s from an herbivore or from fire. The defoliation is an essential part of their life cycle and creates a vigorous, healthy tussock (plant) with better growth the following season,” says Chapman. “And what’s really interesting is that it seems that we’re actually extending out our active growing season as a result of having more organic matter [in the soil], which helps hold additional moisture.”  

Using daily satellite monitoring and on-the-ground reports from local rangelands officers, the Westholme team is able to keep track of land health as the seasons progress which informing how many cattle are grazing, where they’re grazing, and ensure they eat just enough so the pastures can regenerate for next season. 

Who said watching grass grow was boring?