Inspiring work Chris and awesome video Danny! Model example of healthy, functional creek and catchment, rehydrated thanks to your holistic mgt. Shows the stepped creek form surrounded by stabilising vegetation at 5 mins and 8mins for all the Natural Sequence Farming fans! Holistic planned grazing, plus some cool fire where needed offer a lot of hope for landscape health in Australia, particularly our brittle north! Big fan and appreciate your work Chris
Informative and Inspiring. Greetings from Scotland 🏴. Government has a lot to answer for! I wish there was a Department for Soil Regeneration that couldn’t be touched by every new Government. It has a budget like Road Repairs every year. Green Policies can turn people off when they waste money on solutions but let’s keep Soil Regeneration a must!
Nice video Danny. Great fella presenting too. Thanks for spending your time to help spread this message and help challenge the ideas that many wrongly hold as truths.
We argue that this particular remnant population of wild donkeys is managed and not “feral”.
On Kachana we began culling and harvesting donkeys for dog-feed before we even were granted our lease. The culling for selection against feral-behaviour has continued and remains in place to this day. Always, we do this in a manner that we (humans and/or our machines) are not associated with predatory behaviour. Our motivation for this was to be able to access the animals more readily. Flighty animals are harder to kill humanely. A wild animal that can remain within its comfort-zone can be dropped without even hearing the bang. Any animals nearby hear a bang, one animal drops, but they see no predator, and therefore do not flee. This soon proved to have beneficial unintended consequences: herding-behaviour developed. We attribute this to an instinctive response to predatory pressure, even in the absence of a visible predator. I.e., sudden ‘death’ became somehow associated with a form ‘predation’ and the resulting “uncertainty” led to a bunching of breeder-groups, and even in instances to the forming of distinct bachelor-groups. Using this “new” information we were able to begin putting wild animals to work: Mulching, evenly fertilizing and pruning vegetation. Donkeys do much of our "fuel control", especially in those areas where cattle will not readily venture. The science relating to animal behaviour (in general) and to herding, predator-prey dynamics (in particular) and much, much more only became accessible to us once we had internet on Kachana (2002). Being able to tap into such knowledge, and now being in a position to compare notes with others doing similar things, sped up our progress and there was little sense in reinventing the wheel. Now we could begin testing “new” knowledge for local relevance and run with what appeared to be working for us.
Thank you for helping to spread this (sometimes) challenging message, Danny! The learning continues as more and more people grapple with a search for viable solutions. However, for the ‘rubber to hit the road’ we need a new generation of Land-Doctors: www.kachana-station.com/land-doctors-wanted/ (a PDF version can be downloaded) The presentation was delivered in a manner where pictures tell the story and I merely commented on the pictures. Chris Henggeler, Kachana, 29.07.2021
While with this concept there is a legitimate concern over escaped cattle and donkeys returning to destructive feral behaviour, I think there is a good chance people of the future will say the new Australia was born on Kachana Station
Inspiring work Chris and awesome video Danny!
Model example of healthy, functional creek and catchment, rehydrated thanks to your holistic mgt. Shows the stepped creek form surrounded by stabilising vegetation at 5 mins and 8mins for all the Natural Sequence Farming fans!
Holistic planned grazing, plus some cool fire where needed offer a lot of hope for landscape health in Australia, particularly our brittle north! Big fan and appreciate your work Chris
Informative and Inspiring. Greetings from Scotland 🏴. Government has a lot to answer for! I wish there was a Department for Soil Regeneration that couldn’t be touched by every new Government. It has a budget like Road Repairs every year. Green Policies can turn people off when they waste money on solutions but let’s keep Soil Regeneration a must!
Nice video Danny. Great fella presenting too. Thanks for spending your time to help spread this message and help challenge the ideas that many wrongly hold as truths.
Can these methods be used in brumby country?
We argue that this particular remnant population of wild donkeys is managed and not “feral”.
On Kachana we began culling and harvesting donkeys for dog-feed before we even were granted our lease.
The culling for selection against feral-behaviour has continued and remains in place to this day.
Always, we do this in a manner that we (humans and/or our machines) are not associated with predatory behaviour.
Our motivation for this was to be able to access the animals more readily. Flighty animals are harder to kill humanely. A wild animal that can remain within its comfort-zone can be dropped without even hearing the bang. Any animals nearby hear a bang, one animal drops, but they see no predator, and therefore do not flee.
This soon proved to have beneficial unintended consequences: herding-behaviour developed.
We attribute this to an instinctive response to predatory pressure, even in the absence of a visible predator.
I.e., sudden ‘death’ became somehow associated with a form ‘predation’ and the resulting “uncertainty” led to a bunching of breeder-groups, and even in instances to the forming of distinct bachelor-groups.
Using this “new” information we were able to begin putting wild animals to work: Mulching, evenly fertilizing and pruning vegetation. Donkeys do much of our "fuel control", especially in those areas where cattle will not readily venture.
The science relating to animal behaviour (in general) and to herding, predator-prey dynamics (in particular) and much, much more only became accessible to us once we had internet on Kachana (2002). Being able to tap into such knowledge, and now being in a position to compare notes with others doing similar things, sped up our progress and there was little sense in reinventing the wheel.
Now we could begin testing “new” knowledge for local relevance and run with what appeared to be working for us.
Thank you for helping to spread this (sometimes) challenging message, Danny!
The learning continues as more and more people grapple with a search for viable solutions.
However, for the ‘rubber to hit the road’ we need a new generation of Land-Doctors:
www.kachana-station.com/land-doctors-wanted/ (a PDF version can be downloaded)
The presentation was delivered in a manner where pictures tell the story and I merely commented on the pictures.
Chris Henggeler, Kachana, 29.07.2021
While with this concept there is a legitimate concern over escaped cattle and donkeys returning to destructive feral behaviour, I think there is a good chance people of the future will say the new Australia was born on Kachana Station
The important role of herbivorous needs to be understood by Australians and the rest of the world.