An end game of a healthy, viable livestock industry is the imperative that drives University of Southern Queensland researcher Ben Allen.
The controversial scientist – just last week he created a storm of controversy when he posed the possibility of exporting wild dog meat to South East Asia as a sustainable way of managing the feral pest – has plenty of challenges ahead in western Queensland that he’s working on as exclusion fences begin to cross the landscape.
“I predict in the next 10 years we’ll see either publicly or privately funded fences back in a big way, and the dots will be joined all the way from Muttaburra to Tambo,” he said. “When that happens, we’ll see progress.
“We could just let it evolve, or we could help it to happen within five years instead, and get big environmental, production and revenue gains sooner.
“Why are we waiting,” he asked.
He was in the west last week working on a range of different projects for his FOFI5M dream – five pests out, five threatened species in, and five million sheep for Queensland – that has come in the wake of the re-emergence of cluster fencing.
The USQ vice-chancellor’s research fellow is convinced that the environmental and economic future of the west all hinges on the effectiveness of the fences.
“When the fences go up,that’s when the work begins,” he said.
Ben’s philosophy is that four things affect animal populations of all type – births, deaths, immigration and emigration.
“We’ve developed a lot of tools to kills wild dogs with,” he said. “That only deals with part of the issue. It doesn’t stop them from breeding.
“All the killing in the world isn’t going to stop immigration either. The fences will enable you to get some benefit from that work.”
For graziers to get the full benefit, he believes money sources need to be given important reasons to make even bigger investments in fencing.
The first of these sources is the federal government, who Ben said was already spending a lot of money and were seeing a lot of biodiversity values in keeping pests out, but who needed to ask whether money spent on a 10 square kilometre property was more beneficial than spreading the money on a wider scale.
The other group whom Ben believes have strong reasons to get behind fencing projects is the finance industry.
“If you put up a fence, you’re less of a risk to your bank, and you can carry your stock longer.
“I’d like to see banks acknowledge this, and inject millions into programs of fencing and cleaning pests out of fenced areas.
If you put up a fence, you’re less of a risk to your bank, and you can carry your stock longer. I’d like to see banks acknowledge this, and inject millions into programs of fencing and cleaning pests out of fenced areas.
- Ben Allen
“I’d like to see between four and six million sheep return in the next 8-10 years, and decent data is what will sell all this.”
He’s undertaking experiments with clusters in both Barcaldine and Longreach regions, monitoring activity both inside and outside of proposed fence lines.
He believes it is no trouble to double dry sheep equivalents inside a fence within 12 months, something he is keen to prove for federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.
He is also looking for a partner to crunch the numbers on the benefits derived from fencing, saying that his background is the on-ground work.
“If we can articulate that well, it’s more likely individuals will jump in and fence themselves,” he said.
Whoever the partners are, they will need to have Queensland as their focus for Ben, who says the state has lost the most and therefore has the most to gain.
Other questions he’d like to see addressed, in order to add to the economic argument for sheep in the west, are: how many sheep are needed in Queensland to get live exports happening in a big way from northern Australia; and, what would an extra four, six or eight million sheep mean for individual graziers, their community, state and federal governments.
“The first question may be important to understand regional growth possibilities, and the second is important in terms of the jobs that could be created for whole communities, and the taxes those extra people will pay.”
When it comes to measuring the impact of, and doing something to reduce kangaroo numbers, Ben is less sure of himself.
“I’d like to see them at 20 per cent of current levels, so they’re non-significant to graziers, but I’m not sure how to do that,” he said.
Alongside these big picture questions is the on-ground work Ben is doing to keep working dogs safe from canid injectors, thanks to a $60,000 grant from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation.
He is also talking with South West Regional Economic Development about a plan to implement injectors.
“We’ll put them inside and outside the Quilpie cluster, and compare before and after effects to see if they make any difference,” he said.
For many people, Ben’s work is nerdy and impenetrable, and they would rather be out doing something about the scourge of wild dogs.
However, for Ben, all the killing in the world isn’t going to change anything on its own.
“If we don’t have a healthy livestock industry, we’re just wasting dogs,” he said.