Barcaldine's Kylie Burton is putting Farmers for Climate Action scholarship into action

"I think it's one of those things that you take and put into your context," Ms Burton said. "The system is adaptive and needs to be flexible."

She's one of 20 Australian producers selected by Farmers for Climate Action to undertake a climate-smart farming scholarship valued at more than $3000, which she has just completed.

She and her husband were already changing the mix of animals they grazed on their 8282ha Barcaldine property Saltern Creek once the long drought broke, and have been able to fine tune those plans with the help of learnings from the scholarship

They purchased the historic property, one of Barcaldine's original settlement blocks, in 2010, and ran a commercial beef cattle herd, using set stocking techniques.

After years of ongoing drought they made the decision in 2018 to fully destock. That gave them the opportunity to adjust their operation, feeling that what they'd done before hadn't quite worked out.

"We needed to think about, what sort of red meat production could we do that was going to get us back into production," Ms Burton said. "With beef cattle, that's a two-year process."

At the same time, they'd undertaken a big fencing project as part of a cluster fencing scheme, and trialled goats in a small paddock on the place.

They saw firsthand the goats' preference for browsing woody plants on the property, including prickly acacia and dogwood.

"Then what we noticed was that the Mitchell grass was still there, so you could have cattle come in behind them," Ms Burton said. "We thought, right, we can change our red meat production to be three different animals."

As well as buying back a quarter of their breeding cow numbers, goats were the first ruminants reintroduced to their mix of boree wooded downs and soft gidyea country, and Dorpers followed.

"Dorpers are just great little meaty sheep that grow really quickly," Ms Burton said. "In five months we've got fat lambs ready to truck next month, down to Fletchers in NSW.

"They came off (their mothers) in early April at about 50kg.

"Basically our sheep and goat numbers are our main business now.

"We've gone from being 100 per cent beef cattle to being fat lamb and goat producers that still have some beef cattle because we really like them."

Ms Burton said they now had more large stock units on Saltern Creek than they'd run in 13 years.

While it was a great season - their rolling 12 month rainfall is 790mm - that came on the back of one of the region's worst ever droughts.

They're now excited to keep developing the property with a regenerative agriculture lens, moving towards reducing their carbon footprint at the same time.

Regenerative grazing management practices they've put in place includes monitoring soil, pastures, biodiversity and recording all that data.

They're taking worm egg samples and have cattle mixed into their paddock rotations, to ensure any parasites present aren't passed straight on to the next small animal mob.

"They've been great in a season like this - we've actually bought in agistment cattle for the very first time ever, just to try and go in front of a few stock to try and knock down the grass," Ms Burton said. "What we hope (is) that our grazing practices help to retain some of this ground cover."

She said climate change continued to be their greatest threat, eyeing off the possibility of another El Nino on the near horizon, but were now continually monitoring to manage whatever the weather threw at them.

Being aware that the meat they produced is exported, Ms Burton wants to be proactive in the emissions reduction space as a producer.

"You can't do that if you don't know," she said. "That was the big thing, it was about knowing. Farmers for a long time have been innovators - that's why the industry has taken a lead."

One of the recommendations in the Farmers for Climate Action national plan she'd like to see implemented is for on-farm extension officers, to help producers interpret their data.

"You can look at all this data and you can have information but until you sit down with experts and they explain it all, all the dots start to join," she said. "We hear all this information, and think it's just too much."

Since completing the scholarship, the Burtons have done a carbon footprint audit, finding their timber country was adequately compensating for property emissions.

"Traditionally you think you get a bulldozer through and knock the timber over, but I would say you're better off leaving that timber because the sequestration is happening," she said.

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