Profitable and productive farms rely on well-managed natural assets.
The Valuing Natural Assets on Farms project supports farmers in the North West Local Land Services region to build awareness and understanding of natural assets, including the benefits of associated ecosystem services.
The project focuses on managing:
- remnant and planted vegetation
- perennial pastures
- farm dams
- water ponding
- riparian areas for productivity and biodiversity.
Participating landholders are receiving coaching, guidance, resources and ongoing support until December 2027.
Project background
The focus of work aims to mitigate the main threats to agriculture in the region, which include:
- changed rainfall pattern – changes in rainfall will have impacts on natural capital, for example, native and planted vegetation, which rely on certain rainfall patterns for growth, regeneration and reproduction
- habitat loss, which poses a significant threat to biodiversity and ecosystems
- invasive weeds and pest animals management
- knowledge gaps in how to better manage natural assets on-farm to improve productivity
- knowledge gaps in financial literacy impacting effective farm business management
- increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters.
Project objectives
This project aims to build landholder knowledge and skills to:
- improve sustainable resource management practices
- adopt farming practices that build resilience to climate change
- better manage the natural assets on their land.
Project delivery
Work includes:
- mapping activities to identify focus locations for demonstration sites
- dataset development and monitoring like flora, vegetation condition scoring, frog and bird diversity, invertebrate monitoring and soil classification (i.e. pH, texture, aggregate stability, penetration resistance and soil structure)
- revegetating habitats with participating landholders
- financial literacy benchmarking for participating landholders
- education events like financial literacy workshop and case studies, managing natural assets on-farm and monitoring protocols, workshops on carbon emission profile on-farm, biodiversity credit, fauna and farm productivity, accounting for nature/environmental accounting
- on-farm demonstrations of tools, technologies and practices
- skills and knowledge surveys about flora and fauna on-farm
- skills and knowledge surveys about financial literacy on-farm
- circulating information resources.
Project timeline
2024–25:
- Identify natural assets demonstration and monitoring sites.
- Establish agreements with participating landholders.
- Establish contracts/agreements with landholders for revegetation work.
- Complete baseline skills and knowledge surveys, including financial benchmarking.
- Deliver workshops on financial literacy on farms.
2025–26:
- Identify natural assets demonstration and monitoring sites.
- Complete baseline flora, frog, bird, invertebrates and soil assessments.
- Deliver 4 community engagement workshops.
- Complete case studies on ‘analysing on-farm natural asset investments and investment prioritisation’.
- Complete financial benchmarking surveys (indicator).
- Complete habitat revegetation work.
2026–28:
- Continue flora, frog, bird, invertebrates and soil assessments.
- Continue skills and knowledge surveys, including financial benchmarking (annually).
- Deliver community/stakeholder engagement activities i.e. workshops, field days, webinars.
- Maintain habitat revegetation work (annually until May 2028).
- Run on-ground trials or on-farm demonstrations.
- Publish and circulate information products.
- Project close (30 June 2028) and outcomes reporting.
Work underway
- Consultation with Australian National University completed for site selection and setting up monitoring protocols.
- Initial revegetation work has been completed and follow-up maintenance will continue annually until May 2028.
The Local Land Services team have been monitoring frogs using passive acoustic devices as a part of work underway. The spectrogram below shows a call from the most common Peron's tree frog (Litoria peronii) in the North West region.
Peron’s tree frog spectrogram
Project updates
March 2026
2 on-farm demonstrations included:
- a guided bird walk on the farm
- building an ecologically useful corridor.
The bird walk demonstration covered on-farm bird monitoring and productivity benefits of having diverse birds on the farm, including a follow-up discussion on recent on-farm bird surveys across the North West regions.
The ecological corridor demonstration provided hands-on knowledge and skills to improve:
- farm dams
- shelterbelts
- habitat planting for fauna
- farm productivity.
The event demonstrated practical tools for restoring farm dams and shelterbelts, with species-specific plantings to support farm fauna.
'Learning at Lunch – Managing natural assets on farm' webinar series completed. A factsheet covering relevant information and links was developed for each webinar. This four-part series covered topics such as:
- farm emissions accounting
- building farm natural capital profiles
- biodiversity market participation
- an international perspective on carbon farming.
Delivered the Managing Natural Assets on Farms Train-the-Trainer Workshop at Tamworth and Somerton in collaboration with the Sustainable Farm initiative at the Australian National University.
2 Financial Literacy and Investing in Natural Capital workshops completed at Narrabri and Tamworth.
- Baseline flora assessment, bird monitoring and soil classification completed.
- 11 potential sites identified and prioritised for monitoring natural assets on farms.
- One baseline survey for natural assets completed with participating landholders.
- 10 financial benchmarking baseline surveys completed with participating landholders.
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Funding and partnerships
Our key delivery partners are:
- established farmer groups
- local agronomists
- Southern QLD Northern NSW Drought Resilience and Innovation Hub
- Australian National University's Sustainable Farms Project
- University of New England
- University of Sydney's Plant Breeding Institute
- Landcare networks.
This project is supported by the Australian Government through funding from the Natural Heritage Trust under the Climate-Smart Agriculture Program and delivered by North West Local Land Services, a member of the Commonwealth Regional Delivery Partners panel. All outcomes for this project are recorded in MERIT.
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