How Local Land Services supports landholders after emergencies

Local Land Services is a New South Wales government agency that supports land managers to manage a broad suite of aspects across their property—whether that’s biosecurity risks on farm, natural resource management, agricultural production, or emergency management in relation to bushfires and floods.

The extended wet period we’ve had over the last couple of years has led to a lot of erosion risks presenting themselves in the landscape. Land managers have been coming to us for advice on these issues. Our staff have had feedback that landslips are a big problem in the area for some landholders.

Today was all about bringing together knowledge from soil conservation services and ecological expertise in one spot for landholders to learn. We essentially do a whole range of erosion control work in all sorts of environments—from coastal infrastructure to agricultural land.

My role today was to start to talk about and introduce landslips, how they happen, share some of the experience in what we’ve done in the past to remediate landslips, and what sort of options are available to people.

Most of the highlands here is a heavily cleared arable landscape. That in itself is a problem—it promotes a greater possibility of mass movement of soil. If, as a landholder, you’re seeing significant mass movement of soil on the property, there’s a possible inclination to get in there with your own machinery and fix it using what you might consider to be the best option. But you may lose the machine in the process. There are all sorts of risks involved in going onto unstable landscapes.

I realise the importance of having Local Land Services as a key contact to get expertise and guidance. I think the workshops are terribly important. They recognise we all had a problem, and they made us start to be aware of the problem. That awareness, right at the beginning of a disaster, is pivotal to having some success.

When I first saw what I call a slip—just a small shoestring break in the ground—I got a little bit concerned. I thought, this is a problem. I didn’t know what I was looking at. As it went on, it got worse and worse. Individually going to a Local Land Services person who has lots and lots of data, who can say, “Oh yes, we’ve seen this problem before. It happened 35 years ago.” They will have the knowledge and the history.

I’d really like landholders to understand from this that LLS can provide them with education and knowledge, and that we can also go out on farm and provide them with more tailored or specialised advice so that they can go away more empowered and more able to maybe look at their problems themselves and how they can address them.

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We’ve been working with Local Land Services to implement some bush regeneration and re-vegetation projects on Woolgoolga Creek. It’s an important project because, in the wake of the 2019 bushfires, a lot of areas were burnt, and this has become a bit of a refuge area for lowland subtropical rainforest.

The on-ground works have been a combination of bush regeneration work, including weed control. We’ve been able to plant 150 rainforest trees along the riparian zone and also install some coir logs to help with landslips and erosion.

We’ve been here for 40 years, so what you’ve wandered through today and seen is actually 40 years of regeneration—some of it planting, but a lot of it natural regeneration. We’ve lost so much natural vegetation and so many plant communities and habitat for fauna that any little patch we can preserve is so important to the wider picture.

Along the edges of the creek, it’s a significant community of remnant rainforest. It’s a really fantastic opportunity that Local Land Services have given to us. This area here in the hinterland behind Coffs Harbour and Woolgoolga is under extreme amounts of pressure—there’s increasing urbanization and some really intensive horticulture going on. It’s really critical where we can get private land conservation and some really good, enthusiastic landholders.

North Coast Local Land Services has a role in helping landholders recover from disasters. We’re working with impacted landholders after fires, floods, drought, and other disasters. We’re funding projects to help them maintain and improve biodiversity and ecological processes.

The landholder here that we’ve been working with—we provided funding for some re-vegetation, so we did about 3,000 species of plantings along here. We’ve provided funding for some fencing—about two kilometers. The grant allowed us to remove the old fencing that, in many cases, was right up to the water’s edge and bring that back by an average of 25 meters off the high bank.

The idea of restoring the ecological balance along the river was to enhance the farm’s value as well. If we’ve got a functioning ecosystem here on the river, it will support the productive side of the farm. Some of the better results we’ve had here are just through regeneration—just by fencing off areas, taking livestock out of that, and with some weed control, we’ve had great positive results for rainforest restoration.

Having a really vibrant and biodiverse riparian zone has such a huge flow-on effect for water quality, habitat preservation, and habitat creation. This area is actually a prime location for stocking Eastern Freshwater Cod as part of the recovery project for that species, and the recovery is very much dependent on the quality of the habitat, which enables them to breed and be a self-sustaining population.

We’ve had some big floods through this part of the world—not as big as up north—but you can really see that once the forest grows up and gets resilience, it can survive those floods easily and will be there for a long time.