A drought resilient agricultural landscape in the Midlands

This project will develop a regional prioritisation strategy for strategic plantings with the objective of improving animal welfare, biodiversity, drought, and extreme weather resilience on Midlands’ farms. This regional strategy will identify areas where native plantings are most likely to maximize economic and ecological benefits at both regional and farm scales. Ten whole-of-farm drought resilience and planting plans will be prepared for participating properties, including assessments of the potential benefits in terms of natural capital increase. The plans will be partially implemented with a hundred hectares of the highest priority plantings revegetated with native species across the ten farms. The project will be the basis for a range of complementary research projects, notable on water quality, pollinators diversity and natural capital accounting. Finally, the project will contribute content and resources to the knowledge hub being developed by Private Forests Tasmania where landowners can find tools, factsheets, and case-studies to increase drought resilience through strategic plantings on their farms. The project team will work with partners to promote these techniques at a series of workshops.