Graziers from across the New England North West are set to converge on Tamworth next week for the Pastures & Grazing NSW conference, with two days of research, property tours and producer stories on offer – including a Bingara family who spent two decades turning cropping country into productive grazing pasture.
The conference, themed “The Science of Pastures & Grazing,” runs from Tuesday, 28 July, at Wests Diggers in Tamworth. It is the first full in-person event since the COVID pause and a virtual-only conference in 2021.
Pastures & Grazing NSW chairperson Lester McCormick, who lives at Manilla, said Tamworth was chosen as the host town because the organisation was keen to start hosting conferences under its rebadged name. Previously, the event rotated between the state’s north, central and south regions.
“With a draw area of 100 to 150 km, it means by moving the conference around graziers can have the opportunity of attending in person,” Mr McCormick said.
Conferences typically draw between 150 and 300 delegates. Mr McCormick said this year’s dry start to the season, which has had many producers unloading or feeding livestock, may affect numbers, but the message for the region is a strong one.
“The conference brings together the latest research applicable to this area as well as producer presentations on how they have adapted the technology into their management system to be very profitable,” Mr McCormick said. “We are also going to hear what AI is and how we can use that in our grazing system.”
A Bingara family’s story
Among those producer presentations will be Don and Jason Mack of Mitiamo Pastoral Co., who run the property with Jason’s wife Brianna south-west of Bingara in the Horton Valley. Speaking on Wednesday, 29 July, Don and Jason will detail the transformation of their property “Mitiamo” from mixed farming to a fully grazing-based operation, along with the technologies and skills they’ve had to pick up along the way.
Jason is a fifth-generation farmer on the property, and it will be the family’s first time presenting at the conference, although they have attended in previous years. “We have been to previous conferences as attendees,” Brianna said.
The shift away from cropping traces back to a long-running relationship with Mr McCormick himself.
“We started many, many years ago, I’m going to say like 2008 with Lester,” Brianna said. “And that’s what got us into tropicals.”
She said the transition out of cropping and into pasture grazing has taken time to get right. “It’s taken us a long time to get around to where we are, but we’ve finally got here.”
The Mack family’s connection to the district stretches back further still, to 1885, when they first settled on “Pallal Station,” a property that once spanned close to 69,000 hectares. Following the First World War, Pallal Station was carved up into soldier settlement blocks, with “Mitiamo” and “Berrybank” allocated to the Mack brothers. The family later added the neighbouring “Paradise,” bringing the current operation to 3,240 hectares.
Don and Jason’s own turning point came after attending the 2004 Grassland Society Conference at Gunnedah, where a tour of a tropical grass property proved decisive. Since 2005 the family has progressively moved the operation to a grazing enterprise built around tropical pastures, an approach Mr McCormick said reflects exactly what the conference is designed to showcase.
“Producer presentations on how they have adapted the technology into their management system to be very profitable” are central to the program, Mr McCormick said – and the Macks’ journey is a case in point.
The early years were rough. Seed was blown out behind an air seeder and lightly covered with harrows, an imperfect start with obvious potential. A demonstration site with the NSW Department of Primary Industries followed in 2006-07, and the family has continued refining their approach ever since, upgrading their seeding equipment from tynes to discs in 2015. By 2020 they were harvesting, drying and grading their own tropical grass seed, a sideline that has since grown into a seed-supply enterprise for other producers.
Today around 1,784 hectares of former cropping country has been converted to tropical pastures, predominantly Premier Digit Grass, alongside 405 hectares of native grass country. The breeding herd runs to “about 600 breeders,” Brianna said, matching Angus and Black Baldy cows, with steers turned off to the Coles Grass Fed program at around 270 kilograms dressed weight.
Not every experiment has paid off. One season the family made hay from their tropical pasture; while the hay itself was good, the paddock took almost two years to recover from the nutrient loss. They now buy in hay for drought reserves rather than cutting their own — a lesson in conservative, drought-ready management that echoes what Mr McCormick said runs through much of this year’s program.
“Drought is a given and our producer speakers are all confident in their approach to drought management, they make decisions early,” Mr McCormick said.
Asked whether the family were confident they’d got the balance right, Brianna was matter-of-fact about it.
“Everyone seems to think they’re always doing the right thing,” she said. “So I think we’re doing the right thing at this point in time anyway.”
Science on show
The keynote line-up includes Karen Penfold of Four Daughters Beef, who built a vertically integrated cattle business with her husband and four daughters that turns over 13,000 head annually. Melissa Mooney, an agri lending specialist with Regional Australia Bank, will focus on farm profitability, cash flow and risk. Jason Condon will review pasture-fed and mixed species forage grazing systems.
Lorroi and Justin Kirby, who run the Amarula Dorper stud, will speak on transforming tired farming country with multi-species pastures. Tristan Steventon will look at how exponential technological change, including artificial intelligence, is reshaping day-to-day grazing operations, while Malinda Guest will speak on the power of effective communication. Carol Harris will discuss the growing role of tropical pastures, Ted Callanan will bring the Queensland experience with pasture dieback, and Warwick Badgery will present a decade of research on grazing systems and soil carbon.
Mr McCormick said the “Science of” addition to the organisation’s new name reflects its core purpose. “We are stating we are a science based organisation and we promote information based on science,” Mr McCormick said. “We believe we have a role as a vital conduit between research, advisory services and the wider grazing community.”
Three property tours will run alongside the conference sessions: one to the Rummery family’s steer trading operation at Bendemeer, a second to Will and Stacey Sedgwick’s Angus X Wagyu breeding property at Barraba, and a third to Thomas Foods International’s lamb abattoir.
Mr McCormick attended the very first conference back in 1985 and even contributed a paper. He said the science presented has moved a long way since then, and so has the way it reaches producers.
“Delegates will be able to network with each other and talk with the speakers personally,” Mr McCormick said, adding producers tend to get more out of an event they can attend face to face — a view he shares himself.
Registrations for the Pastures & Grazing NSW conference are open via Humanitix and close Friday, 24 July.
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