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| Introduced Red Fox, The Green Line Dec 2019. |
From the start B2B set out to positively influence the way landholders use native vegetation on their land. We quickly found that there are barriers to that - money, attitudes, resources, policies, land use.
But there are ways to break down those barriers - and one of those has been a partnership with a number of agriculture organisations on providing evidence to landholders and industry in a report written 2012 and revised 2015 called "The Economic Benefits of Native Shelterbelts Report"
( a free download from our website www.basalttobay.org.au)
Its been uploaded over 20K times since release, and continues to be the go-to report for finding the studies conducted in Australia which provide proof that shelterbelts using native locally climate adapted species has benefits for agriculture, biodiversity, catchment health, people health, disaster resilience.
Another partnership we've built since 2016 is one with the Australian Taxation Officer (ATO) - which was to develop together fact sheets for registered primary producers which explain what can and cannot be claimed against a farm based business under the Landcare tax offsets scheme.
We also partnered with Private Forestry Tasmania to have a fact sheet produced that explains the offsets available for establishing farm forestry/agro-forestry/plantations by same landholder base.
We also worked with the ATO to capture the details of what registered primary producers can claim to restore riparian zones on their land - which was one of the deliverable actions the Department of Environment Land Water & Planning has in their Regional Riparian Action Plan. We saw it in the plan and identified the blend of information that could be put into a fact sheet so that complementary actions in riparian and other land would be encompassed into a new fact sheet supporting more than just riparian specific outcomes.
In 2018 we took our unique and ground breaking ATO partnership to the next level. There is increasing demand from primary producers, to know what they can do to prepare for fire. Many don't know what they can claim on farm tax to buy fire specific tools like pumps, or build fire specific infrastructure like fire insulated sheds to house vital equipment.
So following the St Patricks Day fire events which hit the Basalt to Bay Landcare Region in 3 fires, we approached the Country Fire Authority (CFA) with a draft written by the ATO on this topic, and developed together a fact sheet "Fire Preparedness for Primary Producers".
All the ATO Landcare fact sheets & the fire and the forestry fact sheet are also free downloads from our website, and all apply to any registered primary producer farming any land anywhere in Australia. This includes businesses leasing land to farm.
Managing a Landcare Network and communicating what we do to our community & stakeholder audience is almost two jobs - and we have one full-time person to do it. So we don't come here often and if you're seeking more about what we do regularly, then there are two ways.
First is to follow our twitter profile: @basalttobay,which is also a live scroll on the front page of our website www.basalttobay.org.au
Or you can follow us on instagram @basalttobay
We also offer associate membership to landholders in Moyne Shire/Warrnambool City - contact our office for more about that.
If you are a business that wants to become a supporter of our network through volunteering, board roles, sponsorship, shared events, education activities, or even just providing samples & fielday info for the network landholders - then get in touch with our office. We are always keen to assist with getting good practical tools to farmers.
Lisette Mill, Landcare Network Facilitator - February 2020
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