2012 NIRRA Policy Forum Workshop: Kangaroos and Land management

To identify policy settings and industry initiatives that could improve land management in relation to the harvest of kangaroos in rangeland areas. Kangaroos in the context of agricultural production systems The Rangelands encompass 81% of Australia. These are areas where rainfall is too low or unreliable and the soils too poor to support cropping and the native pastures of the rangelands are mostly used for extensive grazing. There is an increasing awareness of the need to match production systems in the rangelands to their environments and recognition in the case of the kangaroo that this animal is well adapted to the rangeland ecosystems. That greater adaptation is because kangaroos are native animals that have co-evolved with the native vegetation. The kangaroo is much more efficient at converting vegetation into protein. As a consequence the kangaroo places less pressure on pasture and water supplies compared with sheep and particularly cattle. This has been established in assessments of total grazing pressure relative to net primary production that use Dry (non-lactating), Sheep Equivalents (DSE) to measure the grazing pressure exerted by domestic sheep and cattle as well as native and naturalised grazers (such as the kangaroo) (Bureau of Rural Sciences 2005; Beeton, Buckley et al. 2006). The DSE of a kangaroo is estimated to be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.7 of a non-lactating sheep (Grigg 2002), while beef cattle have a DSE of about 8 (see Table 1. below.). Using kangaroo population estimates (Caughly, Grigg et al. 1983; Pople and Grigg 1999) and relative DSE's (Beeton, Buckley et al. 2006) show that between 1% and 8% of grazing pressure in Australia is due to kangaroos. For the last two decades environmental scientists have been exploring the sustainable use of native species to generate conservation benefits and there is now a substantial amount of data supporting arguments for greater use of kangaroos as production animals (Wilson 1974; Archer 2002). Both as a way of reducing the total grazing pressure in the rangelands – because the use of kangaroo is a better land management strategy in terms of reducing land.