Managing the land at Yambulla is a constantly evolving, collaborative process. There's always a lot going on.
Here, we try to record a little of what is happening each month to share learnings
and allow others to follow our progress.
From plantation to novel forest: Jim Osborne tells the story behind the cornerstone of the Yambulla Project –
20 years ago 'Top Yambulla’ represented all that was wrong with my family's property at Nungatta. Neglected, overrun with blackberry and colonising native species (wattle, tea tree, eucalypts) out competing grasslands, it was no longer fit for grazing and given the blackberry issue, leaving it to nature wasn't an option.
Our founder Jim Osborne recently presented the Yambulla Project as part of the Forests 2030 section of the Impact X Summit at the Sydney ICC.
Regen Labs’ ambition is to bring about good change by growing the quality and quantity of regenerative enterprises in Australia.Providing the right nurturing support - skills, knowledge, networks and finance - so that regenerative enterprises can build community wealth and natural capital, and lead the transition to a more regenerative economy.
We have been on a 10 year listening and learning journey and it's finally time to sharpen our pencils and create a master plan for Yambulla. This will be an overarching document that identifies what, where and how our regenerative ideas in native grains, carbon, forestry, eco-tourism and biodiversity will knit together to make this Country the best it can be.
Managing our waterways requires a deep understanding of how they function and watching how they perform under the extreme pressure of a flood can be very revealing. We have just had an enormous 3 day precipitation event where 25% of our annual rain poured down from the sky. Documenting the resultant flood patterns will inform future decisions.
A quiet Spring has meant we have had some time to catch up on our wildlife camera data. It's been a massive task as we have captured over 300,000 photographs in the last 2 years. These images needed to be reviewed, #tagged, filed and stored.
This winter we worked to replicate the conditions that we experienced after the 2020 Black Summer bushfires. That terrifying event was informative as it rejuvenated the Yambulla native grasslands leading us to a new partnership and a new native grain industry.
We are developing a new program that pairs Indigenous and non-indigenous people to walk together, to share old and new ideas. And to collaboratively find pathways to make this Country the best it can be.
Our main tenant will vacate Yambulla this month, having finished harvesting the 320,000 trees they planted 17 years ago. This ends a relationship that began in 2007 when 650 hectares of Yambulla was leased and planted to down to Shining Gum (Eucalyptus nitens), to be used for photocopy paper.
After many years of trialling different methods of blackberry control we now have an eight year operations process for converting a landscape infested with blackberry to one that is relatively blackberry free. Using data we have collected over a 20 year period, we can now schedule, budget and assess control works.
Last year we realised an opportunity to invite an important Aboriginal Lore group to be co-custodians at Yambulla. We cemented the relationship in December by gifting them one of our favourite pieces of Yambulla. The gift parcel sits beside our most important waterhole where sits an important ‘Mother Tree’ and has a separate access road, keeping it very private. We couldn't be happier to have this group as our neighbour, giving us Cultural guidance.
The University of Canberra landscape architecture school came to Yambulla for a 3 day kick-off of their 2023 Vertical Studio. ‘Vertical’ in that second, third and honours year students are all working together for a semester on developing ideas for our site.
Over the last 12 months we have been crafting the idea of sharing Yambulla. The premise being that single landholders like us do not have the knowledge nor finances to tackle climate change, biodiversity decline and reconciliation with First Nations peoples alone. Opening the farm gate to other stakeholders feels like a workable solution.
Wood4Good have produced a concept and vision document, the blueprint for the future of growing novel forests at Yambulla. It is now clear to us we will be growing lots of trees from seed and so having our own seed bank of locally sourced seeds will be very useful, imperative even.
Wood4Good came to Yambulla to develop renewal plans for our 450 hectare eucalyptus plantation that was killed in the 2020 bushfires. They were inspired by how now, 3 years after the fire, there was a naturally evolving regeneration occurring and, with some tinkering by humans, this could be evolved into an exciting new paradigm for resilient, productive and novel ecosystems.
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We acknowledge First Nations People as the original inhabitants and traditional custodians of the Yambulla valley and surrounding areas.
We recognise and value their continuing connection to the land and culture.
