This page is about high biodiversity and how it underpins every fit farm business
Imagine your farm with no biodiversity - no birds, bees, insects, plants or animals of any kind! Irrespective of where you live, whether you have a large or small farm business, and regardless of whether you grow crops, graze animals or do both, it's a fair bet that if I asked how much 'wealth' you had without all those organisms, you would tell me, 'none at all'. The harsh reality is very clear: no biodiversity equals no wealth. There would be a biological desert. In fact the term, desertification means nothing more than extreme biological diversity loss. To see a list of symptoms of biodiversity loss go to Page 2
Monitoring Biodiversity Loss.
Increasing biolological diversity on your farm might mean more leisure time, and substantially improved profit...
The increased profit comes about by improving improving farm productivity, and at the same time sustainably reducing a great many production costs. When you think about it, increasing the biological wealth on your land must increase your prosperity because it is simply the flip-side of the same coin: if no biodiversity equals no wealth, then increasing biodiversity must equal increasing wealth. That's how it works both in theory and in practice.
How you increase diversity and how you harvest it will depend on the
decisions
you make, but fortunately, increasing the biological and financial wealth you derive from your land does not depend on others. It depends ONLY on your actions!
The two photos to the left show remarkable differences. The far left photo shows bare, wind-blown sandy soil. This 'desertifying' and frightening site is located on the sand-plains just south of Perth, Western Australia. Whilst taken at a different time of year, the photo to its right is of the immediate neighbouring property! The photo-point is no more than 200 metres from the first site.
Different decisions (clearly made with different objectives in mind) have produced entirely different outcomes - bare, blowing soil in one case, and soils deliberately covered all the time with pasture and/or litter, in the other.
Indicators that biodiversity has improved... - An increasing diversity of species (plants, animals, birds, insects, and micro-organisms, etc.) within your environment
The more species there are in your paddock, field or block, the greater the biodiversity that is present - You have genetic diversity within each of those species
If you recall what happened in Ireland when the traditional wide diversity of potatoes was diminished and the people were reliant on only a few varieties, you will remember that vast numbers of people died or were forced to leave their country. An increasing amount of genetic diversity leads naturally towards the opposite effect. - There is a great mass or volume of each of those species
Think about the vast numbers within each species that harmoniously live in a rainforest. A desert may also contain many species of organisms, but because of poor
ecosystem function
they only sustain low numbers within each of those species. That's not high biodiversity.
This is how you begin increasing biological diversity...
The basic principles
- Soil cover
Perhaps the most important mindset to adopt when setting out to increase diversity on and in your land is:
Strive to maintain 100% soil cover, 100% of the time - Do the opposite
If biological diversity loss is occurring, do the opposite to what you are doing now. You will find you will get the opposite result!
Biodiversity gain and loss is never linear
When a new species of plant or organism appears on your land, you can be sure that many other seen and unseen species have also arrived. They often have no known name, yet they all depend on each other for their survival. Similarly, if you deliberately or accidently remove a species, many other species will be forced out as well, simply because their primary host has been removed.
For more information about this very important principle, go to the
ecosystem processes
page. There you will see an example where one additional plant species, lucerne (also known as alfalfa in some parts of the world) was introduced into cotton crops during the growing season.
It was discovered that lucerne is the prefered host to as many as eight insect species who enjoy dining on a major pest found in cotton crops, the heliothis spp. Together these eight predatory insects give farmers cost savings amounting to hundreds of dollars per acre or hectare each year, by decreasing or eliminating chemical and application costs. It is one of hundreds of great example where increasing biodiversity leads to increasing wealth!
GO to Page 2 - MONITORING BIODIVERSITY LOSS
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