When Tasmania’s lowland native grasslands were first recommended for national listing as a critically endangered ecosystem in 2007, mistrust between farmers and conservationists was high. . . .

Four years later, Foster and a small group of other local farmers had come around.

“We’re better off working together than taking an adversarial approach,” Foster said.

Temperate native grasslands are threatened all over Australia, and much of what remains is degraded and fragmented.

Tasmania’s Midlands are a biodiversity hotspot, listed as a “priority place” in the federal government’s Threatened Species Action Plan 2022-32. However, this listing does not guarantee protection.

“Only 30% of original vegetation on the Midlands survive and only 5% of the native grasslands,” says the MCP’s project coordinator, Pierre Defourny.

Defourny says a “mere 20%” of the remaining native grasslands in the Midlands are protected, half of which –about 1,624 hectares (4,011 acres) – is covered by the MCP’s stewardship program. Fourteen farmers have signed.

It’s colloquial wisdom that the wealth of colonial Australia was built off the sheep’s back, but it is seldom acknowledged that the vast natural grasslands graziers depended on had been culturally managed by Aboriginal people for more than 30,000 years.

Disturbance caused by traditional burning and frequent digging for edible tubers, alongside digging by small marsupials, created the spongy soils and extraordinarily biodiverse ecosystems taken for granted by early settlers.

As the colonies developed, the native grasslands and their complex beauty shrank to remnants on private land, where merino sheep thrived on the biodiverse diet and in sheltered woodlands. Their grazing helps provide the disturbance the grasslands required.

“It was after the 1989 wool crash, when farmers had to diversify, that a lot of the grasslands were lost to ploughing and pasture improvement,” says Diana Cameron.

Her late husband, Andrew Cameron, was a Midlands farmer and MCP coordinator from 2011-2021.

“Andrew was a conservationist,” she says. “He knew the farmers, so he could talk to them about the importance of the grasslands and how the stewardship program would work.”

The origins of the MCP are in the work of University of Tasmania plant geography professor Jamie Kirkpatrick, who began developing relationships with farmers in the 1980s and 1990s. Kirkpatrick, who died in October, mapped remnant grassy ecosystems in cemeteries, tips, parks and roadsides, as well as on farms.