Camels help eradicate costly weed
Andy Park: Dozens of giant creatures with stomachs of steel have been called in to dine on an out-of-control weed in outback Queensland. The camels were brought in to eat the prickly acacia, an invasive plant costing farmers millions of dollars every year in lost production. The first stage of the trial was so successful, more farmers across Australia are hungry to join. Abbey Halter has the story.
Abbey Halter: They're not your usual pest control team. But if camels are good at anything, it's eating. A thorny weed called prickly acacia has been plaguing farmland in outback Queensland since the early 1900s. Cattle unintentionally spread the weed when feeding, so experts brought in camels to try and eradicate their costly prickly problem. Geoff Penton is an expert in weed management who helped organise the study.
Geoff Penton: The main impact the camels have had is stopping the plants or reducing the plants from setting seed and spreading.
Abbey Halter: 30 camels were brought onto a 40,000 hectare property in the outback town of Muttaburra in western Queensland as part of the four-year trial.
Geoff Penton: Their predominant diet becomes prickly acacia. About 30% of the plants have been knocked down but not destroyed. So what we've observed so far is that they don't kill prickly acacia plants through their foraging, but they reduce their impact, they stop them from setting as much seed, not entirely, but predominantly stop it from setting seed.
Abbey Halter: Paul Keegan has been a camelier for 40 years at his property near Mount Isa in northwest Queensland. He donated some of his camels for the trial.
Paul Keegan: When the prickly acacia are flowering, they absolutely hammer the flowers so there's no seeds. It takes a little bit of training but you've got a couple of caged camels, quiet ones that can lead the way, well it doesn't take a hell of a lot of brains to work it out, you know. They do the job but you've got to work with them. The company selling the herbicides are making a fortune out of it and it'll keep on going unless you implement something to take the flower and seed out. So they're going around spraying and treating trees that the camels can take care of.
Abbey Halter: David Batt is a sheep and cattle farmer in Queensland's central west. He's not involved in the trial but has been using camels to help control the prickly trees for decades.
David Batt: They are effective, there's no doubt, they won't get rid of the prickly bushes, you know, they can't do, oh well they would have yet enough of them, but they will slow it down to a certain extent. The trouble is they only attack the trees when it's really dry, you know, towards the end of light years or droughts, that's when they really hammer them. Otherwise they're eating all the good stuff on the ground that your other livestock are eating, so they're just directly competing with them.
Abbey Halter: The trial's organiser, Geoff Penton, says one camel for every thousand prickly acacia plants was an ideal ratio and if left uncontrolled it's estimated within five years the weed could dominate more than 470,000 square kilometres of land across Queensland and into the Northern Territory. The second stage of the trial is now underway and Geoff Penton hopes more landowners will develop an appetite for the strategy.
Andy Park: Abbey Halter and friends with that report
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