The role of land use planning in semi-arid areas
Worldwide, the semi-arid grazing and cropping regions are being subjected to severe overuse. Australian semi-arid regions have been cleared on a vast scale for marginal cropping. Grazing land has been overused and shows widespread signs of vegetation and soil degradation. Ecological realism on land capability based on objective condition monitoring, is essential to land management if sustainable production is to be achieved. The Land Care Movement can markedly influence this achievement. The margins of semi-arid cropland and the application of ecologically-based animal stocking rates require attention in several States. Drought assistance policy requires amendment to safeguard natural pastures. Lease covenants have a potentially central role to play in land administration.
Environment and Housing
Housing performs a number of functions. Among the more obvious are protection from heat, cold, rain, snow, sleet, wind, and extremes of noise, light, and darkness. Houses also protect birds from predators and theft and make it easier to control diseases and parasites. From a management point of view houses keep birds assembled together in one unit in which the manager handles the birds as a single group. All birds are subjected to the same environment, feed, water, medication, and management.
Step‐functional incidence and impact of drought in Pastoral Australia
Sequences of precipitation in pastoral Australia can be described by square waves: that is to say, their variation is step-functional. Sampling suggests that similar variation typifies pasture quality, station income, station economies in general, and rates of stock loss. Patterns of management response to drought can also display abrupt change, in consequence of certain types of managerial decision. Where stock losses ascribed to drought can be separated off from total losses, step functions again appear. Up to certain limits, however, drought appears to be merely one of several killers. Prospects of drought prediction appear to be minimal, unless successful use can be made of analogue prediction and/or of variations in the Southern Oscillation and related systems. The incidence of runs of wet and dry years is essentially random. Where an individual series can be recognised as random with persistence, the persistence effect means the prolongation of drought, when this actually occurs.