Q&A with GSNRM Ag Officer, Julie Nicolosi
“Meat is the aim, pasture is the game.”
Meet Julie Nicolosi – one of GSNRM’s Agriculture Officers and project lead for Improving Land Condition across northwest Queensland. Though an agronomist with a dual degree in Sustainable Agriculture and Agribusiness, Julie’s connection to the grazing world runs far deeper than formal qualifications.
Q: Julie, can you introduce yourself, both professionally and personally?
A: When I was probably about 13, I told my mum I was going to be an agronomist, because I had decided that there had to be more to raising cattle than good genetics and praying for rain. So, I set off on a mission to figure out how to grow grass. I’ve got a strong passion for pastures and eco-landscape management as well, so taking a holistic approach. We sometimes like to think that we can separate plants from the environment, from the climate, but climate and environment tend to be one and the same.
Q: You’ve mentioned it can be difficult for landholders to balance environmental and economic interests – can you elaborate?
A: Unfortunately, on the farm I grew up on, I watched the decline of the pastures and the condition of the land. That’s probably why I’m so passionate about people trying to improve land condition, because I can see that grass equals meat, and meat equals dollars. Meat is the aim, pasture is the game. Graziers are grass farmers and grass managers; we just happen to use cows to harvest something nothing else can eat, and we sell cattle to make money.
Whatever we advise them to do, it has to be financially viable, because otherwise they’re going to say they can’t afford it. So, we want to consider how we can manage grazing to sustain the ecosystem rather than sustain the ecosystem for grazing.
Q. How can landholders manage grazing to protect the ecosystem?
A. Rest-based grazing — allowing sensitive areas to have rest during the growing season so vegetative growth can occur. You want a staggered succession in trees, with old, middle, and young trees. That way, as one tree dies, another comes in behind it, supporting biodiversity — birds, reptiles, and everything that lives in trees. It’s like people: grandparents teach, parents manage, kids learn. The land works the same way — succession matters.
Start adding rest periods to let the pasture recover and observe productivity. It’s a faith test — you have to trust the process. It’s a big change, but it prevents the destruction of grass diversity.
Q: How do you see farmers’ attachment to the land and their knowledge of it?
A. I think it’s sad we have this connotation in the media that farmers are the reason we have degraded landscapes, and yet there is a really strong correlation with farmers to the land, like the familiarity, calling it home. I truly believe farmers care — they care more than I think anyone else could possibly care for the land that they own and run. It’s your home, it’s more than a house on a cul-de-sac with a green lawn out the front. It’s a whole business, it’s your family, your kids grow up working it. At the end of the day the only constant is the land, and it’s hard not to be attached to it when you grow up on it.
I remember my dad telling me about before the cane toads, when there were sand goannas everywhere. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing them — big ones, little ones, you name it. Landholders, such as my dad, are the ones running around saying “you can’t take that tree,” because a bird wants to live there. Farmers may not know scientific names, but they have a common name for it, they know what lives in it, when it grows and flowers, what can eat it, what can’t, what’s poisonous too.
A producer has many jobs all wrapped into one title, and one of those is you have to be a land manager; whether you’re cropping or grazing, you have to care about the condition of the land you manage.
Q: How would you encourage farmers hesitant about holistic management?
A. My message for those on the fence: you only have to do a little bit, a little bit goes a long way. Even on a small scale, just watch it for a bit. If it’s the science that’s not helping, read about it. There’s no perfect time to start, but the longer you leave it, the harder it becomes, and the worse the land condition gets.
If you have succession in mind, your children or your grandchildren are going to stay on and keep going. It’s not going to be viable for them either to go from a D back to a C or even a B in their lifetime; it will be a financial burden for them in terms of productivity and environmental sustainability.
There’s always going to be a project going in the grazing system with Gulf Savannah NRM. I know it’s uncommon in the beef industry to pay for a consultant to help with management decisions, but I believe it is the way of the future.
Q. Anything else to add?
A. I am very passionate about pastures, perhaps too passionate! I find it fascinating, the relationship plants have to the rest of the food chain. There is nothing else on the planet that can convert light energy into chemical energy we can use for food and power. We take that for granted, but it’s some very dramatic, very cool science.