Paraway Pastoral Beef Herd Management Project

Paraway Pastoral Beef Herd Management Project is a beef cattle herd management project located at multiple aggregated cattle stations spanning the Paraway Pastoral Company portfolio across Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. It was registered on April 15, 2016, and operates across an expansive aggregation, drawing from a corporate landholding of over 4.4 million hectares. Regional land use across these diverse pastoral properties is heavily dominated by large-scale commercial beef cattle grazing and sheep operations.

Beef cattle herd management projects involve reducing the emissions intensity of beef production by adopting measures that lower the amount of methane emissions produced per kilogram of cattle liveweight. Standard requirements of this methodology dictate that proponents must demonstrate ongoing improvements in herd efficiency. For this project, specific activities include changing the ratio of livestock classes within the herd to increase total annual liveweight gain, increasing the ratio of weight to age of the herd (reducing the average age of the herd), and reducing the proportion of unproductive animals.

Because the project encompasses 10 different cattle herds spread across vast distances, from the Gulf of Carpentaria and Channel Country in Queensland down to the Riverina in New South Wales, the environmental conditions are highly diverse. Rainfall classifications vary from semi-arid, low-rainfall environments in the northern and central stations to moderate and high rainfall environments in the southern temperate zones. Consequently, soil profiles are equally varied, ranging from the deep cracking clays of the Mitchell and Flinders grass downs in Queensland to fertile, alluvial loams in the southern pastoral regions.

An interesting fact about this aggregation is that it was the very first registered beef cattle herd management project under the Australian Government's Emissions Reduction Fund. The cattle managed within this project are fed principally from native grazing or pasture forage, with little to no supplementary feeding required. The project originally secured a Fixed Delivery contract to supply 184,000 Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to the Commonwealth, and it proved so successful for Paraway Pastoral that the proponent expanded their aggregation model to register an additional 50,000 head of cattle under the scheme.