{"id":922742,"date":"2026-10-10T06:32:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T06:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/922742\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T06:32:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T06:32:23","slug":"farmers-fight-to-keep-was-iconic-wildflowers-in-bloom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/922742\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmers fight to keep WA\u2019s iconic wildflowers in bloom"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On a goat and cattle farm inland of Geraldton, a region that gets around 335 millimetres of rain annually, the grounds are awash with colour and life.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t always the case. When Jeff Johnson first purchased the Mullewa farm Tallering Views, in the state\u2019s Mid West, the 1750-acre property was already degraded from overgrazing and poor water management.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s own 20 cows and 400 goats continued to strip the land further. After a particularly heavy rainfall in 2017, he said he had a lightbulb moment.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cOut of 25 millimetres of rain \u2026 about five millimetres of that water is sitting on the surface on the crust, the rest of it\u2019s down the river and in the ocean, and everything\u2019s dying,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI stood back in the shed and said, \u2018holy crap, if I don\u2019t do something about trying to catch this water and getting all the plants to grow again, we\u2019ll be in a desert\u2019, so it really changed my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson began researching methods to revegetate the land and discovered deep ripping or the \u2018rip and tine method\u2019.<\/p>\n

Machinery is used to dig long trenches in the soil, breaking the harder layer of compressed earth beneath the topsoil to improve water infiltration, boost nutrient availability and allow plant roots to grow deeper.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for Johnson to notice a change.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the natural plants that normally grow here for the last 300 years all started springing up where I got these rip marks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe even had earthworms coming out \u2026 in this dry, arid station country it was just mind-blowing because they\u2019re the dudes that make it all happen under the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is now monitoring the return of each native species, including spring everlastings and mulla mulla.<\/p>\n

But Johnson said he had concerns for the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way we\u2019re managing land now with the chemicals and fertilisers, and the station country that overstock, we\u2019ve got about 30 harvests to go and we\u2019re in the shit big time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe land won\u2019t be able to support farming because nothing will grow, and all those native plants will be gone too.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt needs a whole policy change. The state government doesn\u2019t know how to do it. It\u2019s people like myself that are prepared to change. We are the ones that have to put this information out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eddy Wajon agrees.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Gondwana Link is aiming to reconnect country across south-western Australia, from the Karri forest to the woodlands and mallee bordering the Nullarbor plain. Godwana Link<\/p>\n

In 2002 he became the first private purchaser in the Gondwana Link project with his wife Donna \u2013 a block in Boxwood Hill covering 572 hectares and another smaller block spanning 46 hectares in the state\u2019s Great Southern region.<\/p>\n

The project is a large-scale conservation effort to restore and reconnect a 1000-kilometre swathe of fragmented habitat.<\/p>\n

Wajon and his wife have now restored the cleared farmland they purchased into thriving habitat \u2013 in once abandoned paddocks, 95 per cent of revegetation has survived.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could see the land was rapidly being cleared, and we stepped in,\u201d Wajon said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the bigger block there are now 600 species of plants, 260 moth species, reptiles, birds, possums, wallabies and insects.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we started we saw maybe one mallee fowl in five years, now we can guarantee you will see one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wajon said they had also seen six different orchard species sprout \u2013 varieties they had not deliberately planted \u2013 at the end of 2025.<\/p>\n

This year the region\u2019s rainfall has been minimal, with around 200 millimetres falling compared to the average of 400 millimetres.<\/p>\n

But the early drier conditions also resulted in carpets of everlastings which usually don\u2019t bloom until December.<\/p>\n

Wajon said plenty of visitors had come along to photograph the spectacle.<\/p>\n

The contrast between WA\u2019s wildflower season and land protection<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s 2026 wildflower season was described as the \u201cbest in recent memory\u201d, drawing in plenty of tourists to view carpets of everlastings, orchids, and rare native species.<\/p>\n

Another perspective\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

But there is a contrast \u2013 the landscapes behind the internationally renowned spectacle remain critically underrepresented in Australia\u2019s protected area network.<\/p>\n

While the South West is recognised globally as a biodiversity hotspot with exceptional flowering-plant diversity, parts of the Wheatbelt and Great Southern, have as little as 4 per cent of their area under formal protection.<\/p>\n

That is despite those regions being part of the Southwest Australian global biodiversity hotspot \u2013 one of 36 places on earth richest in threatened endemic species.<\/p>\n

Wajon said it was \u201cdistressing\u201d that efforts to protect and revegetate more of the land, or to keep areas including roadsides abundant with native species, had so far recorded limited success.<\/p>\n

The upcoming UN Biodiversity Conference (COP17), held across the end of October, will also test Australia\u2019s progress toward its target of conserving 30 per cent of land by 2030.<\/p>\n

Wajon said the state was no where close to that number.<\/p>\n

He said News South Wales and Victoria had schemes to compensate and incentivise conservation, and that WA needed something similar.<\/p>\n

\"EddyEddy Wajon and wife Donna were the first owners of land in the Godwana Link in WA.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s come from the government is a blank wall \u2013 we are going backwards not forwards,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could do twice as much as we are now to revegetate the land with more support.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a state we need to get serious about protecting the environment. At the moment, what is out there is a sham.\u201d<\/p>\n

University of Western Australia Professor of Biodiversity Stephen Hopper also agreed that large parts of regional WA are on a \u201cvery poor trajectory\u201d towards the UN\u2019s 30 per cent goal.<\/p>\n

He said the \u201cuplands\u201d \u2013 including granite outcrops, lateritic mesas and sand plains \u2013 across the Wheatbelt and Great Southern were \u201calmost impossible to restore\u201d, while \u201clowlands\u201d along rivers, creeks, coastlines were much easier.<\/p>\n

Another perspective\"Flower<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBotanical survey work in the 1980s established that two thirds of threatened plants were concentrated in uplands,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese should be the top priority for conservation efforts. Lowlands along rivers, lakes and coastline had only 10 per cent of threatened plants \u2013 they are easiest to restore but least likely to contain threatened species.<\/p>\n

\u201c[We need to] minimise disturbance of uplands especially bulldozing, applying fire and messing with water tables.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the state government could help landowners with fencing costs, weed and feral animal management subsidies and establishing landcare nurseries.<\/p>\n

Wajon said any financial support would be welcomed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are just ordinary people, but look what we can do,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":922743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-922742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/922743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}