He has battled against the backdrop of a broken system that is wasting taxpayer money, ignoring rule-breakers and covering up bad news while one of our most valuable resources, the pastoral estate, is degraded to crisis point.

But his recently published memoir, The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian Resource, reveals how his dream to restore the land to productivity has repeatedly brought him to the brink of financial ruin.

David Pollock’s decade-long sustainability project on his family’s West Australian cattle station, Wooleen – involving long periods of de-stocking, rehabilitation and rotational grazing – has had plenty of glowing media attention.

These are not the words of an unemployed drifter but perhaps Australia’s best-known pastoralist.

“Being broke is exhausting,” says David Pollock. “You try not to think about it but it pervades everything … [you think] at least the country is improving … ride it through to the end. We’ll find a way. Don’t give up. What else are you going to do?”

It’s turning on the computer for strictly an hour a day. It’s using the evaporative air-con only if the temperature exceeds 45 degrees. It’s plugging the holes in the Landcruiser with foam, buying everything from the op shop, and eating chicken-neck stew. A lot of chicken-neck stew.

David and Frances Pollock know what staring into the financial abyss is like.

While the rangelands are theoretically a renewable resource, overstocking by both managed and unmanaged animals has been the norm, leading to widespread degradation. Erosion and lack of biodiversity now threaten the resource's ability to renew itself, Pollock writes.

Wooleen is one of 285 stations making up the Southern Rangelands, which stretch between the Pilbara, South West and desert interior, and include the Gascoyne, Murchison and Goldfields-Nullarbor regions. They cover more than 40 per cent of WA.

Meanwhile, the public enjoys cheap and plentiful grass-fed beef and thinks all is well within the WA pastoral estate, which produces about $300 million worth of cattle for the state’s $850 million beef industry.

“Everybody knows about it, but it’s been going on for so long that everybody is used to doing nothing about it,” Pollock tells WAtoday.

His fellow pastoralists generally keep their heads down, try to make their living and regard him as a renegade or hopeless idealist. None of his neighbours have so much as mentioned the book to him.

The average age of pastoralists is 60 and few are handing stations down to their children, who want nothing to do with a tough business proposition in a declining landscape, Pollock writes.

Despite this, in 2015, 435 out of 437 WA stations had their leases renewed. The government said this was because of a “high level of compliance” among lessees.

Pollock references a 2011 Department of Agriculture report, released under freedom of information laws in 2014, showing 70 per cent of the leases in the Southern Rangelands were considered “unviable”.

Erosion eating into once-productive grasslands: the soil in the sweetest pasture is removed first. Credit:Wooleen Station

Indeed, the damage represented by the mining scars on WA’s landscape are tiny in comparison to pastoralism’s “death by a thousand cuts”.

Effectively, we have been mining our pastoral resource through erosion of the topsoil over the past 150 years, Pollock writes.

Degradation began to emerge during times of drought, culminating in the “outback Armageddon” of the 1930s. But the land has never had time to recover, instead being subjected to sustained maximum stock levels.

There is now only one staffer left on this project, Pollock writes.

This required up to eight full-time agriculture department staff researching the ecosystems and mapping conditions.

Most were completed in the 1970s and 1980s and revealed severe degradation and soil erosion. Most recommended reducing stock numbers.

In the 1960s, growing awareness of a crisis brewing in the rangelands prompted the government to commission surveys of the “baseline” condition of all regions including all stations.

Pastoralists therefore have no incentive to keep the land in good condition or mount a decade-long rehabilitation project; “Certainly, their accountants would advise them against it,” Pollock writes.

It instead announced new sites would be installed and checked by pastoralists themselves, people Pollock says had “a vested interest in making sure that nothing terrible was ever reported.”

The damning government State of the Environment report in 2007 showed the land was still declining. In response to the resulting pressure to act, regulator the Pastoral Lands Board announced the monitoring sites installed on each station in the 1990s, that were regularly checked by a team of trained and experienced agriculture department staff, were never in fact meant to be the basis for regulation, and would be scrapped.

There has been no monitoring of what pastoralists are doing on 90 million hectares of Western Australia since 2008, Pollock says.

Wooleen in 2004: no perennial grass, no production, no protection for the soil or native fauna. Credit:Wooleen Station

“There is no telling whether there will be anybody left within the Western Australian Department of Agriculture who has enough knowledge of the Southern Rangelands ecosystems to even attempt the final one,” Pollock writes.

It took the lone staffer 10 years to complete the second-last survey – he was due to complete it in 2019 – and the final one remains outstanding.

He recounts the non-mandatory half-day of training conducted for pastoralists.

Pastoralists, Pollock among them, were advised to buy a plant identification book that had been out of print for almost 15 years.

A board member present told them to “make up the names of the plants if we didn’t know what they were”.

And that someone qualified would review the ‘data’.

Pollock wondered who the qualified person might be, since the only employee left in the department who understood the pastures enough to run the workshop was about to retire and has since done so.

Pollock himself wrote to the board saying it was ignoring its legislated function to develop policies to restore the rangelands.

The chairman’s reply told Pollock that he was “correct that the board has done very little to develop policies ... I hope that over time and in the near future ... we can begin to tackle some of the big, difficult problems.”

It was soon after this reply the board “lost its nerve” and scrapped the monitoring sites altogether.

Wooleen in 2014 showing minimal perennial grass, minimal production, minimal protection for the soil and native fauna. Credit:Wooleen Station

Rogues can overstock 440 per cent and report themselves without fear

Pollock describes an industry largely self-regulating through the Pastoral Lands Board, which he calls a lobbying arm of the Pastoralists and Graziers Association.

He makes a scathing comparison between the reporting on the pastoral resource and the comparably valuable fisheries resource.

The 2013/14 report on the condition of the WA fisheries resource was hundreds of pages long, for example. It described Department of Fisheries officers being at sea 90 days a year, doing regular land, sea and aerial patrols, using specially equipped 4WDs, quad bikes and vessels, sophisticated surveillance equipment, with an enforcement unit patrolling the coast from Onslow to Kalbarri. They were across valuable assets such as Ningaloo and Shark Bay Prawn Fishery and conducting catch, licence, gear and marine safety inspections.

Fisheries prosecuted 450 people in the 2013/14 financial year alone for exploiting the resource.

Their regulation board did not have any fishermen on it.

By comparison, the 2013 report on the condition of the WA pastoral resource base was 23 pages long.

It noted that in one district 61 per cent of leases were carrying more stock than the land could cope with.

It cautioned that since the government withdrew staff from the monitoring sites in 2008, even these capacity estimates used for its report could not be relied on.

Overseen by Emily the dog, Frances Pollock plants sedges in the Murchison riverbed to help prevent erosion. Credit:Wooleen Station

One pastoralist was brazen enough to report to regulators he was carrying 4.5 times more stock than he was supposed to.

But nobody has ever been prosecuted for exploiting pastoral land.

Three of the six government appointees to the pastoral board are pastoralists.

Current Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan has read The Wooleen Way and distributed it among senior bureaucrats.

She says despite controversy in the pastoral community, there is “extraordinary merit” in Pollock’s achievements and ideas, which have “consolidated the government’s thinking” as it finalised a pastoral lands reform package during 2019.

The Minister says the reform includes legislative change so the board’s lone environmental member will be appointed by the environment minister of the day, not the lands minister.

“We had to persuade industry this was a good idea,” she says.

She says there will still be three pastoralists on the board, but “they won’t all be pastoralists antithetical to progress.”

Wooleen in 2018: profit from perennial grass, year-round protection for native species, and robust ecology. Credit:Wooleen Station

The reform would also restore station monitoring sites and compel pastoralists to go through a quality assurance and monitoring program before they can renew leases.

“Breaches of the lease will have consequences ... it has to be a culture that we are serious about this,” she says.

Sustaining our meat-eating future

Pollock writes that there is a great deal more at stake than livelihoods; that the current system will not ensure future food security for the planet.

If a fishery is shown to be depleted, it is closed for a time to protect residual stocks, but this does not occur for grazing plants, he writes.

Pollock wants a stewardship program to financially support pastoralists while they destock, to recover from historical degradation, while also creating new models to managing rangelands.

Family businesses are already managing the estate and are best placed to most economically oversee the process, he says. The long-term future in a meat-eating world is likely to continue to be predominantly based on pastoralism, and stewardship programs are a necessary part of the solution.

He estimates immediate destocking of the rangelands for 10 years would cost around $400 million total, $40 million a year.

Each station would need a little over $100,000 per year on average for fixed costs and maintain infrastructure.

And while the $400 million figure is a useful starting point for imagining a large-scale solution, partial implementation would be enough.

Happy cows on the Wooleen lake. Pippa decides whether she wants to be a cattle dog. Credit:Wooleen Station

It would get enough properties to shift from this path towards a more sustainable one, and get quick runs on the board.

It would create properties every pastoralist could visit in their local region for a desperately needed vision for the future.

The sole responsibility for fixing the problems of an area larger than France should not fall entirely on the 290 couples who happen to be managing it at this time, he writes.

It would also result in something more controversial: a decrease in supply and a rise in beef prices, which would improve life for pastoralists, but might be a hard sell in the city.

If it comes that we have to pay more for meat, so be it, Pollock tells WAtoday.

“If the debate is we don’t want to pay more for meat, we prefer to degrade our resources to the point we can’t use them any more, well, we make that decision all the time in other areas,” he says.

“But eventually, the problem will get bad enough that people will say we have to do something about it now.

“The sooner we do it, the cheaper it will be; the longer we take, the more expensive it will get. But we need to have this conversation, and we need to have it knowing the facts.”

Pollock tries to pass on his passion for perennial grass to a TV film crew. Credit:Wooleen Station

Minister MacTiernan says the fundamental message of what Pollock has done, “to give the land a break and do radical destocking to allow regeneration, is a very important one.”

She acknowledges it would be very difficult for other pastoralists to replicate Pollock’s results alone, and says the government is open to a stewardship program.

“We are absolutely taking on board the need for a destocking regime”, she says.

WA has requested 10 per cent of the federal government’s recently announced $100 million drought relief fund for this purpose.

A light ahead

The days of financial desperation are over, with the publicity received to date, plus the square kilometre array being installed “next door” helping Wooleen’s tourism business thrive.

“We’re not going broke any more, so that’s good,” Pollock says.

“Any money we do have goes back into fixing the landscape, so we are never going to make any money, but that’s where we get our satisfaction from that anyway.

“They’re going to have to put up with us for a long time yet.”

The Wooleen Way is in bookstores now. Credit:Scribe Publications

And despite the outrage that fuels The Wooleen Way, there is hope at its core.

Pollock writes of the heady delight of seeing grasses regenerate after destocking, and how after seeing one area recover a species long absent, he kept the cattle off another year.

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His greed for grass outstripped his desire for the other kind of ‘green’, despite his accountant’s lamentations.

“This says something important about the human condition, and our ability to adapt,” he writes, close to the end of The Wooleen Way.

“My point is that greed may be something that we can use to our advantage. Far from being the reason that we will never achieve something, it may be the reason that we accomplish it all the sooner.”