How to show your Gippsland dam a little love, and welcome back turtles and frogs

Keeping a clean dam might seem - on the surface - like a trivial thing for a farmer to add to their laundry list of priorities, but a healthy hole of water can have several knock-on effects, including happier animals and less water evaporation. 

What’s happening: At Paul and Samantha Crock’s farm in Fish Creek on Thursday, the Greening Gippsland’s Dams Project is hosting an event to help farmers and landowners learn about keeping a healthy dam.

Project coordinator Kirby Leary told the Monitor that greening a dam is a “low cost, low input way of improving your farm, not just in terms of biodiversity, but also farm health, stock health and productivity”.

Step one, fencing: “A lot of dams have bare ground around the edges because cattle are accessing it,” Leary said. “Bare ground is basically the thing you never want as a farmer.”

• Farmers avoid bare ground because it can lead to a rapid degeneration of soil health, which can impact a farm’s productivity.

By fencing off a dam and installing a trough for cattle to drink from, grass cover will grow back naturally.

“The water is still there for the animals. We just want them to drink it in a different way,” Leary said.

• Leary said the barrier doesn't have to be a great fence. It can be a simple, single electric wire to deter cattle.

Step two, revegetation: Rather than planting grasses and rushes around a dam’s banks, she recommends farmers plant “some more terrestrial species” (plants that grow primarily on land).

By doing this farmers can not only rejuvenate animal biodiversity, including frogs, turtles and water birds, but reduce water evaporation.

“A lot of the water loss in dams comes from the wind, not so much from the sun. Protecting it from more wind with plants is a real key step in slowing down evaporation, especially over the summer,” Leary said.

Event details

The project is run by South Gippsland Landcare Network and funded by Food and Fibre Gippsland through the federal government.

Thursday’s event starts with a presentation at Fish Creek Hall at 10:30am before a walk at Paul and Sam Crock’s farm at Biran Biran to see their dam restoration works.