“No one’s making any more farmland,” said Stuart Tait who operates the property in conjunction with his parents, “so we have to make the farmland we have more productive.”

To help do this Stuart has received a Nuffield Australia Scholarship to investigate integrated beef and cropping systems, encompassing all facets of a farming operation combining beef cattle and broad-acre cropping; including dual purpose grazing crops, soil and nutrient management, productivity optimisation and grazing management.

The family’s business is predominantly centred around producing certified grass fed Angus beef cattle on their property just west of Mandurama and their secondary enterprise is dryland cropping to produce wheat and canola. It’s Stuart’s aim to investigate ways of integrating the two and it was this idea that won over those on the Nuffield selection committee.

“There has already been a far bit of research into integrating sheep into cropping systems, but we don’t have any sheep, so I’m looking at how farmers around the world combine broad acre cropping with beef cattle production,” he said.

The scholarship will see Stuart heading off to major beef producing nations such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Indonesia and South East Asia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Argentina and South Africa.

Grain and graze is the term Stuart uses to demonstrate the idea behind dual-purpose cropping.

“For example you plant a wheat crop and then you would graze it with cattle when it’s in its vegetative state, nice and leafy and green, and then at a certain time in the plants growth and development that you take the cattle off, and then you can let the wheat crop grow as a normal grain crop,” he said “If you take the cattle off at the right time, there will be no yield penalty in terms of the grain.”