One QLD family has owned Wambiana Station since 1912 and the new generation are now looking at how to adapt to the changing climate

As the sun rises over Wambianna station, the Lyons family prepare for another day on the property their family has called home since 1912. Wambianna's in the northern dry tropics region. We've got 23,200 hectares running Brahman cattle that are well suited to this environment. Michael Lyons grew up here. Now he runs it with his wife Michelle. We came into the family business, Lyons Family Business, back in 2002 and we lived here and we also lived on two of the other properties for a couple of years. But then we made the move back here in 2006. So we've been here ever since. And then six years ago we had the opportunity to purchase the property from Michael's parents. For 112 years, the same family have managed the land, building a legacy. How many hours do you reckon it'll take for us to finish this branding? The family has their own motto, Working with Nature since 1912, which guides management of the station, so we're trying to work with nature as much as possible. Mother Nature's such a strong force and the more we can align our business and our lifestyle with the way the natural seasons and the rhythms of the environment, the better. And so, yeah, we were really focused on being good grass managers, good cattle managers and looking after the whole ecosystem. It's this sentiment which has led the Lyons family to host an Australian first trial, the Wambiana Grazing trial. My colleague John Bushel and I, we started this trial back in 1997 and the idea was to look at different grazing strategies and how they cope with rainfall variability. Doctor Peter Oregon, a principal scientist with the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, has led the trial for the past 26 years. It's the first trial that's actually been run at this scale and for this length of time, looking at how different grazing systems, different grazing strategies affect animal production and profitability. So we've got different grazing strategies, really the stocking strategies where we either adjust the stock numbers from year to year or maybe we just run at the long term carrying capacity or at a heavy stocking rate. And then we've just measured the animal performance over that time and the economics, particularly the drought costs of that and then the impacts on the grass. But with the trial set to continue, the question remains, how can the data collected inform the way we farm into the future in a time of unprecedented climate change? And then you just add up the number of tips per period of time, and then you can work out how hard the rain fell, how intense it was. We're going to have to be a lot smarter with the the way we manage for climate variability because we're really going into new territory. And they're really the other scary thing is that a lot of what we know about our climate and our climate forecast models are based on historical data. And that's all changing. And it's shown that in the longer term, running more cattle doesn't mean more money, it means land degradation. And it means less money because the carrying capacity of the country declines and because the vulnerability to drought and climate change just increases so much more.