Incentive Program: 3000 hectares and counting …

 

Another two rice seasons have ticked by since the first year of formal bittern-friendly rice incentives. They are offered by Riverina Local land Services and supported through funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Program. We’ve gone from record-breaking drought to record-breaking floods.

With thanks to about 15 key rice-growing families, the program has now included over 3000 hectares of bittern-friendly rice, and a bumper rice season is just around the corner. Some of the highlights of the 2020-21 and 2021-22 bittern-friendly rice seasons are highlighted below via Twitter posts.

In sum, from our standardised monitoring, we’ve found between two and six times as many bitterns at the incentive sites compared to the control sites. No nesting has been recorded at the controls while 13 nests have been found at incentive sites, with 85% (11/13) of them having sufficient time to potentially fledge before harvest.

Demonstrating that food production & wildlife conservation can work together.