Sustainable pastoral systems

Group leader

Associate Professor of sustainable pastoral systems, Beth Penrose is a plant scientist specialising in pasture agronomy and plant nutrition. Her research focus has been on optimising pasture and crops for the health of animals, humans and the environment. Beth’s research often involves inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations including with nutrition scientists, zoologists, ecologists, geologists and economists from Australia and worldwide. She is a species and system ‘agnostic’, working on a diverse range of plants and animals in many agricultural systems. She is passionate about helping industry achieve goals that are important to them, and will be working with industry, government and other partners to support a sustainable livestock industry in northern Australia and beyond.

Our focus

The Sustainable Pastoral Systems Group applies understanding of the plants, animals and environments that make up the pastoral systems of the Northern Territory and Asia to provide research for sustainable pastoral systems now and into the future.

Our main research interests include:

• Improving food system sustainability
• Pasture systems, pasture agronomy and plant nutrition
• Improving animal health and welfare
• Linking of soil and plant nutrition to human, animal and environmental health

Importance of this research

The pastoral industries bring millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to northern Australia, and are stewards of millions of hectares of land. The Sustainable pastoral systems group provides research to help ensure that producers in northern Australia and Asia can sustainably produce meat and other products now and into the future

Current projects

Optimising feeds to support ecosystem-based aquaculture

This project aims to assess the global and local consequences of changing feeds in aquaculture by developing a new interdisciplinary sustainability assessment framework. The project expects to generate new methods to understand and predict local farm-to-ecosystem changes and global environmental footprints under contrasting feed and climate scenarios by integrating field data with novel experiments, modelling techniques and global mapping of terrestrial and marine feed raw materials and their impacts. Expected outcomes include new methods to assess ecological, social and economic trade-offs under different feeds to inform decision making in support of an ecosystem-based approach to aquaculture spanning global to local scales.

Funded by the Australian Research Council Grant, Biomar Ltd and the University of Tasmania