Meet your Bob Hawke Landcare Award finalists

Simon’s 600-acre mixed-enterprise family farm at Freshwater Creek produces meat merinos, cereals and oilseed crops, while prioritising farming techniques that preserve the land’s biodiversity.
Simon’s focus on maintaining soil health and his integrated pest and grazing management has made him a leading advocate for best-practice Landcare. His farm has hosted long-term trials, testing everything from soil acidification and biology, to pasture cover and cropping. He’s also undertaken extensive riparian restoration along Thompsons Creek to protect remnant vegetation, and assisted in monitoring the threatened Yarra pygmy perch and growling grass frog.

Dr Graeme Stevenson, from Somerset Tasmania has 55 years of agricultural experience running his family farm as a farm labourer and manager, through his tertiary agricultural education, dairy extension and research, as an agricultural consultant and rural journalist. He has worked with Tasmanian dung beetles and agricultural earthworms in soil management since 1988. Graeme is a volunteer with the Elliott and Wynyard Landcare groups since 1993, as well as Somerset and Camdale Coastcare, Burnie Farmers Market and Tasmanian Organic groups. He has initiated and managed 27 Landcare/organic farming projects attracting $1.4m in grants majoring in on-ground works. Under the pseudonym of Dr Spluttergrunt, Graeme has acted out his ‘soil care’ presentation to over 60 schools. He has 20 years of applied research into organic and biological agriculture as sustainable farming.