Agricultural
20 October, 2025
Condamine Catchment Assoc meeting talks land management
The Condamine Catchment Management Association held its Annual General Meeting last week with around 25 attendees coming from across the Towooomba Region including Jondaryan, Oakey, Millmerran and Mount Kent near Nobby.
At the AGM, it was announced that Mary-Lou Gittins had stood down from her position as Chairperson of the Queensland Water & Land Carers group.
Following the meeting, which saw no change to the executive positions, the members heard a guest presentation from Southern Queensland Landscapes (SQL) CEO Gillian Meppem.
CEO Meppem told the meeting that SQL is one of Queensland’s eleven not-for-profit natural resource management organisations, covering the Murray-Darling Basin and the Bulloo River catchment areas of the state.
Ms Meppem said the organisation’s catchment area covers 314,398 km, 28 Indigenous nations, and is home to home to 1162 animal species, 4309 plant species, 991 fungi species and over 260,000 people within six different bio-regions.
Perhaps the best way to sum up the work of Southern Queensland Landscapes is through Ms Meppem’s maxim “Agriculture and the environment aren’t separate things and never have been.”
Ms Meppem talked about how the group had 16 active projects, including locally through the “Growing Climate Smart Grazing in the Condamine River Basin” project, which encourages the planting of multi-species cover crops and perennial pasture and legumes for improved soil health.
Another current area of research is the Fish-Friendly Water Extraction project, focusing on the installation of fish screens over irrigation pumps to avoid fish being sucked into the pumps.
Although successful in New South Wales and Victoria, a challenge for the project in Queensland is that farmers here only put pumps in during high-flow periods.
SQL has a couple of local connections to the wider Oakey district area, with one board director Graham Cooke hailing from Jondaryan and Business Development Manager Jayne Thorpe living at Kingsthorpe.
The Condamine Catchment Management Association is set to host a meeting at the Oakey Urban Landcare centre on Thursday December 11th at 9.30am.
