Three things this week: why getting a willing young couple a visa to live and work in remote Australia is harder than it has any right to be, another round of Farmer Wants a Wife set-dressing that tells you everything about how our industry gets portrayed, and a conversation with Landcare coordinator Cassie Andrews about horsemanship — which turns out to be a land management story wearing a cowboy hat.
#89 | Beyond the Pasture: Horsemanship Meets LandCare – Agsolutely Fabulous
If someone wants to move to remote Australia, get out of their way
We have a lovely young couple here who want to emigrate. We want to sponsor them. Finding people who actually want to live and work this far out is like hen’s teeth, and here are two of them, keen as mustard, and the process is doing my head in. The paperwork is enormous, the rules are opaque, and the nearest immigration lawyer is in Adelaide and charges accordingly. My policy position, for anyone from government who happens to be listening: if you want to move to a remote part of Australia and there are Australian citizens willing to sponsor you and put a roof over your head, they should hand you whatever you want on the way through the door.
To be fair to the system, the pathways do exist — they’re just buried. The Skills in Demand visa (subclass 482) replaced the old Temporary Skill Shortage visa in December 2024 and includes a labour agreement stream, there’s the Skilled Employer Sponsored Regional visa (subclass 494) built specifically for regional employers, and there are Designated Area Migration Agreements covering agribusiness in South Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of WA and Victoria. Knowing they exist and being able to navigate them from a station 300km north of Coober Pedy without a migration agent on retainer are two very different things. So the ask stands: if you’ve sponsored someone into an agricultural job and lived to tell the tale, send me your tips. Dairy farmers and abattoirs seem to do this constantly. The rest of us are guessing.
Farmer Wants a Vineyard, apparently
A bit of gossip that turned into a serious conversation, as it always does. Visitors here told us their neighbours’ son is on the current series — except he’s an electrician who lives in Adelaide and doesn’t live on the farm, and the filming didn’t happen at his parents’ place either. They leased somewhere 30km down the road. The friends watching it recognised the property and clocked straight away that the “orchard” on screen was a vineyard. This is second-hand — I’m reporting what we were told, not a production credit — but the pattern is well established and it’s the pattern that matters.
Here’s the thing that actually bothers me. Most viewers can’t tell grapevines from apple trees, so nobody says anything, and the version of agriculture that goes into the national imagination is set-dressed, romantic, prosperous and struggle-free. Katja’s take is the constructive one: the format doesn’t need non-farmers in it. If you only land three genuine farmers in a season, use three. And a show with that reach is a gift-wrapped education platform sitting unopened — dairy cows and where the different milks actually come from, a whole production system from paddock to shelf. Whether the audience would still turn up without the manufactured drama is the honest question. People do watch Married at First Sight.
Horsemanship is land management, with better hats
Katja sat down with Cassie Andrews, local Landcare coordinator at Coonamble, who ran a horsemanship clinic in May with Neal Feint and Amanda Nicholson of Texas Star Horsemanship and Performance Horses out of Tamworth. Coonamble is an old horsey, cowboy sort of town — plenty of horses still working, not just being ridden on weekends. Cassie’s partner is a drover and they run a full plant of horses that go to work every day.
The obvious question is what any of that has to do with Landcare, and the answer is: everything. Horse owners are land managers, whether they’ve ever thought of themselves that way or not. Every decision about where you feed, how you rotate, whether stock can walk into the creek, lands on soil, water and biodiversity. Cassie’s list is the unglamorous, achievable stuff — rotate paddocks, avoid overgrazing, maintain ground cover, fence the waterways, feed in designated areas so you’re not creating bare patches, control weeds, plant shelterbelts, deal with manure properly. None of that is theoretical. Uncontrolled stock access to watercourses is a well-documented driver of bank erosion, elevated nutrients and faecal contamination, which is exactly why state land management agencies push riparian fencing and off-stream watering points. Healthy soil grows better feed, better feed grows healthier horses. It’s a closed loop.
Where this really bites is the peri-urban tree-change block. Someone buys ten acres, decides a horse would look lovely on it, and proceeds to flog the pasture into dust and make the horse unwell — not out of malice, just because nobody told them. Horses are prey animals; what reads as stubborn or naughty is usually an animal that’s worried. And they are enormous ticking time bombs for expensive things going wrong. Cassie’s advice on the two most underrated horse skills was the same answer twice: patience. Mine is blunter — do not get your horse advice from TikTok. This is precisely why it’s good news that Landcare is the one running the clinic, because it puts new owners in front of trusted expertise instead of a comment section.
Coonamble Landcare has a carp buster coming up in September and a junior Landcarers eco day early next year. Keep an eye on the local page. And Katja’s first novel — Australian rural fiction, first of a six-part family series — is out before Christmas, with signed copies for anyone on the waitlist. Get on it, because I want her signing arm to wear out.
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