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Growth rates in cattle being run on rehabilitated have been positive. (Landline: Ginny Stein)
Initial trials to find a new use for land retired from mining in one of Australia's major coal fields are showing promising results.
Around Muswellbrook in the New South Wales Hunter Valley region, coal companies now own almost a quarter of all freehold land.
The companies, who will one day want to move once they have finished mining, are seeking alternative uses for the land they leave behind.
Recent efforts have focused on restoring mined land as native pastures.
A series of grazing trials run on three separate former mine sites has shown it is possible to plant pasture more suited for cattle to graze and thrive.
One of the sites being trialled is on land belonging to BHP's Mount Arthur Mine — the biggest open cut mine in NSW.
Cattle farmers Narelle and Trevor Petith lease 1,500 hectares of land from BHP to run their Wagyu-Angus-cross cattle.
They are helping to run the trial, which is being run over two paddocks adjacent to each other.
One paddock is native pasture, and the other is rehabilitated land.
For the Petiths, life-long dairy farmers, being able to lease the property they are currently running has allowed them to continue as farmers.
"We didn't have the money to buy, we only had a small property at Wauchope. This enabled us to get into beef cattle," Mr Petith said.
The grazing trial, being run with assistance of the NSW Department of Primary Industries, is now in its third year.
Neil Griffiths is a pasture specialist with the department and has worked in the Hunter Valley since 1985.
"We are certainly monitoring two different sites, one here at Muswellbrook, one down towards Singleton," he said.
What we are doing is, from one mob of steers, we put half of them on the rehab and half go on the native pasture."
Growth rates in cattle being run on rehabilitated land have been positive.
"Sometimes when we weigh them, each three months there have been identical weight gain, sometimes there has been an advantage to the rehab," Mr Griffiths said.
Over at Rio Tinto's Coal and Allied mine site, the results have been similar to the Mount Arthur site.
On average the rehab cattle have put on 150 kilograms more than the cattle were on the ungrazed mining land.
"In terms of dollar figures that's $500 to the guy with the cattle on the rehabilitated paddock," said Bill Baxter, Rio Tinto's environmental specialist at the Coal and Allied Mine site.
Glencore was the first of the mining companies to kick off a grazing trial and is now into its fifth year.
"We have had three lots of trial cattle come through and that has given us a range of seasons to compare them under," said local agronomist Neil Nelson, who has been running Glencore's trial.
"We've had dry years, wet years. Basically we have found that the cattle on rehabilitated pastures are doing better than on the natural pastures."
But questions are still being asked, and changing opinion amongst the farming community is going to take time.
Eighty-three-year-old Wendy Bowman, a sixth-generation farmer, has fought a long, hard fight to prevent mining's expansion in the Hunter Valley.
She worries about the safety of meat produced on rehabilitated land.
"It will never be the same, it can't possibly be. But as time goes on, maybe in the next few generations people might be able to work out something that might be able to make it a bit better," she said.
Watch this story on Landline on ABC1 at noon today.
Topics: mining-industry, industry, business-economics-and-finance, mining-environmental-issues, environment, agribusiness, muswellbrook-2333, australia, newcastle-2300, nsw