So that Toorale can fufil its role as a reserve for species that are threatened elsewhere - as opposed to being just a locked-up station - its managers could aim to restore soil carbon levels nearer to pre-European status. Driving up soil carbon would, in some respects at least, change the flora and fauna mix and roll back the years toward 1857, when the station was first taken up.

The kicker: the best way to generate soil carbon is with cattle or sheep.

I can provide no better explanation of the process than this (download the PDF offered in the first link) or for a related but alternative view, try this (PDF download at bottom of page).

The Soil Carbon Australia presentation available at the first link impressed a British expert panel to the degree that they rated it one of 20 ideas that could save the world.

Retired University of New England botanist Dr Ralph "Wal" Whalley knows a thing or two about native herbage: he was awarded an Order of Australia for his contribution to our understanding of it. "One of the most effective ways of looking after the native herbacous layer is to use an implement with a slasher out the front, a cultivator underneath, and a fertiliser spreader out the back - that is, sheep or cattle," he told me in a 2007 interview.

It's no coincidence that one of Dr Whalley's students, Dr Christine Jones, has been campaigning since 2005 to have soil carbon on the national climate change agenda, and another, Dr Judi Earl, has become an educator in Holistic Management decision-making methods. HM drove the landscape changes portrayed in the Soil Carbon Australia presentation.

Planned grazing, whether taught by HM or related consultancies like Resource Consulting Services, PrincipleFocus or Techograze, is not the only tool in the box, or even the most important. The most important is the land manager's intentions.

With the right intention, Toorale could be the place to prove, or disprove, an internationally important point about soil carbon sequestration in rangelands. It might conceivably also offer a new tool for conservation.

I've puzzled over the state of some of our outback parks. I recall a visit to Sturt National Park, in north-west NSW, in the mid-1990s. Compared to the surrounding country, it was in appalling shape, bare and full of starving kangaroos. Apart from the obvious issue of 'roos rampant, why should this be so?

A part explanation may be found in the work of Nobel Prize-winning Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, who, in the words of Greg Levoy said that "the capacity to be shaken up is the key to growth", and that "any system - whether at the molecular level, or the chemical, physical, social, psychological or spiritual - that is protected from disturbance is also protected from change and becomes stagnant".

In the case of Toorale, some well-planned disturbance using hooved biomechanical engineering may help shift an environment back toward natural resilience and robustness.

Of course, the conservation community will like this idea about as much as landholders would relish the idea of having their land overseen by a national parks agency.

That's because agriculture and "the environment" are considered to exist in two different boxes. In reality, they sit on the same continuum, the environment morphing into agriculture, and vice-versa, depending on management.

In this case, Toorale can operate across the entire continuum. Sensitive areas might be fenced off, but it may not be necessary: a visit by stock for a few hours once, twice or three times a year could provide beneficial disturbance to all but the most delicate wetland.

There are other incidental benefits. Various governments have shown great zeal in creating national parks, but less enthusiasm for funding their management. Running a profitable herd of "conservation cows" around Toorale might provide enough income to ensure that it receives the attention of more than just one overworked ranger with a shovel.

If the concept fails, no problem: Toorale has been a station for 150 years. Being a station for another decade won't hurt anything.

If properly managed livestock prove to be carbon builders, as so many graziers have come to believe they are, Toorale could be the place where environmentalists, pastoralists, scientists and politicians come together in the understanding that agriculture and the environment really can exist in the same space.

It will always be necessary to keep parts of agriculture and the natural environment separate, but it's where they meet that things get really interesting.

Update: New research from the US makes a much-discussed point about how grazing can minimise damage caused by fire. But just reducing the amount of plant litter on the ground, as practised in the study, is only part of the story. If all that plant material/carbon is lost to the landscape through beef exports, the soil has less capacity to drive biomass production in the next round of plant growth. As much litter as possible should make its way into the soil--going down, not just away.