They may look like ordinary ponies grazing in a field, but these small horses are actually the frontline of protecting a rare ecosystem, and they're changing how conservationists view the role of farm animals in nature.
On the outskirts of Borris Heath, nestled between the Skjern and Omme Rivers in Denmark, the Shetland and Exmoor ponies are hired alongside cattle to graze the nearby forest.
Their role is to stop the forest from overrunning the heath, a 4,743-hectare, unique ecosystem used by the Danish military as a shooting range.
Nature interpreter Søren Frederiksen helps manage the relationship between the farmers and the ecosystem.
"If you go maybe 200 years back, most of the western part of Jutland was almost heath everywhere," he said.
"They founded the shooting area in 1903 because they were losing the heath, going to agriculture, to arable farming."
Almost 120 years later, instead of threatening the culturally significant landscape, farmers and their grazing livestock are part of the reason it is thriving.
"If you don't manage it it will grow into forest, so you have to cut it, graze it or burn it," Mr Frederiksen said.
"I think what we're doing now is better than doing nothing."
Farmer Søren Christensen is the seventh generation of his family to farm in the area, but there have been many changes since they started in 1788.
The valley was drained and the river converted into a canal in the 1960s, and now the Danish government intends to re-flood it, reclaiming about 100,000 hectares of farming land to prevent carbon emissions.
Mr Christensen will lose about 50 hectares, but the conservation work his animals do will bring in an alternative income, earning about 100 euros ($147) for every hectare of public land they graze.
"Danish farmers occupy large areas of land where there's low biodiversity, so in order to pay that back I have the horses to create biodiversity in other areas," he said.
A local university is tracking the animals to confirm the results of the intervention, work that challenges both conservationists and farmers to shift their thinking about how agriculture and nature intersect.
Cattle's carbon capture capacity
Across the Atlantic, at Buck Island Ranch in Florida, cowboys and scientists have been working together since the late 1980s.
At the headwaters of the Everglades, near Lake Placid, the more than 4,000 hectare working cattle ranch is also a natural laboratory home to the Archbold research alliance.
An ongoing experimental study of 40 wetlands there shows intentional moderate cattle grazing is needed to preserve them.
Dr Vaughn Holder is the ruminant research group director at Alltech, an animal nutrition company that has a research alliance with Archbold.
He said production data analysis of carbon emissions of the 3,000-head operation found that the rangelands produced more than 10,000 tonnes of carbon a year, 64 per cent of that from the cattle, but the pastures they grazed sequestered 17,813 tonnes.
"That is pulling a tonne of carbon out of the environment ... that is net positive sequestration," he said.
"It's really important to look at the ecosystem and and understand it from that point of view — the ecosystem is producing the beef."
Dr Holder said interestingly the work showed that if you removed the ruminants — grazing animals such as sheep, goats and cows — the system lost biodiversity and sequestered less carbon.
Measuring biological carbon is a science that is still evolving, one that makes it hard to assess the broader contribution of the industry to both emissions and mitigations.
"These are the really important things that we have to understand as we move forward in the science of trying to manipulate sequestration to have important environmental outcomes."
In its sixth synthesis report on climate change, finalised in April 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the managed-land sector, including agriculture and forestry, accounted for 13-21 per cent of the global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions — meaning those attributed to human activity — between 2010 and 2019.
It said farming systems that could be considered regenerative or conservation agriculture likely made some contribution to mitigation, but just how much was unclear due to a lack of consistency in defining and studying them.
Farmers are land carers
In Queensland's North Burnett, Nadia and Robert Campbell raise their Brangus herd among eucalypts at the head of the Burnett River in an extinct volcano crater that has been in the Campbell family since the 1860s.
Goondicum Station has a unique geology and ecosystem that Robert's parents Bruce and Roseanne Campbell started to actively preserve in the 1960s, by returning vast areas of the property to native forest and converting to a sustainable beef business.
They have been recognised as a leader in land management practices, being named as the state finalist in the Australian government Landcare Farming Award, which will be announced in August 2022.
"We've just been poking along here quietly doing our thing regenerating country and someone's recognised us and nominated," Robert Campbell said.
Mr Campbell said there was growing interest from other farmers in working alongside nature, not just for the environmental benefit, but for an economic one as well.
"We're running field days and education days so people can come and look at what we're doing and maybe be able to tweak their properties to get it so they can produce more grass, beef and trees," he said.
Back in Denmark, Mr Frederiksen said grazing had always been a part of the landscape, the challenge now was to do it in a way that worked in harmony with nature and profitability.
"I think that's maybe a new production for agriculture, to protect nature," he said.
"I think some farmers will see a business opportunity and a future in that, I think that's a good thing."
