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If you've got troublesome weeds at your place, you might be able to knock them over with some weeding or even a spot of poison. But when your property is hundreds or even thousands of hectares... elbow grease and your trusty gardening gloves probably aren't going to do the trick to help contain the spread of a very invasive weed like prickly acacia!

Desert Channels Queensland, a Landcare group out west, is trialling a particularly hairy lawnmower!

Simon Wiggins, the Operation Manager at Desert Channels Queensland, says the trial came about after a few interactions with local landholders in the region who pioneered some of this work, and an interest in the potential opportunities for small numbers of camels.

But there was an absence of work that had been done in this kind of field, particularly in Queensland, and that's how they started!

So how effective could camels be at the weeding process? 
Camels are true stars! In a couple of areas which are very important in terms of controlling Prickly acacia. Firstly, they are absolutely addicted to the flowers - and the destruction of each flower means the stopping of 10 seeds being produced. Secondly, they simply love the seed pods. So, even if they miss the flowers and the seed pods start to grow and develop - they go for the seed pods! And they seem to be very, very good at chewing those seed pods extremely effectively.

And their dispersal rate is unmeasurable at the moment. It's so small that we can't actually measure them. Distributing seed, unlike sort of cattle and sheep.

It seems to be a match made in heaven! Is this a technique that should be adopted elsewhere?!