Dirt tracks weave across vast grazing country like arteries running through the landscape.

These dusty lines have been etched into the land on properties in South Australia's Eyre Peninsula by sophisticated machinery planting native drooping sheoak seeds in the rocky soil.

Conservationists are working to restore the region's critical sheoak woodland, much of which has been lost due to the species' short life span but with the deficit also exacerbated by livestock and pests eating its seeds and hampering natural regeneration.

"We're not seeing any mature trees left in the landscape," according to Simon Bey, a program lead at not-for-profit Greening Australia.

"So now we're having to restore it by hand."

But supplies of sheoak seeds are beginning to dwindle as a result of the decline of

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