I must confess to an almost complete ignorance regarding matters agricultural and climatological. However, watching Robin Batterham on Lateline the other night, in the context of a story about the drought and climate change, reminded me of a study I heard of a while back which suggested that when Australia was settled by whites in the 19th century, levels of rainfall were historically high compared to long term averages over millennia. The conclusion was that many districts thought suitable for farming then are only marginal at best. Add to this the projections of the CSIRO regarding climate change and I start to wonder whether we are barking up the wrong tree by pouring money into relieving farmers during a drought which may in fact be something more like a normal weather pattern in the future.
As Crikey observed back in February, to ask such questions is to go against the grain of persistent Australian ideological motifs:
Yet when anyone raises questions about drought relief policy they get howled down as anti-Australian, anti-farmer and biased against the hard-working country folk who are the backbone of our country.
The reality is that, while many of the folk are hard-working, drought relief is probably one of the most irrational policies — on social, environmental and economic grounds — around.
I’d be really interested in hearing from anyone who knows much more than me about this subject and what the best way to proceed in terms of policy is.
Elsewhere: Rafe Champion looks at the economics of the drought at Catallaxy. Andrew Leigh proposes a HECS-style repayment scheme for drought aid at Imagining Australia.
Update: Phillipa Murray discusses the responses of some farmers to drought assistance in The Age:
The same school of “hard” farmers who champion less government assistance believe the pictures of starving stock in bare paddocks underline the case for an overhaul of drought assistance. They propose, for instance, that land in long-term drought be locked up for several years to allow regeneration.
Part of the problem lies in the lingering misconception that drought in Australia is an aberration. Once considered a natural disaster, it is now a common occurrence and must be managed like any other business risk.
Doling out dollars to the bleating few to achieve a short-term fix will only result in a long-term headache.
Mark, nail on the head with drought being the norm and not the other way around. When I was growing up in New England (northern NSW) in the 50s there was drought but no assistance from government (except of course for sibilant Black Jack’s dairiesssss industriesssss), my father losing about a quarter of his assets in a 1964/5 drought in the area.
My best answer anecdotally to your raising the subject , is the farmer who won a lottery being asked by his neighbour what he was going to do with it all…
”Oh, I’ll just keep farming ’til its all gone”
Yes, growing up in rural Australia (small towns in QLD, NSW and NT), we never seemed to live anywhere that wasn’t in the grip of drought, year after year. Of course, when it wasn’t a drought year there were floods, so it seemed the farmers couldn’t win.
My feeling is, based on my experiences, and on my not-very-scientific understanding of climatology, is that drought is the norm. Australia has erratic rainfall, a fragile and ancient topsoil, and an ecosystem not designed to support large numbers of hoofed animals or intensive, widescale farming regimen in the current way it is done. That’s not to say I’m anti-agriculture, I’m not, we all need to eat, I’m just not convinced we’re going about it the right way.
So while I appreciate the difficulties many farmers experience, I do believe we’re not going to be able so sustain current agricultural practises for much longer, and that by throwing subsidies at farmers we’re not actually doing anything to ensure that farming evolves to best meet both the needs of the market and the demands of the environment. And yes, I do believe global warming is going to have an adverse reaction to our climate patterns which will make farming more difficult again.
As an aside, in rural NSW particularly, it was always the farmers who ‘cried poor’ who had the new cars and new equipment, could afford to go on holidays and send their children to expensive private schools. I know for a fact that many of these people often ran at a loss on paper and yet seemed to have far better lifestyles than most of the townies. I’m probably going to be hated for this, but many of these “struggling farmers” seemed particularly adept at finding ways to make the drought or other “hardships” work in their favour.
Back in the 19th century, when we were still 6 colonies, my old birthplace (SA) produced a fellow named Goyder (my memory is bad; it could’ve been spelled ‘Goyda’) as Survey-General. He did a map of SA, with a line running through the mid-north, which became known as the Goyder Line. It was like the mapping equivalent of the Plimsoll Line.
North of the line, farming was unsustainable because of the poor annual rainfall. He was not believed by all at the time, because there was a rush for farm settlements. Farming communities did start north of the Goyder Line, and surprisingly prospered for about 5 years. ‘Rain follows the plough’ so these settlers claimed. Open up the soil and the rain will come. Alas, it was just a freak of nature, that there were 5 good rainfall years. Things returned to normal, farmers went broke and moved out, and all that now remains are ghoist towns and buildings. Goyder was right. They might not all have believed him at the time, but by the 20th century his insight was well and truly accepted.
The only thing he probably got wrong was his suggestion that this low rainfall land be used instead for grazing. Grazing has probably contributed more to land degradation than the original attemps at farming.
I agree that some of them need to be weaned off the land but what would you retrain a farmer to do? what would they want to do? Would we move them to the cities to be a weight on the ever-failing infrastructure? Into a lifestyle they would probably abhor - noise and whatever other inconveniences?
Kate, that does appear to be the style by many now, now they own many farms - once upon a time, when most only owned one farm - making enough money to keep the family fed and maybe buy a new car, every year or two would be enough to have them satisfied. The only farmers that I know that have sent their kids to private schools have been to agricultural private schools so I can understand it in that context. As a rule of thumb though I disagree with private schools for the very fact that they’re private, cost more, and if you go broke from them it is you’re own fault. Private Schools shouldn’t get more than the public, the only public funding they should get is for the curriculum, all other funds are raised by private enterprise. That’s why its private, but I digress.
I partially agree with the environmental impact too because our deserts are getting larger because of the way we farm. Australia is suited to padded feet (roos) as we now know but they require a massive amount of land and very tall fences to be possible to farm. So its not that feasible.
Don, you are also correct. Anyway you must be channelling Piers Akerman from this morning’s Insiders.
The current policy is on track as it doesn’t provide assistance to those that receive non-related off-farm income for say a spouses job.
It is generally believed most, if not all farmers are capable of handling a drought for two years without assistance. I’d try to extend that to five myself.
Assuming it is feasible for all of Australia, I’d make saltbushes mandatory for farms as they’re drought proof and provide for grazing.
I’m merely a “townie” so that’s about my limit for now, if I come up with anything else, I’ll let you know.
Mark, I don’t think the big problem is how much we settled in the 19th century. The problem is what we did when we got there and have done since. For example, the last half century has not been too bad rainfall-wise and in this time we have cleared and put under the plough vast areas we probably should have left for grazing.
On climate change the expectations are, I understand, that Australia will become drier and more variable, with a greater incidence of extreme events. Subjectively all three seem to be happening, but strictly speaking it is too early to say because we have had it all before, and not so long ago. I believe there were a couple of 20-year periods of nation-wide dry in the early part of the 20th cent.
I recall my brother telling me about core samples taken from the Great Barrier Reef over the last 300 years. There was one ten-year period when nothing much at all flowed out of the Fitroy River, which drains a basin about the size of Victoria.
But, yes, climate change does seem to be the go, and yes it will mean changes for agriculture.
One thing we really do have to grasp, however. If we simply abandon large slabs of the continent it will not return to its former state. It had formerly been under the management of the Aborigines. If we simply abandon the country it will be taken over by weeds and ferals. The notion, which is floating around, is that farmers should be paid for ‘environmental services’. I think you’ll find that the Europeans are already onto this lurk as it allows their farmers to be paid subsidies irrespective of production.
I’m sure the let-it-rip libertarians over at catallaxy would be horrified with that and seem to be prepared to consign the whole problem to the markets and the corporations. The problem here is that corporations don’t think long-term sustainability, except as money-making outfits. They’ll happily mess up and walk away.
Sadly, though, there is a trend in that direction, from peasant farming to industrial farming to corporate farming. Get big, get technical or get out. There are a few writers who think that this notion of messing up and moving on represents what we have been doing in the last 10,000 years. The problem now is that we are everywhere in numbers and there is nowhere else to go.
Our farmers have a few other things to worry about. Imports of processed American pork look set to wipe out a third of our pig indusrtry under the Free Trade Agreement and the Chinese FTA will cut a swathe through our vegetable producers. Moreover, they have just started on wine (with our help) about 5 years ago and are already producing a passable drop from more vines than we have in toto. Brazil has passed us in efficiency in the sugar industry.
What are we doing? Well dumbing down, of course. CSIRO has to go out with a begging bowl. Ag student enrolments reduced by 30% at QU this year and the Nats fearless leader is bleating about a looming skills shortfall. We need leadership and some serious long-term thinking and planning. What we’ve got is Warren Truss!
Rafe at Catallaxy has identified rice and cotton as big users of water. Imagine how many vegies you grow could grow with all that water! Except that the Chinese can grow some of them for a tenth the cost. It’s an impossible dilemma.
Let me just finish by saying that the time has come when we do have to consider the environmental effects of farming in toto as well as at the micro level. We need to think about the effects of vast monocultures, of inudating large tracts of fertile land with large dams, of stripping the forest from the Amazon Basin and elsewhere, of the wisdom of shipping large quantities of bulk foodstuff around the world in badly regulated, environmentally toxic ships, of the methane effects of rice paddies and burping cows, of the propensity to feed good grain to animals so that more people can eat more meat than they need etc etc.
Today Radio National’s The National Interest (this week’s program details not yet up)had an interview with Robin Batterham, wherein he gave a really neat summary of the climate change issue, and Linda Botterill on drought. Linda was very good value. There are definitional problems. These days they have gone away from the notion of natural disaster, recognizing that drought is normal and has to be planned for. So the definition now is a 1 in 25-year event. But the discourse is confused as various support mechanisms cut in earlier than that.
Linda is good on the complex web of rural planning issues and I suspect she is the one doing the leg-work on Bruce Chapman’s HECS-style repayment scheme mentioned by Andrew Leigh.
Sorry to be so long-winded.
No, don’t apologise, Brian - appreciate your informed contribution!
Brian you said what I wish I could have said. Cotton I could probably understand but we export the majority of our rice and it is a big earner for us as well.
Vee, we are going to have to do some more things that pay better than digging stuff up and growing stuff. Do you realise that the company Billabong sells into 90 countries, is scheduled to produce an after-tax profit of $120 million this year and only employs a bit over 500 people?
The Italians have always made more out of our wool industry than we do.
What Kate and Don said.
Mark, you may find Jared Diamond’s latest book, “Collapse”, interesting on this subject. He discusses the role of ecology and land management in the collapse of ancient societies (e.g. Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Maya), and the risks of mismanagement today. There’s a large section on Australia which will be of interest given this post.
The biggest problem that I can see is that there are plenty of ideas about what farmers should be doing, but only one person has asked - what do we do with the farmers who can’t farm anymore? I grew up on a farm but I know I won’t be returning to one. Our 5 acres at Yass will have a few pet chooks and maybe some ducks but we won’t be even hobby farming. The good ol’ Public Service will be paying our bills. But what of the farmers who do want to keep farming? My brother has been looking for years for a sustainable idea for farming, but the only farms making money are niche product producers, and the niches are pretty much full now, and even then are subject to the whims of the market. He’s still looking.
What do we do with the farmers who don’t want to stay on their farms? What do we retrain them in? Who is going to pay for it? How is Australia going to pay for all the imports?
In the past couple of years, around Yass/Canberra a lot of farmers have been working with Greening Australia to make their farms more sustainable and keep salinity at bay. Lots of trees have been planted to help stop erosion and keep the water table down and extend the life of the farms. With the drought a lot have trimmed down the number of stock they keep to more sustainable levels and are rotating paddocks etc. They are doing everything they can and trying to reverse the effects of two centuries of bad land management. Politicians and policy makers need to work with the farmers not against them. Anyone proposing a HECS style agreement obviously hasn’t been on a farm in a long time. There is always something breaking down or needing replacement. Many farmers pay bills off little bits at a time over years. A good year might keep you going for two bad ones, and when the third bad year comes you just hang on and hope. Those that live high on the hog just have bigger debts than anyone else. There hasn’t been much money in farming for a long time.
Fyodor, Jared Diamond was one of the authors I was thinking about. His impressive cv is found at wikipedia.
His most recent book is “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed .” This review seems quite comprehensive and fair.
I also found a talk he had given on Background Briefing, before he published “Collapse” but a brief skim suggests it may contain some of the ideas.
Also this little gem from the 1980s wherein he reckons agriculture to be the worst mistake the human race has made!
I believe Jared Diamond will be in Brisbane early next month, but I’ve lost the reference.
Another book of interest is Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer: how climate changed civilization.
I came across it last year when researching on climate change. I think his notion of trading up the scale of social vulnerability in using ever more exploitative complex technology to overcome previous problems and failures has some traction.
Hope all those links work. More tonight, perhaps.
Damn! Try again.
This is the Background Briefing link.
This is humanity’s worst mistake.
Just to add, I heard a report on RN this morning about the rural decline which was interesting (maybe the one Brian has linked, feeling a bit blah thanks to seeing Nick Cave last night so the brain isn’t working too well).
One point that was made was that farmers do a lot of the environmental work in the land (as Mindy also pointed out) and aren’t paid for it.
I don’t want to see rural communities shrivel up and die, nor do I want to see farmers out of work en masse. (Though one hidden effect of the drought and of the on-going industrialisation/corporatisation of farming has been the loss of jobs to the ‘workers’ which has seen vast shifts in the make-up of rural communities. In my grandfather’s day, dozens of people worked on cattle properties and the big wheat farms; now these operations tend to need a much smaller workforce. In times of drought, too, the farming communities suffer as much as the actual farmers as the money going through the towns dries up, so this migration of workers from agriculture has already happened to some extent).
It’s a thorny question. I’ve always hoped to go back to the country one day, though perhaps not to the truly small towns I lived in as a child, and I find it deeply depressing to see rural towns dying. I also find the environmental degradation truly awful.
Not adding much here, just musing. Good points from Brian too.
Don, we were farmers rather than graziers and I don’t know much about the impact of grazing except what you see on the TV. But I do know that by putting dams and bores everywhere we have made the place a lot better for kangaroos. Roos and wallabies, together with wild dogs, can be horrific around national parks and hilly areas. The marsupials use the parks and wooded hills as dormitories and then come out to graze on the nearby land at night. The effect can be quite problematic and it is difficult to get a cull.
Kate, the question of what do supernumery farmers do is quite a problem but becoming less so. A lot of the young people leave and the average age of farmers is quite high in Oz. It is a huge problem in places like China, India and Brazil where they head for the big cities. China is said to have 200 million excess farm workers. It could be one reason why they are putting in a big effort in the textile/clothing area. I heard one night that they could suck in 30 million jobs, some of them from place like Sri Lanka, Fiji etc.
The segment on RN’s Breakfast this morning was entitled ‘The Future of Farming’. Unfortunately they don’t do transcripts anymore, but it is available on audio.
Not everyone on the land is doing badly. My elder brother has four or five properties around Rockhampton. He’s into beef. He has two irrigation blocks with good water supply. At present he sends 240 head a month off to a contract lot-feeding outfit who finish them off for sale. With that sort of volume you don’t need to make much on each animal to get some good numbers. I don’t actually know how well he’s doing, but he hasn’t been complaining lately. A 10 year drought would change things though.
I think we have to get away from the idea that we are feeding the world’s hungry as our food production is pretty marginal in world terms. We need to find the high value niches rather than bulk commodities.
But according to Jonathon West in The Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures 2005: Lecture Three, Designing a Future or Tempting Fate (transcript will be up in a day or three) the future of farming may be in growing materials, such as plastics, and pharmaceuticals in the plants of the future. He reckons there is a scientific revolution going on in the biological sciences. The Qld ’smart state’ and Victoria’s big push not withstanding, West reckons that from where he sits at Harvard and as he gets around the world, the view is that Australia has already opted out. Sigh!
Phillip Adams will have a segment on Late Night Live tonight on “Drought: Time for farmers to face the inevitable?” (10pm most states, repeated at 4pm tomorrow)
Today I heard a news item citing Prof Peter Cullen saying that perhaps 10% of farmers should be helped to leave the land. I haven’t been able to find his statement, but I did find this item, an interview with Peter Cullen and the new CEO of the National Farmers’ Federation, Ben Fargher. It picks up many of the points touched upon in the thread so far, including climate change, plus more.
Climate change is pretty much an accepted fact now in the discourse of rural reporting in Oz.
Not sure why the above remark was addressed to me Brian. comment 5955. I agree with you on just about everything. I do not know anything at all about the company Billabong.
Vee, I can’t figure it either! The point I was making related to the notion of how much we depend on our farmers for export income, which isn’t a point you made. Must have got my wires crossed. But clearly we rely too much on the production and export of commodities and need to build up industries that have a greater value-added dimension. Billabong is one of our success stories in that regard.
Brian, you are sort of right. I was trying to make the point that we export 2/3s to 3/4s of our rice and it is a big earner in the agricultural sector. Though overall the agricultural sector’s earnings are down quite considerably.
Vee, there was an article in the Courier Mail the other day about a CSIRO study which looked at how many litres of water were required to produce each dollar’s worth of product. I couldn’t find it on the net.
From memory, rice was way out on its own requiring over 8,000 litres for each $1 worth of rice. Then came cotton with, I think, about 1,800 litres. It’s a problem.
It is a problem. I don’t know that much about cotton but I know agriculturally Rice is one of our largest exports (not that that means jack if its a corporation doing the farming) and its probably the closest thing to the world’s staple diet.
I haven’t be over your other links yet but the background briefing one was quite good. I’m inclined to agree with it.
COMING UP ON INSIGHT…
MINING THE LAND
WITH SPECIAL GUEST- Jared Diamond. As prolonged drought takes hold, desperate farmers are again struggling to survive. But is more drought relief the only solution? Is the message that some of this dry continent was never really meant for farming? Are our farmers exhausting the land? Have we already done irreversible damage? .
just took that off the insight website. thought it might be worth posting.
The last chapter of Diamond’s book Collapse is on Australia. He reckons we are first in the firing line with global warming and climate change. At the same time, apparently he sees some hope in some of the things we’re doing.