just took that off the insight website. thought it might be worth posting.

I haven’t be over your other links yet but the background briefing one was quite good. I’m inclined to agree with it.

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.

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.

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!

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.

This is the Background Briefing link.

This is humanity’s worst mistake.

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.

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.

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 Italians have always made more out of our wool industry than we do.

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.

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.