With climate such an intensely discussed topic today, a fascinating Hindsight audio documentary about Goyder’s line.
George Goyder was the Surveyor-General of South Australia from 1861 until 1893. While he was involved in many things, Goyder is most famous for his analysis of the patterns of the South Australian climate, deriving a boundary within which the rains were reliable enough for wheat growing, while beyond they were too low and, equally importantly, not predictable enough.
Despite this, a sequence of good seasons in the 1870s saw his work ignored and wheat growers head out into the farthest northern regions of South Australia. Needless to say, the good seasons came to an end and whole communities were abandoned, leaving the desert regions of South Australia to the graziers and miners. The documentary discusses the religious aspects to the farmers’ optimism - the idea that “rain follows the plough” as a reward for effort seems to have been a popular one.
Foolhardy optimism about the Australian climate, in the face of the best scientific advice of the time, doesn’t exactly seem to be a new phenomenon.
I’ve heard that the line was proposed to be shifted. Is this true?
I’m a bit of a fan of Goyder.
Smart fella.
I grew up in the area he traversed on horseback drawing his conclusions from his observations of the land and the vegetation in particular.
And then drawing his line with its [largely accurate] implications of sustainability on that basis.
Without the advantage of a huge backlog of climate and vegetation data and scientific methods of measurement [current jargon is ‘baseline assessments’] that we have today.
Then copping a pile of political flak for it.
Deserves a lot more credit than he gets and, particularly given the current scenario of global warming, land degradation, tenure responsibilities and sustainable future, should be a lesson to the present genaration.
What is more interesting than another dose of doom and gloom from you is the reality that despite your notions of GW / CCh the actual line is inexorably moving North. This is because varieties of crops are now producing on much shorter stems and requiring a much shorter growing period than 140 years ago and no till techniques prevent soil moisture loss etc. Also we are beginning to be able to tell what the season will do and this ability will continue to grow taking out more and more of the risk of planting. The future is bright for farming in SA. But GW doomsters and their failed models continue to be the standard MSM fare.
In short the evidence is against you but you are not looking at the reality because it does not fit your theory of what must be happening. Imagine how much quicker the plant improvements will be when Genetic Modification starts to get going!
Edia, do you mean the belief that it will shift because of climate change?
Yes, I thought that there was a chance that the line may march south due to the changing weather climate (i.e. drought). I worked for a while in this area and in some places its quite dramatic to see how easy it is to define where goyders line is. Many ruins in the flinders on the wrong side of the line make wonderful photographs.
Scientific advice is always ignored if it is going to cost the gov. too much or is not an issue of the day. 30 years ago a former lecturer of mine suggested that stormwater be collected to preserve Adelaides water supply. He was ignored to the shame of the city. I still can’t believe how much water is just funnelled out to sea everytime we get a decent rain event.
I bet he was not an Econonomist!
Nor one of them either.
Edialeda, I’ve been hearing on the grapevine that agronomists and meteorologists suspect that Goyder’s Line has been trending southwards in recent decades, and that there may have been a shift in the order of 20 km or so. Haven’t seen the data myself - one of the difficulties in interpreting SA met. records is that variability increases as mean/median rainfall decreases, so there can be a lot of uncertainty over whether you are looking at the usual year-to-year variation or a systematic shift.
Goyder’s work was one of the great achievements in 19th C applied ecology. Great to see that it has received wider appreciation.
Feral think about what you are saying. A line drawn 140 years ago that only then made sense most of the time is up against the age of rapid change in everything. Why is it going to move south 20k? No doubt because of Global Warming!! Some years in SA it goes south 200k other years it goes 100k north. The point is risk and how we cope with it.
If we can better understand the coming season (and we will) lower tillage (and we are) with plants with shorter growing seasons (they are happening) the trend is that humans will more effectively farm areas that were a huge risk when the whole thing was done with horses and a belief in god!
patrickm - try reading my post again, and then try to comprehend what I’m saying, not what you would like me to say.
I’ll spell it out for you - the suggestion is that the rainfall isohyet has already moved south. I neither said nor implied anything about the future. I also made it clear - I thought - that I was talking about a systematic change in patterns, not year-to-year fluctuations.
I lack your confidence re extending cropping into lower rainfall areas. Might work on some of the sandy soils, but I have real doubts wrt heavier soils to the north of the line, eg in the Upper North.
The heavier soils need a good deal more rain to wet the soil profile, and the frequency of rainfall events of that magnitude (15mm or so according to pastoralists) decreases quite sharply with distance from Goyder’s Line. And evaporation rates in periods between rainfall events are higher, giving longer drier periods between rain. So less plant growth and quite probably higher crop mortality.
patrickm
Hmmm general experience from the arid regions of Oz - is the opposite of this assertion:
ie many regions which have previously supported (financially)viable agricultural/grazing in the past no longer do so - attempts to maintain past practice have compounded and added to environmental degradation, resulting in reduction of viability of these pursuits - or perhaps you haven’t noticed ?.
This is not necessarily linked to GW, and is possibly a result of poor land management practices, which have degraded some of these areas to such an extent that even the conservatives are talking about governments “buying out” those operations which are not viable, or sustainable.
This statement is irrelevant in terms of “movement” of the Goyder line - which would be situated at some mean point in the range you give (assuming your assertion is correct) - and does not counter the statement made by others that the Goyder line may be moving southward - what the latter means is that the line around which such oscillations occur is trending southward - difficult (not impossible, given the appropriate data and math) to detect in that much movement (”noise”).
I do question your statement that the Goyder line (which roughly corresponds with the 10″ rainfall isohyet) moves over a range of 300km on an annual basis - a difficult proposition to defend when the base measurement (isohyet) represents an average taken over many years.
Pseudo-leftist fools!
Belay that science-mongering! Quote me no statistics! All humanity will feel the wrath of our super-powers when the revolution comes. The revolution where we… y’know… keep doing everything just the same but better.
When I was a child all the potatoes were grown in the high rainfall areas like the Adelaide Hills. Now they are all grown in the sandy soils of the Mallee and many more are grown with far less labour. In short, Goyder would never have thought this was the way to go. But it is! 140 years ago Goyder didn’t have to draw a line for potatoes because no one was so ‘stupid’ as to require it. Everyone knew where to grow potatoes. Yet who is stupid now? Farmers who grew them where they oughtn’t naturally be grown are the only one’s growing them now.
The other notable thing from the ABC program was about the smell of all the dead animals in the drought. This does not happen now. We truck them around and manage their numbers very well. Just look at the hay carting industry. The more industrial approaches are applied to agriculture the better. The faster the city transforms the country and makes it more productive the better.
There are cyclical droughts but that was just as true in Goyder’s time. Now the Global Warming cranks pretend that every drought means we are in the last ten years before disaster or some such crap.
The way we have been going (greater industrialization) is the correct way (it is just not fast enough under capitalism so we ought to think about getting rid of that). The issues that the Global Warming cranks latch on to (like the wisdom of the elders represented as Goyder in this instance) are bunk. Instead of talking about what is holding back our development and rising standard of living they produce programs about the wisdom of the elders.
Of course there was a line, is a line, and will be a line in the future, but that line is only a problem for people to solve, now that we have God well and truly out of the way. There are no God given rewards for effort as implied with the notion that the rain follows the plough. No one believes that crap any more. We are all effectively atheists now (even the rich Seventh Day Adventist wheat growers). It’s all science and agri-business now.
What is behind this stuff about Goyder and his wisdom is green politics and a reactionary right-wing philosophy. The solution offered to the problems (future problems that is) is the push for (global warming required) cuts to our standard of living in the form of price increases to stop the use of airplanes; Sunday drives; electricity; water use; even meat consumption by the ‘teaming masses of humanity’ that is supposed to be bringing on a catastrophe.
Green politics simply has nothing to do with any historically left position. It is descended from the Right. Take the Australian Conservation Foundation; who do people think set that organization up?
And a hell of a lot of irrigation water from the Murray River: so much that one grower described his business this way on LandLine:
So, what happens to hydroponic potato growing in the Mallee if we don’t get the Murray Darling sorted?
Established scientific fact is not “the wisdom of the elders” - for someone who wants environmental problems addressed by scientific research that produces solutions acceptable to your ideological agenda, you’re gobsmackingly ignorant of what science is. I take that back - only someone who insists that science must conform to a political ideology would dismiss scientific knowledge as “wisdom of the elders”.
Improving soya bean yields through the rigorous application of the thoughts of Chairman Mao, anyone?
Gummo. What ‘Established scientific fact’ are you trying to draw my attention to?
Having another of our little retreats into wilful obtuseness are we patrick?
Here are three facts that other readers will have noted from my previous comment (and your response):
First, that potato growing in the Mallee is supported by high inputs of fertiliser and irrigation water since the environment provides neither water in the form of rainfall nor soil nutrients. Clever - yes. Sustainable - I doubt it.
Second, Goyder’s conclusion that wheat growing wasn’t viable north of his famous line is a fact - a scientific fact, established by observation and evidence.
Third, that when you’re confronted with facts that challenge your world view, you resort to transparent attempts to dismiss or discredit them - as in your dismmisal of Goyder as a “wise ancient”.
That might be because your deeply held belief - faith, I think fits the case nicely - in the precepts of whatever version of Stalinism you subscribe to, like the faith of the Biblical literalist, won’t accomodate any observation that can’t be fitted to your existing beliefs or any reasoned argument that doesn’t arrive at a proper, “true left” conclusion.
patrickm
Stalinists have considerable form when it comes to the application of political theory to scientific methodology, - try googling Lysenko and you will see how unwise such attempts were, and are.
BTW, Green politics, IMHO is neither of the Left nor Right, as the basic motivator for such a political stance is the recognition that the sacrifice of the biological systems which sustain our existence on the altars of “the economy”, or “the proletariat” is pointless, and, indeed life threatening (in terms of our race), unless subject to constraint.
This is not to deny that Green social policies have much more in common with the Left, then they do with the Right, as opposed to the claims made by those of the self-styled “true left” idealogues, which seem to be closely aligned with the Right, and completely out of touch with reality, particularly wrt to such issues as the Iraq fiasco and AGW.
I might also point out that the origins of the ACF have had very little to do with the development of Green politics, either in my case, or in general - the Wilderness Society, Greenpeace and organisations such as the WWF has been far more influential in this process.
SPAMINATED - again !!!!
Is it because I am using a “@gmail.com” email address ?
Please help.
The first ‘fact’ is that Gummo doubts that the new potato farming is sustainable. Sorry Gummo the only fact there is that you believe that.
I am looking at a photo of plowing in the 1850’s on Mr Fisher’s Hill River Estate SA. There would be twenty teams of four horses pulling away with a man slaving away all day turning the soil and loosing the moisture from the bare earth. That is the era that Goyder was working in. The wheat grew much taller and produced far smaller heads. Australians had virtually no knowledge of what brought on our droughts and the ability to get in a crop when the conditions were right were incomparably more limited than now.
Now we do it in an air conditioned cab.
Those ultra modern (by Goyders standards) silos beside the rail are now idle junk. The whole process is different several times over.
Fact is Gummo, that wheat is regularly and massively grown north of Goyders line.
Despite just 140years of agricultural advances, what you think of as Goyder’s ‘fact’ is being disproved every time there is a good season. But the collapse of this ‘fact’ has nothing to do with Goyder.
The observation that rainfall beyond his line was so unreliable that setting up wheat farms of that era was not a good thing (even though a series of good years immediately proved him wrong with many people notably the first to farm, financially setting themselves up for life) was correct in the longish run for his time ad a lot of the next century. The unreliability was demonstrated.
So now the trick is to apply modern methods when conditions are right and huge crops result. No one has to live within fifty miles of the paddocks when the seasons are no good. That’s just not how it was even 70years ago let alone back in Goyders time. Now we can strike very fast and can transfer very productive equipment even from one side of the globe to the other to take advantage of the alternating seasons. For example I met a bee keeper who spends half his time in Australia and the other half in Canada and does very well.
Gummo; If you fairly review this thread nothing said by me ought lead to your third point.
Let me ask you; have you ever come across a policy stance that while presented as left in its form is, in your view, right in its essence? If you have, and I think we all must have if we have a few years under our belt, then you are doing no more than me in telling that person that you believe them to be actually pushing a rightwing view. Actually following a pseudo left policy. Even if followed by a genuine leftist its still a wrong policy.
I presume this, from patrickm :
“The first ‘fact’ is that Gummo doubts that the new potato farming is sustainable. Sorry Gummo the only fact there is that you believe that”
refers to this ,from Gummo:
“First, that potato growing in the Mallee is supported by high inputs of fertiliser and irrigation water since the environment provides neither water in the form of rainfall nor soil nutrients. Clever - yes. Sustainable - I doubt it.”
Well Gummo is correct IMO [does that make me a Trotskyite?].
There is a potato farm near me [I can see it now as I type] that fits Gummo’ description.
It uses 2 gigalitres [ thats 2 thousand million litres] of water per year.
The water is free, no cost, unlike in the city where it costs about a $1 a thousand litres.
Is that sustainable?
It is adding vast quantities of salt to the land and river.
Which the taxpayer pays to have [some] removed elsewhere along the river.
Is that sustainable?
It is adding truckloads [literally] of fertilisers/insecticires/herbicides to the land and the river.
Is that sustainable?
To make potato crisps.
It s a nice ‘trick’ that is can be done.
But whether it should is another matter.
patrickm,
Where ?
Bloody hell !
SPAMINATED - again !!!!
Pterosaur, if you’re reading, typing a different email address into the relevant field might trick the spaminator. It’s a nasty beast - once it decides you’re spam, it’s difficult to convince it otherwise despite the fact that every time we realease a false positive it’s meant to learn from its mistakes.
I wonder what the 1st citizens of Israel would have thought regarding this ‘Maginot Line’?