Comments on: Xenophon amendment – on its merits

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:47:47 +0000

mehitabel, you would be interested in an interview with Prof Mike Young on Bush Telegraph the other day. He'd just come back from a meeting of UN agencies in New York as part of the UN Environment Program reporting to a G20 meeting in April where the G20 countries were going to discuss the importance of a co-ordinated forward look for all the economic stimulus packages in terms of looking to the future and a sustainable approach on a changed planet. It was broader than water, but he stressed that the past was irretrievable and we couldn't patch it up. What was needed was an acceptance that a new climate regime was in prospect and to proactively make the best of it. He was stunned by how similar countries in that particular latitude were experiencing the same problems. Californian irrigators had been told to expect 15% of their normal allocation. Spain was in similar trouble etc, etc.

By: mehitabel

mehitabel — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:46:19 +0000

My understanding is that the reason cotton and rice are grown in NSW and not Victoria is because of the difference between the allocation systems.
So in Vic you get (supposedly – it hasn’t worked the last few years) a guarantee of a certain amount of water and thus can plant permanent crops such as orchards.
In NSW you KNOW that the amount isn’t guaranteed so you farm opportunistically – if you’re going to get sufficient allocation, you grow cotton, if you’re not, you plant something else.

To my mind, that makes a lot of the ‘cotton vilification’ spurious. If cotton is only grown in years when there is adequate water, then surely it is better we grow it here than importing our cotton from somewhere else, whose farming methods might be far more dubious than ours. (ditto for rice, of course).

All of that aside, the MDB is only a ‘food basin’ because of irrigation. If that’s not sustainable – and a host of environmental problems, from die back of redgums to salinity, suggests it’s not – we may be better off spending the money getting farmers to move production elsewhere (there is elsewhere, it’s just elsewhere the land isn’t so cheap) or to radically change their farming practises.

I have a bumper crop of apples this year, and had last year as well, despite not giving them a drop of water and record low rainfalls. If irrigated orchards and other permanent crops were shifted back to areas such as this (higher in the valleys) then they would have a much better chance of survival.

We need to drastically rethink the way we farm and where we farm. This will mean good science driving really hard decisions, but in the long term will result in a more effective use of the resources we have.

By: Robert Merkel

Robert Merkel — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:25:05 +0000

In any case, we export a huge proportion of our agricultural produce. Even if we cut back considerably, we’ll still be a net exporter.

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:40:17 +0000

Michael and TFA, I think the picture is complex. Certainly we have urban spread and hobby farms in SEQ, but there is good soil in the Fassifern Valley to the SW of Brisbane and in the Lockyer Valley to the west. The Mary River Valley is good farming land and there is masses of good land in pockets up the coast (the cane farms of Bundaberg/Childers, Mackay and elsewhere come to mind). But Bob Katter will tell you that he has enough deep black soil around Cloncurry to feed 100 million people if only someone would turn the northern rivers inland. He’s bound to be right, but it won’t happen.

I think the point is probably that we could grow heaps of food even in a reduced Murray-Darling system if we gave away cotton, rice and other large scale commodity crops for export and concentrated on higher value crops, whatever they might be. Dairying is another that requires huge amounts of water to produce anything edible.

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:22:56 +0000

murph @ 34, I had an idea that the law may have changed in Qld also, but I really don’t know. I was hoping that someone else did. Certainly practices should be uniform.

Furious, I assume you are referring to SA getting shuttled off the end of priorities when the Vics are using peak power. I’m not clever enough to solve that one. I do think that desal should be powered by renewables.

But desal as planned is surely only a supplement to existing reservoirs and the Murray. In the long run I’d hope that Adelaide could be independent of what comes down the river if I were living there. I know that is a big ask, but I suspect competition for that freshwater is going to test civil relationships everywhere in the future.

By: The Feral Abacus

The Feral Abacus — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:55:08 +0000

“Much of the coastal strip of SE Queensland and all NSW (excluding major towns, cities) was productive farming land taking advantage of the best soils in the states and the most reliable rainfall. Now it is taken up predominantly by hobby farms which seldom actually productively farm.”

Michael Cusak, I’m not sure that I’d entirely agree with that first sentence. Much of the best soils in both states lie to the west of the Great Dividing Range. Your second sentence is an assertion in need of substantiation – can you provide any evidence to support your claim?

By: Michael Cusack

Michael Cusack — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:39:05 +0000

The MDB is the food bowl of Australia, somewhat by default. Much of the coastal strip of SE Queensland and all NSW (excluding major towns, cities) was productive farming land taking advantage of the best soils in the states and the most reliable rainfall. Now it is taken up predominantly by hobby farms which seldom actually productively farm.
Maybe it would be better for the Australian environment, and for the economies of near neighbours with better climate/soil endowments if we imported much more in the way of foodstuffs from those neighbours and returned the MDB to mostly large scale grazing, and the most marginal land to nature reserves. This would stir up the mother and father of sh*tfights, not least in urban redneck territory, but in the long run it is probably going to happen anyway.
Dispossed farmers could be employed as tree planters, erosion controllers, feral pest controllers, fire fighters etc.

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:17:55 +0000

The MDB is the food bowl of this nation and it is collapsing in front of our eyes.

Emergency action is required, and Senator Xenaphon has decided to force the issue.

He is a courageous man…this is no cynical stunt!

By: furious balancing

furious balancing — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:00:43 +0000

Brian, we are going Desal. But don’t you think there are similar issues for South Australia in regard to the national electricity market? Or doesn’t it matter because building it will create short-term employment outcomes, regardless of whether we can operate it during peak times, ie, mid-summer.

By: murph the surf

murph the surf — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:28:24 +0000

Brian,the situations you outline show how things vary from state to state. It is illegal in NSW to harvest too much water in the ways you have described .
Taking storm water and dams with out planning permission – just not happening legally in NSW.