Tonight Four Corners is going to investigate the proposed mining of the Liverpool Plains area near Gunnedah in NSW in a program entitled The Good Earth (preview here.) There has been considerable discussion of the issue of mining on fertile agricultural land, especially in Queensland, on the “Toxic waste” thread, which is now quite long, so I thought I’d start a new one.
I also heard a discussion about the program between Mark Bannerman, producer of Four Corners, with Richard Fidler on local radio this afternoon.
The basic story is that BHP Billiton and the Chinese owned Shenhua Corporation paid the NSW Government $400 million for exploration rights in a new province thought to contain one and a half billion tonnes of coal. When the mining companies rolled in to start prospecting about a year ago they were met with a blockade by farmers, who took legal action to prevent them.
This must have been highly confusing for Shenhua, who actually thought they were in an extension of the Hunter region. They didn’t even know which way the rivers ran apart from the cultural shock of revolting locals.
From the preview:
They say the massive long-wall mines that would be used to extract the coal would cut into the fragile underground water system, resulting in contamination and diverting it from productive farming use.
Now the conservative, National Party-voting farmers have begun an activist campaign that green groups would be proud of. For the past 12 months they have manned a blockade to stop the mining companies’ exploration work. The action has meant court hearings and the issue has split the National Party. Outspoken Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce was slow to react to the issue but now he’s come down firmly on the side of the farmers: “I’m a great supporter of coal mining as our major export, but there are certain peculiar areas in Australia where the quality of the land is so exceptional that you should not be compromising that for coal.”
The mining companies fear that by excluding the Liverpool Plains, a dangerous precedent could be set that could keep them off other valuable mining land.
The battle for the Liverpool Plains though is more than a land-use dispute. The water that runs below the plain ultimately drains into the Murray-Darling Basin. As a result the farmers have joined forces with the Greens to demand the Federal Government stops any mining that would destroy water flowing into the endangered river system.“The lack of logic in the government allowing BHP Billiton to move in on the Murray-Darling Basin like this screams at you.” (Bob Brown, Greens’ leader)
In an attempt to find a way through the issue, the New South Wales government has agreed to a major study that would look at the aquifers that locals say hold the key to the region’s future agricultural prosperity. Will this resolve the clash between Australia’s two great primary industries?
Bannerman raised the prospect of a Franklin River type issue, where the Feds may prevent NSW from giving permission to mine.
As James Hansen never tires of telling us the planet simply can’t afford to burn all the coal that there is in the ground. When is someone going to draw a line? The trump card in this case is the issue of the aquifers and the fact that the region is smack in the Murray-Darling area, which will perhaps gain the farmers support. No-one knows what will happen to the the aquifers.
The mining companies offered to restrict mining to the ridges, but that is where the water comes from.
It will be interesting to see how it all works out.
The one time I agree with the farmers – good on them for blocking this.
PS we should be considering nuclear power- we’ve got to stop the luddite objection to it.
If you support nuke power, Glen, I’m sure you can be bothered making a proper case for it rather than just smearing your opponents with the epithet “Luddites”. You obvs don’t know what a Luddite was, since opponents of uranium mining and nuclear power know that as soon as the stuff is mined and built, the game is over. Smash it and you only make the situation worse. At any rate, try making a case rather than flinging random and historically inaccurate poo.
What a tantalising possibility, an alignment of normally Nat types and green types, conservatives and conservationists arriving at an understanding. That sort of thing could lead to greens in lower houses.
I suppose there will be an online forum to go with the 4C program?
Idont think the Chinese should be blamed for this,but lazy BHP. I once applied for a job at BHP Lysaghts Westernport .Victoria didn’t get it.The thing where BHP is being lazy is self evident here,but, if everyone continues to research and be open minded, technologies may allow all matters to continue without loss to farmers,water supply or aquifers.Simply both BHP and the Chinese are good at design and mighty steel has a long life,even underground.Tanks of food grade steel are already produced if they made sure to catch water and pump towards its natural flows,then what is encaptured as water, is for local farmers.Tunnels could be built that are never going to subside,are earthquake resistant,and the tunnel remains then places for industrial expansion after the coal is won.That is,aslocal agricultural or other industrial development.Carbon dioxide as pollution,doesn’t have to be as Polish scientist inventors can convert CO2 rapidly to a fuel.This is definitely the way to go.We are being held back by wrong priorities in research, then again…stuff BHP and The State Government..for pushing through plans simply because they thought there would be no resistance.Typical.The farmers and conservationists would be better off talking directly to the Chinese,after all, they don’t really need Australia as a enemy or hostile even.Eh! Some Human Rights improvements would be good China!Leave the State Government out,until you have spoken to the locals.
It is a mistake to assume that farmers’ interests don’t coincide with conservation principles. So obvious, that it is bizarre it has taken the rural and conservatively minded so long to become active and vocal conservationists – and / or a mob of belligerent “Greenies”. But it is great that common sense is prevailing here.
But in watching this program I had to wonder whether Mr Joe Clayton (the first non-Chinese employee of Shehua) has heard of a fella called Mr Stern Ho? He may have got his fingers caught in the cookie jar.
Depending on which side you’re on, it’d be fun to surmise whether Joe is planning a trip to China.
I’ll run a book on whether his visa runs out long before he is released.
To the cobbers around the fire there on the plains – good on ya mates. It looks like a very pleasant way to have a protest and I hope it remains as easy as it appears now. And spare a thought for the people whose care of the land has spanned – what 700 generations?
I love it where they continually spruik ‘farming and mining can co-exist’. In the same state maybe, but I have yet to see even one example from any mining company where prime farmland has been returned to even close to its former productivity. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find grazing country returned to it’s former self – just take a drive to Moura or through the Hunter Valley.
ML @5. Farmers ARE environmentalists and conservationists. They make their money from the environment – if they ruin it they go broke.
Up front confession – Have spent over 45 yrs working in the mining industry with over 15 yrs in coal and over 30 yrs with BHP. Some comments:
1. At current prices we are talking over $200 billion in export earnings.
2. Hard to say how much, if any, surface damage there would be.
3. Longwall in the right type of seam costs less than the other underground alternatives and extracts a greater % of the coal.
4. Longwall does result in roof collapse after the longwall has passed. Depending on how deep the seam is and the nature of the overburden this may this may result in movement and cracking at the surface.
5. Cracking at the surface may affect runoff after rain.
6. Collapse of the roof and progress of the longwall itself may result in water running from one aquifer into another aquifer or into the mine. Depends of the location of aquifers above the seam.
7. Water that gets into the mine will be pumped to the surface.
8. Water ex mine may be saline. if so, this saline water will need to be managed to prevent it getting into rivers or contaminating fresh water sources.
9. Water ex mine may also be acidic due to the oxidation of pyrites. This would have to be treated.
I am not up to date with the NSW environmental impact laws. However:
1. The environmental impact laws will not allow run-off from mines except under tightly controlled conditions.
2. The environmental impact statement will have to deal with water issues in some detail.
3. The blockade will prevent the miners getting the information needed for a proper evaluation of the water issues.
Gut feel is that it is all emotion at the moment and some hard facts are needed.
However, the real issue is why the hell are we even thinking about developing a new coal field when the world should be running down coal production? The taxpayers should be screaming because we will end up being hit with a big compensation bill when the mine is blocked.
Seems like the NSW government pulled a swifty taking the $400m and leaving BHP to sort out the mess?
I’ve been to so called “consultative” meetings for proposed mining developments & farmers have strongly made the point of the poor record of land reabilitation of mining companies in Australia. The mining company PR types can’t answer the challenge I have farmers who are affected by mining leases call out, “Take us & show us where you have sucessfully reabilitated land after mining back to its original condition.” They can’t answer because it is yet to be done.
The loss of good earth forever & the loss of its benifits for the entire community weighs more heavily over a farming community than the individual loss of land ownership.
Mervyn: “it is bizarre it has taken the rural and conservatively minded so long to become active and vocal conservationists”
You’re a bit out of date, mate!
still@downfall
Mate – the mining company’s have never taken reveging the land seriously. And let’s face it: how can we, in a short time frame, re-constitute what has taken eons to develop?
In Qld – “in the good old days” – the fine for non reveg was deliberately a joke. Was it $2 per acre? Instead they sucked up the environment as hard as they could, destroying whatever and whoever got in the road. It has always been the “bottom line” that has been the arbiter – not community interest or welfare, or the longevity of a way of life, or a natural / national or human heritage. Or hell! – the thought that a contract might have to lapse until actual problems can be solved.
Having to adequately face the responsibility of their actions is less realistic than Swire coughing up the cost of their recent environmental vandalism with good grace. Or the now bankrupt mining company whose tailings dam spewed its entire toxic wastes throughout the Diamantina and Georgina in last years’ floods, with incalculable harm over an enormous area and for an unknown length of time.
Having to face a determined and cohesive local community is something they and their usual political cohorts – and the noughts in their cheque book – haven’t often confronted.
It’s wonderful the debate is being redrawn and at the same time drawing a line under the stupidity of a 19th century outlook.
I think Henry Lawson wrote: “We’re going to light another fire, and boil another billy………”
No milk and a bit of sugar for me, thanks.
ML
Yes the fines & bonds imposed on mining companies is a joke. In the 4 Corners, “The Good Earth”, Mitch Hook of the Minerals Council?? tried to pass off a $100 000 bond as significant. Bull, its chicken feed. Continuation of the practice of pay the bond & walk away.
Mitch Hooke spruiking for the Minerals Council didn’t create a lot of confidence.
It was interesting that there was concern about damage to the aquifers even in the exploration phase, as in Queensland.
“The one time I agree with the farmers” Yes, Glen, sadly you reflect the views of too many of the idiots out there who don’t give a shit about the farmers and are out to screw them as far as you can.
The PR woman for BHP-Bill was hopeless. She was so busy dissembling, trying not to say trigger words that she just made the Big South Afro-Australian look corporate shifty.
I was under the impression that the big companies had cleaned up their act in regard to the need to be more transparent when dealing with sensitive issues and community liaison. Not at all, it seems.
Given the externalities in the damage the coal will cause when combusted, the loss of ag productivity and potential loss of water, the accrued damage may well in financial terms be larger than the export earnings, even without getting into the intangibles. Will have to play with some numbers and see …
Maybe the real point to all this is that since this thread was posted about 7000 people have died of starvation. While these people have probably never been able to afford to buy food at world grain prices, every bit of ag land that is destroyed drives supply down and prices up and forces more people into this group. Somewhere a line has to be drawn in the sand.
Such fertile country so close to markets and ports especially should be protected with the impact fossil fuels in the transport sector have on climate change. This will add enormously to the price of food produced too far from the markets when Carbon emissions need to be accounted for.
this really makes me angry. At a time when it is being demanded of farmers to improve their environmental practises, with a raft of laws, which in many cases requires to still pay loans, rates and taxes, but to put portions of our privately owned land out of production or retard our ability to manage it because of confusing and contradictory legislation – the government comes along and says… ‘Oh no, you can’t clear those White Cypress pines that are preventing soil cover, but you can take out the entire hill, pollute and destroy the aquifers and so on, as long as you give us a big wad of money and are a mining company.’
The fact is Australian government and society is addicted to coal. Unless you live in WA, the royalties from mining aren’t spent in the area they mine, but into the cities. So anyone who lives in a city, including environmentalist, and enjoys the fruits of these environmentally damaging practices, have some responsibility in this too.
All that fertile land stolen from the original inhabitants by murderous wasps is to be stolen again by another bunch of related thieving bastards.
I wonder if they are selling off the BHP shares now?… that they bought with the endless profits from perfect growing conditions. I wonder if they ever thought of the poor bastards surrounding the OK Tedi Mine before?
Those ferals in R.M.W’s should just get out of the road of progress.
While it is almost certainly true that “farmers” (Dabby@3 and Mervyn @5 and especially Brown Wiggle@7) can coexist with conservation measures rather better than they can coexist with miners this claim has the potential to be seriously misleading.
Certainly, as I’ve pointed out in another topic on this site, it’s possible for farmers to produce agricultural products sustainably. (In this respect one might take put “artisanal farming” or “grass farming” into google and see what comes up). Nevertheless, one should not overlook that what farmers are essentially doing is extracting nutrient from the top soil and converting into product in a way that is analogous to what miners do when they extract raw materials from within the upper layers of the Earth’s crust. Their mining method is different — they use plants and animals to retrieve valuable commodities from the soil, and of course some of what they extract is derived from biological processes which take their energy from the sun, but bearing in mind the rapidity with which the world’s topsoil is being depleted, one can see for the most part that this process is also depleting a finite resource. In so far as this is driven by resort to artificial fertilisers and pesticides in turn made possible by resort to the extraction of the Earth’s fossil resources, one can see easily enough that we have linked up one unsustainable practice with another. The only serious cultural difference in the way many see mining and agriculture is that whereas the roots of agriculture go back several thousand years to a time of unchallengeable human authenticity, mining is fairly recent in human society, uses large machines and is seen as “an extractive industry. And yet when we wipe our eyes and look at what is going on, aren’t farming, mining and industrial fishing all extractive industries?
Something else to keep in mind is that while it seems intuitively reasonable to make the claim one so often heard from the National Party spruikers during the Howard years that farmers will go broke if they don’t look after the land, on close examination this can’t really drive farming practice. Firstly, and most obviously, while poor farming practice may ruin a piece of land in the long run in the short run, depending on the market for a given commodity, it may well enrich the farmer. In a sense, the farmer is transferring the burden of loss to future potential beneficiaries of the land. And of course some poor farming practices, while ruining the land as a whole impose much of the ruin off-site, in declining health of riparian systems. In the US, agricultural run-off from excessive resort to industrial fertilisers has seriously harmed local river systems, produced toxic algal blooms miles downstream. Much of the Gulf of Mexico adjacent to the coast where the Mississippi empties for example, reflects the operation of industrial farms. Here in Australia, one cannot fail to notice that poor farming practice has ruined the Darling Murray river system. Whether one calls this ignorance or greed is moot. It was driven by the perceived interests of “farmers”.
I put the scare quotes in to emphasise another point. While we city folk can easily imagine the term farmer referring to people who look like characters from McCleod’s Daughters or The Waltons much of the land= from which the principal commodities are extracted is held by major agribusiness, which sees the value of land as no more than one industrial factor in production — and not different in any meaningful way than the plant and equipment used in a manufacturing enterprise. There is no inherent reason beyond cost-benefit and ROI to consider the health of the land, and since, as we saw above, much of the cost of poor practice can be externalised or put into the future, the broad claim “farmers have an interest in protecting the land” implies different conclusions from “an individual ‘farmer’ has an interest during the business cycle in protecting a particular piece of land or the environment more generally”.
The lives of individual humans are, in the grand scheme of things, fairly short, but human society, most of us hope, will be enduring, if not eternal. It follows that what serves the health of human societies isn’t entirely the same thing as what serves individual humans, and indeed, can be sharply at odds with it. That is, after all, why human societies — the most rational ones anyway, make an effort, at least in part, to protect the commons from the depredations of those who would embezzle its bounty, enriching themselves unfairly at the expense of others.
Fran
Joe2 is a bit closer to the truth than is comfortable.
This lobbying effort and protest has been developing for a couple of years but has only succedded in getting more media exposure lately.
The farmers in the area are owners of great soil and so very productive land and the exploitation of the aquifer means they can grain farm for handsome profits.This is serious big money farming and now it may be damaged by the mining companies extending their activities.
There is already mining around the town and as the program mentions Gunnedah has been a boom town now for 3-4 years . The town locals welcome the development and the jobs while the farmers fret they may either miss out on the top prices offered to some landowners or will end up living next to a mine and without a buy out offer at all.
Their priviledged position is under threat and sometimes it is hard to work out what they fear losing more – the big money buy out offers or the multimillion dollar cheques each year after the grain harvest.
Yeah that would suck if you could make decent money from grain farming near the markets. It’s wrong in some sense. The sense that there are mines elsewhere which these blokes didn’t stop. Unlike the rest of us who so heroically brought the mining industry to a standstill. And who boycott bread.
There’s one famous case in NSW where the coal miners long-walled under an existing gas pipeline; they’re probably still fighting over who pays for the damage. Thus I am not too trusting of the requirement for EISs etc etc.
Landcare @ 10
Mate, I can accept that farmers are getting more up to speed with the need to “manage” and live in and with the environment. But you have to also acknowledge that farming practices have been, since the arrival of white people into this land, basically the mining of the soil – with food as a by-product. That this neanderthal outlook has moved rapidly, I accept – but it is still there in the hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of bare dirt, that gets called ‘farmland”.
But the main topic of this thread is the mining giants who think they can rip, burn, slash and plunder to their bank accounts’ content.
And I’m delighted that this 19th century outlook is getting buried on the Liverpool plains.
Fran: “but bearing in mind the rapidity with which the world’s topsoil is being depleted, one can see for the most part that this process is also depleting a finite resource.”
Not all farmers, Fran, not all farmers. Pasture and land management practices are improving, there’s lower use of imported fertilisers, careful work on soil improvement, etc. Yes: you can point to rapacious practices in Australia, but many of these are in the distant past; and now many farmers are rehabilitating the land.
Brown Wiggle is spot on: farmers have a clear financial incentive NOT to ruin the land. Most of them also have an ethos of responsible custodianship. And they’re using IT and other tools to refine and improve their practices, lower their environmental impacts.
OTOH, 4 Corners was about as slanted (in the protestors’ favour) as we’re likely to see. *sigh*
So Landcare@23
You have some data to back your claim on contemporary farming practices? There isn’t widepread resort to unsustainable farming practice in Australia?
You claim BW is “spot on” and repeat the specious claim about financial incentives driving good practice but don’t actually challenge the reasoning I offered for doubting its force.
If you and BW are right today then you should have been right during the time that you acknowledge farming practice was poor since the same rule applied, no?
“It will be interesting to see how it all works out.”
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Sadly it doesn’t seem to me like it will be interesting at all.
Mercenary exploitation of resources for short term gains, that primarily concerns making as much money as possible.
Dig it up, chop it down… a culture of the shallow mindless pursuit of money and status. That’s Aussie mate.
You could blame government or big business, though currently it’s hard to see how they don’t actually reflect the ignorant alcohol soaked yobbo/footy chick culture that seems to dominate in contemporary Australia.
We’re all hurtling towards a f*&k you culture it seems… anyone think that will really do any of any us good?
Quoll, I’m pessimistic about the outcomes. What I heard on radio indicated a greater Federal Government involvement that came out in the TV broadcast, with Wong having to give it some attention. Perhaps Wong/Garrett aligned with Joyce vs Marn Ferguson?
My money is on Marn.
Fran Barlow I think is confusing what is current best practise with what may actually occur. Any DPI meeting/ lecture/ course I have attended over the last 4 years has been focused on careful resource management and educating farmers about the benefits of the same practices.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone will implement these ideas but there is a united front working to get all farmers to understand their long term financial viability is going to be improved by addressing these issues.Riparian management is the cornerstone of this thinking as is balanced nutrient extraction/ replenishment.
“Unsustainable farming practice” is self limiting – the dropping returns ensure the practices stop and while there will be work needed to revitalise the land it can be brought back into sustainable production .
They said they have 800 years in coal to be used up elsewhere, why the sudden need to destroy one of the best resources (food producing land) for brown coal, the money? As we’ve all seen with the credit crunch, the money is gone in the click of the fingers anyway. Once this land is dug up, there is no return.
Joe2 and Fran, get out of your ivory towers. We have all benefitted from resource explotiation in this country. There is a reason why when we go to Cambodia the exchange rate is so much better than theirs. People who don’t mine or don’t farm in Australia aren’t innocent; they are just downstream beneficiaries. Yes, farming has to change, and we are being hit and left and right with legislation from the State government to put pressure on us to do that. So then why should a mining company be able to remove a hill, when a farmer isn’t allowed to remove a tree on the hill.
You can bash farmers all you like, to make youselves feel superior and enlightened, but if you are really serious about saving the world and the environment, then it has to be across the board… not just shifting blame onto farmers all the time, who are demanded by society to produce a product for them as cheap as possible. Agriculture would be more sustainable, if society was prepared to pay the ecological cost of producing food, but we are not.
In five years time, we are going to be taxed for a cows burping. I have managed my farm so that it is entirely covered by native grasses and open white box woodland… but apparently those trees, those native grasses, and any other native vegetation I have managed to conserve and I dare say promote on my property isn’t going to be elligible for a Carbon Credit.
To put it politely it is hypocracy… or in plain words, it is bullshit. An environmental attitude that involves a green elite living in cities that were built on the boon of resource exploitation, wagging the finger at everyone else while holding out their hands for all the goodies, isn’t going to work. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Mining companies shouldn’t be allowed onto this land without an independent water study, at a time when water is being bought back from farmers in the Murry Darling Basin for the sake of the environment. It doesn’t make sense. If you can’t see that, you are a baffoon, regardless of any academic self-righteousness you attempt to convey.
Norm – one fact I have learnt from a few trips to Gunnedah is that the coal they are after has a high component of anthracite in it. This is used for steel production and is worth much more than coal which is used in power stations.The coal is to be exported mainly to Japan and Korea I recall.
And with lower rainfall how sustainable is the use of these aquifers? Is aquifer water usage regulated under the same scheme as direct irrigation from the rivers?
Jason@29
I wondered how long it would be before someone would come to the defence of the much assailed farmer with a swing at urban elites with their “ivory towers”. Congrats at being the first at the window waving about the banner of plebeian authenticity.
You seem to think because I declined to give “farmers” (more accurately, rural commodity producers so hereinafter RCPs) virtue points over miners that I favour ruining farmland with mining. If so, you’re mistaken. You seem also to have formed the impression that I’m against RCPs having their actions that support sustainability recognised. Again you’d be wrong. I would regard it as poor all round for those doing the right thing, or approaching it to have to compete with those who aren’t. So if you are indeed doing the rtight thing or even less of a wrong thing than others, you shoudl want agriculture in the mix of abatement so free riders can’t profit at your expense.
Nor do I hold that all the costs of not raping the commons (including of course, the water) should fall onto RCPs. Rather, the costs of externalities foregone should be borne ultimately by the end users — which end users certainly include those of us who have to expend the energy to get RCP output up to the tops of our ivory towers.
Ultimately, communities should pay the true cost of what they take from the biosphere with their labour, precisely so all of us can be sure of living within our means.
Fran
http://www.connectedwaters.unsw.edu.au/resources/articles/coalmininggroundwater.html
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Chris , here is a link to a UNSW site . I think Wendy Timms is a convenor of an investigating committee looking at the effects of the proposed mining on the water flows.The site has a map of the known extent of the aquifer- the Peel River runs through the town of Gunnedah and it can beseen on the map if you look very closely around the centre!
All water use is controlled by licence in NSW.
Oh dear Fran, I think you may be venturing into something about which you actually know very little.
Farmers mining the topsoil to produce grain is quite correct in some ways. That is why today there are massive amounts of legume crops grown for N fixation. Animal manures are almost impossible to obtain for fertiliser sources due to the huge demand on it as a fertiliser source, while broadacre farmers close to the Eastern seaboard are using human waste as a fertiliser source. This Fran, is returning to the soil the very nutrients that were removed and relying on the atmosphere to supply N. You may remember a group of farmers on the Eastern Darling Downs who wanted to pipe treated effluent from Brisbane to irrigate farms some 11 or 12 years ago. Wouldn’t this have been a wonderful way to recycle nutrients? Sadly the government chose to continue pumping nutrients into the ocean. So no Fran, farming is not, and need not be unsustainable.
Fran, how in any way is the use of pesticides linked to the unsustainable use of nutrients in the soil? You also go on to say that poor farming methods that destroy the environment are enriching farmers in the short term. An example of the idiocy of this claim can be seen in the huge uptake of zero till farming in the last ten years across pretty much all sectors of broadacre farming. In the old days (and indeed still now by those who don’t believe in the use of herbicides) weeds were controlled by ploughing, or some other mechanical means of weed removal. This led to the destruction of soil organic carbon and broke down organic matter on the soil surface, leaving it prone to wind and water erosion leading to the loss of topsoil and nutrients, as well as increased turbidity in rivers and nutrients loads in watercourses and the associated problems with that. Cultivation also causes compaction – exacerbating denitrification and Nitrous Oxide emissions, and relies on the far greater usage of fossil fuels to pull the ploughs. The timeframe in which these problems occurs is months – not years or decades. That is why you are seeing the huge adoption of zero till farming – what is good for the environment is also good for the farmers back pocket, while those that continually resist using herbicides in any form are dying out by natural attrition – they cannot compete and maintain profitability with declining terms of trade. Meanwhile those that don’t use herbicides in the name of organic farming and saving the planet are in fact doing a huge injustice to the environment and feeding off those ill-informed consumers who are silly enough to pay extra for thier produce.
“In the US, agricultural run-off from excessive resort to industrial fertilisers”
How does the use of fertilisers contribute to the amount of run-off from farms? That is one of the more ridiculous things I’ve heard.
The other side to pesticide use is insecticides. Again, maybe some examples would help those who are too ignorant to travel to the country and see for themselves what is actually happening. The major summer feed grain crop – sorghum (but also strawberries, sweet corn and chick peas amongst others) has a huge insect pest – the helicoverpa armigera, that has the potential to wipe out yields and profits (oh yeah, and reduce the peoples cheap food supply). 15 years ago these would have been sprayed by a broad spectrum, destructive synthetic pyrethroid spray that killed off all beneficial insects. This led to flares in aphid numbers and more spraying and around and around it went. Incidentally, natural pyrethrums, of which synthetic pyrethroids are a copy, are one of the major chemicals used by organic farmers to control insect pests. Skip forward to today and you’ll find the absolute major insecticide used on Helicoverpa in sorghum is a naturally occurring Helicoverpa virus that affects nothing but that Genus? Fran, you could drink that insecticide if you were thirsty enough and it wouldn’t harm you.
Maybe the example of companies set up that rear beneficial insects for release into citrus, horticulture and cotton crops to combat damaging insects would help get the message across. Maybe the example of cotton farmers doing routine, detailed counts of beneficial species of spiders, bugs, beetles, wasps, flies and predatory mites so that they can ascertain what level of protection they are receiving from these, despite the fact that GM cotton has reduced insectide use by some 90%.
Maybe it’s the huge range of very selective insecticides available and the very low usage of broad spectrum insecticides these days that will convince city types that farmers aren’t environmental vandals putting off the day of ecological comeuppance to some future generation.
Do you need any more examples that farmers need to and do look after the environment? I could go on all day about Area Wide Management, Integrated Pest Control, Attract and Kill technologies, Weedseeker technologies, advanced fertiliser application techniques, nutrient monitoring etc. Time to get with the times Fran and look at what farmers are doing today, not 20 years ago.
The world needs food, farmers need the environment, and the climate does not need more coal.
Yes.
Ivory? How unethical.
My isolated tower is carved from fairly-traded tagua nut harvested sustainably in Venezuela.
But Liam, was it transported to Australia by SAILING ship? I certainly hope so. And did the Venezuelan farmers use indigenous bird droppings for fertilizer, not that processed chemical stuff?
Fran, in 1995 I embarked on turning the cultivation on my property to native grassland. I was a part of a group of farmers that were convinced that this was the way to go. I am afraid to say that I’ve watched many of those farmers since go bust, and as my taxable income last year was $100, I don’t think it will be too long before I go the same way. I’ve decided what to do now though.
Can I have you address, Fran? Because I am coming to live with you, so that you can teach me how to as one with nature. We can hold hands and skip on down to the magical money tree. Then we can buy a ticket to fly to Zimbabwe, in a non-polluting private jet, to look at all the cute third world people, and see how so much better the world can be when we get rid of the evil white farmers. Then we can visit some Chinese owned mines in some of the other African countries, and see some more cute third world people, and see how much they are benefitting from their benevolent multi-national guests.
Then I can come back home, have my chakras re-aligned and purged of any remaining farmer stench. I shall get naked for PETA, and become a celebrity and an academic who can preach to the rest of mankind about their evil ways. You will be proud of me!
Brian,
The Cth involvement pretty much was just between the Greens, Nats and Windsor with the Libs being taken along for the ride and Labor (properly) arguing that the amendment proposed by the Greens and (eventually in an amended form by the Nats and Libs) was unnecessary and incomprehensible. The section introduced is here – it is the first s.255A in the Water Act 2007 (I say first because the amendment they introduced tabled it as s.255A when there was already a s.255A and now we have two s.255As – the only case of this type of stuff up that I know of any legislation in Australia):
From a legal perspective it doesn’t make a lot of sense because nothing is defined and apart from an independant study needing to be preaperd, there appears to be no requirement for consideration of the plan by the state agency nor the weight to be given to it (nor indeed what State approval we are talking about)! Unforttunately this is the sort of amendment that we see a bit from the greens esp in NSW – all spin and little legal enforceability or effect except increased bureaucracy.
Labor had, as part of the MDB package, money for various studies. Some of this is being allocated to the Liverpool Plains aquifer studies. Labor’s position, as communicated in Hansard in relation to the above provision, was that these studies were a better way to proceed that the confused legislative provision that was passed. As far as I can tell, Federtal Labor have had very little involvement in the Liverpool Plains issue and this isn;t really a case of Marn overriding Wong and Garrett.
A couple of additional things:
1. The Landholders do not own the coal in the land. Coal was compulsorily acquired in the early 1980s by the NSW Govt and compensation paid to affected landholders (ie, where the coal wasn’t already reserved to the crown). The fact that the Crown retains rights to minerals and the rights to facilitate access to these minerals is often overlooked by people when arguing about mining companies overriding landholders rights. Landholders affected by mining are entitled to Compensation under State laws and in many cases, the land is actually acquired by the mining companies for far in excess of what it’s worth (usually more than double and I’ve heard of cases up to 10x the value).
2. It needs to be stressed that we are only talking about exploration at this stage. There has been no right to mine granted nor has a mine plan even been developed or proposed (other than excluding Longwall mining under the plains). The exploration drilling (not mining) is unlikely to have a negative effect on the alluvial aquifers and, at any rate, is not much different to the drilling currently done by landholders to extract the water from the aquifers (in fact it is probably better regulated).
3. The drilling program is necessary to work out what is happening in the aquifers to enable a mine design to be prepared. Stopping drilling as the landholders are doing, including the drilling on the plains, effectively prevents a water study from being completed and without a good study, the landholders know that a mine will never be approved.
4. If a mine plan is put forward by either BHP or Shenhua for approval, that is the time to assess the likely impacts. At the moment, it is all a big fear campaign about what might happen using worse case scenarios – the reality is that we don’t know what the mine plans will be and there is insufficient modelling of water in the area so there is no way of knowing what the likely impacts on agriculture will be. For all the Greens cry out about sustainable development, they are pretty keen to make knee jerk prohibitions on development before the science is in- particularly where coal is concerned (as reflected in their Policy documents); this is pretty backwards and hypocritical IMO.
5.Finally, the assessment of these mining proposal will present some interesting (read difficult) issues for the Minster for Planning and Cth Environment Minister. Inter and intra generational equity issues will play a huge role in this assessment. This shouldn’t be simply about balancing the $ associated with impacts and coal but also about protecting what is some of the best cropping land in Australia, if not the world. The value and importance of this ag land cannot be overstated and accordingly any mine plan submitted for approval will need to have some pretty good moddelling and env studies behind it justifying any impact they may have on this land.
Brown Wiggle@34
1. I have no problem at all with your desire to recycle suitably treated effluent to the soil. I can’t imagine why you think I would.
2. For about the third time, I don’t deny that RCPs could farm sustainably. Some do, but as far as I can tell, these amount to a few pioneering eccentrics rather than RCPs as a whole. I’ve actually looked into this in the recent past and as far as I can tell, there are very few doing this here. If you are indeed amongst those with a near zero footprint on your land, then kudos to you. If you are driving change in this direction within your community, then help yourself to even more kudos.
3. You ask how “pesticides [are] linked to the unsustainable use of nutrients in the soil. those interested should examine the 2nd para above @19. My argument was that the use of the land by RCPS demanded amongst other things, resort to artificial fertilisers and pesticides, the production of which entailed resort to fossil fuels. So farming as it is normally conducted entails mining — they are not separate. Sustainable farming would be an exception, but until this becomes the industry norm, it’s misleading to talk as if it is.
By your own reckoning, as recently as 15 years ago, RCPs were doing irrational things withe pesticides, despite the fact that you acknowledge that this was contrary to their interests — which rather subverts the claim that the interest of RCPs in their land is a barrier to poor practice. One might add, even if they do go broke, the land and its footprint is ruined for use by others for quite some time.
4. You speak of zero-till farming and one can but agree this is a good thing, but by no means all poor practice realises costs within the business cycle of a working farm. And again, one might say, why would farmers do this if the costs made it poor business? Either they were ignorant or it made enough sense to do it. One suspects they did it to save labour and increase yields — much the same would be the case for much of GM cropping.
5. I’m sorry if you don’t know how run off from fertiliser use affects water ways.
Here are some resources:
Here’s one source and See also or look here
One problem with industrial fertilisers is imprecision. One knows roughly how much one should use but given that the crop is the key asset, and you only get one shot at getting it right, all errors tend to be on the high side of use — or what RCPs commonly call “yield insurance”. The dictum “time is money” applies just as much to agricultural factories as industrial ones. Rains at the wrong time can wash fertiliser away and you can’t afford a poor crop because time is money, so you apply more to compensate. Nobody knows for sure how much because it’s inexact. And what happens to stuff not taken up by the crop? Some of it becomes acid rain. Some goes into the water table. Some is washed eventually into river systems where the nutrient feeds algae. With good organisation [ironic observation] these can find their way to catchments where they can become nitrites which bind to haemoglobin which compromises the ability to carry oxygen to cell tissue. That’s certainly what happens in large parts of the world where these factory farms operate. In a real sense, the beneficiaries of this system are (via the
Haber process) drinking fossil fuels.
Jason@38
I’m not sure that the chap here, Jole Salatin knows much about chakras or Zimbabwe but he may well be willing to share with you the expertise he has developed running a working farm which started in the 1950s on degraded land in West Virginia. He’s apparently on the right of politics but I’m sure you won’t hold that against him.
I’m of course assuming you weren’t being sarcastic and really do want to learn.
Murph @ 34: Good link. Nothing as frightening as facts. Answered quite a few of my questions. Interesting to note that the farmers opposing the exploration are indulging in unsustainable mining of fossil water. Also interesting to note that the auifers were not being recharged from the sandstone hills despite what was being said above.
Perhaps it is time that someone rehabilitated the Gregory hypothisis: Increased mining drives up the value of the dollar which makes our manufacturing industry less competitive which drives up unemployment which damages our society by turning us into another Bolivia.
It all says developing this coal field should probably put on hold forever.
<a href=Murph’s link @ 33 is well worth a look.
Wendy Timms, an author of the comprehensive and very readable paper, isn’t just some partisan squattocrat local who happens to be “convenor of an investigating committee looking at the effects of the proposed mining on the water flows”, whose views as such can be discounted. She’s Consultant Senior Engineer-Scientist, UNSW Water Research Laboratory, and she’s not sole author: Professor Ian Acworth, Gary Johnston Chair of Water Management at UNSW has his name on it.
The historical users of the aquifers/aquitards don’t come up smelling of roses in the UNSW report either:
The paper’s conclusion: “Based on the extensive research that has been carried out in the past 10 years, we believe that coal mining on the Liverpool Plains will impact on the groundwater system used for irrigation, stock and domestic use”
At the other, ie abysmal, end of reputable and authoritative environmental management practices, there’s this approach by the BHP rent-a-mouth, Wendy Tyrrell, in a display of the mutual back-slapping that apparently passes for best practice for Australian corporates:
…Sustainability reports outsourced to PR firms, and tailored to meet the needs of stakeholders? We’re supposed to believe what they come up with?
Then again, this is the ex-Great Australian that “had paid AWB for the wheat on behalf of Iraq in exchange for the grant of oil exploration rights in Iraq”, so ethics of any sort can not be expected to be high on their priorities. Instead we get Wendy Tyrells, who’ll indefatigably argue that their boss’s blacknesses are consistent with your whites.
Murph and John D
The recharge comment in the program last night was very mischevious. The problem with clearing the hills is that it increases water infiltration into the alluvial aquifers which increase the water table and bring salts to the surface. Dryland salinity has been an increasing problem in the Liverpool Plains for over 20 years.
Just how mining will affect these processes is unknown and won’t be known until more studies are done and mine plans developed. As I said above, the opposition at the moment is all about absolute prohibition and not evidence based. NIMBYism at it best and jumped on by the Greens for their anti-coal push.
This is not to say that the concerns shouldn’t be investigated; rather, the concerns should be investigated before any edcision is made to approve or prohibit mining in the area. A blanket prohibition based on an absense of scientific knowledge is not a good way to progress society. Sure, it’s precautionary, but not in any way consistent with the precautionary principle.
Didn’t Joe Salatin say Fran, ‘Everything I want to do is illegal.’ I did a course in 1995 called Holistic Resource Management. If you want to show me how much better you can run my business and land, then take out a loan and come and buy my farm. It was easy for the Holistic Management educator to come along and tell us how to do things like Joel Salatin and then hop in his car and drive down the road to the next group of ignorant farmers. Farmers listened to him, and tried, and failed. Pooginook Merino Stud was one of the businesses that did the course about the same time I did. The were enthusiastic about it, but I believe they have since sold out… along with many other enthusiastic farmers, who were told they would suddenly become profitable if they stopped using fertilizers and chemicals.
You are so freaking condescending, and I suggest you are all talk. And I am a human being, not an RCP. Well at least last time I looked, I was a human being and not an android out of a Star Wars.
If mining on the liverpool plains is going to destroy the aquifers there, it has to be stopped. If you aren’t with us, you are against us. Not much point criticising the farmers there, if the environment there is going to be destroyed anyway. So maybe you should stop preaching, and actually do something… unless of course you are too busy sticking your snout in the trough as well.
“Then again, this is the ex-Great Australian that “had paid AWB for the wheat on behalf of Iraq in exchange for the grant of oil exploration rights in Iraq”, so ethics of any sort can not be expected to be high on their priorities.”
And don’t forget the NSW government in all of this. It looked like they pulled off a nice little earner by selling rights to explore such a controversial and seemingly unclear area. And it just happens to piss off a number of Nationals and probably the Chinese who already have a few doubts about Aussie business dealings.
Jason @46
I used the term RCP to make the point that by no means all farmland is run by farmers in the sense most people understand the term. Some of them — a shrinking number — are but by no means all.
I may sound condescending but you sound defensive. You managed a reasonable impression of the classic plea against sustainable in your last post with your caricature of what I was saying, and you totally missed my acknowledgement that farming practice need not be unsustainable. You hear what you want and what you hear is city elites attacking you. That’s your problem not mine.
I have no interest in running a farm. I’m perfectly happy for others who like the whole farming thing to do it. I’d like them to leave the land no worse than they found it and not contribute to trashing the planet. That goes for us city folk as well.
And yes, I’m against mining in all cases where it is not the least of all evils, and destroying an aquifer counts as a very significant evil so unless there were absolutely compelling arguments, I’d be against it.
It’s unfortunate that you borrow from the arsenal of Bush though “if you’re not with us you’re against us”. That’s way too sweeping. I daresay nobody really knows for sure where their best interests lie with absolute precision and the precision fades even more when we are discussing whole communities. There are all sorts of solidarity yet only some of them are good in the long run. And as Bush illustrated, some assertions of community are bogus.
Fran
You have no interest in farming, Fran. You just expect others to do the impossible. I don’t think Bush is the only person to use that term. And the question remains – it’s these farmers fighting this battle, while you are sitting on your arse condescending us.
And I don’t apologise for sticking up for myself. The fact is that export industries, farming and mining included, are paying for your quality of life there in the city. There were no cities until there were farmers. There were no affluent people who lived in the cities preaching about the environment I guess, when mankind started to farm, so I guess that is where it all went wrong.
If farmers are the leeches of the environment, then people like you, however self righteous you are, are the blood sucking ticks on the back of the farmer. That city you live in would never had existed without farming, and your ivory tower has its foundation in the coal seams we are talking about here, and that is why these mines will probably go ahead… because of people like you.
Jason@49
You are doing a tremendous job of playing to the stereotypes many urban dwellers have of rural people, which is a shame.
It’s really very silly asking who is pulling harder on the oars of the boat or pushing the pedals on the bike harder (choose your metaphor). Contemporary life is a collaborative effort from which we all draw things of value. The development of industry was made possible by the development of agriculture and the discovery of easy to get at fossil fuels and new mineral resources, which in turn ratcheted up trade and science which now could use Haber to make more agriculture and facilitated more science and required more administration and so it goes. Trying to play the authenticity card is simply lame. We humans all have to find useful ways to contribute to humanity as a whole.
Historically of course the development of agriculture lay at the base of the development of cities. Self evidently, you can’t carry land with you and of course if you want a diversity of products there must be some trade — which means lots of off-farm activity. You have to be able to store food stuffs so some collaboration was necessary. Once you have things worth protecting, you develop armies and that leads to taxes and bureaucracy (who don’t live on the land) and so forth.
I do find your reference to city folk as parasites (“blood-sucking ticks”) amusing. If the cattle could speak for themselves, how would they regard RCPs I wonder? Generally the ticks don’t kill the host.
It’s sad that you have worked yourself into such a lather. Living out there surely does foster a sense of alienation from your fellows … I suppose it may be the flipside of seeing yourself as some sort of inheritor of the rural legend — Marx spoke of “the idiocy or rural life” after all. I certainly don’t want to upset you further, so I’ll leave it there.
best …
Fran – a copy of part of your diatribe at #19 – ‘ In the US, agricultural run-off from excessive resort to industrial fertilisers has seriously harmed local river systems’ I ask you again, how does use of fertisers contribute to run-off. Poor farming practices such as cultivation and low ground cover cause run-off – NOT THE USE OF FERTILISERS. Sure fertilisers once run-off cause higher nutrient loading in the waterways, but cultivation for weed control causes turbidity and silting problems.
15 years ago farmers were doing the best they could with the technology, information and resources available to them. Sadly they didn’t have available to them what is available now.
In fact Fran, sustainable farming is very much the norm now. You say you’ve done some research on this in the recent past – how long ago was that and how old was the literature you read? You see you really could gain a lot more by simply driving a few hours west and having a look for yourself instead of immersing yourself in this ‘farmers are the bain of our existence’ world and not checking things out for yourself. It really is a great shame that city people have this view of farmers. Good environmental outcomes are, as farmers know, and some city people refuse to acknowledge, also good financial outcomes. I would say that at least 80% of farming across the darling Downs is zero or minimum till now. What did your research tell you?
My point with the effluent is that farmers are screaming out for some of their nutrients to come back to the farm – and have tried to get governments to co-operate. Sadly there are too many people in the cities galdly eating their cheap food produced in the country, sh.ting that food into the ocean and then whinging about farmers having to resort to mined Phosphorus and Pottassium. Of course eventually, like coal, P and K will run out, food will only be able to be grown on highly fertile land such as the LIverpool Plains and the expense of food will cause city folk like yourself to cry blue murder about farmers ripping the world off. Somehow I’m quite sure Fran that you’ll always be able to afford food at the expense of some less well off sod, so I suppose you probably aren’t that concerned at all.
In fact the use of ‘industrial fertilisers’ is not imprecise. Fertiliser is a huge proportion of costs for farmers and as such technologies such as soil testing, yield mapping and variable rate application, petiole testing and in crop fertilisation are the norm. As I said previously, legumes are a major part of farming systems now to provide N from the atmosphere. Again Fran, hop in your car and go for a drive.
Fertilser that is washed away is money washed away from the farmers. Thats why everything is done to prevent run-off and excess loads of fertiliser in the soil at any one time or for any period of time. Well look at that! Another case of what’s good for the farmer is good for the environment!
So, Fran, you sever yourself of all responsibility, and put the blame of the worlds evils onto me, because I am some kind of ’stereotype’. I am sure that delusion is very comforting for you. Last federal election I voted for labor. Does that fit your stereotype too? Next federal election I won’t. Will you vote for the same people next time that you did last time. Who is inflexible here, who is a stereotype, and who is being defensive and blame shifting? Have you sacrificed any portion of your income for the environment? When you go to get your paycheque or welfare benefit or whatever might be the case, are you going to ask,’ where is this money coming from’. If you were told that a portion of that money you are given was generated from mining royalties, would you hand it back?
You know how I make my living, and I have told you how I have attempted, even though you may rightly point out that I am an enormous failure, to do things better and try to work with the environment. How about you tell us how you make your living. Where is your income derived. I’d like to know, so that when I give up farming, I can make my way without impacting the environment like you do.
You seem to think that it is everyone else that has to change. Your idea is to tell everyone else how to do things, even though you have never done those things yourself. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with you. Who really is the stereotype here; who really is against change?
*raises white flag above trench, waves furiously*
If I can step in to the firing line (by the way, wow, just wow at the conduct in here; effective communication appears to be all but absent in favour of rampant soapboxing on both sides), I’d like to point out that while on-farm practice is improving rapidly, a combination of extended drought, information overload, and lack of tech support for farmers is significantly hampering uptake of sustainable practice. This varies by state, with QLD presently sucking the most.
Agriculture is largely still an extractive industry, its beginning to shift away from that a bit. Give it time. The best measure to track this is whether soil organic carbon is accumulating on a given plot under the current land practice or not (because most ag lands are sigificantly depleted in it, older practices make the problem worse, and the stuff controls a whole load of essential soil processes that underpin crop/beast yield and environmental health). Its a handy little metric, that.
So you’re all wrong, basically. Neener!
*pulls bazooka out from behind flag, fires indisctriminately*
Oh, and coal mines are silly.
Fran and Jason – I really get disappointed when I hear the old “dumb farmers” vs “ignorant city slickers” argument.
Having lived long-term in both places (Tamworth and Sydney) it shits me to tears to hear a couple of people who could probably sit down over a beer and sort out things screaming at each other online.
Fran – It’s bloody hard to run blanket sustainability projects across the country given the different soil types, weather patterns and other factors. The isolation factor is also at play, and is definitely not helped by the city-centric attitudes of most news services and governments. Ironically I’ve recently seen a Blue Mountains conservation group support rail-freight of grain (on a carbon-footprint basis) for western NSW farmers. This is something the government seems to be dead-against and has barely been reported despite the massive effects on grain-cropping communities.
Jason – It’s too easy to criticise city people for being parasites. I’m sure-as-hell not (engineer) and neither are any of the other people I know here (including the CSIRO people who’ve helped your industry). You’ve summed up nicely the work done by many on improving farming practices (Landcare is a classic example) but from long experience talking to people on the land the progress can be pretty slow. This seems to depend from region-to-region and I’ve come up against as many idiots as wise people.
In summary, what we need are the resources to go to those who are doing the good work and the punishments to those who don’t. A bit more willingness on the part of both sides to talk (as opposed to bitching) to the other “side” does wonders.
Back on topic – if the mine has any of the effects on water we associate with the Sydney-region mines then it will cause major problems (salinity, metals content, acidity, etc). On that and the fact we have other mines that are still viable I see no need for the mine and the re-hab work I’ve observed previously will leave it almost un-farmable (and nowhere near NP standards).
end-of-rant
Brown Wiggle, you comment:
I’ve actually put some effort into trying to track down sources of food from providers who are certified organic but found them thin on the ground, though I do get my fresh produce from an organic supplier.
This corresponds pretty well with what I have found.
You may say that it isn’t fertilisers that cause run off but poor management of them — which sounds a bit like the gun nut defence. If inevitably, the structure of farms predisposes practices that are wasteful becuase avoidance of waste is more costly to the producer than waste, won’t we always get waste? Isn’;t that a reason for ensuring that we make wasting fertiliser costly enough for people to avoid doing it. You seem to imply they do, but I’d like to see some hard data on this.
It seems to me that there are a number of things that must change — not simply from the farmers end but at the consumer end. We consumers have as a group, to stop demanding stuff out of season or wanting stuff that can’t be produced locally in a sustainable way, because ultimately our desire for anything anytime underpins this poor practice. Ultimately you can talk until you’re blue in the face, but a price signal and information is what we need. I’d like more product information on things like carbon miles and certification and environmental footprint. This is a debate we need to have.
I could almost cry. I am angry because I tried to do the right thing, and I’ve seen others try too, and we aren’t rewarded or given support. It might be a lot harder than you all think, and the reason that there aren’t better farmers out there may be that, is that we don’t have the social and economic mechanisms in place that favour those farmers over those who want to mine the Earth.
And you are saying I am saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ it’s these people who are out there trying to stop this catastrophy that is going to happen to the Liverpool Plains if mining is going to go ahead. Alright, go out there and get up the farmers, but damn well, if you don’t want the farmers to be there protesting the mine, then you better get some people on the bus and get out there yourself. Is it that you just resent us so much, that you won’t give us support or help us out when we do try to do what is right? Is that what it is?
And I don’t think much of landcare – as it has mostly involved throwing money at bandaid solutions that address the symptoms and not the root cause. What we need are economic and social mechanisms that support good land use. That is not happening with agriculture now, and I will be the first to agree, but the answer sure isn’t handing over our best agricultural land to multi-national mining companies to do with what they like.
Fran
just for starters: “organic” is not identical to “sustainable”. I think it’d be good for the thread if you dropped your accusatory stance. “Sounds a bit like the gun nut defence” forsooth.
And as for “waving about the banner of plebeian authenticity”, it’s astounding and patronising.
Well given that you go to the organic market Fran, I can completely understand the smugly superior tone you’ve taken here.
Steveh and Grumphy
You mischaracterize me by implying I’m on about “dumb farmers”. I neither claimed this nor implied it. My account @19 was an attempt to counter the fatuous and PC-style claim that there is some inherent tency amongst exploiters of land (and let’s get real this is what RCPs do on our behalf for there is no alternative) to look after land. There isn’t. Humans are not always rational and certainly not long term thinkers. We work with partial knowledge and uncertainty. We are unsure when to trade current advantage for future advantage. Climate change mitigation debates are a prime example of this. We say we want the best for our offspring, and go without much to make this possible and yet apparently we worry about the cost of CO2 mitigation to out lifestyles. If everyone were ruthlessly rational the worlkd would be a far better place. People would do things that eventually come back to hurt them, but they do, all the time. We do it even more so when the pros and cons aren’t always obvious and are built into a system.
Most of us know it makes sense to be energy efficient and to use our cars sparingly and do all the things that complex abatement schemes are deigned to prod us to do, but most of us need that prod so that we can talk ourselves into it.
For some — in my experience mostly conservatives, all commentary is incipiently personal and they respond in equally personal terms. They get so upset they can barely hear what you are saying. I don’t know the first thing about Jason’s farming practices. I’m merely pointing out that the natural tendency in industrial scale agriculture is to find the lowest cost way of doing things and compete on price and since that nearly always means “quick and dirty” — time is money — what comes out tends to be quick and dirty. That’s not a swing either at Jason or “dumb farmers” but a commentary on the context in which industrial farming occurs. Ultimately the responsibility falls upon not simply the RCPs but all those who enable and predispose them. Buyers of farm produce should pay for quality product where one of the qualities is of source, sustainable practice.
It may well be that Australia’s farm practices are somewhat less egregious on the whole than US farm practices or the world standard. But even if so, this means that taken as a class, farming is not on the whole, a clean business even in Australia. Who is responsible for that? Pretty much all of us who don’t agitate for this top be done differently and support this alternative with every resource at our disposal.
And yes, new coal mines just now are madness.
I don’t recall saying a damn thing about “dumb farmers”, Fran. Care to address what I’m actually saying?
Because really, there’s not a whole lot to object to about what you’re actually saying, and the same goes for Jason, but neither of you are communicating well at all.
Organic farming doesn’t use any water. Water is a chemical compound, formed from Hydrogen and Oxygen, so it shouldn’t be used in Organic farming. Organic farmers don’t use pesticides to treat external or internal parasites in there animals. They use solutions of sulfur and copper – so these apparently aren’t chemicals either. They don’t use artificial fertilizers. They do use poultry and cattle manure, I believe. But none these ‘organic’ fertilizers do not come from intensive animal production systems, I am sure. Organic farmers don’t believe in genetically modified plants or animals – the plants in particular, that they use, have been unaltered by man from their natural stock. Organic Farming is a bit of a myth. Permaculture is a much more of a reality you can accept with confidence, because it is based in principles rather than just the tools – what you can and can’t use.
#53 & 54 Blessed are the peacemakers
Fran,(and a couple of others), you did come in over the top. I’ll have to stand beside Jason & say with him
This thread was so cheery for a while I was wondering whether I should go out & shoot myself. Jason pull up from the charge, lets see weather we can teach those who know so little of life outside the bright lights something. But then again maybe we ought to tell them to F off & go do something useful.
Stuill@downfall
If you’ve read Jason’s last response with its fatuous strawman and still fancy that I’m the one that needs learning about life beyond the bright lights then I find that regrettable. The squealing in here is all coming from the self-professed advocates of rural life.
That said, I would endorse your blockquote from Jason — and would have at the start of this topic. I’ve not said anything to contradict it. Go back and look
Ambigulous@58
Yes, I know that organic is different from sustainable but ATM there is no sustainable certification to use. Organis is also different to what the chap I referred Jason to does — he explicitly says he isn’t organic because in the US ‘organic’ due to deregulatory fervour, can mean nearly anything. But here organic and occasionally “biodynamic” is as good as it gets.
And as to plebeian authenticity, I’d say the comments of Jason amply justify it. It’s an old saw he is using. He didn’t invent it. The teeth are well worn, but out it comes. He can even do Rolf Harris with it.
As to the “gun nut defence” [ie guns don't kill people, people do] this was essentially the claim about fertiliser use and I went on to show the pertinence of the allusion. I didn’t say BW was a gun nut.
Grumphy@61 No, you didn’t say dumb farmers but Steveh did. Yet you were both in quick succession putting the same claim about some sort of war in which I was involved. I should have distinguished. Mea culpa.
Sean@59
Smugly superior? Classic shoot the messenger when the message stings. Good thing my name isn’t Pheidippides.
Fran
They certainly don’t want to be selling BHPB now – the twin AGM’s are on 29/10 in London and 26/11 in Brisbane later this year.
The NFF should be emailing every dbase and contact in the country, counting heads/shares and booking the coaches now.
Keep the pressure up in every direction.
still@downfall, any of youse own xstrata – the AGM was held in May just gone in Zug, but worth thinking about for next year. Local shareholders turning up is always a pain in the arse for the Chairman and CEO etc.
Having moved from the city to a rural area 30 years ago, and having started to observe farming close at hand and discuss farming with farmers, and then seeing improvements (piecemeal as they may be, but the families don’t save their land by going broke) I must say I’m astonished by the ignorance of farming shown by some folk who get up on a soap-box and shout.
The ignorance could be remedied by long and careful study. Information abounds. Wisdom is rarer, but is available.
Is the problem that folk (all humans) “think in stereotypes”? Maybe, but I wouldn’t dignify it by the term “thinking”.
“Parrotting” is more apt. Sad, really.
I reckon we should drop this free-trip-overseas habit of “twinning” Aussie cities with Asian cities. Twin them with rural towns. Get out in the countryside a bit more, please, and listen.
I’d prefer to be a peacemaker.
Around here, some ears have walls.
Fran @ 50.
Had to laugh at your comment ” If the cattle could speak for themselves, how would they regard RCPs I wonder? Generally the ticks don’t kill the host.”
For your information a number of ticks will kill their host…
Have you ever heard of Tick Fever in Cattle or Paralysis Ticks???
Goes to show the little knowledge you have on Agriculture.
Congratulations to Four Corners for airing this report on Mining Vs Agriculture. People need to be aware of whats going on out in the rural communities; that have direct impact on there way of life….
Ambi@66
I’m going to suggest you stick to your day job or get more training. Maybe you could look back over the topic before you make unfounded implications? This is a text-based medium. Review isn;t cheating.
Mel@67
Yes, I know about paralysis ticks (I train dogs), but you see you have to read all the words, including “generally”.
But Ahhhh Fran they still do…
Oh don’t worry I’ve read all your comments on here; you seem to think you’re the fountain of all knowledge on Agriculture practices…. Ha
Mmmm, I stand corrected. Nothing self righteous or condescending in that post at 68, for eg.
I find it interesting the little amount of attention that has been given in this argument to the damage the farmers have done to the land over the years. It wasn’t too long ago that locals would smash enormous bores into the ground for there water, much bigger than the majority of drill rigs that I’ve seen in around town. Farmers have been clearing land and amazing rates, poisoning the ground with fertilizers they now know weren’t such a good idea. Farmers have sucked so much water out of our river systems that the mighty Darling is a trickle and the Murray is facing an even worse state, yet the minute someone turns up that might upset the status quo, they have the cheek to play the green card. You’ve got to be kidding.
Ok … you know Mel@69 that kind of strawman stuff ["fountain of all knowledge on Agriculture practices" (sic)] simply highlights how defensive you feel. Nobody who felt confident about what they were doing would trouble with it. Even in cyberspace, one can hear you scream.
I’m genuinely regretful that some of you feel I’m attacking you personally. I didn’t and I’m not now, but I accept that that is how you feel. There’s not much I can do about that, but I am sorry that it has come to this.
I hope you come to realise that being critical of what seems to be the dominant approach to the usages of rural land doesn’t entail asserting that those using it are ethical bankrupts. Community is a complex thing and the current mix of property rights and obligations continually invites all sorts of cost-shifting and argy bargy over who should do what and when, who is responsible and so forth, much of which is arbitrary. Singling out individuals to personally blame is unhelpful. It would be far better if we all got a stronger and more coherent sense of our connectedness to each other and sought to ensure that burdens and benefits were settled in ways that were equitable, efficient and maintainable, regardless of where we lived and how we got by.
All the best …
How little attention is given to the fact what farmers are doing to damage the environment, Chris? You got to be kidding me. That is what the whole argument has been about in this discussion – more so than the damage that mining is going to do.
Fran, I am going to ask you to tell me what to do, how to make myself a more valid person so that I can argue against mining the liverpool plains. Let me you tell you about my stereotypical life following the great rural myth, that according to you is what I am all about.
In 1995 my father died of Golden Staf. I returned home and took over the farm. Things were pretty tough, and dad was pretty stressed out and depressed before he died. One thing dad was interested in was this Holistic Management course. He never got the chance to attend one, but I did so being a member of my local landcare group. It made sense to me, so I embarked down that road, along with a number of other farmers in the region.
Between 1995 and 2005 I didn’t use any fertilizers or herbicides on my property. And it seemed to work, because in 2003 I had a cash reserve equal to a full years gross income. Trouble was we got hit with a series of droughts. When we did get a break, the native pastures – grasses and native legumes weren’t nutritious enough to give me the production I needed to turn off stock.
When we came to this property, 60% of it was cultivated for cereal and fodder crops. 100% of my property is now under native grasses. Now I know, there are people who disagree with the use of animals in agriculture, but what are my options? I either have to cultivate my land, either by physical means using a plough (causing soil structure degradation and erosion), or by using chemicals. I naively thought that livestock production was the best option, because it allowed me to integrate native vegetation with something I could make a living out of.
Now in a perfect world, I could tell all my animals that their existence is no longer required, and that I am just going to sit here and watch the grass grow and the birds sing… but what do I do when the Shire Council comes along and asks me to pay my rates, what happens when the bank manager comes and asks for interest and principal repayments?
I look over the fence and I see my neighbour plowing up the land, spraying weeds, and shoving grain into his cattle. He is not at all interested in native grasses. I thought I was doing the right thing, and that he was wrong. I didn’t think I was a typical rural type. I am not interested in football, I don’t like hunting, I don’t listen to country music, and I believe that global warming is a fact.
So tell me, how am I using an old saw? Tell me what to do to make myself a more valid human being like yourself, and not just a rural stereotype that doesn’t have any idea about the environment. What are my options? What choice do I have now but to start doing some of the things my neighbour is doing, because if I don’t, I am not going to be able to feed myself and the bank manager is going to own my ass.
I am 38, I am single, I have a holiday every six years, I am disallusioned and tired… and I am probably going to get out of the agricultural industry. So you can be happy that instead of people like me raping and pillaging the land, it will be BHP and Shenhua. One day when I am no longer a farmer, I guess I can talk to you and my opinions and thoughts will be as valid as yours.
While I have no axe to grind for BHP Billiton, I can only support the farmers in their quest.
We have two sets of rules applying here; farmers are controlled in the state jurisdiction by native vegetation laws, prohibition and prescription of water use. However when it comes to big dollars, mining royalties and mining leases, the rules conveniently don’t seem to apply. Not to mention the MINOR issue of the CPRS and ETS.
I see a much bigger problem surfacing here and that is the loss of common law and its replacement with statute law that in many instances cannot be challenged in its own jurisdiction; either because the mechanisms are conveniently left out; and/or the State governments have removed common law rights without the prospect of compensation. Interestingly common law is the precinct of the High Court and yet States can remove it simply by statute, and the general public seem quite happy until the statute affects them personally.
Many properties are now being affected including urban properties either wanted by councils for redevelopment by big business, or properties that might have a heritage value. Then you add in the rural properties where native vegetation legislation can make agricultural land unusable because it protects regrowth, or where reasonable access to water has been removed.
Without the common law, acquisitions on just terms for the items that form part of the land are lost. Where this loss of common law rights ends is of concern. Do we end up with communism by default and lack of interest by the general public?
While we can accuse “the farmers” for land degradation, fertilizer use, using too much water etc; a lot of these practices were allowed and even encouraged by governments of the time. Experience changes practices.
We mustn’t forget that the water requirements of cities in South Australia, for example, are a massive demand on the Murray Darling.
It also must be remembered that big business whether it be farming or mining can make massive changes to the “landscape.” Once the change in land use is made be it scrub to broad acre farming, or broad acre farming to plantation trees; it cannot be returned to what it was without massive expenditure. Returning any agricultural/mining land back to what it was historically is almost impossible in the short term.
In short it is easy to blame the farmer, he is a small part of the population with minor voting power. Australia’s compliance with past and current Kyoto goals is mainly a result of the loss of broad acre agricultural land back to some kind of regrowth, for which the farmers have paid a very high price in lost income and production.
The prize for which goes to Ambigulous @ 66, not to mention a few other rural idealists who seem to see constructive criticism as a personal attack.
Having lived in a rural community for over 20 years before returning to the big smoke, it sounds as though the rural chip on the shoulder has grown rather than diminished in the intervening period.
Still, Fran Barlow should be congratulated for her patience and civility in the face of some completely over the top attacks.
So when someone from the city criticises a rural person, it is constructive criticism. When are rural person challenges a city person over their own environmental credentials, that is an over the top attack, due to the fact they have a chip on their shoulder? I am just saying that it is easy to sit there and say how farmers should be better environmental managers, just as it would be easy for me to sit here and tell the Australian cricket team how they should play better cricket. Now if someone was to come out here and demonstrate to us how to do things better, that would be constructive, and you can sign me up to that anytime you want to walk your talk.
Guys, I’m a bit annoyed that the bulk of you are shadow boxing. There isn’t a mining proposal in front of us and there is no way of knowing at this stage what any proposal may look like. To suggest that it is a given that it will ruin the Liverpool Plains is, quite frankly, a conclusion that cannot be made at this time. It appears to me that a lot of the anti-mining sentiment that is being displayed above comes straight from the anti-coal lobby riding on the back of AGW concern rather than any real understanding of the type of mining that is likely to be proposed, where it is proposed, what the likely impacts will be and how the aquifer systems operate in the Liverpool plains. On that latter point, no-one has any real idea on the scale we are talking about although we do know generally how the system operates on a larger scale.
If you are coming at this from an anti-coal basis – be upfront about and say so – then justify your case when the alternative to mining black coal in Australia is mining much dirtier coal from elsewhere in the world where the environmental controls are much less stringent.
If you are coming at this from a pure NIMBY (ie, mining is OK and good for the economy but just not here) – again – say so. Then argue on the science why it shouldn’t be here on some basis other than the plains are special and anything you do will damage them.
As some others have pointed out above, the Ag sector doesn’t have a great environmental history, the Liverpool plains are no exception and there is bugger all native veg left on the actual plains and increasing dryland salinity due to over clearing of the hills and long fallow practices. Things are improving and the native veg laws play a role in this.
Longwall mining poses some real problems as a result of subsidence impacts. On the plains themselves, the subsidence would likely present some serious problems with regard to flood patterns and inundation. For this reason, more so that the aquifer issue, I don’t think mining and the plains are compatible. But this doesn’t mean that mining coal under the ridge country can’t be carried out without unacceptable impacts on the agricultural value of the plains. The reality is though that without exploration and decent water and other environmental studies, we wont know if this is possible. Quite frankly, all of you forming your views on this proposal now are doing it on ideological grounds rather than anything based on science or, in a number of cases, in real understanding of the issues at play here. Personally, I’ll wait for more exploration and environmental assessment before I make any conclusion about whether or not mining should occur in the exploration areas currently held by BHPB and Shenhua – in the meantime, I guess I’ll have to listen to the same old tired arguments that add very little to the actual debate.
The trouble is Dave55, there wasn’t going to be an independent study into what were the ramification for the aquifers until these protests, and now they are saying they won’t guarantee that mining won’t go ahead before this independent water study is actually done. That is what the farmers in this situation are asking for – an independent environmental impact study.
If you watched the progam, you might have see the farmers who had applied to clear white cypress from the ridgelines to encourage grass and undergrowth, as soil was being washed away underneath a monoculture of these trees. They were refused on the basis that this run-off was recharging the aquifers of the liverpool plains. So you see, farmers are now being forced to adhere to such guidelines. So shouldn’t the mining be required to go through the same process. Shouldn’t there be an independent study done on the possible impact of mining will have on these aquifers before it is allowed to proceed?
Grumphy at 40 or 50 something. I absolutely agree that organic carbon in the soil would be a good measure of how far farmers have come over the last 15 – 20 years. You see farmers realise that organic carbon is good for yields, and yields are good for profits. Doggammit – there’s another example of what’s good for the environment is good for the farmer. That’s why there has been a massive upswing in zero till farming, controlled traffic, GPS guidance etc, etc. recently. It would be fascinating to see the difference in OC levels between now and 20 years ago, but what people need to understand is that OC levels cannot realistically (and unfortuanely) rise above the level for that soil type under it’s native, virgin state. What you therefore find is that after zero tilling for say 10 years, your OC levels will plateau out at the same levels found under the virgin country. It would be fantastic for farmers (oh yeah, and the environment) if it could rise above this, but a healthy, resilient soils microbes do not allow it.
Ambigulous #66 – I think having city people get out to country areas to have a look is a great idea. I reckon farmings great, I think it’s sustainable, and I think I’m improving the environment in the process – I’d just love to take Fran for a drive!
One more thing Fran, when you next enquire about organic or biodynamic produce – ask them how they control weeds. When they say ploughing, ask them about wind and water erosion, compaction and loss of organic matter. Maybe go on to ask them about how they reconcile this with river turbidity and siltation. Ask them about insect control. When they mention natural pyrethrums, ask them about loss of beneficial insects and the impact on local ecosystems. Ask them about crop nutrition. If they use manures and legumes say wonderful, if not ask them why they are mining the soil to produce food. Maybe go on to ask them how much food the world would produce if everyone switched over to this method of farming. I’ve got nothing against organic and biodynamic farming – more power to them for servicing a niche market, but they are not the great environmental saviours they are sometimes portrayed as.
Back on thread, if Chinas production of grains dropped by just 10% (maybe a mild drought), it would require the entire worlds grain stockpiles to make up the difference. Since 2000, 8% of their arable land has been lost to urbanisation. Why are people considering destroying more farmland when things are so tight?
Jason,
I think you’ll find that the cypress wasn’t allowed to be cleared, not because of the run-off but because the cypress actually intercept the water preventing it from recharging the aquifers. The tree cover on the ridges is needed to alleviate the dryland salinity issues in the area – it is the overclearing of these ridges which contributes to the problem. Surface run-off plays very little role in aquifer recharge and I actually laughed out loud at how little those two farmers actually understood when they used the refusal of their clearing application as a reason to stop mining.
As for the independent study, I am pretty sure it would have been required without the protests. At the very least, significant environmental studies would be required as a part of the Part 3A approval process for coal mines. Now I know a lot of people are very sceptical of the integrity of these studies but they are a lot better than they are given credit and do guide the development process. I am willing to bet a large amount of money that mining will not be approved before an independent study is carried out. Besides, if you think that those farmers are going to shut up if an independent study says that mining can go ahead without to much problem for the aquifers, you are kidding yourself. That Clift bloke was saying what he really meant when he said the only way they would mine his property of he was dead. Nothing will convince him to change his mind. The sad thing is, if the mine does go ahead, the stress that he will put himself under because of his conviction probably will kill him, and before his time. And I really mean that when I say it is sad because I’ve seen it happen a number of times and it is unnecessary.
Jason@73
I will try one last time.
1. I’m not favouring mining coal on thr Liverpool plains or anywhere else just now. I thought that was already clear.
2. I have no advice to give you so that you can become “a valid person”. I never asserted your occupation made you non-valid. You carried on like a porkchop and that raised questions about your state of mind, but that’s it.
3. I’m sorry to hear of your loss. Really. I can’t begin to feel your pain, but I’m sure glad I don’t have to find out what it’s like. My heartfelt condolences are offered, for what they are worth to you.
4. I’m also sorry to hear that you suffered in the drought, especially since you seemed to be trying to do the right thing. There isn’t much you personally can do about that.
5. Although a vegetarian myself, my main objection to animal rearing concerns cruelty. The link to Salatin I gave you seems a descirption of farming practice in which cruelty is probably absent and the impact on the environment positive. So I don’t condemn animal raising in principle
6. I can’t give you business advice on running your property. If it means a lot to you to keep it, then you have to do what you have to do — which was kind of my point. My problem is not with individuals but the context in which your business operates. Of course, if you don’t think the game is worth the candle then you should cut your losses and ditch. There are no other options.
I wish you would not take this personally. I bore you no animus when I started and still don’t. I do accept that life on a rural property effectively running a marginal business can be very tough. That’s one of the reasons I know I’d never try it. I know what I’m prepared to spend my time on, and it wouldn’t tick enough boxes. That applies to lots of things I pay others to do.
Your ‘old saw’ was the cri de coeur about the arrogance of city folk. I know when people hurt they lash out, and I suppose I presented as good a target as any, but I can assure you, raging at others on one basis or another will not long salve your pain. I hope you can make a go of your property, if that’s what you really want, and of course I hope the context is right for you to do it sustainably. And if you choose to leave, I hope you can do so on reasonable terms and find happiness in your life.
All the best …
Thanks for the prize, self-r ‘r’ us @75
In fact I’m not a farmer… I was trying to stick up for others; I’m often amazed at the venom directed at current farmers.
Some of the criticism of farming practices is no doubt well-deserved. There’s plenty of room for improvement. It’s ignorant “critique” I object to, as would members of any other profession or community subjected to abuse. It’s the ignoring of science-based tangible improvements (esp reduction of environmental impacts) that gets my goat.
The sheeps are indifferent.
Fran Barlow isn’t ignorant about farming. It shines through in all the comments above that Fran has read & heard plenty of farming. Talk is cheap.
Armchair expert? The Americanism “Monday Morning Quaterback” is more apt.
Jason, on the other hand, hasnt the luxury of sanctimonious pontification. Jason has to produce actual physical results.
Ambigulous #66 (first paragraph) makes the most apt comment on this thread.
Dave55, I would like to believe what a lot of what you say is true. I can’t comment on these particular farmers understanding of their land – if that was the reason they were given for their application being refused, then that was the reason they were given. I haven’t been to that particular ridge-line, and I doubt that you have as well. I have seen where regrowth, albiet even if it is trees, doesn’t necessarily reduce run-off, and the lock up and leave approach to repricating these problems has often not worked. I have seen soil erosion underneath trees, and there was more to the dynamic environmental system before it was interfered with than just trees. I think if you find a monoculture of white or black cypress, perhaps on land that was overcleared or overgrazed before, but which is now locked up, you will find soil erosion underneath these trees.
I have a similar problem in my own area. We have a stockroute here that is over-run with coolatai grass – introduced from Africa. It is unpalatable, so travelling stock don’t eat it, and RLP boards, now LHPA, haven’t maintained watering points to enable grazing these areas anyway. Effectively you have a lock-up and leave situation that isn’t resulting in the environment reverting back into its natural state.
On my own property, and I can show you this video to demonstrate it – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YnIYWwudy0&feature=channel_page – I have regenerated native grass pasture that is composed of species that aren’t found out on the route. I was sent a letter from some Government Department, which I can’t remember the name of now, offering to pay me to remove my stock from these grass pastures. Maybe it is an offer I should have taken up, but I feared that if this land was locked up, and livestock weren’t used to utilise the grass, it would just result in a fuel build up, which inevitably would result in a fire at some stage. What I have noticed is when a grass area like this is burnt, it gets overtaken by Coolatai grass. Still, stupid farmers like us are repeatedly being told we don’t know what we are talking about, and we should do what people who have never actually been on the land what we should be doing. Maybe what we have done in the past is wrong, but two wrongs don’t make a right. That’s a cliche, I know… and maybe I am just deluded, but I have tried to observe and figure out what is going on and what is actually the best way to proceed. It has never occured to me before now that it should be a coal mine.
Let’s trust the State Government and the Miners, and see what happens.
Fran #81 I wish to thank you for coming to a position of humility & empathy. Perhaps you are beginning to understand the growing anger & frustration of those who live in regional areas. Some of the comments made in this thread have been uninformed vindictive crap brewed up in venomous unsupported generalisations. How are we supposed to react when vilified with untruths, its no wonder that there is a growth to the chip on farmer’s shoulders? The worry about being subjected to unnecessary vilification is that once untruths are cemented into the consciousness of the majority then justification can be made to do whatever you wish to these unsavoury characters. It amazes me that this can happen in less than a generation. It would have been as unthinkable one time as one of the most trusted professions today, a pharmacist, in 20 years time having rock thrown through their window with angry calls of, drug dealer!
Let us start a civil debate.
Jason,
I suspect that the landholders really didn’t understand the reason for refusal that they were given, rather than the reasons being wrong.
I don’t know the ridge in question but I’ve seen a lot of black and white cypress monocultures. I agree- they aren’t ideal and can have erosion problems but keepin mind that these farmers first and foremost wanted to clear the area for pasture – not to prevent erosion. While run-off causing erosion is a problem, the bigger problem is dryland salinity which stuffs up the productivity of the lower plains areas. The primary cause of this is the increase in the alluvial water table, largely due to increased infiltration on the ridges. Tree cover, even scrappy cypress, prevents this infiltration. We aren’t talking about the recharge of the aquifers being tapped on the plains – the bulk of this recharge occurs in the Coolah Tops and further away, this is shallow alluvial aquifers only and when they rise, they carry with them salts. Run-off is actually OK (erosion impacts alone). If these farmers had wanted to clear and revegetate with ironbark/ gum (on the sandy country) or white box on the red soil, I doubt the Government would have had a problem (or if they did I would be annoyed) but the removal of the bigger veg has real problems from a salinity perspective.
You seem to be concerned that this mine will be approved without any assessment or only a very poor assessment. I can’t see this happening because the project has a higgh profile and big potential impacts. If it is approved with a poor assessment, the approval will almost certainly be subject to legal action – the emotion and Green ideology involved make this almost guaranteed even if the assessment is solid. While you may have concerns about the NSW approval system, it has a hell of a lot of advantages over those in other countries and our environmental controls are quite strong by world standards. Please keep scrutinising these projects but don’t let opposition without firm scientific support
BTW, I’m not saying that coal mines should be approved in the area, simply that jumping to conclusions now is premature.
Steve at the Pub, what is the purpose of that post? Is is possible that Fran and Jason have valuable perspectives and both are worthy of being heard? People are passionate about this country, [thank fuck] and while the stereotypes are grating, get beyond it and there is some important stuff being said here, from all sides.
Jason, is that your place in the YouTube piece? It looks great, congratulations on your patience. Your video addresses a question I had humming around in my head today while I was doing some work in a grassland…that stuff about shading out new growth…food for thought, thanks for posting the link.
Jason,
OT – I had a look at your youtube clip – It’s an interesting working experiment. Have you found the Holistic approach worthwhile? I’ve always had my doubts about it in Australia largely on the basis that it was based around pasture response to large herds of hoofed animals whereas the Australian grasses evolved from soft footed marsupials. I’ve always felt that the HRM approach in Aus would actually work better with introduced species. The native pastures on your place look great but as you point out, they can drop off quick (although generally they will hold on longer than the introduced species in a drought), query whether the long term production is actually improved by “doing the right thing” when even the organic buyers don’t care if it’s from native pastures or introduced (although I suspect the natives would require less pest control and survive on lower nutrients). My preferred approach to pasture management was more to simply increase OM by mulching on a regular basis (say every 3-5 years or so, and plowing that in (In your soils, you would also need regular deep ripping to avoid hardpan probs). Admittedly this is from high rainfall eastern fall where kikuyu is the dominant species and not Western slopes stuff but I’m familiar with your country and species as well and don’t see why mulching couldn’t be applied in those systems as well.
You seem to know what you are talking about, Dave55. You seem to know more about legislative and approval side of things than I do, and you do have a pretty good knowledge of these areas and the environmental issues occuring there.
I was born in the Hunter Valley and lived on a farm there the first eleven years of my life. When I look up a the sky here, the clouds are white. When I drive down the Hunter now, it seems to me the clouds are yellow. So maybe that is why I am a little bit scared of mines moving up here. I also didn’t recognise the landscape the Western side of Muswellbrook as being what I remember when I was a child. Clearing ridges is bad enough, but these fellows actually remove entire ridges, and put ridges where there weren’t ridges before. I do hope they know what they are doing, and they won’t be given the go ahead on the Liverpool Plains due to the money rather than the science. The NSW State Government is pretty hard up for cash – what was that about them selling water recently?
On the question of Holistic Management. I think the basic principles are sound – that when you make a decision, you should look at what effects that decision will have socially, environmentally and economically. Understanding water cycles, mineral cycles, biodiversity and energy capture through photosynthesis are also basic good sense. What I saw going wrong with Holistic Management as a movement, was on one hand they were telling people to test every decision and every tool, but then advocating things that weren’t following that principle. I was keen on it, because I saw sense in the basic principle, but I saw people charging off and doing things, not because they had been through the process, but because they thought if it was alternative to what they were doing before, it must automatically be a good thing. My opinion was that a lot of these ‘alternate’ methods were just a lot of Voodoo and Junk Science… but a lot of people will be offended by me saying that.
As for the Marsupial versus Introduced Livestock question… my thought is that it isn’t that introduced livestock are large and have hard hooves that is the problem, it is that introduced livestock have much larger energy and nutrient requirements than native animals. My grazing management at the moment has been neglected, because physically I haven’t been able to keep up with everything, but when I had it going pretty well, tracking and compaction pretty much disappeared. I’ve heard that Alpacas are better for the soil than cattle and sheep, because they have soft hooves… but when I visited an Alpaca farm, I saw there were just as many tracks in a set stock paddock of Alpacas as there were for any other animal. I think if you could manage to lock a mob of kangaroos up in a paddock, you would get the same thing.
Maybe we should be farming kangaroos. The problem I will face with that though, if I get rid of my cattle, is that the Kangaroos seem to prefer the shorter grass that is produced after cattle have grazed a paddock. They shelter in the longer grass, but don’t seem inclined to eat it. I fear that if I get rid of my cattle, all my kangaroos are going to be over in my neighbours place in his cereal crop, and the roo shooters from in town are the ones that are going to make a living from them, rather than me.
When you talk about Mulching, are you talking about flail mowers. I think it is a good idea, but I am not sure how they will handle our basalt rocks. You can put a big mob in a paddock and knock down the grass and not worry about sticks, shrubs and rocks. To use a flail mower, I would have to do a lot of rock picking, and probably use a stick rake to push up fallen timber… and what would I do with those piles of timber?
The problem I have run into with what I am doing, is that native grasses and legumes without fertilisation of some kind, just don’t provide the nutritive value required for me to run enough stock to make a living. That might be a lack of marketing on my part, but lean beef from 4 or 5 year old cattle doesn’t really seem to be that marketable a product. I am early weaning calves of cows now and putting them on a short duration grain ration before selling them as stores, not because I think feeding grain to stock is a good thing, but because I am facing an animal welfare issue if I don’t. It might be cruel to take calves off their mothers, lock them in a yard for three weeks and feed them grain, but the little bastards chase me all over the place for months after I let them out in the paddock.
So, I don’t know where I will go from here. The investment scheme involving forestry on land that was previously used for food production down south hasn’t seemed to have been a great success, so I don’t know whether farm forestry or horticulture on this land is going to be a viable option.
furious balancing, you aren’t going to believe this, and maybe I have had too many beers and haven’t seen things properly when I’ve witnessed it… even though I wouldn’t be drinking when I have been on the job with the local bushfire brigade… but what I seen when I have kept my mouth shut and helped people try to burn-off where Queensland Bluegrass, Redgrass and Danthonia (native grasses) is they don’t burn very well during the cool months because the desicate very quickly. Coolatai grass – from Africa – on the other hand will give you 12 foot high flames even after it has been sitting there for a couple of decades.
To answer your question about shading, the thing is that grasses are plants that have their growth points at the base near the ground, unlike trees that have their growth points at the tip. The mystery is, that if these native grasses don’t seem to be fire promoting like Eucalypts, what was the natural process that stimulated the growing points of these plants? Are they a legacy of the era of the Diprotodon and Giant Kangaroo – Australias own megafauna that became extinct sometime in the last 100 000 years. I heard once that plants evolve a lot slower than animals, but I am not sure that is true.
I wonder if these native grasses could be used as fire retardation barriers? I guess there needs to be some research done to actually see if my observations have been correct, that these grasses don’t actually want to burn real well. In a dry summer, I am sure they would burn pretty well, but when this does happen, they subsequently seem to outcompeted by introduced grasses. I think it is an interesting phenomenon this.
Dave55, from what I’ve seen most species of grasses are robust enough to withstand the pressure from grazing, the issue with hard-footed animals is more of a problem with managing the land for biodiversity outcomes, as a lot of the very rare plants are niche plants that would exist in inter-tussock spaces that are usually held together by mosses and lichens. Regardless, pulse grazing is often used in grassland conservation, to increase biodiversity, I don’t know if that would have benefits for growing meat too….it could possibly increase native legumes, and improve soil fertility?
I think the main obstacle to native pastures in temperate regions is land tenure, in that most land holdings are too small for a property to be sustainable on it’s own, without supplementary feeding – wouldn’t that be true of a large number of small holdings in Australia – regardless of whether the pasture is native or not? I guess that’s where the farming as mining the land analogy comes in, as any off-farm inputs are coming from somewhere.
It’s ironic, that today I was on conservation land doing something that could and should be done by an animal, that in turn could eventually feed someone, instead I was on the end of a brushcutter using up fuel and my own energy to essentially simulate grazing. It’s kinda crazy…there were goats next door, and I hatched an idea that I could let the goats in to do the work and I’d still get paid.
Dave(88)/Jason “even the organic buyers don’t care if it’s from native pastures or introduced”…
Has it ever been tried, marketting a premium 100% Aussie Eco-Meat product “No wog grasses were consumed in the production of this Steak/Roast”?
For an example of niche marketting, look at the egg section of the supermarket, there must be 20 market segments from rock bottom priced eggs laid by caged, hormoned, de-beaked, low-self-esteem ex-westie broilers to eggs with individual certificates showing they were laid by well-travelled, montesori-educated, polites-gymmed, gluten-free henriettas that had a natural-birthing midwife present at the laying of each egg, for which a large premium is gladly paid by that sort of customer. (I personally go for the ones that have a little x-mark where to pierce before boiling so the shell doesn’t crack, I just hate it when that happens).
Hell, go the whole hog, produce a JustSoYouKnowExactlyWhatYouAreBecomingWhenYouEatMe label that has the various native grass species that have been upgraded into meat with little check boxes: Flinders Grass, Mitchell Grass…
Stop press, maybe it’s not so silly, one producer seems to be making a go of the
MitchellGrassMeats brand
” Our lamb and beef are products of natural Mitchell & Flinders grasses, virgin soil, plenty of sunshine, fresh air and healthy animals.”
Omigod!
I run these posts in large part to increase understanding between the city and the bush. On that count it’s been a failure.
The first comment from Glen @ 1 cast farmers as ‘the other’ and it got worse from there.
Fran, sure Jason was reactive and on occasion used language that stretched civility, but you got some feedback from others later in the thread which I’m not sure you understood. The words “accusatory”, “condescending” and “patronising” were used by commenters with long records of civil discussion on this blog. When I turned on tonight I saw one of the later comments and knew the thread was in trouble. As I read from the top, I thought those epithets were justified. I could add sarcastic and I thought the RCP thing was inflammatory. You made the point, but didn’t need to rub it in.
Then @ 81 in an the spirit of reconciliation you tell Jason he’s carrying on like a pork chop!
Unfortunately the point made by still@downfall @ 85 has some resonance. Recently I attended a meeting of country people in Gatton, a meeting which was trying to address the problem of how country people can communicate the worth of what they do to city people.
Two older ladies, retired to Toowoomba from grazing in Blackall, related how they were in a social setting where people were introducing themselves. When they said they were retired graziers about half a dozen of the people in the circle physically recoiled.
Some of the peak farm groups in Queensland recently came up with the idea of a new organisation to bridge the gap. It’s up and running and called Life Source. They’ve had access to a more than competent web designer but they’ve chosen a high and difficult mountain to climb.
That is a good suggestion, Danny. My trouble is that I have yet to figure out how to produce a acceptible quality product to market. In the Mitchell Grass regions, futher west, and I think they’ve done the same thing with lamb on Saltbush, stock seem to do better. On this heavy black soil of Northern NSW and the Darling Downs it seems to be hard to fatten stock without the use of an oat crop or grain, in spite of the soil being relatively fertile. I am trying different things to address this, including pasture cropping and using Australian bred Droughtmaster cattle instead of American bred angus, and I have experimented with biologically activated fertilisers that are supposed to make existing soil nutrients more available. Maybe I should try different livestock all together – Dorper Sheep or Goats.
The ethical problem with beef also is that you have to send stock to an abbottoir. My concern is not with the process of killing the animal, but with the stress of the animal being transported, kept off feed and held in a foreign environment that causes the animal stress. The best thing for the animal would be too slaughtered on farm, but with food safety laws, it is illegal (short of building your own abbattoir) to slaughter stock on your own property for consumption for anyone but yourself.
The thing is I am not from the generation that cut down all the trees and continuously cultivated paddocks in spite of the soil erosion. The challenge is try to heal the environment, but to produce a marketable product to pay for it, which so far I haven’t been able to do I am afraid. There is always that pressure there to go back to doing it like it was done before, like your neighbours are doing. I think that is part of the reason that many farmers are so slow to change, because working out how to something different is a big challenge, and farmers are people who have families to look after and overheads like everyone else. My attempts at pasture cropping so far have cost me money but haven’t been very successful. It would have been easy for me to just plough or spray out the paddocks. On the education side of things, when I went to University, I was told things like – you have to get big or get out – they promoted the use of monocultures and so on… so part of the problem is with what farmers were educated to do by experts in the past.
Being paid by the government for environmental services is not viable at the moment either, because that inevitably gets tied up with a top heavy, inflexible bureaucracy that is focused on paying you for using methods, rather than paying you for outcomes. If you use the recommended method, and you are seeing that it isn’t giving the results that are expected – for example, after locking up land like you are told, you are seeing weed infestations instead of regeneration of native plants, to communicate that to a bureaucrat in Sydney or Canberra who never comes out and looks at the problem first hand is pretty hard. And I don’t think taxpayers can afford that anyway. You can see what happens with top heavy, centralised management approaches with the CFA in Victoria during the Vitorian fires – the people in charge either weren’t getting the messages or they were ignoring people on the ground.
I just wanted to communicate that when it comes to how farmers manage the land, it is a complex matter. Some of the environmental degradation in the 20th century, I think was caused from the Soldier Settler scheme. Larger properties were carved up and land given to people perhaps without much farming experience. To try and make a living out of these small parcels of land, inevitably unsustainable stocking rates and cultivation methods were used. To call these people WASPs, however, is really a disrespectful thing to label people who fought for their country, and that is what got me riled. Not all farmers are descended from the landed gentry. Some of my ancestors were Polish and possibly Jewish. I guess the farmers on the Liverpool plains might be of anglo-saxon stock… I don’t know. If so, anglo-saxons seem particularly partial to moroccan lamb.
Dave55, if you go back to Jason’s You Tube link & look on the side of the page to related videos, you will see one there that talks about the belief of the impact of hard hoofed animals. Furious Balancing & myself have just had this conversation on the More Methane thread; start reading at comment 104. Some of the points I could repeat are @ comment 118.
Back to where this thread started about the Liverpool plain & the possibility of it being mined. Dave55 who are making an effort to sound reasonable in your comments about that the mining companies are only exploring at the moment & the farmers shouldn’t be stopping exploration. I believe you must begin to understand how precious top quality soil actually is. In Australia this is a rare & valuable resource. I don’t know the national figures but in Qld top quality only represents 2% of the land area. Simular areas to the Liverpool Plains under threat of mining in Qld are the Haystack Rd & Felton. All farmers would have to agree with …..? Cliff on the 4 Corners program when he said something on the lines of, “you would have to have rocks in your head even thinking about mining this type of country.”
still@downfall
Well forgive me for ‘trying’ to sound reasonable. I know full well how good and rare the soils in the Liverpool plains are. I know the area and climate and ecosystems well. What I’ve been trying to say is that these soils and their productivity should be protected but, if the companies believe that they can extract coal witout compromising the productivity of the plains then why should they be stopped if the science (as independantly assessed shows they are right.
As I have said above – the precautionary principle doesn’t mean no development because you don’t know the science. In the present situation, the water and soil systems and the interactions between the drainage systems of the ridges and aquifers must be better studied; not only to determine how mining should be carried out but also to ensure the sustainability of ag production.
Brian@93
I’m going to disagree respectfully with your observations.
Putting matters into context may be useful.
I am, as you may have gathered, a person of strong views. My primary desire is to speak truth to power. Speaking as someone who for the past 34 years or so would be seen by most as on the far left, I readily accept that truth-as-I-best-apprehend-
it is very different from truth-as-all-non-leftists-apprehend-it (even if non-leftists are not themselves unanimous on truth.
I can’t help that any more than everyone else who thinks they have a handle on things and is passionate about it can. While I always regret it when my observations provoke acrimony, the idea that fear of acrimony would discourage me from calling matters as I see them is utterly implausible. What possible reason could there be for spending time posting material that one can hear accidentally channel surfing on AM radio? In my opinion, this country, like much of the western world, has lived under a suffocating blanket of conservative dogma that can only serve the interests of the elite at the expense of working humanity. And while I do understand that attacking instantiations of that dogma will inevitably disturb the sensibilities of those who see their own selves in these instantiations, I can no more refrain from expressing my self on these matters than a gay person can pretend to be straight for fear of people taking umbrage. I’d prefer thoughtful responses to ad hominem but I am what I am. For me, the question is existential, much as it seems to be for Jason, for example.
Apart from the well-recognised division in politics between left and right, there is another one that applies here. One may say that politics can be divided between those who see systems and process as being the key factors in human welfare and those see the action of individuals as being key. For me the key test is how systems empower individuals to realise their possibility and so you may conclude that I am a systems-focused person. This is important in the context here because while a number here seem to have concluded that I’m deprecating them for their choices as individuals, my real quarrel is with how the system positions people in ways that predispose poor choices. Jason himself expresses this quite clearly when he agonises over how to resolve the balance between sustainable practice and the cost-saving practices of his less sustainable rural peers. And yet I neither condemn him nor his peers, because in the wider system sense, neither can be held accountable for their choices. When all the choices are poor, what can an honest and ethical person do but make poor choices, striving typically with partial knowledge to make what seems the least poor choice?
You say you wanted to “increase understanding between the city and the bush” but what triggered my distress was the oft-repeated meme that there is something inherent in the work of rural producers that drives them to want to work sustainably. In my experience, this is ever claimed as a defence against criticism of poor practice or to deflect systems reform, and so you can hardly be surprised that I would object. Inevitably, the claim is made that proposals for reform express the arrogance and ignorance of city folk. It is a demand to be left alone to do as they please, and though its object is to preserve usages in rural life seen as virtuous, it is not in form different from the kind of claim every interest group–rural or urban — makes to protect its patch. “Self-regulation” was the slogan of the 80s, always made on the basis that intervention by “meddling bureaucrats” and ivory tower academics with no insight into business would be worse. One need not repeat the examples here, but it’s hard to think of any major industry that has not made this claim. Ironically of course, if one looks a little deeper, one always finds that these claims always serve the primary figures in the group typically at the expense of its lesser lights — and so it seems here too. Unsustainable farm practice has not, in the global sense, helped most rural producers. The result globally has been quite the opposite, concentrating control of the land in fewer and fewer hands and driving down the incomes of those who remain. I read a while back that despite the fact that corn feedstock, for example, appears in perhaps 27% of what one finds on US supermarket shelves, some 4% of revenue actually goes to US corn producers. The deregulatory environment of the US industrial food system has put a cross where there might have been a tick in nearly every benchmark for a good food system.
You seem to endorse the view that my tone was “accusatory”, “condescending” and “patronising”. Someone else used the adjective,vindictive. You’re entitled to your views but I disagree. I sought to refute one idea — that being a rural producer leads through self-interest to sustainability, and amidst the welter of outrage from some, they acknowledged that the claim was indeed bunkum, by accepting that until quite recently, practice was unsustainable. Jason still complains of his neighbours doing this. The paradox is obvious.
You say that the use of the initialism RCP was “inflammatory” but you don’t say it was inaccurate. I didn’t intend to provoke outrage, but accuracy surely trumps sentiment, does it not? You are bothered that I claimed Jason was carrying on like a pork chop, but that is precisely what he was doing in the part of the thread up to then with his fatuous strawmen, a thing you characterised as merely “reactive” and borderline “uncivil”. My description was more blunt, but accurate nevertheless.
You relate the incident of the city folk recoiling from those who described themselves as graziers. I’d regard this as regrettable. Nobody in a legal business ought to elicit such a response. If there is controversy about the ethics of a particular business, then IMO, it is the system that predisposes the practice.
I hope people here will accept that however much I might differ with them on what would be worthy in a system designed to produce agricultural goods (and I’m not sure that the gulf in perspective is quite as large as the tone of some of my antagonists here suggests) I bear them no animus at all — quite the reverse — I accept that they are acting in good faith and doing right as best they know it, as do we all. My sorrow at Jason’s particular circumstances is utterly genuine and as I said, I hope that whatever he decides, that matters will work out acceptably well for him.
Fran
I don’t think I have ever claimed that rural people are inherently sustainable. I just made the suggestion that city people aren’t inherently blameless or can seperate themselves morally from activities of farming or mining, just because they don’t directly participate in those activities. I can show that I have actually attempted to do something tangible, environmentally, and I would expect those that would judge and label me according to some acronym, to be able to stand up to scrutiny of their own activities as well.
Fran I literally have to go and only had time to read the first para of yours @ 97.
“Speaking truth to power’, “I am as I am”, but then @ 72 “It would be far better if we all got a stronger and more coherent sense of our connectedness to each other”.
I don’t think Jason feels very powerful, or is powerful in any objective sense.
We are all responsible for ourselves and can’t just say that if there is a problem others will simply have to deal with it.
If you want to achieve connectedness, then there has to be respect, what Carl Rogers called “unconditional personal regard” in fact and the appearance of same, plus a point of connection needs to be found and built upon.
IMO it’s a quite different modus operandi from speaking truth to power and just accept me as I am or it’s your problem.
I’ve got to go, but tonight I’ll try to dig up the link on the “Toxic waste” thread where myriad in Tasmania tells how as a green she made positive contact with farmers. We need it in this country and greens won’t achieve there ends in the long run if we don’t get it.
What they also need to realise is that when they make genuine contact, with respect, their ends will change. They will not be any more a fountain of truth, but will embark on a journey together with others who want to learn and also care for the planet. As surely as the sun comes up tomorrow IMO.
Meanwhile while I’m out try to be gentle with each other or I’ll go through and edit all the crap out. That’s a promise.
Jason@98
You say: “I don’t think I have ever claimed that rural people are inherently sustainable”.
You are right, but my first post was triggered by this:
You continue:
Look back through what I’ve said and you won’t find me disputing that. I made that point several times, including in my last post.
You say:
Again, I’m not, as I’ve said, judging you or indeed, anyone else, and I’ve affirmed your efforts to do the right thing. Most people are trying, as best we can, to do right within the constraints of our settings. My poiunt is to get the settings right so we can all make better choices.
Fran
Dave55 # 96, The Liverpool Plain is out of my territory, I know its reputation & have travelled across it a couple of times. So I’ll take it that you know the area far better than me. To quote you ”water and soil systems and the interactions between the drainage systems of the ridges and aquifers must be better studied; not only to determine how mining should be carried out but also to ensure the sustainability of ag production.”
I agree, we must always undertake research to gain a better understanding of the natural systems we are trying to utilize sustainably. But should the mining companies undertake this research? Do you trust that the results provided by the mining companies be independent & accurate? The only question to ask when it comes to mining is – would mining the ridges affect the plain? Mining the plain should be most definitely off limits.
I felt I need to make those points, because regardless of what farmers in the past have done, in spite of that, the soils of the Liverpool Plains remain productive and valuable. They haven’t been desertified and made useless by agriculture at this stage. I believe whatever damage has been done by agriculture to this land, it is not so damaged that it is beyond salvaging. So yes, we have to address a lot of environmental issues concerning farming, but there have been a few comments on here that have steered the issue away from the ramifications of mining and attacked the farmers instead and insinuations that every farmer out there is murderous, George Bush loving, right wing, White Anglo Saxon Protestant. I don’t see that kind of attitude is going to result in anything positive.
People who promote veganism as an environmentally ethical choice, claim that if we only use farmland for crops directly for human consumption, we would only need 10% of the agricultural land we now use… and it would seem the Liverpool Plains is kind of land they are talking about. Especially if you destock the western division and lock it all up as national park, places like the Liverpool Plains are places where farming is going to have to be undertaken, and quite intensively, if you are going to feed everyone.
That is the reality of the situation, regardless of how much people hate and resent the WASPs that are using that land at the moment. There is a new generation of farmers coming along like me, but we aren’t going to get very far if people are determined to kick us down at every opportunity and make life as hard as possible for us. There is a high suicide rate in rural Australia – could the percieved animosity that rural people feel that city people have for them, or the overwhelming task that seems to face them from the expectations society has of them, that they are made to be responsible and carry the weight of all the wrongs of the past, contribute in any way to that? Maybe not entirely, but should you really be visiting the sins of one generation onto another?
Jason@102
I’m not into guilt tripping and it’s even crazier if you want to do it across generations. Bad stuff happened in the past and to a very significant extent, has authored the present. The people then though could, if we could listen to them, make the same claim, and so it goes. That’s a waste of emotional energy. Let’s deal with things as they stand, learning from past mistakes and move forward.
I’m not sure of the numbers for deriving all protein from non-animal sources — 10% sounds a little ambitious in practice, but certainly, a lot of land could in theory be returned to its natural state if most protein were sourced other than from animals. I forget the numbers for spirulina, but the multiples are huge compared with meat. We could probably make savings in refrigeration too, since grain doesn’t require as much refrigeration as meat or even eggs. And since meat contains watr, meat exports and transport are even more energy demanding than foodstuff that travels dry. We’d also need a lot less water. And we could devote some of those savings to rehabilitating the land.
But that’s not the world as it is or likely to be anytime soon, so I’m in favour of something more along the lines of that Salatin model I pointed you to, especially since there seem to be some positive returns to the land in doing things this way. And more broadly, I’d like to see the system relatively reward this kind of responsible stewardship.
Fran
I too have worked extensively with farmers and farmer organisations attempting to deal with land management problems, which have largely arisen from mismanagement of our natural resources.
My observation is that (at most) 10% of those whom I have dealt with have been willing to countenance ANY change to their activities which may threaten their “bottom line”. This 10% or so includes those who only undertake remedial (or similarly appropriate) projects if given government funding.
Agriculture, and its associated activities has lead to greater environmental costs to Australia than any other activity we have undertaken, such as the disasters of dryland salinity, the destruction/disruption of the Murray Darling catchment, and virtually all of the watersheds along the eastern seaboard, the incipient destruction of the mitchell grass plains in western Queensland (through weed invasion and their deliberate spread by “farmers”), the destruction of most of our dry rangelands through overgrazing (by both ferals and stock). This destruction of ecosystems, and catchments has resulted in whole ecosystems disappearing, and in the highest rate of extinction among native species experienced anywhere.
The agricultural sector claims “we grow your food”, while ignoring that a far higher percentage of such production is in fact exported, and that all of Australia’s food requirements could, in fact be produced on a sustainable basis on a fraction of the land being currently degraded through irresponsibility and/or ignorance. Thus agriculture (as practiced) can be obviously classed as an extractive industry, along with mining and forestry, neither of which approach the sheer magnitude (in terms of land area affected) of agriculture.
That many of the individual farmers have made fortunes in degrading “the commons” for private wealth is incontestable – that they should then demand payment from the “commonwealth” in order to reform their practices, or before they will even take token action to address the problems which have arisen through their own actions (and from which they have profited, often greatly), gives the lie to the “farmer as conservationist” meme being peddled by some here.
FWIW, the few “enlightened” farmers I have encountered who actually do manage their properties “for the long term”, do so without seeking public monies, and generally have not experienced the problems faced through overstocking and inappropriate land management decisions being faced by their peers. Unfortunately, such examples are rare, in my experience.
So, while agreeing with the general thrust of those who oppose these mining ventures on the grounds of “lack of available knowledge with respect to consequences on aquifers etc.”, I also feel that we have here a privileged section of our community engaging in “NIMBYism” of the worst sort. From the programme, not only did the featured farmers reveal their ignorance about natural process, but also their lack of credibility wrt “green issues” (as typified by the two complaining that they weren’t allowed to clear some cypress trees).
BTW, my rant is not particularly aimed at any individuals, but is intended as a more general critique of the lie being peddled that
.
Some are, but the majority, from my observations and experience are not, and indeed, one of the greater barriers to change in the rural sector (at least in Tas.) is the fear of adverse peer pressure being experienced by becoming perceived as a “greeny”.
It just occured to me, a little bit of an irony with the whole Anglo-Saxon thing. I remeber in school learning about how Anglo-Saxons developed rotational farming, rotating their fields instead of farming a field to the soil was exhausted and then moving onto new ground. I have heard some racist things said referring to farmers of Irish stock being poorer farmers than Anglo-farmers, because they didn’t use rotation as much, which is rediculous – I don’t think ethnicity today is going to be a good determinant of whether someone will be a good or bad farmer.
But I think this reduction of land-use if we all adopt a vegan diet, has to allow enough land for rotation. The old Anglo-saxon system was a three field system. So if you take the amount of land we need to feed the world, you will have to multiply this by a factor of at least a third, and if you are not going to use domesticated animals as part of that rotation like the 15th century Anglo-Saxons did, you are probably going to have to look at mechanical mulching and ripping like Dave55 mentioned earlier. I think a grass phase benefits cropping land because it improves soil structure, helps control pathogens, and improves the water cycle. Very rarely do I get run-off to fill dams on my property, and quite often I have dams that are completely dry, whereas I can look over the fence and see dams whose catchments are on minimum til farmland filling up with water after a rain event.
Don’t tell anyone I am damming water on my property using grass, or I might have the Department of Natural Resources out here.
Jason, I still do not see why you, as someone who obviously cares about the land, need to throw your lot in with farmers in general. We all know that some are on the ball with what their environment needs while others are struggling. Sounds to me like you are a pioneer in land management and it is never easy when you in the forefront.
I was being a bit mischievous with my wasp comment (apology to you, if it hurt) regarding the farming community on the Liverpool Plains. To turn that area into a coal mine is just so crazy that I cannot believe that it is being contemplated. Mind you, if the nsw government had access to nuclear weapons I would be making plans to leave Australia. There judgement sucks.
I must say, still, that it is ironical to see these wealthy landholders who claimed generations of connection with the land were now being trounced by a new wave of bigger, meaner, batters. Humans, animals and trees had been cleared out for their home and now the mighty mining industry, that seems to rule above everybody and everything, is attempting to walk over them.
To see Barnaby, out of breath, trying to catch up with Brown was a special Four Corners moment.
Jason,
Not sure if this is any help at present, but an ecologist friend mentioned recently that at Uni they were told: European pasture grasses (such as most of those transferred from England to Australia last century) in the structure of their leaves can cope with cattle or sheep munching them, or being mowed by a lawn mower. The plants survive.
Australian native grasses tend to be lifted out by their roots if munched by cattle or sheep. The leaf doesn’t easily break when ’side-swiped’. The plant dies. I think the marsupial biting action is different (from sheep, cattle).
Now I do NOT know if this wide generalisation applies to the grasses on your farm. Just thought it might be worth mentioning as a possible separate factor (apart from trampling). But it may be a QLN-FS [Quite Ludicrous Non-Farmer Suggestion]
cheers
I’ve been following this thread for a couple of days, but have been sick with the flu and too spacey to comment, and also didn’t really want to step onto the merry-go-round. But as I’ve been named, and my brain is half-working, I’ll give it a go.
smidge of background: I worked for a little over 10 years in environmental policy and natural resource management, mainly for the feds; the last 5 of which were spent in an on-ground policy implementation role that involved direct engagement with both the farming sector, the environment sector and government / NGOs. I grew up rurally (country vet’s daughter) and have spent much of my life with farmers and living rurally; and I’m a green (political party).
I’ll start by saying that I really hope both Jason and Fran can find the mental space and calm to have a constructive conversation, as it’s pretty clear to me from reading the whole thread a couple of times that you’re actually -basically- on the same side.
But the really heated emotion that has come into this thread despite this needs to be taken seriously as a very good indication that – whether people think it’s true or not – farmers have a strong perception of being villified and scapegoated by urban dwellers – and you can’t tell people not to feel something, you can only acknowledge and respect it, and adjust communication accordingly if you want to succeed.
A few observations from my experience (NB these are not aimed at anyone in particular in this thread):
– to understand agriculture in this country the personalisation has to be taken out of the equation. It’s no good blaming farmers for ‘unsustainable practices’ when there is ample evidence that many are historic in origin; others were/are actively promoted and paid for by government; and most are now largely driven by major externalities beyond a farmers’ control of which the principle one is the market.
– while people expect food to continue to be cheap or even get cheaper, whilst simultaneously expecting farmers to sustainably manage their farm, they have no place in an educated debate about farming practices IMO. Equally, treating farming as if it’s simply an economic activity that can be analysed as any other industry is a useless furphy.
– it’s hard to ask people who routinely work 14 hour days to find the time and patience to constructively engage with the non-farming community; nevertheless farmers owe it to themselves and the rest of us to be positive advocates for what they do, and to lose the chip if possible. The rest of us owe it to them to listen. The fact that farmers work longer hours than virtually any other industry or small business employee in the country should be a reminder at the very least that agriculture is not a typical business.
– agriculture consists of a whole range of activities under such a broad heading. It’s not helpful or appropriate for eg to compare grazing and meat raising to intensive vegetable cropping or dryland wheat cropping. They are very different beasts.
– there is such a thing as enlightened self interest. Rather than questioning the motives of farmers, we’d be much better off focusing, as others have said, on the external factors and costs that make sustainable farming a hard ask for many in the industry, even if they (farmers) are fervent supporters.
For starters, farmers are nearly always price takers, not price makers, and the globalisation of the agricultural market has direct impacts on an individual property owner’s ability to make good decisions. Just one small eg: in NW Tasmania which is fantastic vegetable growing country, farmers are generally on contract to multi nationals like Simplot, who supply a global market and our national supermarket chains. Farmers have to harvest potatoes (one large contract) when they are told. In many instances a harvest coincides with the start of intensive rains in the NW of Tas. So farmers are forced to harvest knowing full well a big rain is coming that will cost them topsoil. No choice, even though it will cost them valuable soil and they know it’s wrong. At the same time the contract means they make a few cents to the kilo of potato.
What are we doing? Well the government funds various research and remediation methods to try and help farmers find ways to harvest that minimise topsoil loss. Wouldn’t it be better if we could remove that market pressure and do something about the farm gate price? But while people expect to eat all vegetables and fruits in all seasons at cheap prices, farmers remain at the bottom of the food pile, and our land and water resources and biodiversity pay the ultimate prices.
I believe very strongly that we should be paying farmers for ecosystem services, but can also well understand Jason’s antipathy towards such schemes when run by large bureaucracies. However we need to persevere and get it right, because it’s the only way I can see other than people being prepared to pay significantly more for fresh fruit and veg to ensure that the market provides the right price signals to encourage sustainable farming.
For an interesting small study into indexing ecosystem services, have a look at the Tamar NRM Sustainability Index
A brief word on organic, as The Brown Wiggle raised it. It’s true that large-scale monocultural organic really isn’t much of an improvement on large-scale monocultural non-organic. My basic rule of thumb is that with the exception of native pasture grazing for livestock, large-scale monocultures of anything are ultimately not a sustainable way to manage a farm. However there is increasing evidence that well managed mixed crop organic farms are just as productive as non-organic and provide substantive benefits in terms of reduced inputs (fertiliser etc.) and remove much of the conflict in terms of production vs sustainable practices. The question is will people pay for such food, and can we pry away various vested interests from the agricultural sector to allow such an approach a level playing field.
The Brown Wiggle listed off an accurate and positive list of changed agricultural practises based on zero tillage, integrated pest management and other mechanisms that are finding rapid adoption and greatly improve farming practices. What’s a little amusing is that many are either a) a revival of old techniques that lost favour during the ‘chemical revolution’ 50s and 60s and/or b) are techniques long advocated for by organic / permaculture proponents that got routinely and almost ritualistically derided until the last decade or so by conventional agricultural scientists.
In terms of the actual thread topic:
– personally I side with the farmers. An independent study of the potential impacts of the proposed mining on prime agricultural land, and water resources, is a reasonable ask. Prime agricultural land – and water – are a scarcity in Australia. That the farmers themselves may be using the aquifers in an ultimately unsustainable manner doesn’t somehow make it ok to hand over that resource for mining interests. We have no shortage of coal; we have a major shortage of good agricultural land and water resources. Perhaps what this conflict should trigger is a more sustainable approach to the aquifers for long-term farming sustainability.
Jason, I take my hat off to your efforts to farm your property sustainably, and I really hope that conversion to native pasture pays off – soon! I take it that you’ve looked at veg management agreements, covenanting etc. as possible means to raise revenue? I appreciate you don’t want to be tied by gov’t reg, but there’s gov’t reg and gov’t reg, if you know what I mean.
Good on you, myriad !!!
Well said Myriad.
I can endorse that …
Fran
Pterosaur
interested to know where / what you were doing with farmers in Tas, and when? No accusation implied, just curious?
I’d point out a couple of things vis your long list of environmental ills in this country and their links to farming:
a) until only very recently (like a decade or so) farmers were penalised financially by Australian state governments for *not* clearing their land. This accelerated the loss of native vegetation exponentially. It is a fact frequently forgotten and cannot be repeated enough IMO – we had a policy for decades in this country of actively encouraging private land owners to clear native vegetation. The impact this had on our biodiversity and agriculture was if not catastrophic, ‘minimally devestating’.
b) science mislead farmers all over the place. A lot of the salinity we experience can be pointed directly at imported irrigation and land use practices that were actively promoted to farmers by government. The tragic thing about salinity is it takes several decades – if not a century – between on-ground practice and the problem arising. It’s taken us far too long to make the link. Similarly, scientists and government policy persisted with a strong european command-and-control approach to Australian agriculture far past the point where we actually had the empirical evidence to know that Australia is radically different and needed / needs to be managed differently. One only needs to look at the list of environmental / agricultural weekds in this country that were first actively introduced and promoted to farmers by government – for eg pampas grass and gorse – as good examples.
c) the signals sent by government and market, that started right back with original land grants in this country, which continue to support large farms with onsite managers and drive farming families off the land have contributed significantly to land degradation. I hate to sound the ‘evil multinationals’ horn, but there’s certainly a lot of truth to it. To understand where our agricultural sector could head in these terms, one only needs to look at the USA, from which we’ve adopted many of our worst practices.
d) none of this removes the fact that farmers are also responsible for the state of our resources; it does however also in part explain why they are so resistant to change and taking government advice!
cheers Fran. I hope you keep trying to discuss this topic and related ones, because lord knows, there’s a shortage of non-rural dwellers who take an informed and active interest.
at the risk of being seen to bomb the thread, one more quickie:
- are people aware that the Rudd Gov’t axed one of Australia’s premier agriculture-environment research bodies, Land and Water Australia?
I link to Sen. Rachel Siewart because her analysis is informed, and spot on.
Ambigulous #107
That’s an interesting idea. At present, I don’t think there are any marsupials that will eat a mature grass plant of any species. The kangaroo is a wonderfully adapted animal that can travel large distances and it has the grazing habits of a browsing rather than grazing animal; ie, it prefers short tender grasses, and will actually prefer a short green wheat plant to a short green Danthonia plant – and why not, when you can hop a few hundred yards, jump a fence and have something that is leafier and juicier and sweeter, and leave the poor, mature native stuff to the frustrated old Bovine that can only look over the fence with longing.
I am not quite sure how one could use Kangaroos to mulch grass – it is hard enough to do with domestic stock. I have noticed that cattle will pull out the odd native grass plant, but if things are going well, these older plants are pulled out at a less frequent rate than the rate they are being replaced by seedling grasses of the same species. Allowing grassplants of any species to recover after grazing and replenish their root system certainly helps. Where I am getting bareground from plants being pulled out by stock, are on old cultivation paddocks, paddocks that were cultivated for several decades, which are infested with Scarab Beetle grubs. These grubs cut off the plants root system below the ground, and having lower grazing pressure and allowing greater seeding in these areas is necessary. On the ridges where it has been too rocky to farm, the higher level of biodiversity seems to prevent this damage done by scarab beetles.
Thanks, Myriad
there is at least one thing I need to correct you on. Not all farmers are working long hours. I’ve noticed at least on farmer spending time on the internet in the last 24 hours rather than tending his fields.
I am actually heartened that I have found such reasonable perspectives on here. I am aware that this a left of centre orientated blog, but I don’t really think a lot about where I fit in the political spectrum, and I vote according to my conscience and who is tabling the best policies at the time. I think you can see this reflected in the bush too, by the number of independents out here, including Tony Windsor. The Free Market doctrine of the liberals isn’t entirely embraced with enthusiasm in the bush.
One suggestion I would make to Kevin Rudd is to convey to the United States and Europe is that Australian livestock producers will pay for their methane emissions on the condition that the US and the EU reduce market distorting subsidies to their own farmers. That might give people like me at least half a chance to absorb an 18% increase in costs.
Apology accepted, Joe2. It is sometimes necessary to play the Devil’s advocate. I did rather like seeing Mr Duddy in the kitchen cooking Moroccan Lamb. He either sent his maid out of the kitchen before the cameras roled, or he is a New Age Sensitive WASP. If you can get the landed gentry doing that sort of thing, maybe you can get them to change in other ways as well. And remember, he did work with Bob Brown on that Bill, and that isn’t something you’d imagine a Blue Blood would ever do.
And Jason,
They could also reset the way they “protect” the price of corn, since what this does is ensure masses of really cheap corn, the beneficiaries of which include those operating those cattle feedlots — i.e. US agribusiness.
This current system goes back to the second Nixon administration which, under Earl Butz threw out the depression-era .”Ever Normal Granary” in favour of a system of guaranteed prices, which simply encouraged the production of a lot of corn that would not have been produced, but for the guarantee.
The consequence has been seriously cheap corn, the use of corn in biofuels etc …
And while I usually like to stick my oar in anyway, reading this thread has been very frustrating because people who could probably benefit mutually from constructive dialogue have been pressed into the ritual dances of their home trenches.
But it’s now becoming, I hope, as productive for those genuinely engaged as it has been interesting and informative for the likes of me. Blessed are the peacemakers indeed.
Less Noh, more yes!
Hi Jason
lol @ the farming hours comment. Yes I know it’s somewhat of a generalisation these days, but I have to say that the vast majority of farmers I interacted with in my previous job were still working the traditional up-at-5am, down tools at 6pm routine, and sometimes longer.
Agree re: Rudd & US/Europe subsidies. Although I think it’s worth pointing out that not all subsidies are the same with regard to Europe in particular. Some are actually a crude form of ecosystem service payment, but there’s certainly a need for a major review of them all.
The other thing that Rudd et al should be doing is pushing hard and leading with R&D funding on carbon sequestration via soil carbon and other good agricultural practises. Australia could lead in this, and it should be part of carbon markets. Instead we’ve run, not walked away, and this new government has gone far beyond what I was expecting in terms of bad ag policy, in de-funding agricultural R&D, at this most critical of times. I knew they’d take a very cynical view of a lot of agricultural support programs (everything gets viewed through a lib/nat rural pork barrelling lens), but I didn’t expect that stupidity.
Fran, if you haven’t already read Michael Pollan’s the Omnivore’s Dilemma which elegantly lays out the whole disaster of subsidised corn in the USA, I highly recommend it.
It would be wonderful to get such a concession from the US, Fran.
It is not just subsidies and price protection either. I think a lot of farmers are realising they have been conned by the Green Revolution. Being told that if we produce more of something, we will make more money, and instead seeing our terms of trade continually decline. It is quite an entertaining to indulge in a conspiracy theory that it was intentionally orchestrated by the big supermarkets. Let’s not mention Monsanto.
It certainly would be good for me if there was a decline in the feedlot industry in the US, though I have to confess a lot of my stock go to feedlots here. If supply reduced, however, and prices per unit increased, it would make grass fattened beef production more viable, and income wouldn’t be so driven by production. It’s a complicated ethical and economic dynamic.
Thanks myriad for your timely intervention and informative posts.
dave55, still@ etc.
Not sure if an ‘independent study’ is often requested by the Dept? The company is required to provide an EIS and the Dept would then ask for more info and/or ask for modifications and/or provide approval based on the application/EIS etc. Unless there is a decent stink.
With a bit of a history of longwalling now, the southern coalfields of NSW (part overlap with Sydney Water Catchment… see links below to the latest Dept. of Industries Review of the impacts, dated July 2008, and second link to a 2005 report on the same, by the Scientific Services Section, NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change.
On first lay reading, some subtle differences in tone and emphasis between the two.
You can also google up the responses to the Review from environmental groups (RiversSOS and TEC etc) most of whom who made submissions to the Inquiry.
“Not happy, Ian” sums up the responses and it’s probably worth reading their detailed responses for what they believe was left out, the narrow terms of reference and so on.
“Impacts of Underground Coal Mining on Natural Features in the Southern Coalfield”
http://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/planningsystem/pdf/report_southern_coalfields_final_jul08.pdf
Ecological Impacts of Longwall Mining in the Southern Coalfields of NSW – A Review.
http://duap.nsw.gov.au/planningsystem/pdf/wyonginquiry_submissions_deccattach2.pdf
Thanks Myriad
As a vegetarian I actually read TOV a couple of years back. I expected to hate it, (yes, I often enjoy reading stuff that offends me — weird!) since it was making a case to which I was extremely hostile, and the last two chapters struck me as largely self-indulgent rubbish — what the author himself dubbed “hunter porn”, but that aside, the book was an excellent and well-documented read, which changed my mind on the whole question of rearing livestock and provoked an interest in the agriculture question.
That and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which set out, amongst other things, the horrors of the industrial feedlot and the link with MacDonalds-style eating in the US.
myriad,
good on you for your words that have brought closer dialogue. I’m flat busy and would have liked to engage, but things got so heated so quickly, didn’t have the time and brain space to do so …
This thread has opened up a few issues that I waste much time and brain space on.
Two things: 1. We r not doin it rite and 2. There is no one group who has the high ground, so like #118, ’s not good to have discussions from opposing trenches
None of the conventional approaches to sustaining the good earth exist, I have my doubts on carbon markets as total rural renewal (it’s just a part thereof), and the Rudd government’s funding policies for the environment have actually gone backwards, if that could actually be believed. Xenophon’s interventions to get funding for the MDB is being wasted because there is not a viable plan and too much haste. Just because the problem is urgent, doesn’t mean that an urgent reponse is the correct one.
Hi myriad,
worked mainly in NE, (ICM), and later western Queensland, as part of “community driven” processes, and for govt. in various capacities directly involved with LM – all except the govt. stuff in this century. Close enough ?
And yes, I am well aware of the points you make and their role in the current situation – what I most object to, though, is the denial of your point (d)
by many of those I have dealt with (farmers and rural lobbyists in particular). not to mention clowns such as the NQ grazier who, upon hearing of the pending “listing” of buffel grass as a noxious weed, was boasting how he’d recently got several 100kg of seed from a “mate” so he could beat the ban.
Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no shortage of such “cowboys” in agriculture, and they are far more numerous and influential than those committed to sustainable practice.
And none of these factors, IMHO, mitigate against the argument that, in terms of agriculture, that what has and is governing these pursuits is the “principle” of “privatizing profits, while socializing losses” which is so readily ignored or swept under the carpet by most commentators.
The scrapping of LWA is regrettable and short sighted IMHO, and continues the process of devaluing approaches such as ICM to land management started with the cuts to its predecessor ( the Land and Water Research and Development Corp.,)by the previous government, despite the exceptional work it was doing.
Myriad,
Thankyou, you most certainly haven’t bombed the thread, rather you have done much to defuse the bomb. The last time I was indoors comment 104 was the latest contribution. Pterosaur I hope you read Myriad’s comments a couple of times. I came in after working out something rational to say but Myriad has done a far better job than my limited ability.
There has been so much disengagement between urban & rural people that it’s almost a different culture. If you try to express yourself improperly to a different culture you will not be listened to. Recently in QLD there has been yet another State Govt imposed natural resource law. I heard on my local ABC radio one of the architect’s who drew up the Landcare concept that Rick Farley & Phillip Toyne took to Bob Hawk, say with deep melancholy “They do not understand rural people, this will only harden the mindset.”
Rant alert
Instead Govt’s availing extension officers to work together with farmers towards sustainable futures; these services have been withdrawn & the Pterosaurs of the world are given big sticks to watch over the peasantry. Instead of research for a better future, it is canned; good example is Land & Water Australia. Instead of being economically secure so as to enact proper environmental practises, the market has lost so much contact with natural systems that it imposes plenties to those who try to do the right thing. And then to top it off the farming community is told we are simply a bunch of a***holes. Well at least that is how it comes across
Rant endth.
still@downfall,
I have never had, nor even desired a “big stick” to hold over the peasantry as you suppose. I have worked cooperatively with farmers for most of my working life, and have much in common with the individuals I have met and successfully dealt with – however, like Fran, I still call bullsh*t when I see it – and now retired, see no reason not to do so.
Do you deny the evidence of malpractice (lost ecosystems, extinctions, degradation of public resources) I referred to ?
Do you deny the fact that many landholders do whatever they can to avoid or circumvent environmental protection laws and regulations ?
Do you deny that profiteering at the expense of the environment is a case of “socialising losses and privatising profit” ?
Do you deny that peer relationships have a role in forming people’s actions ?
Perhaps you could tell me what gave you the idea that I had or wanted a “big stick”? Or do you just like evidence free assertions ?
FWIW, I regard your assertion as both personally and professionally insulting , and request you withdraw it.
And on the other side of the farming debate – here’s a slidey type presentation (says commerical in confidence but was online) – from some “strategic thinking” mob on oz family farms – presented at the 2007 South Australian Agribusiness Conference – entitled:
“Can the traditional family farm survive and compete over the long-term and, if so, how will it be different?”
(It’s a pdf ’bout 1.7mb) Warning – a bit wrist-slitting for vulnerable family famers if you want to buy into their prognosis.
http://www.mckinna.com.au/uploads/downloads/homepage/RuralSolutionsSA260707.pdf
The pressures on oz family farmers to compete and also do the right thing are pretty huge.
And as someone who’s eaten mostly 3 meals a day of 99% oz farm produced food for 47 years….and plans to go on hopefully doing the same for many decades..it’s past time many of the issues raised by this type of argibusiness modelling/projections were discussed in the context of sustainability for both the environment and the economic survival of Australian family farms.
There was an unrelated thread on LP recently where some were of the view that many famers should just walk off the land, but I think it’s a bigger discussion than that.
still@downfall, you gotta learn to leave some stuff to go thru to the keeper. srly.
Jason @ 105, it’s possible (as I’m sure you know) to do crop rotation without leaving fields fallow (or at least not for a whole year). You can still rotate legumes – grains – brassica to get very high productivity without massively impoverishing the soil and without ending up with a huge nemotode load (or so my Roseworthy-educated son tells me – I’m going to put a lot of this into practice myself when I retire to the rural squalor of a 20 acre paddock I own).
Hi Pterosaur,
I’ve not worked in Qld, but all my colleagues who did told me that thinking of it as Australia’s Texas was pretty accurate.
I certainly agree that responsibility for decline in the state of our natural resources rests at least in part with the farming community; I’ve focussed on the other side of the equation in this thread because I think it’s a lot less known and I also do think things are changing. Cascading crises tend to drive that, if nothing else.
As to this:
Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no shortage of such “cowboys” in agriculture, and they are far more numerous and influential than those committed to sustainable practice.
ain’t it the truth? And why do they always seem to either be in politics, looking to go into politics or at least be enabled by various politicians.
I think the farming community in Australia has about the same rate of adoption and adaptation to new technologies etc. as most sectors, but things are distorted by the players you are talking about, and they in my experience are nearly always wealthy larger farmers riding on generations of fat from various questionable practices ranging from their land management to labour market behaviours. That puts the adoption rate of 10% you mentioned in your first post about on par with rates of adoption in most parts of the community. Then there’s another 20% who typically follow the first pioneers quite quickly, then a 40% who sit in the middle and take their time, a final tail to wag the dog, and then the usual intractable 5-10% that only legislation – well enforced – will budge.
I do think that your average farmer is often suspicious of new techniques and paradigms precisely because in Australia there is a history of gov’t getting it wrong, interfering with little incentive offered to ‘do the right thing’ and just general political bastardy. Take Managed Investment Schemes as a current modern example.
Speaking of which – Jo, looking through that presentation you linked to, what struck me was the not-particularly-subtle support for MIS, one of the biggest rorts ever perpetuated on rural Australia and still going despite the collapse of the tree plantation spruikers; interesting how it didn’t mention that MIS have also inflated rural land prices well beyond the grasp of farmers – how can you compete with a company that can buy prime agricultural land and cover it in pine trees, and offset the entire thing for tax?
That’s true, David. If, as some suggest, we don’t use or minamalise use of so called ‘artificial’ fertilizers, we are probably going to undertake practises such as green manure farming, which effectively means you are not harvesting those plants.
Unless the rules of physics and chemistry are different to what I think, then even the best farming practises are not going to be sustainable if you are sending produce off the farm, you are removing at least some nutrients, and if farming is to be cyclicle rather than consumptive, then the fact is that people that are eating that produce are going to have to send their sh… I mean ‘wastes’ back to the farm.
Pterosaur and fran – it looks like I was the one that riled you so. Very sorry for that. I’ve given you plenty of examples of how modern broadacre farming is benefiting the environment, I’ve even given examples of how the beloved organic industry is maybe not the saviour of the environment after all. Maybe a few examples of how modern broadacre farming is damaging to the environment rather than out of date generalisations. I’d love to debate something concrete instead of being preached too without actual issues being bought up.
By the way, it is very short sighted to say that we can cut back agriculture because we export most of our food anyway. If everyone did that, 80% (guess) woiuld starve.
Ambigulous – “Not sure if this is any help at present, but an ecologist friend mentioned recently that at Uni they were told: European pasture grasses (such as most of those transferred from England to Australia last century) in the structure of their leaves can cope with cattle or sheep munching them, or being mowed by a lawn mower. The plants survive.
Australian native grasses tend to be lifted out by their roots if munched by cattle or sheep. The leaf doesn’t easily break when ’side-swiped’. The plant dies. I think the marsupial biting action is different (from sheep, cattle).
Now I do NOT know if this wide generalisation applies to the grasses on your farm. Just thought it might be worth mentioning as a possible separate factor (apart from trampling). But it may be a QLN-FS [Quite Ludicrous Non-Farmer Suggestion]”
I just came in from the rain and there has been loads of interesting stuff said here, and I’ll go back and read it more thoroughly when I’ve got some more time but I wanted to address the above from Ambi – as far as what I have witnessed here in South Oz, I’ve seen nothing to support that claim at all, in fact I’d argue that the opposite is true. Some of the most species rich native grassy remnants are places that have a history of being grazed or repeatedly mown….in fact temperate native grasslands tend not to flourish without it, and will quickly be consumed by introduced weeds without some kind of management, it’s a bit of a crazy balancing act trying to get it right though [which, btw, is the motivation for my user name here].
Jason, you posted while I was writing my post last night and I missed what you said about fire…again that’s more food for thought, thanks.
My mentor in the 90s told me that to be careful when someone turns up in a Dept of Agriculture vehicle. He reckoned they should have sticker on their vehicle that said, ‘Beware, We May Send You Broke!’ He also said pretty much the same thing about Holistic Management Educators. That was pretty harsh, but the thing is over the years I have had no shortage of advice, and a lot of that advice has been pretty good, but the thing is if I did everything that everyone told me to do I’d have a budget deficit four times the size of my gross income. And that is a very important thing for people who advise or work with farmers, or anyone else for that matter, that you can’t really give categorical advice unless you sit down and work through a budget that will determine if it is financially possible.
Of course there are cowboys on the land. There are plenty of cowboys wearing business suits too. What was that about a Homebush development a few years ago that required kangaroos to be culled or shifted to make way for development. Flora and Fauna have been impacted due to development along the coast as well.
In nature, an organism will move into an environment if it has the opportunity, when the conditions are condusive for its survival and reproduction. Weeds are an example that if you don’t address what is making conditions suitable for the survival and reproduction of that weed, then it can be pretty hard to get on top of no matter how much money you throw at it. Maybe the same applies to people as well. If you want people with certain attitudes to land to manage that land, then maybe it just might work if things are put in place that favour the success of those kind of people. People will often react to your negative expectations of them, and if you approach them with a negative attitude, they are probably going to fulfill your expectations… and that sets up a whole chain of reactive conflict.
thanks myriad, as a total non-expert I put that up, because I sussed there are agendas within agendas and as I said, it’s way past time that all not-so-subtle vested interests were unmasked, and wherever they fall on the great divide. Hopefully, some in the audience at the conference made the same point.
My only general point in linking to that presentation was that there are significant pressures coming from every direction and without goodwill, good policies, good science, good practice and so on, who knows where Oz agriculture will be in 20-30 years time? (I’ve noted my own not-subtle vested interest in wanting to eat quality local produce 3×365 for reasonable prices until I fall off the twig.)
keep it coming myriad.
Jo #128, you are right,”you gotta learn to leave some stuff to go thru to the keeper”. In the interests of calming this thread down to a rational debate I should not have cut loose. Like Jason I do get so bloody frustrated & angry, when I personally am trying to do the right thing.
Pterosaur, I went back to #125 & I see you haven’t worked for Qld Govt agency “this century”, its been since 2003 that cooperation has gone out of the window, carrots withdrawn & a theat of a big stick. But I’m afraid your comments got under my skin, just like mine did to you. I do not believe I have not said that everything & everyone has in the past & is now working perfectly in rural production systems. But lets get over this vintictive stuff & learn to achive more balanced systems.
Allow me to again make this point from my comment above since it got overshadowed from the next paragraph. Pehaps I should take heed of the second sentence.
There has been so much disengagement between urban & rural people that it’s almost a different culture. If you try to express yourself improperly to a different culture you will not be listened to. Recently in QLD there has been yet another State Govt imposed natural resource law. I heard on my local ABC radio one of the architect’s who drew up the Landcare concept that Rick Farley & Phillip Toyne took to Bob Hawk, say with deep melancholy “They do not understand rural people, this will only harden the mindset.”
Jo #128.
Looked at your link. If that is correct, maybe we will have to rely more on coal to balance our terms of trade.
Is there any advice on what industries retired family farmers should enter once they’ve walked off the farm?
Seems to me, these days, owning any kind of business is not a good idea. You need to either be on a wage, or have shares in multi-national companies.
BW,
No, you didn’t particularly rile me – more the argument you mounted @7 which does not match my experience.
Further, you seem to think that I am advocating that we should cut back agriculture – not at all – merely pointing out the implicit bullsh*t in the argument commonly made by those defending the status quo, or attempting to deny any responsibility for land and water resource degradation, in the terms of “we’re the food basket”.
My memory indicates that something over 90% of Oz agricultural production is exported, although I wouldn’t bet anything on that figure.
S@D,
agree – I was unaware that cooperation had been withdrawn – OTOH, even under the cooperative community NRM processes I have been involved in, I have been exposed to levels of corruption and fraud which I wouldn’t have thought possible, and all without the involvement of any govt. workers.
I’m not into vindictiveness, just sick of seeing the same (discredited) arguments against change being mounted again and again, by vested interests which continue to profiteer at the expense of the “commons”.
myriad,
thanks for your comments – I feel a bit more “free” to voice some of my concerns now that I have retired (although my interest remains). WRT to the various percentages you’ve alluded to – seems to be another instance of the 80/20 rule – 10% at either extreme, and those in the middle, who were those who it was possible to assist and educate.
I agree that there has been some improvements made in the situations being faced across OZ, although I suspect there’s a fair degree more to do (as an understatement !)
jason & furious balancing,
thanks for your detailed knowledge of the introduced pasture leaf grasses comapred with native grasses. My ecologist friend told me the European grasses had adapted to the grazing habits of European beasts. Maybe that’s inaccurate too?
I very much welcome the calmer tone of discussion here now. I, for one, have much to learn and digest.
It might be accurate, Ambigulous, and say my knowledge is very detail as regards to leaf structure. They may have adapted specifically to those animals. Trouble is we may have to bring back to life a Diprotodon and Procoptodon to see what the mechanics of their grazing action is; though perhaps your ecologist friend is talking about the reconstruction of these animals in relation to these grasses. It maybe that the grasses I am managing here are adapted to Diprotodon and Procoptodon grazing, rather than that of the grey kangaroo. We probably need a paleontologist to answer that question.
I suppose if we to find some Diprotodon DNA it would be unethical to inject that DNA into a bovine embryo. I could see marketing opportunities in selling Diprodoton steak.
I wouldn’t say, I meant.
After some research, it seems Diprotodon ate leaves rather than grass, so I guess I was mistaken. Curious though that there are native grasses that have their growth points much closer to the ground than other native grasses, so maybe this is an adaption to grazing by grey kangaroos, afterall.
Can’t get much lower than a grazing kangaroo! We were amazed years ago to observe a swamp wallaby pause, lower itself and neatly slip under the lowest wire of a barbed wire fence (bordering a beef cattle farm) then hop on up the grassy slope.
Not so impressed years later when a larger wallaby used one paw to steady itself on the rose archway in the home garden, while the other paw transferred very young rose leaves into its mouth.
There’s a limit to my admiration of skill.
The way kangaroos graze certainly differs greatly, this was mentioned by Chris, or was it still@d? in the methane thread. My main problem with what your ecologist friend said is with the notion that cattle etc will rip a native grass out of the ground, and it’s my experience that native grasses are some of the most deeply rooted of grass species, again I can only speak from experience in SA, but recalcitrant is a word that springs to mind when describing native grasses [with thanks to P Keating], they are really very hard to pull out. Over here most species have their biomasss close to the ground, and they don’t form such dense, rank clumps you might see with some of the introduced species, this is most likely an adaptation to the grazing of macropods as well as to the so called fire-stick farming of Aboriginal people. As I inferred earlier, I think the main problem with the grazing of hooved animals is not so much in the damage to the grasses themselves but to the soil binding species – mosses, lichens, as well as the herbaceous plants that grow in inter-gussock spaces. The effluent from non-native grazers also ha more of an impact than kangaroo poo, as we discussed elsewhere. Ambi, for a range of reasons, I think cattle aren’t appropriate in arid regions, but I do think that grazing in more temperate regions can, on balance, yield some benefits, both in terms of food production and in terms of grassland management, but I think that rotation and resting, may be the key…again still@downfall posted a link to an interesting item about ‘mobile herd’ grazing of grasslands in the methane thread.
It is something I think about a lot, actually. I have experimented with something called pasture cropping. Instead of spraying or plowing to grow a crop, you sow your cereal crop directly into a stand of dormant, summer active perennial native grasses. The theory being that because these grasses go dormant during the cool months, they won’t compete with the cereal crop. Last year, when I did this, Kangaroos went right across the paddock and very effectively ate every oat plant, without touching the native grasses at all. Considering that these grasses produce so much bulk in the summer, have their growth points at ground level, rather than above the ground like more primitive grasses like Themedis Australis, don’t seem to be utilised by Grey Kangaroos to a great extent, and don’t burn as well as introduced grasses from Africa, it would seem that there should be an animal there that is missing. I just assumed that it had to be Diprotodon. Or maybe it is just that the Eastern Grey Kangaroo doesn’t touch it when it has better options.
yep, “doesn’t touch it when it has better options”….
OT: I was asking a postgrad student about the N2-fixing ability of blue-green algae; they can grab N out of the air, so don’t need (necessarily) dissolved N in water as a nutrient source.
She said, yes they CAN do it, but that doesn’t mean they WILL do it. Might take too much energy to fix atmospheric N. They “might have a better option”.
This pretty much answered a fundamental question put by some researchers: if cyanobacteria (blue-greens) can fix atmospheric N, why should water bodies they grow in, ever be “N limited” (very low N)?
I reckon you’ve nailed it in your last sentence, Jason. They also favour planted tubestock over regenerating natives, the buggers – we thinks that’s because of higher nutrients [its a guess]. They’ll always graze the north facing slopes [higher sugar content in plants growing in full sun?] to within an inch of their lives and leave the shaded slopes alone too.
As someone pointed up above, once everyone settled down this has turned into an intelligent and well-informed discussion.
re myriad #130.
“I think the farming community in Australia has about the same rate of adoption and adaptation to new technologies etc. as most sectors”
In some sectors like dairy and viticulture, we’re actually setting the technology pace.
I’d be interested Jason in your views on bioengineered pasture grasses.
http://news.theage.com.au/national/australianfirst-gm-grass-trial-to-start-20081028-5ahh.html
http://www.molecularplantbreeding.com/secure/downloadfile.asp?fileid=1001818
FB #144 grazing & resting is most certainly the answer. It not only benifits the livestock and the grasses but it also allows the recovery of the small delicate plant spiecies.
Jason #145 I believe that native grasses lend themselves best to sod seeding, it is a practice advocated byDr Christian Jones. With growing the small areas of fodder crops, I have shifted away from mindset of this is pasture & this is a cultivation area. I now rotate where I plant oats in a renovation program.
Mulching has been mentioned in the thread above. This is a practice with a lot of potiental. Instaed of burning old dry plant material, lay in down, shade the ground & build organic matter.
FB # 144, it was comment #115 on the More Methane thread about the mobile herd.
BTW that poll in Manshester must be only a day off closing & the nukes are ahead last time I checked.
Jo (135): ‘wanting to eat quality local produce 3×365′,
Don’t know where you’re from but here in Brisso we have a FoodConnect collaboration between city folk and farmers going, which basically organises the logistics between subscription food customers and contracted farmers, a Community Shared Agriculture enterprise. “Produce from Food Connect is all sourced from within a five-hour radius of Brisbane”. It’s a social contract as well as a way of getting boxes of ultra-fresh fruit and veg, in that htere are weekend tours to the supplying farms, so you, and your kids, can get to know who’s putting food on your family table, and how it’s done.
Talk about the Liverpool Plains foodbowl being trashed: the district just south of Brisbane, which has, or had, the most fanstasticly fertile volcanic soils, imaginatively called Redlands, of which up till 1979 it could be said “The suburban sprawl has managed only scant inroads to a few pockets of land, but the remaining farmers have stubbornly resisted even the juiciest of offers from land developers, preferring a continuation of their inherited lifestyle”, is now completely covered with Casa Del Shithouse MacMansions,
So Myriad (130), ( good natured ribbing alert) of whom “all her collegues who did work in Qld told her that thinking of it as Australia’s Texas was pretty accurate.”, it’s all you bloody Mexicans’ fault that the paradise up here has gone to rack and ruin.
Actually there still is a declared rural green belt between Brisso and the gold coast, mainly wasted on sugar cane. When I was down there getting a trailer load of mulch the other week, I noticed a few fields with what looked like a big clover cover, turns out to be soybeans being used as a nitrogen fixing rotation crop. So even sugar cane farmers, who in the inner urban stevia-sweetened soy milk ecco-chino rankings of vile eco-criminals must rate on par with uranium miners, are getting with the sustainable agriculture program.
furious balancing #144
Something I would throw up in relation to that is to remember that there were some very big marsupials in Australia that went extinct as late as 18000 years ago. One was the Diprotodon, an animal that weighed between 1 and 2 tonne, which is twice the weight of a domesticated bovine, another was the Giant Short Faced Kangaroo that had the weird attribute of having its front toenail very similar in size and shape to a horses hoof, and it was a big animal too.
It says in a lot of the sites I’ve looked at that Diprotodon was a leaf eater. Surely, when you look at some of the extreme adaption that the koala has made to survive on a diet of Eucalypt leaves, the leaves that an animal as big as a white rhino was eating had to be more nutritious than that of a gum tree. Aborigines have been credited with causing the spread and subsequent dominance of Eucalypts in Australia via firestick farming, which may explain the extinction of Diprotodon, but how much do plants evolve in a space of 60 000 years? Are the native pasture grasses we have now, adapted fully to the fire regime that promoted the Eucalypt, or are they in fact remnant species from an earlier time. Are they species that spread out of the heathland areas with the Eucalypt, are they species that were there before the Eucalypt came to dominate so much, or are they species that have changed and evolved a great deal in the last 50000 years?
There seems a great deal really we don’t know about the Australia Ecosytem.
Bio-engineering is a thorny issue, and a lot of people are afraid of it. The problem I see with it is not the technology, but who is controlling it and the goals they work towards in using it. Bio-engineering plants to deal with symptoms without a perspective on the whole ecosystem your dealing with, will probably be as effective as spraying weeds with a chemical until those weeds become resistant to that chemical and then going onto a new chemical to spray them with. If you have an ineffective water cycle on your farm, you are having run-off and lack of water infiltration by soils because a lack of ground cover, then a more nutritious rye grass plant is going to do nothing to increase your effective rainfall, and is likely to be hammered by stock, ensuring that the real problem, lack of ground cover doesn’t improve.
But to be honest, if someone came along tomorrow and offered me a genetically engineered cereal plant that grew especially well when directly sown into dormant native grasses, I would be beside myself with enthusiasm. If they offered me a more leafy variety of Queensland Bluegrass that retained its nutrition through the cooler months, I’d be very tempted. If someone came along with a genetically engineered merino sheep that didn’t require mulesing, was resistant to worms, didn’t get flystruck, shore itself, didn’t burp methane and was skilled in the arts of Kung Fu so that it could protect itself from stray dogs, I’d probably ask where I could get more of them
Danny # 150 Placing a slab of concrete for housing on every quarter acre patch of high fertility soils is a practice that needs to stop in this country. The vegy’s for our cities use to come from right on the doorstep. After being overrun by suburban sprawl, there are outcomes such as less tasty tomatoes because of the need for them to travel distance.
I’m a great believer in rotations & even in these top quality class A soil farming areas there should be a return to an old practice; ley farming. Ley farming is a rotation every so many years of a grass/legume/livestock phrase instead of endless cropping. Here is a 8 page PDF file, a research paper about long term fertility in cropping lands. Read the intro & check out Figure2, improvement of a pasture phrase on soil organic carbon.
A few comments,
Jo – I’m nowhere near enough of an ‘expert’ that you need hesitate to put up your own thoughts on the link you provided. My main beef about it was the MIS shilling, and overall the relentless focus on the economy of our farmers and ‘efficiency’. It’s a very stereotypical and single-layer focus on what is a complex multi-layered problem.
Nabakov – indeed our farmers do lead in certain areas of innovation; I think unfortunately though that in areas relating to getting the balance right between farm sustainability and productivity/profitability there is still a lot of inherent suspicion, particularly as large industries such as fertilizer groups have a very captured intellectual market in certain farming sectors, the history of gov’t stuff-ups making farmers inherently suspicious of intellectual property from that quarter unless it’s linked to stereotypical science approaches; and the very real market barriers and lack of gov’t incentive to support trials of innovation that does look in this direction.
Danny – sorry about the generalisation of Qlders – was more meaning to refer to a certain influential part of the farming community up there that Pterosaur is well familiar with. Yes, subdivision of prime agricultural land for McMansions is a crime, and should be banned in every state. Here is Tas the gov’t passed just such an act but it was a stalking horse for MIS tree plantations, as it included tree plantations as an ‘agricultural use’. In fact when the local council on King Island tried to amend it’s planning scheme to explicitly prevent prime agricultural land from being available for tree plantations, Gunns and the government rode into town. I’m still not sure of the outcome of that one.
While we’re talking tree plantations and farm forestry, I think it makes an excellent parable of the problems in the agricultural sector, one I was (un)fortunate enough to follow through on its full trajectory from well-conceived beginning to appalling end.
Farm forestry was the original concept, and the idea was to develop sterile hybrid native or pine species capable of producing good wood harvests in low rainfall areas of Australia; with a particular view to creating a long-term, sustainable and highly profitable crop for farmers to plant on parts of their land unstuitable for cropping (poorer soils) and also to assist with reforesting areas that had suffered severe tree loss as this is known to decrease rainfall and runoff retention in regional micro-climates. Parts of the Midlands of Tasmania makes a good example.
So the vision was that farmers would have small woodlots on their least useful land, would help reverse rainfall decline, would benefit in 20 years from crops that could deliver as much as $25,000 per hectare, and that such a scheme would in fact also help encourage farmers to work cooperatively (eg poor soils rarely follow a property boundary, so it might be appropriate for several farmers to plant & manage such a plantation together).
What did we actually get? Well first of all research into species that could grow in low rainfall, poorer soils and produce good wood was slow, but it was pretty easy to develop species that would grow rapidly in higher rainfall areas on poorer soil – of course they grew even better on good soil.
Governments then got bored with waiting for the science to deliver the original result and of course were intensively lobbied by various forestry interests that it was all a pipe dream, and look at the shiny benefits of rapid plantation forestry based on pinus radiata. Not to worry about sterilising it, it would be so well managed there’d be no problems. Some farmers got into this – the ones with enough wealth to be able to set aside large tracts of land for such a high return crop. By now the research focus was solely on producing trees that grew to maturity in less than 15 years.
Fast forward another few years and now we’re all thoroughly convinced by superranuation funds & others that Managed Investment Schemes are a fantastic idea to help us ‘plant more trees’ and should be given complete tax breaks and offsets. Radiata pines abound in many thousand hectares, along with the blue gum eucalypt hybrid, Eucalyptus Nitens, for plantation forestry. Farmers watch the price of land skyrocket as MIS schemes use their significant investment capital combined with unbeatable full tax breaks to buy up prime agricultural land, cover it in plantation trees often poorly managed (who cares? tax break!), and laugh all the way to the bank.
Pine wildlings invade local forests. Tree plantations unlike every other farmer aren’t required to account for or pay for their water use, even as young trees suck up staggering amounts of water and alter catchment hydro-dynamics. Biodiversity is significantly reduced by massive tree monocultures. Significant portions of Tasmania’s best dairy & vegetable cropping country is now covered in trees and prices are well beyond the vast majority of farmers. The only well-funded research in the area if for more ‘private farm forestry’ so any canny researcher who wants their work funded and to further their career jumps on that band wagon. Those interested in public good farm forestry scrape a few thousand here and there to establish basics like the effects of tree plantations on catchment hydrology. Social research has also shown than tree plantations help kill small rural towns as they employ significantly less people than working farms.
Meanwhile in the Midlands, farmers suffer through another excruciating drought, and there’s no further significant research into or support for farm forestry in arid areas that could help ameliorate the extreme conditions experienced. Farmers who have for many years run successful dry-land wool stock on well-managed rare native grasslands have been forced to sell off their breeding stock and the suicide rate is appalling.
It’s like any other tale of vested interests triumphing over public good I know, but the far-reaching ecological, social and economic impacts are just one of the many tales that aren’t known or told about what’s happening in rural Australia.
On a more cheery note – still@downfall, there’s also some really heartening and terrific results being achieved by some farmers in Tas who have returned to long-rotation cell grazing. In addition to very competitive farm costs and good meat production, they are also finding it greatly increases the amount of stored carbon in their soils. In any fair world they would be able to get carbon credits for it, as it’s measurable, maintainable and has multiple positive environmental benefits.
Did anyone else hear Philip Adams’ intereview with Vandana Shiva in LNL? Her latest book is called ‘Soil not Oil’. Her Navdanya Organisation is well worth checking out.
Ps- Jason, alpaca wethers make excellent flock guardians.
“alpaca wethers make excellent flock guardians”
Sure, but where’s the fun in a kung-fu free solution?
Alpacas doing kung-fu would be even more speccy FDB – think of those long limbs & necks, not to mention their ability to spit!
myriad, if i know something about anything, I’ll def. chip in, but as I posted when I linked that to that presentation
it’s past time many of the issues raised by this type of argibusiness modelling/projections were discussed in the context of sustainability for both the environment and the economic survival of Australian family farms
However, my limited knowledge of agriculture means that I’m restricted to just pointing to stuff and saying “oy, there’s a lot of pressures coming from all the shop and we (the collective ‘we’) need to get on top of this” and also we need to be a whole lot more aware of the unintended consequences of all sorts of schemes.
The closing down of Land & Water Australia imo, is a very worrying sign and the instinct of a self-satisfied Federal ALP Govt doing the bidding of big vested interest agri-business, purely because they have no long held or deep ideological position or constituency that runs counter to what are probably the slackest and easiest choices.
Which is why a Greens/family farmer alliance in respect of agriculture is seemingly now fundamental to cajoling, prodding, shifting, hassling and challenging any short term-ist policies of the more often captured Lab/Lib’s, in respect of resource management.
Excellent telling of an appalling story there Myriad (154).
I’m intrigued by the bit about planting out of forest “would help reverse rainfall decline”: is it widely accepted that there actually is a virtuous cycle where by rain makes for tree gorwth and tree growth ‘attracts’ clouds and therefore rain?
You’d have to go a long way to surpass the government sponsored clearing of the Brigalow Belt (Acacia harpophylla) in the 60’s up here for ecological vandalism on a stupendous scale: almost the area of tasmania, covering the Fitzroy and McKenzie-Isaacs River Basins.
One enterprising contract clearer, a certain Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, pulled more than his own weight in this. In the 50’s he came up with the idea of uprooting landscapes en masse by stringing ships anchor chains between the biggest dozers he could get his hands on and just letting them rip. A bit of prospecting on the side while he was at it, leading to dodgy exploration permits in ‘57 when the Country party got in, accquired for 2 pounds as a perk of being a back bencher, (shared with the then mines minister), onselling them on at a 6 million percent markup 2 weeks later to US fossil fuel interests, and voila we are on the way to Queensland Treasury’s continuing pas de deux with Big Foreign Coal, eg Utah, Peabody, Mistsui.
So from state-sponsored ripping up a landscape of nitrogen fixing acacias to becoming the worlds biggest carbon de-sequestering eco-criminal state in barely 50 years, not a bad turnaround huh.
In a bizarre irony, apparently the B-P’s slipped up at their own game, and some company has the coal rights to under Joh’s family property, including where he is buried. Yep, shudder, the insatiable lust for hydrocarbons by corporate carpetbaggers might release on the world….Zombie Joh.
I do have a couple of Alpacas, Myriad… but it cost me $20 to get a shearer to shear an Alpaca and there is nothing in the award that says I have to pay anything extra to get a shearer to shear a kung-fu sheep compared to a normal sheep – $2.30. I’m not sure how I would go with OH&S, so I am going with the self shearing trait as an optional extra.
Danny
don’t think my story’s a patch on yours – zombie Joh, the horror the horror (can I recommend as excellent entertaining distraction while ill can I recommend plants vs zombies). Not to mention how mind-boggling the sheer scale of state-sponsored land clearing was.
re: “I’m intrigued by the bit about planting out of forest “would help reverse rainfall decline”: is it widely accepted that there actually is a virtuous cycle where by rain makes for tree gorwth and tree growth ‘attracts’ clouds and therefore rain? “
Well I simplified a bit for the point of the yarn, but it’s not so much tree growth attracting rain, it’s that clearing native vegetation – particularly trees as significant individual ‘pumps’ from a landscape contributes to declines in rainfall – it’s not just limited to tree loss though, there’s been interesting work on savannahs for instance.
Loss of vegetation creates a negative cycle that feeds itself, ie less native veg cover = more runoff, higher evaporation, higher temperatures (greater albedo), more chance of fire, which reduces the veg cover…..and round we go.
Taking the case of the Midlands in Tas, which I know well, rural tree decline has been an issue for over 30 years. It’s known to be caused at the most fundamental level by climate change which has seen the region suffer a subtle drought (higher temps & lower rainfall) for over 20 years. The area has also been significantly cleared, being originally native open grassland / woodland, so it was targeted extensively for clearing. So the clearing combined with the climatic changes has meant that the native veg became increasingly fragmented, meaning trees were much more susceptible to disease, pest damage, wind and fire. Less trees, even less rain. In one startling example, one river, the River Jordan (no kidding) was found to have lost flows by an order of magnitude. The fragmentation of the landscape continued with further clearing, exacerbating the tree loss, and rainfall loss.
So coming back to farm forestry, part of the idea was to find resilient plantation species that could survive in the reduced rainfall environment and thus restore groundcover, run-off retention & balance etc., and also help effect local rainfall.
Cos I don’t work in the area any more I don’t have my library or bookmarks, but googling about, I did find this interesting study in Brazil talking about similar concepts for rainforest.
This ties with a fantastic positive story I once read about an individual in a south american country (sorry really stretching my memory) who wanted to rehabilitate an area left acid and barren by previous extractive industries. It had left people living in the area with no clean water, reduced rainfall and not much hope at all. This man convinced someone to fund him to plant thousands of hectares of pines, of all things. The pines were able to cope with the acid ground and restore nutrient balance, but most astonishing of all really helped restore the local rainfall cycle, feeding local streams and returning drinking water supplies. Over time the pines were harvested in small lots and rainforest regenerated to replace it. It was an amazing story, and I really wish I could find it again and give more specifics.
I think what all of this shows is that nature is just as much about structure as species. It’s one of the reasons that good permaculture practitioners make use of weeds where they are not threatening to become rampant as plants that can survive where others can’t, restoring normal ecosystem and hydro-geomorphic processes, which in turn allow the return of natives. This is pretty much what Peter Andrews discovered but is a very poor advocate for because he doesn’t get the flip-side of weeds is that some really can’t be trusted in the landscape and should be avoided at all costs. But his central ‘discovery’, that he could use the weed species that survived on his property to recreate normal ecosystem processes is correct IMO.
Is it true that pine trees make the soil they grow on acid? I am just wondering if the soils from radiata pine plantations can ever be recovered for food production, or does it mean that once they’ve been there, there will be rank upon rank of those evil goblin trees there forever? Not that my computer desk is made out of pine or anything.
The shape of the future?…
“Oil and gas producer Santos Ltd will create one of Australia’s largest forestry plantations as part of its $7.7 billion Gladstone liquefied natural gas (GLNG) project in Queensland…. the world’s first operation to convert coal seam gas (CSG) to LNG….the plantation project, at Fairview near Roma, would use water produced in the extraction of CSG and be the first state government-approved, large scale undertaking of its kind….The $50 million first stage of the plantation comprises two million native Chinchilla hardwood gum trees and agricultural feed crops over 2,234 hectares….more than 515,000 trees had been planted and 1,300 kilometres of irrigation pipelines had been laid so far. A further 715,000 trees would be planted in the next three months (as of 15 may 09)…Talks are underway to expand the plantation to up to six million trees.”
There’s an enormous amount of water liberated with CSG, at average salt concentrations 3000 ppm in Bowen and Surat basins, it’s a potential deal breaker now that evaporation ponds are verboten. I wonder about long term ground salinization, but the mining companies would have done duty of care on that wouldn’t they, this couldn’t be a short term, albeit massive, PR stunt could it?
Danny,
I was told by someone who come past the Spring Gully area north of Roma that, like you said @164 there is already a big plantation of Chinchilla white gums in the ground. As I understand it the coal seam water from this gas field is of a much higher quality than the crap that is comming out further east.
Chinchilla white gums looked a possibility to feature in agro forestry in these parts. Agro forestry isn’t like a huge solid block of plantation monoculture, rather its where a number of commercial species are planted in bands across the lanscape. Often planted across the prevailing winds with grassland between the bands of trees. Just as well I didn’t get too serious, in the last decade drought has prevailed against this species of tree.
Jason – lots of data on that. Pinus do indeed acidify soils, even to the extent that they facilitate leaching of certain elements (Fe & Al, from memory) from the A horizon. Not sure how reversible any of this is.
Mind you, many other spp have analogous effects. Some interesting studies in Dutch heathlands by Aerts & colleagues have demonstrated that quite a few species profoundly modify soil properties over decadal time scales.
And amongst weed ecologists there is a growing suspicion that weed ’success’ is at least in part due to their ability to modify either soil properties or soil microbiota (fungi, bacteria etc) – see papers by Kliniromos or Callaway & colleagues.
Jason #152
“The problem I see with it is not the technology, but who is controlling it and the goals they work towards in using it.”
That pretty much accords with what I’ve heard other farmers say. They’d welcome innovation in this area but are concerned about how it would work when it comes to who supplies it and on what terms.
The Feral Abacus #166
I am supposing that would have ramifications for ever revegetating these areas with native species, as well as possibe food production.
It is pretty easy to see how weeds can alter their environments. Sometimes that is good. Varigated and Saffron Thistles seem to do a good job of aerating the soil and encourage earthworms and after they have done their job will make way for other plant species like native grasses. St Barnaby’s Thistle on the other hand is more of a signal weed – that you will actually have to do something to change the conditions that are favouring it, and control it, before you will get anything else growing on that soil.
So perhaps weeds should be categorised into two groups – self-promoting weeds that alter the environment to suit themselves, and successional weeds that are there trying to heal the damage that has been done to the soil from other agents.
167 Nabakov
It seems to me that bio-tech companies aren’t asking the farmers what they need, but creating products that will benefit them for the farmer to have.
I think round-up ready Canola would have to be one of the biggest cons I’ve ever heard of. Round-up is a useful product, and like many tools we use in agriculture, it is something very good for the farmer to have in his arsenal. Where any tool becoemes damaging, whether it is a mechanical cultivator, herbicide, or artificial fertiliser, is when the farmer becomes too reliant on it and over-uses it. Actually, artificial fertilisers are a great example of that – if you have your water cycle and mineral cycle working well, then any nutrient you add is probably going to cycle through the system several time before being used up, but many artificial fertilisers are used in a way that is similar to a drug dependency.
The really good biotech products probably won’t be very profitable for biotech companies, so maybe gene technology is one thing that needs to be taken out of the hands of private enterprise and rather be funded by the industries that use them themselves.
Sorry I’ve been absent from the thread. I’ve had a demanding couple of days. I’ll put up a few comments on particular issues rather than one big one.
On the proportion of agricultural produce exported, there was an interesting study early this century by a QU academic whose name escapes me. He found the ABARE, the NFF and others, consistently quoted 80% export. This guy found that the opposite, a 20/80 split was nearer the truth. He said it depended on how you counted things, but 36% export was the most he could grant. I remember he won the arguments, but the NFF and ABARE just took no notice and kept quoting 80/20.
I recall raising this on Quiggin’s blog. Prof Quiggin has a background in farm economics and he succeeded in blurring the lines by pointing out that the academic had not looked at all industries, but a sample.
The truth is probably somewhere nearer the Qld academic’s POV, or that is what I concluded at the time.
This is not to downplay the importance of the sector in the economy.
In the future with growing population and probably decreasing world productive capacity through climate change food security is going to be an increasing concern.
Fran, I understand the relationship between rainfall and tree cover is well-established, but that does not mean that it was a factor in brigalow belt clearing as Danny seems to be saying. In the Amazon I understand the percentage of rainfall from transpiration is about 50% and that factor is quite significant in transporting moisture deep inland.
The Atlantic Forest which you linked too is different and I’ve not heard any definitive data on it.
Tropical forests such as the Amazon are obviously very different from the Qld brigalow belt and I’m doubtful that it would have made much difference. I’d point out for starters that the 50 years before the brigalow belt was cleared was considerably drier than the 50 years after.
Secondly, you don’t have to go very far in the Qld bush before you’ll be quoted the famous case of Dr Bill Burrows, a Qld Government scientist who was tasked to do a study on vegetation thickening. His report produced such an inconvenient truth that he was instructed to destroy it and delete it from his hard drive.
He’s now retired and seems to have retained some of his notes and the hard drive between his ears remained intact. If you have a look at the first two items here you’ll get the drift. I gather that what he did was to collate information from studies and stories in the public domain. There’s more to it he makes a general point about vegetation thickening where European agriculture follows hunter-gatherer land use. From what I’ve seen subjectively in the moister subtropics and tropics I’d have no trouble at all believing him.
I grew up on a block which was 75% virgin brigalow when my father went there in 1921. It still had significant areas of untouched brigalow when I was a boy in the 1940s. The Aborigines had left the area about 70 years earlier. Much of the bush was so thick you couldn’t walk through it. Generally you hear that when the aborigines managed the place there was much more open country, with a thinner covering of trees. On that basis it would have had lower albedo but a smaller volume of timber to provide any transpiration.
But I can’t imagine that our brigalow was much different at all because you couldn’t put a fire through it and it would have been the same 70 years earlier, I think. But who’s to know?
OTOH when you drive across the open farmland in NSW, Victoria and SA you’d have to think there are fewer trees now than in times gone bye.
So I’m not sure generalisations hold true for particular areas.
BTW I’m working on a post on vegetation management in Qld, which has the potential to be more emotionally charged than this one. Not sure I’m game.
Myriad, I did hear Vandana Shiva on Lateline. You can download or listen from here. I’ve followed her work for a while, and you’d have to say that she has what we lack, a view of agriculture that is integrated into a vision of society and the economy that has coherence and consistency.
She claims that smallholder farming is superior in every way except in quantitative output (and economic reward) per unit of labour input. But while her vision may represent a forward path in India for the millions of peasants it is unlikely to gain much if any traction here where the industrial farming model is well-established.
Still I think we are wrong to regard food as just another tradeable commodity subject to the vicissitudes of thoroughly corrupt world markets. The latest example is Victorian dairy farmers being told they will have to make do with 26 cents per litre instead of 44. the reason? The EU and the US are pushing subsidised powdered milk into Asia, they say not into our dominant markets, but it is affecting the price.
Given the way these games are played, more Australian farmers going out of business and more farmer suicides would be quite a good result for them.
Brian@171 … I think your comments are for Myriad …
Brian #171
Coincidently, I was reading this pdf from the CSIRO while having a cuppa this morning, which accords with with what your wrote there.
CSIRO link
I usually switch off when trying to read academic papers, but this was a well balanced and nicely written report, and enjoyable to read. I thought the model of the three fire regimes – pre-human ‘wild’ fires, aboriginal controlled ‘tame’ fires, and fires becoming ‘feral’ since white settlement – goes a long way in explaining the phenomenon of tree density increases.
If it is correct, it would further increase my reservations about the policy of locking up land as a sound management regime.
Ach, stuffed up the link.
Jason. I’ve re-inserted the link but it doesn’t lead to a specific publication.
Fran, I thought Myriad and typed Fran. Just another senior moment, I think
Brian. Didn’t work for me when I tried to link it in Facebook either. Only seems to work when you cut and paste it. Oh well.
Feral abacus – the lower the soil pH the more Fe and Al will be liberated from the chemical bonding in clay – this results in the soil becoming quite toxic to some plants. Native grasses seem to tolerate higher levels of Al and Fe .Both elements are abundant in soil so there isn’t a risk of them being removed from the topsoil.
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I’d also like to comment on Pterasaur’s response .
“My observation is that (at most) 10% of those whom I have dealt with have been willing to countenance ANY change to their activities which may threaten their “bottom line”. This 10% or so includes those who only undertake remedial (or similarly appropriate) projects if given government funding.”
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The public in this country generally doesn’t have any problem with recognising that landowners do own their land and usually do so so they can earn an income.
Why are you shocked that farmers would be concerned about actions which affect their bottom line?
Failing to see the use of land as the use of an asset is part of the conceptual gap that many suffer from. Property owership is not theft .
Why the exasperation that the 10% will accept government money to take remedial action? These are funds are to enhance to common good (as you say ) where the degradation is long standing – as most of it is – so why the grudging attitude where farmers are willing to take action?
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“Agriculture, and its associated activities has lead to greater environmental costs to Australia than any other activity we have undertaken,” …
This reads like a great piece of hindsight informed deduction! I travelled from the mid north coast to Sydney yesterday . As I travelled past rivers and farmland I can imagine that what I see as productive and well maintained farms others will see as degraded sores resulting from man’s intervention. If you then proceed to your conclusion that we only need 10% of our current output to feed ourselves you are defining most agricultural activity as destructive and of no benefit.This is just a doctrinaire approach and it helps no one in advancing a reappraisal of how we farm.
You are defining our activities as unnecessary without recognising the farmers right to use the land within the limits set out by government.
The list of destructive activities is also just more peddling of an anti farmer mindset.
No one debates that errors have been made but you state these problems as if they all occurred within the last decade.
Land clearing was done at a time when the available knowledge suggested it would be OK. Subsequently when problems emerged practices were modified and remedial actions were taken. It is not correct to suggest that farmers just passively sat around while thier methods destroyed their lands .
I also think it is rich proposing that agriculture alone is responsible for the negative changes to our land. Farmers didn’t introduce fireweed not lantana and I think it might have been the advice of environmental scientists that led to bitou bush being released on our coasts.
Farmers certainly weren’t responsible for the current problems of feral cats and dogs decimating Australia’ native animal populations.Furthermore though rabbits were introduced by settlers for sport the devastation they have wrought on the landscape can’t be just blamed on agriculture.
Where knowledge is incomplete it is always going to be a risk that with new ideas unwanted outcomes will emerge. That doesn’t then lead to the conclusion that we should all stop trying to work toward better outcomes for the environment .
I don’t think adopting a holier than thou attitude is inappropriate on either side of this debate.
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“The agricultural sector claims “we grow your food”, while ignoring that a far higher percentage of such production is in fact exported,…”
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This is again an unnecessary intervention in what is still a person’s right to earn money from their assets as long as they do so within the law.
It is widening the debate into areas that have little to do with farming. I might as well suggest that all cars should be limited to 1000cc motors and all people only need 2 pairs of shoes and should live in houses of certain dimensions. It would cut consumption and be beneficial to our environment but it is unrealistic and tending to totalitarianism.
Where do you think the authority to limit individual activity would comes from?
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“Thus agriculture (as practiced) can be obviously classed as an extractive industry, along with mining and forestry, neither of which approach the sheer magnitude (in terms of land area affected) of agriculture.’
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Agriculture is an extractive industry. Why this seems to come as a shock to some readers only makes me think they haven’t understood what agriculture does. If you are exporting product off the farm you are extracting from it.The trick is have an appropriate way of reintroducing the exported elements be it through fertiliser or crop rotation, mulching or if it tickles your fancy burying yeast in ram horns and baying at the moon on a monthly basis.
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“That many of the individual farmers have made fortunes in degrading “the commons” for private wealth is incontestable – that they should then demand payment from the “commonwealth” in order to reform their practices, or before they will even take token action to address the problems which have arisen through their own actions (and from which they have profited, often greatly), gives the lie to the “farmer as conservationist” meme being peddled by some here.’
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This is just cant – the greatest problems emerged in the early part of the last century and the wealthy farmers you are now aiming at are all long dead and buried.
As you say it is incontestable that they raped the land and benefitted but you need to get over this envy based mindset.
Those farmers who are trying to take remedial action can access funds from CMAs and other government funded agencies – in fact these agencies exist so they can!Claiming they have no right to any money is a distortion of the reason why the CMAs exist. Perhaps you would just prefer public works on public land but that is a political issue and stand and a separate issue.
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“BTW, my rant is not particularly aimed at any individuals, but is intended as a more general critique of the lie being peddled that -
Farmers ARE environmentalists and conservationists
Some are, but the majority, from my observations and experience are not, and indeed, one of the greater barriers to change in the rural sector (at least in Tas.) is the fear of adverse peer pressure being experienced by becoming perceived as a “greeny”.”
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This is another gap in perceptions. Farmers who carefully manage their land think they are being good for the environment but by defintion this is unacceptable to you . As you claim exported foods don’t need to be produced the farmer is by default engaged in little other than a land degradation activity. No activity undertaken will be acceptable to you. Farmers will think they are acting benefically while they control feral pests , stop weeds encroaching on their land and work towards riparian repair.This why they claim they are conservationists but the mindset you outline will see anything less then signing their land over to the National Parks and Wildlife Service as unacceptable.I would politely suggest you are being naive and unrealistic.
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I apologise for the long post but it is difficult to be more condensed.I have attended a few courses with the local CMA and understand that your attitudes aren’t unusual.
The trouble is that while 10 highly educated , government paid functionaries sit in a room explaining their unrealistic plans to the 3 farmers in attendance ( often all over 50 years old ) I’d have more sympathy for your predicament if just one or two of you actually owned some farmland and encountered the same hostility we do.
Imagine that – you could spend your own money Pterasaur and be a leader for us all.
It is undoubtably the trend that massive amounts of funding are going to CMAs and at the same time Departments of Agriculture are being starved of funds.Those 10 highly educated government workers can see where the money is and it would be cynical of me to suggest they need to keep their beaurocracies expanding.
This also highlights another significant problem with environmental work- the educated workers have often no sympathy for the social problems in the areas they work.They should really be working as extension officers and collaborating with farmers but when they encounter the limited education many farmers work with the effort just isn’t made to explain their work. I have seen this many times – the farmers think the ideas are intriguing or strange but their trepidation is
mischaracterised as rejection or hostility. I understand the focus of the government workers is the environment but you need to spend more time working on appreciating that many rural people are very poor and have inadequate capital for any remediation works. Again I’d suggest that owning land yourselves or at least living long term with your target populations will ensure a more positive outcome than being posted for a couple of years here and another couple of years elsewhere while you develop a killer CV just right for career advancement.
Brian,
fran I mean myriad here
thanks for the fascinating links to Bill Burrow’s work. I’m not sure why you thought I was suggesting that the clearing of the Brigalow did cause a decline in rainfall – probably just because Danny and I discussed some examples ’side by side’ so to speak and perhaps created confusion.
So for clarity, I don’t know anything about the clearing of the Brigalow, and wouldn’t assume it caused or had a relationship to rainfall (I actually thought in my response to Danny’s question I’d added another sentence about it being pretty complex and ecosystem specific, but it seems to have got lost in the drafting, sorry). I do know, as you seem to as well, that there has been a relationship established between tree/veg cover and rainfall in some particular evcosystems (rainforest, savannah), and in my back yard, amongst the grassy woodlands of Tasmania’s midlands, and your comments on SE Australia are pertinent there.
On the Brigalow, assuming Danny’s account of the area cleared is correct, it strikes me that there’s a big difference between seasonal clearing via burning as practiced by the Aborigines, that I assume in Qld also had something of a mosaic effect as it did down here; and cable clearing vast tracts in one go. Even if opening up the landscape is appropriate, I would think the short-term impacts of improper clearing methods would need to be taken into account. This also reminds me of the arguments on one of the threads here about the Vic bushfires and the role of fire in the landscape as a management tool. It’s so damn complex and what is true for one state / ecosystem often seems to be precisely aposite to what another needs.
Burrell’s work on tree thickening in Qld is fascinating as much as a lesson in the politics of science. What I find particularly bemusing about it is that as far as I can see the conservation movement is not particularly strong in Qld and I doubt had the influence to cause the cessation of land clearing via the VMA. What I do know is that the way the legislation was introduced by Beattie with a long lead-in time allowed a lot of ‘panic clearing’; so if the aim was truly to protect rare species & communities, it almost completely backfired.
Interestingly some states in the USA have gone in the opposite direction; having realised that strong legislation to protect prairie species leads to the farmers killing them as quickly and discretely as they can (and enforcement / compliance is virtually impossible); they have removed legislative ‘punishments’ and gone rather to an incentive reward scheme for maintaining relevant prairie habitats. This encourages reporting, helps with species mapping and surveying, and has proven far more successful as a conservation tool.
There’s currently a project to conserve Tasmania’s Midlands habitats that is based much more on the USA approach, offering farmers stewardship payments, and is being run as a joing project between the local DPI, Australian Bush Heritage and the Tasmanian Land Conservancy. You can see more on it here
On that note Jason, I would point out that good conservation management these days doesn’t involve ‘locking up’ areas in the way you mean – have a look at what organisations like Bush Heritage Australia and the Tasmanian Land Conservancy are doing. What we need is state governments to resource our National Parks Services so that they have the science and other relevant resources to similarly manage our national parks and reserves.
Brian – concur entirely with your thoughts on Vandana Siva.
Myriad,
The question is, at a time when Governments can’t even finance their social obligations, where does the wealth come from to pay for these resources? Unless you can draw enough income from a national park to cover cost, then it is a cost that has to be paid for by something else. If agriculture is an unsustainable basket case, and mining creates just more environmental problems, where do we generate the money to pay for these costs? Tourism doesn’t seem to be going great guns, workers in Australia can’t compete with slave labour in China, so our manufacturing industry is un-competitive, and I am not sure if we have any particular services we can offer to draw in the levels of wealth to allow us to do the things that our conscience, or rather necessity, demands of us.
Murph @ 179
Well, it seems a bit much for me to reply to your unfounded assumptions about me and (deliberate ?) misrepresentations of what I’ve had to say, but I’ll give it a go.
I’ll be as brief as possible.
1. My comment about “the 10%” is both unremarkable and reflects the realities of the situation(s) I have encountered. The more enlightened of that group also accept that they are “custodians” of the land, and that their “ownership” does not entitle them to degrade the “ecosystem services” (such as clean water, air, viable ecosystems) provided by that land to the community at large . This in contrast to the majority of those engaged in such pursuits. The point that you ignore, (and which I made earlier) is that much agriculture practice has, in fact ignored and degraded such “ecosystem services” in search of $$$, (which are then pocketed by the protagonists), who then will not act to remedy the damage caused by their actions, as a class in seeking a profit, even when such practice has significantly, and in some cases, irreparably, damaged the environmental services upon which all of us, (including the farmers) rely.
You assume I am shocked by such behavior – not really – it’s “par for the course” for self seeking profiteers in any field – when it involves the destruction of the resource base from which the farmers make their living, and upon which everyone relies I also see it as bloody minded idiocy, and smacks of an “all rights, but no responsibility” attitude among such individuals and groups.
This strikes me as highly irresponsible behavior.
2. You obviously find the realities of the massive destruction and ecological disruption resulting from agriculture discomforting, but that doesn’t alter the facts of the matter, and you are fantasising if you believe such operations have ceased, or that all such destructive processes and practices occurred in the distant past, and ceased as soon as better advice became available.
I regard pointing out the truth of this (ongoing) history as an acknowledgment of the realities of the situation we all face, and as such, one of the necessary steps to be taken if the problems of land and water degradation are to be properly addressed.
3. If you weren’t so keen to be offended, you would see from my previous post that I was relying upon the figures (wrt to export/local consumption of ag. produce) from the peak body for farmers, the NFF. If those figures are wrong, and the ratio differs, then that isn’t really something I can help.
However, I was merely making the point that (whatever) the actual ratios are, that
the oft-repeated argument made against change (saying “you need us for food”), did not stand up in the light of those figures.
How you managed to interpret this otherwise, frankly bewilders me, but then you do appear to be a bit oversensitive to any criticism.
4. Your claim that “the wealthy farmers you are now aiming at are all long dead and buried” is rubbish, and I’m sure you know it, if you actually do have anything to do with land management, as you imply.
5. I don’t recall ever “Claiming they have no right to any money” – as a matter of fact, I have been responsible for the disbursement of millions of dollars to various farming communities over a significant period. Pointing out the disjunction of “private profits vs. social costs” does not even come close to justifying your claims about my attitude.
I actually can’t be bothered replying to the rest of your post, as you haven’t even the slightest clue as to what I am about, and in the absence of fact, have chosen to assert your suppositions and prejudice as facts. That doesn’t make them so.
It rather looks to me that you have a bad case of “chip on the shoulder”, as you have reacted so defensively to my criticisms of some and taken them so personally. Your ignorance about extension work(ers) is astounding, and also, I would suggest both evidence free and an ideological statement.
Oh, and BTW, not that it makes any difference to my argument, but I do own a rural property, and have lived and worked nearly my entire life “in the bush”, and still maintain many rural connections.
Myriad # 180 I don’t want to get into the veg management debate in this thread as Brian @ 171 has said we’ll have a chance to debate it at a later date. Just a couple of things, the conservation movement is strong in Qld & did have an involvement in the cessation of land clearing. You are correct in this observation, “What I do know is that the way the legislation was introduced by Beattie with a long lead-in time allowed a lot of ‘panic clearing’; so if the aim was truly to protect rare species & communities, it almost completely backfired.” It is my belief the aim was for political mileage; Beattie wanted the panic clearing to occur.
Like I said before, lets debate the land clearing at Brian’s proposed post. I wish to focus on & agree with the sentiment of your comments in your next paragraph including, “removed legislative ‘punishments’ and gone rather to an incentive reward scheme” There use to exist in the State of Qld, although not perfect, a working partnership involving shared learning & mutual respect between the land managers (farmers) & the Govt agency extension officers. The DPI has been starved of funds & is very much less effective & the DNR has been given a ‘legislative punishment role’. The staff are no longer called extension officers, rather compliance officers. The result has been in this last decade a climate of distrust, lack of engagement & lack of respect. Surely this isn’t the environment to produce the best results for productive systems to be balanced against protecting flora & fauna.
Myriad, I don’t know how we got into a tangle over the brigalow clearing. I was really reacting to Danny.
Also I don’t have a good historical account of the brigalow clearing. I know that on our farm in the early 1940s significant areas were felled by axe, burnt in a very hot fire and then my father planted cotton between the stumps. Brigalow suckers very vigorously and people used to cut out the suckers with a mattock. Alternatively other areas were ringbarked.
But when they started using cables and chains in the 1950s you would clear 600 acres where you cleared 60 before. Much of the brigalow area was opened up with soldier settlement schemes where large pastoral leases were broken up for closer and more intensive farming. Returned soldiers didn’t always make the best farmers.
Regrowth is much more vigorous in that area and in many parts of Queensland, so the landscape now has many more trees on it now than some of the open farmlands of the south.
Whether this was an ecological disaster or not I don’t know. What Burrows work shows is that the landscape changed after the Aborigines land management era ceased. With each subsequent land use – pastoral, cropping – it changed again. If you try restoration you get something different again and in the case of brigalow something quite unlike what was originally there as far as I can see.
But more of this no doubt when I tackle the VMA.
Meanwhile I think all memes about farmers and farming need to be treated with scepticism and suspicion. I think there is just too much variety in landscapes, in the different types of farming operations and differences also between one farm and the farm next door.
But I do understand people feeling a bit tribal when commented on as a class or group. It’s inevitable.
Also when I used to work in education I found that everyone was an expert in education, including the dentist, the taxi driver and the hairdresser.
BTW when I took myriad’s name in vain upthread as an exemplar of working with farmers this was the comment I meant. myriad says it’s “often location/demographic -specific”, but it contains good principles that can apply elsewhere.
I have to confess, Pterosaur, that I am an aspiring profiteer.
There is nothing sustainable about going broke.
I think agriculture would probably become more sustainable if farmers were educated to work more towards profit, because the education I was given in University was about production and efficiency, and I think it has been that, as much as anything, in the last fifty years has lead to the negative environmental consequences of agricultural industrialisation. Production and efficiency often, in fact, involves low profit margins and high turn-overs. I think that Shiva bird that was in Brian’s audio link touched on that, in a sort of a way.
In my area, and I am not that far from the Liverpool Plains, the last of the big rural Dynasties went bust with the collapse of the Wool Industry. My neighbour likes to think he is a member of the landed Gentry, I think, but he is eighty years old and doesn’t look like passing on his land to any of his children. Most of the other farmers are either soldier settlers, or their descendents, or the descendents of free settlers who got into land when it was still affordable for the average fellow to buy a bit of land and build on his equity. I belong to the latter, and if I am a representitive of that group, we are hardly dragging in big dollars. My taxable income was $100 last year, so you’d probably have to go to China to find anyone else that would work for that sort of money.
We can argue about the environmental damages caused by white settlers over the last 200 hundred years, but a proportion of them were sent here without any choice and just had to make a go of it. Maybe they made a hash of it, but the thing that is important now, is how we are going to manage the land in the next 200 years.
If you are convinced that we can’t move forward, because of these ‘wealthy farmers’, well I guess that means this whole discussion is pointless, unless you want to hire some hitmen to take out the bastards, or drive for a takeover of all rural land by the state. I guess this is a left of center blog. But I can tell you now, if the state was to control all rural land like it does State Forest and National Parks, you can forget about this little black duck putting on a yellow outfit and going to fight bushfires – I’ve been sent once into a State Forest with a Rural Firebrigade, and I will never do it again. At least on an overgrazed sheep farm, you know that at least you and any wild-life that is there isn’t going to get cooked alive.
Jason @ 186 said
“Pterosaur……If you are convinced that we can’t move forward”
Well, I’m not, and I don’t see that anything I have posted could give you that impression.
I do agree that attempting to discuss anything with those who, wilfully or not, continually misrepresent one’s point of view is pointless.
Thanks for the reply Pterosaur,
“This in contrast to the majority of those engaged in such pursuits. The point that you ignore, (and which I made earlier) is that much agriculture practice has, in fact ignored and degraded such “ecosystem services” in search of $$$, (which are then pocketed by the protagonists), who then will not act to remedy the damage caused by their actions, as a class in seeking a profit, even when such practice has significantly, and in some cases, irreparably, damaged the environmental services upon which all of us, (including the farmers) rely.”
There is no hard data ( the requirement needed by Barlow of the Bennelong ) to support this assertion. I’ll presume you base it on the contacts and evaluations you have made personally. It is in stark contrast to the opinion of a CMA officer based in the Alstonville area in the latest addition of The Land – he suggests that the majority of farmers in his area are acting to stem problems through their own actions. This may be an isolated case but exceptions like it appear to be becoming more common.
It is the strangeness of your ideas that intrigue.
The concept that farmers who make a profit in the majority of cases lead to a degradation of the ecosystems in the area they control.As I have replied there was significant degradation in many areas and in many differnt ways and while damge continues I think your attitude is predetermined by a prejudice against profit making. You are even confident enough to lump all farmers togather as acting en masse , as a undifferentiated class of rapacious land abusers that is at variance from others experience.
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” You assume I am shocked by such behavior – not really – it’s “par for the course” for self seeking profiteers in any field – when it involves the destruction of the resource base from which the farmers make their living, and upon which everyone relies I also see it as bloody minded idiocy, and smacks of an “all rights, but no responsibility” attitude among such individuals and groups.”
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So I can only take the meaning of this little diatribe to be that all persons engaged in business are self seeking profiteers. Nothing unbalanced about that assumption at all!
Being in business doesn’t entail being greedy and rapacious nor do all farmers act contrary to the good of the resources they control.It isn’t realistic to extrapolate from the poor behaviour of some to conclude all farming activity is detrimental to positive long term stewardship of the land.
I’ll leave it to you to clearly explain to us why making a living off the land is so repugnant to you.Or maybe I should say to that class of state sponsored overseers that appoints themselves as the judge and jury for good environmental practice.
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The other points you make about current farmers being as responsible as those for the distant past is not accurate.There just isn’t the same widespread malpractice going on. However it would tie in nicely with your blinkered view of other’s motives- guilt by class association is a poor point to try and make.
Your miserly attitude towards funding farmers doing remediation work is clear from your comments and I apologise if you think I was suggesting that you were advancing the argument that they couldn’t access these funds. It is no good saying you have been close to the decision making process – you clearly think the self serving profiteers are unworthy.
Tough luck for you on that point I guess. If you think this is all about having a chip somewhere you are mistaken – I don’t have any problem with CMA funding and I think they are trying to work in difficult circumstances .
I also don’t have an ignorance of extension work by the various functionaries – rather I think they all to frequently have a course and abrasive attitude towards their target audience.
Again if you don’t like such criticism tough luck – I can only comment on the attitudes these workers display.
Such a criticism is hardly going to relevant without experience and I draw on the many encounters I’ve had with Landcare groups, DPI workers and CMA and National Parks workers. Pity that the enthusiasm and conviction that they are always right isn’t temptered by some humility and empathy for other’s situation. As I miswrote in my first response – a holier than thou attitude on either side isn’t any good.
re Jason @ 186
are you really ?
Profit
vs.
Profiteer
not something I would aspire to be myself though :-O
Profiteer – ‘One who makes excessive profits on goods in short supply… one who makes profits at the expense of the public.’
Producing something in short supply and making people pay for it, sounds a lot better than what I am doing now, which is paying society and the government for the privilege of producing something that retailers make all the profit out of. It is just about time that I started to be the one profiteering from my work.
You could probably accuse the cotton growers in Northern NSW and Southern Qld as being environmental cowboys, but the real big water users there are probably corporate farming enterprises. I don’t think what they are doing out there is sustainable, but everytime I am tempted to start slamming them, I realise that I am clothed head to foot in cotton, and the communities in those areas are benefitting from that industry – Moree, at one stage, being one of the richest shires in the state.
If you want to think linearly, then yes, you can put blame onto certain individuals, but it is just like weeds, if you create the environment, whether it’s natural or economic that favours those kind of plants, or those kind of people, then that is what you are going to get.
The mistake I think of governments and other probably well intentioned interests, is that they are stuck in a method mentality, rather than a results mentality. For example, the government shouldn’t be offering to pay me now to lock up land, instead if they want to pay me for environmental services, they should pay for results. If they want trees, then pay me for the number of trees I have on my property, instead of giving me money for fencing materials. If they want native grasses on my land, then pay me according to the composition and number of hectares on my property consisting of native grasses.
The method based approach inevitably results in a top heavy bureaucracy that is too inflexible and remote to truly manage a dynamic system such as nature. The RLPB in NSW was supposed to be responsible for stock routes. They have a lot of regulations about preventing overgrazing and stopping people harvesting firewood from the routes, but kilometre of kilometre of it is infested with non-native grasses and weeds. Now, the RLPB has become the LHPA, and our rates for this non-service have gone up. When we enquire about what exactly we are paying for when there is bugger all weed control, we are told that it is now our responsibility to control weeds on the route, adjacent to our land… and we have to pay $900 a year for the privilege of doing so.
You can see it with Landcare too. Landcare Groups are given funds to do all this earthwork and fencing, and often as not, once it is done, it isn’t maintained or monitored and ends up being a load of money spent for transient outcomes. If that money was instead used instead on incentives to achieve results, then I think you would actually start getting some results; ie, you say to the farmer, you will pay them to increase ground-cover from 30% to 100%, then that farmer only gets rewarded if he achieves that. It would be pretty hard to profiteer from that. Of course the farmer will try to achieve that target as cheaply as possible, but that in effect is promoting innovation and experimentation.
I was President of my local landcare group for about 24 months. During that time, I worked to get a backlog of projects done, but I didn’t seek to have any of those projects done on my own property, because I could see that it was a big waste of money and I subsequently resigned. If someone had come to me and said, we will give you financial rewards for turning all your cultivation into grassland dominated by native grasses and legumes….
Well, I wasn’t… I did that off my own back, and having done that, I prevented more erosion than any of those bull-dozers and dump trucks chucking rocks and wire flumes into gullies. I hope that I am rewarded for that at some stage – that I will profit from that forsight… and anyone who would deny me of that can go and take a flying leap.
jason and Pterosaur – did you realise that over 70% of the water extracted for irrigation in the Murray Darling basin irrigates pastures for cattle to eat?
Murph the Smurf – you sum things up pretty well from my experience. As you said, Pterosaur needs to get out and see more for himself, or at least take his blinkers off if he is out here. He is dead wrong in most things he says it’s hardly wirth commentiong on.
Do you not deny Pterosaur that governments encouraged/facilitated/mandated bad environmental practices some 50 or 60 years ago.
Do you deny that the government did this to increase taxation revenue to be spent on ‘the commons’
Do you deny that the government did this to get more of the commons’ employed.
Do you deny that the government did this to allow more communities to develop, where new found wealth could be spread among ‘the commons’.
It just ain’t happening anymore.
If there’s one thing we can agree on it’s that I don’t think farmers necessarily should have much funding to fix environmental problems. If they can’t work and spend money thmselves to fix the environmental problem (that always causes a loss of farm income) than they should put it up to the market for whatever value they can get so that someone willing to fix the problem can do so.
I didn’t know that. Could you provide the source of that 70% figure for livestock.
Checking the abs.gov.au site it gives the breakdown of irrigation used in agriculture for the following industries
20% – Cotton
17% – Dairy
17% – pasture for other livestock
16% – rice
It doesn’t say where the other 30% goes…. perhaps water for stock to drink?
If livestock have been historically bigger water uses that cotton for example, then one would expect that the rivers that feed the Darling in Nothern NSW and QLD would flow better now seeing that cotton has taken over from Merino sheep and dryland cropping in those areas.
There is no doubt that there is an overuse of water for livestock, that probably shouldn’t be. On the otherhand, it will be interesting to see which is the more sustainable industry in Northern Australia – beef cattle or irrigation schemes like the Ord. I suppose cattle drink a lot of water over their lifespan, and per kilo irrigating plant crops might be more efficient – I just don’t know if that will translate to better environmental outcomes in that part of the world though.
One thing that isn’t taken into account either is effective rainfall of a well managed grass pasture compared to spray or mechanical fallowed cropping land. My observation has been that more water runs of fallow cultivation country than high ground cover grass country, but maybe this is because the grass is using the water and so the soil isn’t saturated, and the consequence of this that reduced run-off from grass paddocks leads to lower river flows.
I somehow doubt that if I were to take the water that I use to water my stock, I could use it instead to irrigate crops on my property, and whether this would provide better environmental outcomes.
TBW # 192 I don’t believe your 70% figure is right either. There is pasture irrigated for dairying but even with this you would need to come with some evidence to back it up.
You hear of figures thrown around even for the dryland situation about how many litres it takes to produce 1kg of beef. How are the figures worked out? The amount is that high that it can’t be possibly what the animal drinks. I believe that the amount can be only calculated by whatever rain falls on the pasture the cattle graze upon. This I believe is highly misleading. The rain would fall whether livestock were a part of the landscape or not. Also in the grazing situation there co exists a large range of native flora & fauna. Maybe not as much as a National Park but still lightyears ahead of the suburbs.
Pterosaur, going back to your comments @ 104 and @ 125, I’m told that there is are remnants of a particular imported species, certainly in the southern inland parts of Qld and the SW, perhaps further north in the western parts, known as the squattocracy, who are more than a little obnoxious to anyone outside their own class, perhaps also within it, I’m not sure.
I wonder whether these were the farmers you encountered in western Qld.
I recall when visiting schools distinct differences in the culture of the locals. On one visit in a light plane when I tagged along with the DG we dropped into Arcadia Valley, north of Roma, near the Carnarvon Ranges. At the school we were greeted by an outstanding puppet performance. Turned out that one of the mothers had a background in theatre in Adelaide. Turned out that her talent was no exception. A more open group to outside ideas you would never find anywhere.
By contrast, for example, I understand that northern cane farmers are quite a different breed, as it were. Politically not rusted on National Party, as many of them came from a country where it was not unknown to vote for communists.
So I’ll say again, as I said @ 184, that I’m wary of generalisations covering the whole farming community.
BTW, I understand buffel grass wasn’t listed as a noxious weed. The problem with such species is that they can be damn fine cow tucker in some areas, tend to out-compete the natives and don’t stay in the paddock where they are meant to be.
While I’m nitpicking, murph, manufacturing gets an unwarranted bad press. You’d think there wasn’t any left, but last time I looked there were about a million employed. Also traditionally about 20% of manufacturing was food, I’m not sure whether that’s up to date.
Like agriculture manufacturing tends to suffer from fluctuations to the dollar which in general follows the mining industry.
I think we are all very prone to focusing on stereotypes, and by doing that those are the people we give most of the attention to. Another generalisation is that rural people are racist conservatives, and you can go and find plenty of racist people out here if you want to, but things like this happen out here too.
Australian Farmer and Refugees
Change is possible, and we see that too with the farmers on the Liverpool Plains working with the Greens. I think when things like this happen we should work to give it momentum and encouragement, instead of allowing prejudice and resentment to hinder it.
The Bronze Wiggle,
It is Murph the Surf if you don’t mind! Smurf – ha !
.
Please see the link for an explanation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Roland_Murphy
Hello Jason and S@D. I’ve got a couple of links for you. I’ve never done them before so hopefully they work! You are correct – I was wrong. Irrigation for pasture and livestock drinking water accounts for 55.5% of total water used in Murray Darling Basin. Irrigation of pastures is 47.6% of water used. Irrigation of broadacre crops (including cotton and rice)accounts for 28.2% of the water, with significantly more used on cereal crops than cotton. The balance, as you can see goes into viticulture, horticulture and other, smaller uses. I could go into the gross value of the water as derived by the value of the crops produced by a ML of water, but that would make cotton and rice look better again. People need to keep some of these figures in mind before making claims.
see here</a) or maybe you could look here.
A couple of other points. I note myriad saying that we are now reverting to practices used before the chemical revolution. I assume she is talking mainly about IPM – it is interesting to note that IPM is only truly effective when used in conjunction with very selective insecticides of low toxicity, the likes of which have only been available recently. I don’t think anyone could argue about the huge production gains made after the chemical revolution. This is the next logical step, where the environment and the farmer benefits.
Jason, I’ve seen you talk about GM crops and cite GM canola as an example. The important thing to keep in mind when arguing your case is that farmers are in no way compelled to grow GM crops, and are in no way disadvantaged by not growing GM crops. If they, as you do, see Roundup ready canola as a con, then they don’t grow it and don’t pay any fees to a biotech company. I’m not totally up to speed on GM canola, but I’m assuming the idea of Roundup ready canola is so that farmers can replace residual, persistant and environmentally more dangerous herbicides with the relatively benign glyphosate, which is not residual and relatively non-toxic. The point is Canola farmers can do whatever they choose. The environmental impact of any GM crop is absolutely, thoroughly tested, studied and researched by some of Australias best scientists at the OGTR for many years before it is released.
Oh yeah, sorry murph, although bronze does sound better than brown!
I knew I’d balls that up. If you click on the first ‘here’ you’ll get irrigation type by area, while the 2nd ‘here’ will give you irrigation type by water used. They’re both a bit old, but the best I could find with a small amount of time available and shows cotton as using more water than the figures I was given during a post grad certificate in rural science at UNE in 2003.
I saw the MDB commission report you are talking about S@D and I have to say it is a lot different to anything I had seen before now – although I can’t really argue with it. It would be interesting to find (I tried but can’t) data for previous years (dare I say normal) where drought was not severly limiting the water availability in Southern states. From what I was always led to believe, pastures and dairies in Vic and southern NSW were the biggest users of water by far. Heck, I’m not even an irrigated cotton grower, in fact I don’t irrigate anything other than my lawn when there is water in the dam – I’m just trying to point out that all the blame is often, unfairly, pointed at cotton for over extraction. Having said that, it is difficult to argue against water being over-allocated in the past.
“Change is possible, and we see that too with the farmers on the Liverpool Plains working with the Greens. I think when things like this happen we should work to give it momentum and encouragement, instead of allowing prejudice and resentment to hinder it.”
Hear! Hear!
It’s in everyone’s interests to keep our regions clean and green and yet productive for our current way of life.
T’would be interesting to see the genuinely earthy rump of the Nationals hooking up with an equally pragmatic bunch of Greens as a true party of land stewardship with an occasionally tiebreaking Senate seat.
Brian: I don’t really understand why you were ‘reacting’ (184), I was just wondering, @160, after M’s (154) post, about the phenomenon of extensive tree loss reducing rainfall, and thus, on the basis of me not knowing a more extensive local tree clearing exercise, wondering, just wondering, not accusing mind, whether the brigalow clearing had any identifiable effect. I’m glad, per your observation that the years before clearing were drier than after, it didn’t.
For the record, answering doubts that my ‘account of the area cleared is correct’, from http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/BD/1977/1977bd146.pdf. BRIGALOW LANDS AGREEMENT AMENDMENT BILL 1977,
the 4.52 million hectares cleared represents only a paltry 67% of the area of tasmania (4.52/ 6.84), my saying ‘almost the area of tasmania’ was protesting a bit too much methinks. Mea Culpa.
So, feeling a bit guilty about referring to the massive brigalow clearing as ‘ecological vandalism’, ( even though the fact that only 5 % of uncleared old growth brigalow remains in Qld, that, or 95% of any ecology being removed, is evidence enough for me) I’ve done some research and I’m still not sure that it wasn’t. It’s only, as Ms Hansen puts it, book learning, and I’m happy to be corrected by real farmers.
To me, one of nature’s miracles, up there with photosynthesis itself, is atmospheric nitrogen fixing legume/bacteria symbiosis. The brigalow scrub was a gigantic nitrogen fixing engine, 100kgs N fixed per hectare.
Like I say, book learning.
Northern Imperial Hairstreak butterfly larvae (one of those interesting species tended by ants, because they produce a special exudate for the ants, another symbiosis) only feed on old brigalow, never have been observed on regrowth. They also don’t occur within 40 metres of the edge of a brigalow stand, so stands less than 100 metres diameter are no good to these fussy bastards. Plenty of other critters would have called brigalow scrub home of course, but a society that’s prepared to extinguish as iconic a species as the Koala, isn’t gonna care too much.
Finally, in praise of the despised brigalow, from the EPA, “Brigalow (is a) deep rooted and salt tolerant species. Removal of this ecosystem could lead to increased salt levels in sub-artesian water”.. which grows in low phosphorus soils and fixes nitrogen prodigeously, and we’re doing our best to eradicate it. With some success: All 16 of the regional ecosystems (REs) that comprise the listed Brigalow ecological community in Queensland are listed as Endangered under the Vegetation Management Act 1999 (Qld) (Bulter 2007; Queensland Environmental Protection Agency 2008).
Not that it matters much anymore, the oxidation and atmospherisation of even tens of millions of hectares of woody solid carbon grown over the scale of decades or centuries, to turn the landscape into a methane factory instead, will be like a pimple of a pumpkin compared to the CO2 that plants have fixed over geologic time and which we are about to desequester over a decade or two from the coal ocean that queensland basically floats on, by any number of mining technologies, for, and in the main financed by, China.
Danny, interesting and no sweat. I did a bit of googling but all that I found out was that there are two brigalow belts, the south and the north. So it goes further south and north than I thought. Also that any images I saw didn’t look all that much like the virgin brigalow scrub I knew.
So I’m thinking that 5% is little enough, but I’m afraid that if it’s gone it’s gone.
Danny @202. Is that 100kgs N fixed per year or fixed forever. Probably the latter as Brigalows are very inefficient N fixers, and woody legumes have very little N in their stems/leaves etc. Imagine the Nitrous Oxide emissions from Brigalow country if it fixed N at the rate of 100kgs/year. Especially given that they also grow on extremely ‘melon holed’ country that stays waterlogged for months after good rain. I can just imagine the different CPRS policies put forward by government if this were the case and the Qld, NSW and commonwealth governments had to foot the bill for Nitrous Oxide emissions on the vast tracts on Brigalow country on state owned and crown land.
Danny
In the interests for our society as a whole, different tracts of land are given over to different land uses. If anyone out there believes that all rural land should be a National Park and wish to live a comfortable lifestyle they are living in fairyland. On the hand a manageable proportion of land should be kept aside in its natural state. In the development of landscapes to productive systems there has to logically negative impacts. When the brigalow came down there is a good chance that no one, including Government agency staff, had knowledge of the little of the couple of little critters you have brought to our attention. With a change in habitat some species are lost, some adapt & some thrive. Another species that moved out of brigalow areas was the scrub turkey but it was replaces by the plain turkey (bustard); considered endangered in southern states but now plentiful in a changed landscape.
It must be remembered that under the Brigalow Development Scheme by Government regulation the brigalow scrub had to come down or the Government would take the farm away.
If anyone is worried about the scrub turkey, please be assured that there are plenty within the suburbs of Brisbane. A couple of years ago I saw one in Spring Hill, about a mile away from the GPO.
At the same time there were four living near a garden I used to work in in Milton, about 3k from the GPO.
Brian, in army days I very nearly initiated an ambush on a scrub turkey, once upon a time in the Border Ranges.
Nabakov: I’ve long held that the Nationals could actually achieve things for their constituents if they split from the Libs. True that it might be some time before the tories were in government again, but the Nats role in a coalition government seems to consist of saying “yes sir” alot. On their own they’d have an almost permanent balance of power and could make a lot of parochial demands in return for support.
Sean, you would have to surgically separate the National backsides from the ministerial leather, unfortunately.
For a while De-Anne Kelly and Bob Katter were quite good at standing a bit outside the tent and pissing in. Katter became an independent but now he’s too far away and it falls short. Kelly went the other way, but she couldn’t clear the edge of the tent.
Actually Barnaby plays it about as well as you could expect within a coalition.
BM: googling brigalow nitrogen fixing gets me a Google Book by mary White called Earth Alive which says:
… the grammatical implication would be the 100kgs per hectare, (10g/sq m?) is annual???
Anyone wants scrub turkeys, there’s often plenty in my back yard, and occasionally on my tin roof, the bastards. I’m thinking a slingshot would be a fair match. A couple of days ago I saw an echidna waddling across the street down the back: this ‘tin and timber’ Brisbane town plan fetish is good for someone.
Now Still, be fair: Just cos I pointed out that only 5% of Brigalow ecosystem has survived the clearing drive doesn’t make me “all rural land should be a National Park” type, as if there actually is anyone like that, and if there are I’d like to know what they eat.
From what I’ve read about brigalow, its deep-rootedness, its salt tolerance, its evolved ability to grow on auatralia’s low P soils, its nitrogen fixing (= soil improving for subsequent/neighbouring crops??) ability, it sounds like it should have the potential to be the seriously sustainable farmers best friend, rotating it out in decade cycles. You’d want to be able to selectively switch off or breed out the suckering genes. Great if we ever go back to a wood based economy (I’m guessing it’ll coppice like a beauty) via some fungus-enhanced franken-bug that enables us to turn wood into diesel. Its salt tolerence’ll could make it a candidate for dealing with the floood of salt water from the coal seam methane adventures in the district.
What a hoot that’d be, a goverment mandated, CSG carbon fixing, and stock methane stemming, brigalow re-cultivation scheme replacing the trees they just paid out for eradicating.
Back to the topic of mining on quality farmland. The following article was in this last issue of the QCL entitled Mining moratorium plea on hard ground.
It appears to me that currently there is a head down, eyes shut & run flat out approach to ‘developing’ the mineral resource. Can’t we learn from past mistakes & try to create a balance. In my opinion balance equates to no mining, housing development or plantation of exotic tree monocultures on the small 2% of Class A farming lands.
Danny #209
No Danny I wasn’t putting you down as ‘that type’, please escuse me por writtn.
Something positive from what you wrote back @202 is that you appear to have knowlege that a health of a landscape can’t be measured solely on the most visibly dominate species, namely trees. Ants & the nunber of ant species are a very important indicator.
I know about brigalow, its the country where I belong. I have respect for this tree that gave this country it’s fertility. It also has the ability to sucker & reclaim the country back. Am planning, with better seasons, to plant this species amongst others in corridors across my farm.
Danny @ 209, I know a bloke on acreage who actually did try a slingshot when invaded around the house by 6 or so scrub turkeys. You had to keep at it, because if you were not attending they’d come back. One day he got an (un)lucky head shot and killed a bird.
In another 16 perch inner city allotment a turkey decided to build a nest in a prized garden. This 80 something year-old lady would redestribute the rubble daily and replant the plants, to find that the turkey put it all back again when she wasn’t looking. My wife gave me a 1.5m mirror that was on its way to the dump from a refurbished preschool which I put on its side in front of where the turkey was going to make the pile. It actually worked. Every time the turkey came it found a bird already in residence.
still@downfall @ 211, I’m wondering if you plant a corridor and try to cultivate nearby whether the trees will suck out the moisture in a strip next to the corridor. I have a memory of this happening with a strip on the boundary of one paddock, though I think it was lighter soil and may have been more belah than brigalow.
Brian, trees are very efficient at reaching for moisture & cultivating right up to them is a wasted exercise as far as growing a crop is concerned & with brigalow the action of mechanically bruising their root system brings up a crop of suckers. So grass has to be planted as a buffer between the tree line & the cultivation. The corridors of trees can’t be too close together or there is no production in between. Solid shadelines (corridors) of with complete clearing in between gives far greater production than parklike scattered individual trees. Dr Bill Burrows demonstrated this in his trail work up in the Dingo region.
In a grazing situation there are benefits of cooler temperatures in summer downwind of a tree corridor because of leaf transpiration & warmer temperatures in winter because of the windbreak. I had a small involvement in trail work that measured grass growth within treelines of variable distances apart. Measured in kg/ha, there was close to zero kg/ha dry matter at the treeline. This amount climbed in amount of kg/ha out to 60 metres from the treeline. From 60 to 100 metres kg/ha dry matter remained stable & after 100m production fell away again. At the 100 m mark the benefit the timber was having on the grass had disappeared. Conclusion, tree corridors should be around 200 metres apart in the livestock grazing situation.
Brian: Great tip about the mirrors. What have you got for possums in the roof?
Still: Sounds good, your Bring Back Brigalow plan.
No wonder it got to cover 80 million hectares in qld, from what you say about root disturbance and suckering. From photos I’ve seen, it looks like any insult, a mere nick of the bark, results in new shoots, it looks like if you break a twig off, it’ll strike wherever it falls. Must be maddening for farmers who are fixated on eradicating it.
Is it any good as a drought forage species?
Danny thank goodness it dosn’t grow at a drop of a twig. The previous generations had an uphill battle attacking brigalow scrub with a axe & madock especially in the early days when the prickly pear had hold of the country.
The brigalow being a giant legume made the country very fertile. Its not in the same class as the Livepool Plain or the Condamine & Jimbour Plains on the Darling Downs but is only one step below. The majority of the proposed massive Xstrata coal mine at Wandoan is high quality brigalow country. That is why I was making an issue of it back in the Toxic Waste thread. 11 000 hectares lost to open cut pits besides haul roads, coal washing site & all the other infrastucture is a major impact on food production.
still@downfall @ 214, that’s another impressive example of how research has resolved an issue and provides guidance on what to do.
All the more tragic that agricultural research has been in decline here and around the world. Not what the world needs right now.
Fascinating thread, encapsulating the best and worst of the blogosphere.
Brian, that link to http://www.lifesourceqld.com.au/ is v interesting for sociological types like myself. Unfortunately it looks like a lot of it is a shiny cover for chest thumping and boundary maintenance (‘We’re the ‘Real Environmentalists’, ‘You don’t understand’ etc. as if their sovereign rights trump all other knowledge of ecosystems). Nabakov’s vision of smart Greens and Nats shouldn’t be just that, but it will require humility. Life Source is the anti-thesis.
Brian #217
Through the 1990’s there was more research in this field than the couple of examples I gave. I was heavily involved in the Landcare movement in the late 90’s, early 0’s. Our group had collated much of this research & was down the path in planning the running field days & workshops.
Brian your words were “impressive example of how research has resolved an issue and provides guidance on what to do.” I’m glad you thought it was because the Beattie Government tossed it aside because it didn’t suit their political agenda. Instead of using scientific research as a guidance to what to do; from around the year of 2001 Beattie suppressed the research & created the expectation in the near future of closing down any further land development & thereby strangling future income. The result was panic clearing.
To this day I have a sense of sadness over this entire farce. The opportunity was lost. Landholders at the time would’ve been responsive to this research. Now days they have an even greater reason to mistrust Government. The research clearly showed even taking in environmental principles that the land clearing wasn’t the problem as such; it was how the clearing was done.
dk.au – Lifesource looks like a procattle industry marketing organisation.
Not that I have any trouble with that!
Close involvement with this type of organisation will probably lead to the first test of your committment being your willness to order at least 30 kgs of expertly butchered beef every month.
still@downfall @ 219 – v. interesting: but may I ask who commissioned and the Landcare research? It doesn’t seem like anyone trusted the government! The ‘unbeatable alliance’ of TWS, QCC, WWF and the ACF commissioned their own scientific research on land clearing rates to correct the SLATS, which apparently didn’t account for biodiversity and other losses; though I’m trying to make sense of the TWS smear on SLATS for not ‘ground truthing’ of their interpretations of Landsat images in providing vegetation loss figures. This looked like just code for ‘probably understimating the rate of loss by not accounting for scrub etc.’
murph@220 – collaborative research should come with some benefits! As long as it’s wagyu of course – I’d gladly make that sacrifice if it saved all those GHG emissions from the shipping to Japan
dk.au, the research that I referred to upthread about the relationship to strips of trees & grass production was conducted before the relationship between landholders & the DNR fell apart. So at the time of this research there was a level of trust with Departmental staff. It was started or ‘commissioned’ before I came onto the board of the local Landcare committee.
There is a story behind why research was conducted on this site. Sometime in the early 1990’s, a grazier needing to clear brigalow regrowth because it had regrown to a state there was zero production available from this particular paddock. The grazier got in a contractor with a large dozer & a blade plough. He worked out he could only afford to clear half of the paddock, so instead of half completely cleared & the other half zero production, the contractor was instructed to go back & forward across the paddock clearing a strip & then leaving a strip. The intention was to go back & take out more when the finance was available. But this grazier never did because he observed benefits from this unconventional form of clearing than the other more conventionally cleared paddocks.
The Landcare project aimed to quantify what were the benefits, what was the level of production & what were the benefits for native fauna & flora. Govt. agency staff & independent researchers partnered the project. The locals identified the need for the research & did the leg work. The methodology used to set up the research was done by the expert partners, as well was the interpreting of the data.
Now this is only one small local research project. There were others looking at obtaining sustainable production from land without large negative environmental outcomes. Learning to strike a balance. I haven’t had time to read through the link you gave me, but I plan to. I checked out the source of the paper you linked to. I hadn’t heard of The Change Agency before – interesting. Their motto at the bottom of the page: listen deeply, refect critically, strategize effectively, make change
dk.au, thanks for the links which I also haven’t yet read but intend to. As I’ve said I’m planning a post on the Vegetation management Act in Qld, which has become very topical because of the regrowth clearing moratorium associated with the recent election. I’m targeting about 2 weeks from next Monday.
Life Source was born out of a meeting at the latest annual Beef Expo in Rockhampton and it’s probably fair to say that it is a response to the regrowth moratorium, so the mindset is the Central Qld grazing industry. Interesting reactions. I can’t help feeling that they need a bit of help if they are to penetrate the consciousness of the average voter in SEQ.
Australia Talks had a session on Mining versus agriculture today, which I thought was better than average. Jeff Bidstrup from Haystack Road on the darling Downs did well, articulate and informed. Prof Menzies of QU pointed out the difficulties in restoration with the Darling Downs soils. No-one can point to where it’s been done to restore anywhere near 100% productivity.
Mitch Hooke of the Minerals Council of Australia said at the end of the show that mining needed a continuing social licence to do what they are doing as well as a regulatory one. He had received the message loud and clear that they have work to do in that regard.
The pity is that those in Government who issue the regulatory licences may well have tin ears. At least that is the expectation in Qld at present.
Also I’ve been meaning to link to the Six degrees campaign which was explained here and here.
In short Friends of the Earth conducted a campaign which succeeded in getting the LNP and the Greens to sign up to no mining on prime agricultural land. But the Greens did a preference deal with Labor. In 12 seats the outcome was determined by Green preferences which decided the election, but didn’t get Ronan Lee elected in Indooroopilly as the Greens had hoped.
Brian: I’ll take the practical politics bait…
You (‘the Greens did a preference deal with Labor…which decided the election’) seem to have a handle on the bare knuckles of it: who ( the hypothetical Qld Green MP, allegedly scuttled by the TWS ) is being referred to in DK.AU’s linked paper
And further to your observation, (congruent with the a priori unlikely alignment of Liverpool Plains cockies and greenies,) that in the QLD election it was ‘the LNP and the Greens (who signed) up to no mining on prime agricultural land’: it’s also the LNP who, like the Greens, took a policy of a 44c a kilowatt gross renewables feed-in payment to the last election. (To which Ronan Lee responded with the bilious snark ‘Dave Gibson needs to be careful he doesn’t get too far ahead of his party on energy policy… For further information: Drew ‘. I’ll bet not all Greens supporters were happy with the cynical, unconscienable, ultimately doomed ‘12 seats to Labor in exchange for Indooropilly preferences to Ronan’ deal that Drew cooked up…quote:’Queensland Greens veteran Drew Hutton, who is handling the party’s preference negotiations, yesterday said preferences for Mr Lee were a deal breaker with Labor. The ALP would not get a single directed preference from the Greens otherwise.’)
Surely that ‘Labor preference machine’ misadventure will be it’s last reprise and put an end to the Hutton Era for the Qld Greens, they’ll now bring on someone with a bit of practical dirt (not the political machinations kind) on their hands who can get the respect of, build rapport, and develop an inner urban green seat and balance of power winning strategy with the conservationist conservative constituency of the tories, such as is appearing in this issue.
Yeh right, as if.
dk.au
I’m interested how you think the people in behind life source should contuct their awareness campaign. I don’t know any of them in person although I have had contact with a few by email. They, as do nearly everyone in rural Qld believe that there are legitemate concerns. If you go back to the link to life source & then click on Our Team, you will see that many in the leadership team are educated with a wide range of expierences & I assure you are articulate. Unlike myself who has stuff all education & not quite sure of why the hell I’m streching myself, sparring above my wieght division.
Danny @ 225, I don’t have any contacts that give me inside information so I can’t provide the answer.
As I see it there are diverse ‘green’ issues, which include (1) the wild rivers in FNQ, (2) World Heritage listing in the Cape, (3) reef runoff and the presumed sins of sugar farmers and pastoralists in this regard, (4) land clearing and now regrowth clearing, (5) mining of agricultural land, (6) the Traveston Dam.
That’s not the limit, but those are the main ones that relate to farming.
The political Greens have effectively sacrificed the last two in favour of what they regard as favourable outcomes in the first four, and I have a suspicion that they would do so again.
But politically they are more likely to knock off Labor seats than LNP, which are still quite a rare commodity in SEQ. But if they help the LNP into power they’ll lose out on the first three.
Brian – I heard the radio national program last night and you would have to say it was another pitiful performance by Mitch Hooke from the resources council. He finished up by saying ‘we need to communicate our policies better to the people’, or something along those lines. He could start by telling the truth on a couple of basic questions which he just refuses to acknowledge or answer. Firstly, where and when has prime farming land, or any good quality farming land ever been returned to it’s full productive self after mining? He can’t answer that and dodges the question because they never have rehabilitated land like this, despite his assurances they can while acknowledging an appalling track record in all cases up until now.
Secondly, he stated that he did not know if a mining lease had ever been refused due to agricultural interests and top quality ag land. What a load of horsesh.t! He knows the answer to that, the answer is never!! By refusing to answer simple questions he knows the answer to, the resources council looks manipulative, they look like liars and they look hell bent on digging up all the coal they can before it’s out of favour due to climate change, regardless of the land above the coal.
He went on to state that mining wouldn’t worry the downs soil because there is ‘70 to 80 foot’ of fertile topsoil that could just be plonked back in the hole and be used to grow good crops again. This is rubbish as all farmers on the Darling Downs know and it was very good to have a soil scientist on the show to further rubbish his claims. Again, another case of blatant lies to further their cause.
I haven’t even mentioned the world food supply or the devestating impacts on climate change – CAUSED SOLELY BY THE USE OF FOSSIL FUELS LIKE COAL! It’s just a pathetic state of affairs and future generations will look very poorly upon us now if mining of prime agricultural land is allowed to occur.
still@downfall, I’d be interested in what dk.au has to say, but I agree that the Life Source team are an impressive lot in terms of personal skills, abilities and experience. At the meeting I attended I heard Peter Mahoney who has exceptional oratorical skills. What he said worked a treat on a sympathetic audience, but would have gone down like a lead balloon with the SEQ voters he’d really like to influence. The site also would be cheered by supporters, but there is not much there to go back to on a regular basis if you’ve had a look once.
In the paper dk.au linked to it seems The Wilderness Society were the one who had the smarts to mount a campaign.
It seems to me that Life Source, which isn’t a political lobbying group, and the other peak organisations which are, are not in the same league and probably don’t have the necessary income to compete.
There was an interesting segment on AM this morning where “a group of activists from Cape York Aborigines gatecrashed a fundrasing party organised by The Wilderness Society.”
I’ll have to listen to it again tonight, but I thought I heard a TWS person say that she really didn’t care what the Aborigines thought they should do with the (their?) land in the Cape.
The problem as I see it is that there is no common ground, no recognition that there may be any legitimacy whatsoever in the other party’s point of view. So it comes down to access to power and coercive action. Right now in the first three issues I listed @ 227 the greens as distinct from the Greens are winning hands down.
Funny story – Bryce, one of the smart young agribusiness students attended the Powershift conference earlier this month, which was organised by the Youth Climate Coalition (I’m a policy adviser). So I reckon he’s up with campaigning industry best practice
From my very limited reading of the case, I suspect that they should be working with the DNR. If there’s no substantive, positive proposals behind the chest thumping they’ll just get nowhere – assuming their goal is to construct a compromise solution, it’s likely to involve some kind of monitoring processes, bureaucracy and – most importantly – humility on both sides (looks doubtful). I’d be giving some serious though/critical appraisal to this proposal to incorporate biodiversity measures into land clearing assessments (see later section)
As for your last comment, articulate is great, but depends what you’re trying to articulate and to whom. If you’re trying to convince a vegan of the environmental benefits of a particular way of farming beef cattle, well, good luck. That project myriad linked to Tassie looks like it might be an interesting template.
Thanks dk.au, I think making a connection with the average carnivore should be a big enough challenge for lifesource. I believe that too many connections have been severed between urban & rural people. It has been too easy for some to take advantage of this situation by adding misinformation to a lack of knowledge. There is developing an unhealthy climate of mistrust amongst both groups of people. It may be in the short term interest for some parties but for our nation this situation needs to be turned around.
dk.au, I’m told that if a grazier wants to put in an application for land clearing his/her assumption is that it will go to an officer in the DNR who is in fact a vegetarian if not vegan.
Noel Pearson tells of going to see a minister (DNR?) to find an old sparring partner from TWS now sitting at his right hand. It’s well understood that the DNR has been shall we say infested with greenies.
So your compliance officer who decides whether you have committed a crime in landclearing may well be a vegetarian with attitude.
Trust is not going to happen within the current legal/administrative structure. The paper you linked to by Whelan and Lyon is the key to why. A co-operative model has been replaced with a coercive one.
Pearson also tells of money being available to build some more houses at Hope Vale in the current emergency push, only to find out that the head of DNR won’t sign off on some trees being removed so that said houses can be built. This is at Hope Vale, which I visited in my youth and at a rough guess I’d say is about as big as Brisbane.
I’m going to be interested in whether that last link reveals any of the secrets of how the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) was done. I hear numerous stories where “ground truthing” even now reveals open paddocks, roads, playing fields, whole towns in fact, showing up as remnant vegetation.
Brian it speaks volumes about the rural community that they assume that vegetarians are unethical and vindictive.
BTW I worked in that department for several years, though not in the native veg branch. It was pretty conservative and vegetarians were few & far between. The notion that DNR is in the grips of radical greenies is nothing short of risible.
TFA, do you mind telling us when you were last there?
It’s important.
Brian, I’ll email you.
Feral# 233 & Brian beforehand, This assuming that “vegetarians are unethical and vindictive” is a non issue. I don’t believe rural people think much down these lines at all,at worst ‘different’ because being a vegetarian is not common in rural areas but still not that uncommon, its not hard to come across those who chose to be vegetarians.
Feral, the DNR staff did have a postive productive working relationship amongst rural landholders. I have had much to do with the likes of soil conservation officers. Also I believe that the majority of staff to this day whish to play a part in the advancement of balanced production & enviromental outcomes. But the climate that the Govt has set for their staff is far different to days of old. It was once a reasonbly brown dept. but it is definately bright green these days. There are a few in the DNR who enjoy a little too much, the greater authoritism of the role of a compliance officer.
TFA, thanks for that.
As far as I can make out, and I have come in late on this issue, the green groups essentially withdrew from a cooperative model because they were not getting their way and they were witnessing a continuing “holocaust” of clearing. This was back in the panic clearing days which I have heard no-one reasonable defend. Instead they lobbied government and according to paper by Whelan and Lyon won a significant victory in the 2004 election. As the authors say this was new and marked a change from “governance” to “government”. In short the power of the state was now available to determine what landowners could and couldn’t do in very significant ways in managing their own properties.
There were options open to the Qld Government in what laws it used to implement this new philosophy, but they chose an approach which jurists, and I think the legal profession generally, believes breaches standards of justice in law and procedure in ways quite out of kilter with notions of civilised practice. Essentially it is a very authoritarian approach and both oppressive and punitive to the people it applies to, with reversal of the onus of proof and other abominations.
In order to implement these laws it seems that compliance officers, with appropriate values, are being employed. So it is at the pointy end that the culture is changing. But the pressure to act and implement exemplary fines seems to be coming straight from the political realm at the top, where as the paper says, there is accountability effectively to the green groups.
The temperature in the level of contestation is quite high where there has been resistance, and there has been at several levels including some court cases, which so far I understand have been lost by the DNR. But the personal and monetary resources of most farmers is limited, so the general pattern is that the legislative program is proceeding as planned. The DNR is quite unperturbed by minor judicial setbacks it seems.
Now the greens may well be on the side of the angels, redressing the crimes of the panic clearing and maybe on some measures saving the planet, although this is contested. But there are ways and means that should have no place in a civilised society.
The ante had been upped considerably with the current regrowth clearing moratorium, which threatens to take millions of hectares out of production. This may be reasonable if there is compensation, because it has the potential to cut right across existing business plans and even render some operations unviable.
If I go ahead with my planned post I can see that I am going to have to give a couple of case examples, but the problem is that truth is often stranger than fiction and they might stretch believability.
The issue of how many vegetarians there are is by the way but there is a real question as to the ultimate aims of TWS and other green groups. The way the game is currently being played gets back to the typification of farmers as environmental vandals.
Greens on the side of the angels? Come on! The whole debate is because the state government has sold out the bush in return for ballot box preferences of urban greens.
That the greens are treated as if they are a stakeholder, or are a credible party is stretching things enough.
Primary Producer perception of greens: Greens are no more interested in our natural ecology than is a cop parked with radar behind a bush at the bottom of a slope on a wide straight highway interested in helping the public.
To suggest in the bush, that a green (a) understands nature, and (b) cares about it, would result in people looking at you just a little bit strangely.
I think South Australia had the first Native Vegetation Act, which legislated against the removal of remnant veg, as well as re-growth that was more than 10 [I think] years old. The issue of regrowth was revisited quite recently as it was seen to be and obstacle to conservation, as well as running counter to the interests of farmers. It essentially resulted in places that had 9 year old regrowth being cleared. I haven’t read the Native Veg act since it’s been changed, I should check it out to see what else has altered.
Over here the Mines Act overrides the Native Veg Act, and the Roxby Downs indenture Act pretty much overrides everything, including Freedom of Information. It’ll be a warm day in hell when the mining companies have to show the same amount of accountability as farmers do.
On the greenie v farmer stereotypes – I’m a [sub]urban greenie – I interact with landholders most days and I enjoy working with real farmers. They are quite dismissive of ‘desk-top conservationists’, but since we are there to do the practical, on-ground stuff, it’s usually easy to get a good working relationship going, which suggests to me that farmers simply relate to hard work. I might also have an advantage over other greenies in that I grew up in the country, I also feel quite strongly that conservation and farming can coexist and perhaps even be mutually beneficial.
I’m not that crazy about a lot of wine-growers, since they know the art of distorted truths and telling people what they think you want to hear, you never get that kind of bullshit from a dairy farmer or grazier. Some of the hardest people to work for are actually deep-green lifestylers, there is a sub-set amongst them that are simply control freaks – I think they believe that nature cannot survive without their intervention, and they worry themselves sick with their own self-importance, they are definitely the most inflexible thinkers I’ve met. Of course there are also some wonderful people amongst that crowd, they are just quite difficult as clients.
oops, I meant, ‘cold day in hell’, obviously. I blame the person who last week told me it was as, ‘cold as hell’, for the above mixed metaphor.
Thus, I continue my war on the english language. Apologies.
FB, yours & myriad’s approach of working with farmers shows clearly that greeny’s are not automatically dismissed by rural landholders. Your comment of desktop conservationists being unwelcomed strikes a cord with me.
Further to the comments upthread from #214 onwards about positive working relationships between farmers & the Qld DNR changing for the worst in recent times & research ignored for the sake of a political agenda I offer a further example.
The DNR sometime in the 90’s had officers research best practise of farmers who had good outcomes for production balanced with environmental values in the clearing regrowth. A booklet was published with a number of case studies. I have read this booklet but do not own a copy. Then after vegetation management legislation came in there was an incredible situation whereby one of these farmers who was one of the case studies in the publication I mentioned above was visited by the new vegetation compliance officers. The compliance officers had a hidden tape recorder & from the small talk they encouraged from the farmer,(entrapment?), a prosecution case was mounted. The farmer was overwhelmed emotionally, didn’t have enough funds financially & even though believing himself innocent pleaded guilty in front of a magistrate to get the whole sorry show out of the way. Please check out this link.
http://qcl.farmonline.com.au/news/state/agribusiness-and-general/general/disappointment-and-anger-at-guilty-plea/8025.aspx?storypage=0
The account in this link is a very similar situation & outcome experienced by another farmer.
Now rural people are very much the straight up & down, look you in the eye, your handshake is your bond; we’ll take what you say upfront until proven otherwise. Can you imagine what these type of tactics have done to the confidence & trust between Govt agencies & farmers in Qld. There must be some of the old hands in the Department who have now seen many years of good productive work go down the drain.
I recently saw a news film clip of an American politician stating that the US farm sector is the best and most efficient in the world largely the cornerstone responsible for the strength of the US as a nation. And further in no uncertain terms said “We do not want the conservation or Green movements any where near our farms as they are the food source of the nation”.Looking at the involvement the green movement has had to date in the Australian farm sector I am of the conclusion that the sooner we get them to the hell out and away from our farms sector the better. I say this because while the greens my be well meaning all they have done to date is show a complete lack of understanding of farming, practice systems and lobby Governments to pass laws that are unjustly restrictive to the farmers management and damaging to the environment. I know this may be hard for some people to recon with but unfortunately it is true.
Yeah, right. When I can drive more than an hour out of Brisbane and not see landowners left and right clearing 30+ degree slopes, I’ll give that screed a half second’s consideration. Until then, my faith in many landowner’s education, goodwill, and even basic sense of self-preservation remains staggeringly low. A statistical few farmers are smart practitioners. Most are stuck in 1975, which is doubly bewildering when you encounter those of them who were born after that. Its a struggle to adapt and take on better methods, I’ll freely admit, but far too many don’t even care to try. They’re not even like Jason, who’s giving it a good shot but whose understanding of the term ‘organic’ makes me flinch on occasion.
I’m DNR (by the way, we were NRW for the last several years and are now DERM, catch up folks). Not particularly green, and neither are pretty much any of my colleagues – we’re all very much of the hard-headed-cynic/do-what-works school of environmental management. We work off the best data we can assemble, and do the best we can with the scraps of resources the government deigns to fling in our general direction. We’re consistently ignored by policy and ministerial staff whenever its convenient, but we’re still plugging away. Can’t speak for the compliance mob, since they almost never consult us technical staff on anything, but I’m fairly insulted by the characterisation of DERM staff by some in this thread. I don’t even know where to start with the assertion that the eating habits of regional staff members are driving them to screw over rural landholders (presumably while sipping carrot juice, stroking a white bilby, and cackling madly). Really, where did that come from?
Environmental management legislation will always be a pain in the ass, no matter how well its written, but demonising those stuck with administering it won’t help. You want to make things better? Stick to needling the folk in the big ugly tower next to QUT.
While I’m at it, the US agriculture sector is a bloated human health, environmental and financial disaster that is only maintained by massive taxpayer subsidy. The farm lobbies are a blight on the US political scene and their influence extends far enough to screw over the primary production sectors of half the planet.
Grumphy , why so down cast?
Who ever suggested to you that public policy work was easy?
The recent comments on this thread resemble the situation in NSW as I experience it but there is little of the “pointy” end action as far as I know.
One well publicised case against a landowner who cleared a wetland was a victory for the agencies , also at appeal. When this was mentioned at a meeting the CMA /NP staff were quite assertive about the usefulness of the case.
Fair enough in the circumstance.
.
“Really, where did that come from?” Well I agree with you that the mischaracterisations are unhelpful.
Nevertheless I’ll relate one conversation I had with a Landcare co-ordinator-
” So would you guys like to come out to this property and co-ordinate a plan with me ?”.
I wanted to get their input about riparian areas and other geological features on the place – it has a sinkhole and caves as it sits over limestone.
.
” Well that would be good – but first you need to go away and really think about what kind of place you want to own”.
.
” As I’ve described to you I want to have a grazing enterprise”.
.
” Yes we know – you need to think about that”.
Maybe I need to go to more meetings !
Grumphy
Yes, I believe you & I believe that what you say holds true for all of the old DPI & a good proportion of the old DNR. It’s the folk in the big ugly tower next to the QUT who have stuffed it up for all of us. Go back & read my comment @ 236. Principly it is the ‘ugly tower’s’ but I also believe that there are some in the compliance mob who have propagated this climate of mistrust. The eating habbits thingo is a load of crap, it’s not revelant.
I have witnessed the under resourcing of DERM staff who are the “do-what-works school of environmental management” and I would add, are undermined by the political priorities of those in the ugly tower.
still@downfall @ #236 said “assuming that “vegetarians are unethical and vindictive” is a non issue.”
I’m quite happy to accept that is the case for you and for Brian, but the fact remains that someone somewhere made the link and that is has stuck. Not to mention that Brian – who I reckon is one of the most fair-minded & reasonable people in the Australian blogosphere – uncritically repeated the phrase here.
It seems to me that this sort of coupling of trivial social differences with the attribution of unacceptable personal behaviour resonates in the QLD psyche in a way that I’ve not observed elsewhere.
The term “efficient” has many and varied definitions when one is referring to agriculture.
That said, anyone using the words “US farmers” and “efficient” in the same sentence is having themself on.
Australian farmers have always been proud of being the most efficient farmers in the world. That is; they grow the most food per person, or for the resources sunk into food production.
This caused by Australian farmers being in the more or less unique position of being unsubsidised, and labour being expensive.
TFA, I don’t think I ever said that “vegetarians are unethical and vindictive”. If I did please show me where. It’s not what I think. What I said @ 232 is
On reflection that is over-stated, it’s not what every grazier would assume every time, but it has been put to me in those terms. I think the problem is that the ultimate aims of the green groups are not clear to the farmers and many of them feel very threatened by what has happened without any consultation in recent times, or, where there has been consultation there is a feeling that it’s a PR exercise and there is no real listening.
Brian – I think we’re falling foul of multiple cross-references & my paraphrasing. A bit like chinese whispers.
To clarify, your post @ 232 stated the sentence you’ve reposted @ 249, as well as
“Noel Pearson tells of going to see a minister (DNR?) to find an old sparring partner from TWS now sitting at his right hand. I. It’s well understood that the DNR has been shall we say infested with greenies.
So your compliance officer who decides whether you have committed a crime in landclearing may well be a vegetarian with attitude.”
What you have conveyed there is that at least some landholders are claiming that they won’t get a fair deal because they believe their application will be processed by someone who elects to not consume meat.
This is what I meant @ 247 by the coupling of difference with supposed behaviour.
Its odd that such notions should gain significant traction in landholder communities. As I intimated upthread, anything remotely resembling radical veganism is a very long way from NRM culture as I knew it. I don’t see how inadequate consultation could give rise to such notions; seems to me more likely that right-wing political opportunists have been exploiting landholder dissatisfaction over the imposition of controls on water use.
Yep, that clarifies it TFA. There are a couple of things I’ve said on the thread that I wish (a bit) I hadn’t, at least not quite like that. It’s hard for me to know exactly what is going on but I do believe the temperature of the interactions is quite high at times. From my source I’m prepared, for example, to believe a story about a farmer actually being arrested on one occasion and subsequently let go by the sergeant but I don’t want to get too specific about that.
When I come to the post I think I’ll try to step back a bit.
Having worked in government I can understand the frustrations of everyone being tarred with the same brush through the actions of a few.
To further clarify it’s not so much the eating preferences of the officers it’s the law and the method of administration thereof that is perceived as unfair, and from what I can make out breaches notions of justice in a civil society. Perhaps it’s all justified in the cause of saving the planet, perhaps not. But it’s not much use in carrying this further, I think, until I expand on the issues in a separate post.
I’ve actually been trying to foreshadow to some extent what I’ll say then as a sort of advance organiser, and to get some feedback, for which I’m grateful.
Sorry Chris, but I have to respond – I’ve wanted to at least chime in once more about the whole greens / farmers bizz anyway, and your post just about sums up a lot of the issues for me.
I recently saw a news film clip of an American politician stating that the US farm sector is the best and most efficient in the world largely the cornerstone responsible for the strength of the US as a nation. And further in no uncertain terms said “We do not want the conservation or Green movements any where near our farms as they are the food source of the nation”.
First of all I’m concerned for your faculties if you listen to anything a ‘pro-farmer’ US politician has to say about farming, given that the industry is as described by others above, relies on massive politically driven subsidies and is dominated by massive corporate style farms that are merrily trashing the landscape while claiming said subsidies. In fact a more nuanced reading of the history of small farm and sustainable farm activism in the USA would find that the most successful and in terms of perception, unlikely, alliances have been forged between green groups who’ve gotten over their farmer prejudices and farmers likewise. Pertinent to this thread, battles over groundwater control in Montana (in this instance againt property developers rather than miners) come to mind.
Looking at the involvement the green movement has had to date in the Australian farm sector I am of the conclusion that the sooner we get them to the hell out and away from our farms sector the better. I say this because while the greens my be well meaning all they have done to date is show a complete lack of understanding of farming, practice systems and lobby Governments to pass laws that are unjustly restrictive to the farmers management and damaging to the environment. I know this may be hard for some people to recon with but unfortunately it is true.
and if the world was a static place where we are locked into a temporally-stapled understanding of an issue and stuck with certain attitudes forever, that might be true. But hooray it’s not, and having been involved in green politics for over 10 years and the agricultural sector for similar, I’ve seen huge shifts, but of course that isn’t uniform across the electorates, and by the sounds of it there’s a lot of work to be done in Qld.
I personally as a green don’t have a lot of truck with much of the QLD Greens politics (like Danny, not a Hutton fan) and thought the recent preference deal with the ALP was a terrible decision. Again personally, one of the reasons I’m in the Green party is that while there are a lot of inner city types present who don’t understand farming and conservation management, the general principles of the party are right, and it’s going to take people who do have an understanding and empathy with the rural agricultural sector to get involved and help us find the common ground – which to my eye is screamingly obvious. That won’t happen if we adhere to dogmatic postures on either ’side’.
I’ll end by saying you’d be surprised at the number of green voting and green party member farmers are out there. Of course in many instances they have to keep it deathly quiet because voting green has been so successfully demonised by certain powerful lobbying sectors of the agricultural industry. Fortunately there are an increasing number of individuals seeing through that, and for my part and I know of many others, we’ll keep working internally on the party. I would point to Christine Milne and Rachel Siewart as obvious rebuttals of the ‘greens are a disaster for farmers’ argument. Funny how many of the NFF press statements in recent times have been in accord with the portfolio statements of those two Senators.
My 2 bob’s worth,
For a mob who reckons you like plain talking, it’s pretty plain to me you, you like to dish it – but can’t even take the truth when it’s put before you.
The hissy fits thrown, with all their false assumptions, strawmen, and “advice” (offered from a position of ignorance) at me (rather than the arguments I made) are pretty instructive to those who don’t realise the colossal chips you’ve got on your shoulders.
Not to say that you don’t sometimes speak and argue your points reasonably, but it’s a bit rich of you to carry on about the idea of a few “greenies” “rooning everything”, when you’re acting in the very ways you reckon they are.
Of course there’s idiots among the greenies, just like everywhere else – just like among the “rurals” for want of a better term ? Reckon you’re in a position to judge all on the actions of a few ?
Oh, and wrt to the crap suggestions about what I should do, or think so freely offered, 3 things.
1. Not that it should matter, but I’m into my 60’s, have lived and worked in the bush all my life except when studying, and derive my sole income from my bush block.
2. I reckon a good hard look at yourselves wouldn’t be such a bad idea
3. First step in fixing a problem is admitting it exists
CYA
myriad, which takes us back to the bridge-building work done by Rick Farley and others all those years ago and the tragic parting of the ways since then.
In Queensland, unfortunately, I think things are going to get worse before they get better.
BTW, I’ve been voting Green in the senate since the days of Michael Macklin. Drew Hutton lives hereabouts and I think I’ve had the opportunity to vote for him 11 times as a candidate for three levels of government. I’ve never been tempted in the slightest.
I’d much prefer a voting system like they have in NZ, Germany and some of the other European countries, where significant minority positions can have representation in the parliament. In an effective two party system you are often faced with unpalatable choices.
Pterosaur, I should probably let that go through to the keeper. I’ve been uncomfortable with the tone of the discourse at times, but right now I don’t think a sundry spray about hissy fits helps. Anyway I apologise if I’ve added to your discomfort.
I certainly agree with your third point, but I doubt we’d be looking in the same places.
Part of my frustration has been a seeming lack of appreciation of the power relations as they currently exist. The paper by Whelan and Lyons.
Take Imogen Zethoven, QCC coordinator from 1995 to 2000 who believed “there shouldn’t be any landclearing at all.” In areas where there is strong regrowth that could mean almost the entire loss of productive capacity of a grazing property over time. In a recent stoush between Aborigines and the TWS a representative of the latter said that trees were more important than people.
Whelan and Lyons see the Beattie legislation of 1999 as marking a signal change in vegetation management.
So then:
In that context apparently the old notion of cooperation between stakeholders was still meant to work. In fact in local committees we are told by Zethoven there was “open conflict between committee members, noncooperation, screaming matches and intimidation” while “there was an environmental holocaust going on”.
It is no wonder then that the environmental groups withdrew from Beattie’s ‘cooperative’ model and decided on a combined strategy to influence power at the very top. In this they were successful. Subsequent iterations of the vegetation management act were directed at even more precise controls over what can be done on privately owned property with very direct penalties which were designed, so I have read from jurists, to be non-appellable.
So from the perspective of the farmers we have moved from a cooperative model where there is emphasis on “consensus building, participation and social capital” but where nevertheless the final decision effectively rested with the farmer, to one which is coercive and punitive and as Whelan and Lyons say “the conservation movement … hold government accountable for responsible natural resource management”.
At the same time you have wild rivers legislation in the far north and applications for World Heritage listing. The ultimate intent here (and I know very little about this aspect) may well be to turn the north into a huge nature park. There is an existing grazing industry already there.
In view of the unstated nature of the conservation groups ultimate aims, their undoubted political success in recent times, and as I’ve said earlier the capacity of the state to use compliance orders to lock up areas of vegetation for 40 years to be fenced and maintained free of weeds and ferals at the expense of the farmer, leads to uncertainty and I should imagine difficulty in putting up a decent business plan to a bank.
Right now the legislative follow-on from the regrowth clearing moratorium and the election promises is unknown, but why wouldn’t farmers be worried?
Now all of that I can get from reading literature available to me, though some of it not on the net. No need to listen to any war stories.
So mutual stereotyping and name-calling especially at this time is not going to help peace and goodwill break out all over the land.
But to some the threat is perceived as existential in terms of their role on the land which makes any discomfort suffered by you and I (yes, me too) on a blog thread pale into insignificance.
Anyway, with that I think I’ve got to move on.
Its a shame to see so much farmer bashing, The defamatory remarks made by the WWF concerning sugar producers is disgusting. As an A class sugarcane famer it is insulting that i could be classed as a vandal by people that really have no idea. The WWF don’t want any more clearing, How is agricultural production supposed to expand? they’re too stupid and short sited to work something like that out. Maybe they should stop eating food, but no they are hypcritics. The fact that my nutrient managment plan actually makes the Great Barrier Reef Amendment Bil 2009 look like childplay, shows their idiocracy, and farmers , well at least some not only meet regulation, but kick its arse. Minng is wrong, it is totally destructive and is not natural and is a emmitter, agriculture, when say “old vic down the road who burn his stubble” is no longer farming actually sequester carbon, also consider old vic gives up his rotary hoe.