Good idea Goeff, perhaps Flannery or Beale could provide us with a more realistic budget for a range of property scales and climes?
Can't say I'm looking forward to seeing the product of 50 years of selective breeding, a fat 'roo that waddles so slowly it can't get to water, falls easy prey to Dingoes and is so heavy its claws do serious damage to soils and, when being turned to steers or being drenched, can rip your teenage son's guts open in a single workplace horror. Intergenerational equity, indeed.

Haven't heard a peep out of 'rent-a-crowd' yet.

To all of the above -

One of the best, most honest and realistic reads I've enjoyed for many years. Thanks to all you farmers for doing the thankless task of feeding the faces of the ungrateful city people. Please keep up your good work.

As for me, I'd have to be pretty damned hungry before I could eat roo, rats, frogs, snakes, goannas, grasshoppers, spiders or any other exotic creatures, including humans. Nah, I just wouldn't buy any of it - unless of course I was starving. But even then I don't know if I'd be able to keep it down.

Kangaroos? Nothing but a bloody pest and menace. We'd do well to get rid of the bloody lot of them.

Kangaroo is delicious, although I have a preference for wallaby. If there is a way to make farming of these tasty marsupials viable, I am for it.

Great thread, interesting responses.

It's strange... all those who hate and berate farmers are not in this thread, and there is less shouting, fewer irrational statements and no personal attacks. Instead, we've had rational discussion and a good dose of pragmatism.

If only it were like this more often.

On an aside. Has anyone ever eaten koala, does is taste good, how is it best cooked?

I don't know DFXK, but after having eaten (taken one bite) a turkey that fed on camphor laurel berries, I would assume the taste of eucalyptus might limit koala meat to a very strong Laksa sauce and hold the lemon grass.

Kangaroo is really good if only lightly cooked (when the juices first run) and with Terriyaki sauce. As for farming, they might be viable with a natural barrier (an island?) to keep them in but the big hurdle is the existing environmental protection measures that have challenged the notion that animals on ones property are the property of the landowner. It would need a complete and unambiguous recognition of the landowners ownership of them, and all other wildlife on their land. And this right of ownership would need to include the right to dispose of as and when they see fit, including the right to completely destock in the same way that cattle or sheep can be completely destocked.

The existing situation where the farmer tries to manage his fodder reserves by adjusting his cattle or sheep herd while the relevant Environment Minister does absolutely nothing to adjust his 'roo herd, even in a serious drought, is REALLY unsustainable. If they are out there and they eat grass then their numbers need to be properly managed. At the moment, the real environmental damage is done by the public's uncontrolled 'roo herd while the farmer cops the blame for the outcome.

I have no doubt that "free market ecology" would produce much better outcomes than we have today but as long as the rural minority is beholden to an urban majority it will not even get a chance to show how good it could be. But thats another issue.

As a former wildlife officer in the south west of WA who issued licenses to allow the culling of kangaroos, can I please bring some grass-roots reality to this issue of kangaroo farming? Anyone who tried to farm kangaroos on the smaller properties described by Ian Mott would have to be plain silly to try it, for all the reasons that Ian has raised plus other reasons. The reality is that kangaroo farming is only seriously proposed for the pastoral regions of Australia where the average property size is maybe 100,000 hectares, where you wouldn't need fences in any way shape or form and where you would quite deliberately be removing cloven hoofed exotic animals such as sheep, cattle or goats and instead be allowing kangaroos to become the harvestable animal species.

The environmental benefits of removing cloven hoofed animals would be huge, as shown by numerous case studies where deteriorating land quality has been reversed in places like the Murchison-Gascoyne region of WA by destocking and allowing our native herbivores - kangaroos - to take over.

Kangaroo farming in this way would allow 90% of the costs discussed by Ian to disappear, thereby improving the economic viability of kangaroo harvesting enormously. As well, if you understand what the term 'ecosystem services' is all about, then it is about time that we urban residents of Australia started paying farmers and pastoralists to better manage the ecosystem services (such as clean water and air, protection of biodiversity, bush tucker, etc) that their properties should be providing to the Australian landscape, i.e to all Australians.

Bernie Masters