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The Forum > Article Comments > A bit too much drought and not enough flooding rains > Comments

A bit too much drought and not enough flooding rains : Comments

By Brad Ruting, published 25/10/2006

Australian governments need to stop focusing on short-term, economic solutions to droughts and look to the long term.

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This is the usual litany of factoids out of context and urban bias masquerading as intelligent discourse. Some facts.
1 farmers do not use 70% of "our" water. They use 70% of the captured water that is allocated to commercial users. As well as "allocated" water, a large volume is captured in dams and then released as environmental flow, often at times like now, when the rivers would normally be bone dry.

And in many schemes only a third of the farmers "allocation" actually makes it onto a paddock. The rest leaks out of the ditch into the ground water. And neither the government nor the environmental movement have supported moves to capture (fix) this leakage to enhance environmental flows. They found it was cheaper to simply put a few more farmers out of business by taking back their allocations to supply bogus environmental "needs".

Farmers use much more of "our" water because they own the land on which that water falls. Even in drought, it is still called rain. And it may come as a surprise for some to discover that the distribution of it is not determined on a per capita basis but, rather, by the area of land one owns. RAIN IS NOT DEMOCRATIC. GET USED TO IT!

2 Australian farmers crop less than 2% of their land. So all these lines beyond which cropping, and by implication, all farming, should cease has only a very tenuous link with the facts. Farmers don't invest time, fuel, seed and fertiliser on marginal land because it is a very quick way to go broke.

3 Agriculture may only account for 3% of GDP at the farm gate but only a fool would assume that this is the full extent of the value adding for this sector. Downstream processing of food and fibre would take the contribution of this sector to 15-20% of GDP. Those additional jobs still exist here because the produce is grown here so never delude oneself that the jobs would remain here using imported produce.
Posted by Perseus, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:43:31 PM
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Perseus says "but only a fool would assume that this is the full extent of the value adding for this sector".

Well well, here we go again on economic multipliers where any activity can be made more significant, even the casinos get onto this bandwagon when it suits. Perseus, get it, 3 per cent is 3 per cent and that sector seeks to get taxpayer handouts and other favours far out of proportion to its contribution to the economy. It plays victim in the bad years, lies quiet in the good years. The dead lamb lying strategically behind the man letting the dust run through his hands plays on TV. Poor man, here's some more money.

Well what about the rest of the country?

The National Party operates like a trade union with a big letter V for victim on its back.

Get off the land fellahs. Let it lie fallow. I would rather see my money applied to infrastructure, smarter land use, superior crops, education on water and land management and anything that stops the restructuring with handouts to the "inches of rain", "bags per acre", "miles per gallon" victim brigade that some on this site seek to champion.

Incredible how Australia is stark contrast to say NZ can continue to support a mendicant activity at the expense of vibrant activities.
Posted by Remco, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 1:07:14 PM
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"Perseus, get it, 3 per cent is 3 per cent and that sector seeks to get taxpayer handouts and other favours far out of proportion to its contribution to the economy"

Umm actually not so Remco. Broadacre agriculture is one of the
few world competitive industries that Austalia has. Mining
is the other. If we relied on city slickers for exports, or they
had to import their food at much higher cost, their Aussie
peso would be worth very little and they would not even have
bananas to pay for their imports. Do not underestimate the
multiplier effect of agriculture.

The easy solution, so that handouts arn't needed, is to let
agriculture perform at its potential. City slickers are
holding us back from achieving that. The best way for farmers
to survive droughts for instance, is to sell livestock early,
before things get serious. City slickers are against live
exports, they won't let us import labour when its required,
yet the meat industry needs to be able to adjust to changing
climate, which even Govts can't regulate for. Take the
shackles off our industry, let the meat industry have a flexible
labour policy, then most drought payments would not be required.

Thats a win-win situation. The present situation is lose-lose,
due to city slicker stubborness. So cough up, if you won't
see reason. We'll sit back, as you spiral downwards.
Posted by Yabby, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 2:46:02 PM
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Present land use systems are unsustainable in the long-term, as widespread degradation of land and water is already warning us, Dr John Williams, deputy chief of CSIRO Land & Water told the National Outlook Conference in Canberra.

Dr Williams called on the nation's research funding agencies to give far greater priority to strategic research aimed at designing new ways to use the Australian landscape that will both fight degradation and return income to rural comunities.

"Our present systems are not sustainable because they leak water and nutrients. By designing systems that avoid these losses we may achieve better harmony with the landscape.

"This "leaky" nature of Australian agro-ecosystems lies at the heart of the problem. We desperately need biophysical solutions to plug the leaks and capture both water and nutrients for productive use.

"It is not a trivial challenge - but our tendency to treat it as trivial has been perhaps the biggest stumbling block to sustainability," he says.

Guess when this intuitive piece was written? 1999 What have our fearless leaders done? Absolutely nothing.
Posted by Steve Madden, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 3:54:38 PM
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Yabby, unfortunately, it is broadacre dryland farming which suffers the most from drought. With the climate change which seems to be upon us, our broadacre farms are generally becoming less likely to become competitive. Our friends at Coles and Woolworths import food cheaper than our farmers can produce it, so your argument there goes down the tube.

For the past 40 years or so, I have watched at first hand, while inland towns have dwindled in size as the numbers of farmers and supporting businesses have left. In more recent times, drought notwithstanding, the trend seems to be continuing as first the farmer's daughters go to the big smoke to look for work, and then their sons follow, firstly to earn some money and also to find a mate. The accountants of the seventies who forced the farmers to follow the philosophy of "Get big, or get out", forgot that to do so required the farmer to pay out more for labour and his sons wanted more than "This will all be yours when I die, son".

Remco, it is all very well talking about superior crops, but every time someone mentions GM crops a whole herd of environmental knockers comes out of the woodwork and says "You can't do that". Then there is the person who complains about chemicals, so what do you need to go to GM for but to get over that problem. Our dry land is generally of low fertility, so we need to apply fertiliser and the cost of maintaining the sheep which are generally run as an adjunct to the cropping, is also increasing. The days of being a dryland farmer for the lifestyle are numbered. The capital outlay required to become a farmer is much too great to give an adequate living wage in return.

Perseus. It is because of "Farmers investing time, fuel, seed and fertiliser on marginal land" that many are in the situation that they are in today.
Posted by VK3AUU, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 4:40:27 PM
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Yabby, like Perseus, is clearly supporting the "inches of rain" mob when talking about impeding the export of livestock as an obstacle. Hey what about getting smart like say the Netherlands or Israel? Tiny countries producing high value added produce without the assistance rorts of Australia (eg see the rural assistance (rort) list at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/61/21/37034206.htm).

If you support live exports, you crowd out smart activities. How is it that our manufacturing sector (still four times the rural sector by the way and if you use Perseus’s multipliers of say three, you get more than one half the GDP being supported and a GDP three times actuality etc) has fallen to one-half without a hiccup and rising living standards? Why, because it got smart when protectionism ended. Not so in the rural sector due to its "trade union" the National Party.

Australia is getting drier, a pity the hand outs are not (yet).

For the "inches of rain" mob: If you face the sun, you can't see the shadows. Sadly, the government continues to hand out umbrellas to keep the mob in its support base and so we'll see that "bags per acre" man crouching near the dead lamb to pull the public's purse string yet again and again.
Posted by Remco, Wednesday, 25 October 2006 5:02:07 PM
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