Great article, a very clear and sensible argument.

From letters in The Age today

OUR Prime Minister, who art in Canberra, Narrowed be thy Name. To thy kingdom come, Drought has come, for continuing environmental crimes against our Global Haven. Give us this day recognition of Global Warming. And prevent us our Parochial Mindedness, As other countries' efforts only further isolate us. And lead us not into economic obsession, but deliver us from coal-based destruction. For thine is thy future, with renewable power, and water aplenty, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Anthony Poutsma, Albany Creek, Queensland

Years ago, a friend loaned me a copy of One Straw Revolution. It was a life-changing book, and relevant to this topic.

As luck would have it, electronic copies can be obtained here (pdf 3 Mb):

http://www.soilandhealth.org/copyform.aspx?bookcode=010140.fukuoka

- I obtained a copy this morning, so it all works.

Fill out the form to obtain an e-mailed link directly to the pdf. Save to a suitable directory.

You can press the "non-join" button to swipe a freebie copy, but I think I'll do the right thing and join, make a donation - whatever.

The Soil and Health Homepage is here:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/index.html

Happy reading - happy dreaming. Cheers.

why is all this 'news' to oz agri-businessmen?

perhaps the monoculture extraction of maximum cash from nature is built in to a capitalist society? or are all oz farmers total fools about land management?

more likely, this is just the latest manifestation of the intersection of two lines on a graph: the ever rising line of population multiplied by energy use, and the cyclical line of available resources, tending downwards.

there are visible leaks in the dyke between business culture and the sea of physical and biological reality. bad tines are coming, and that's the good news. if people don't get control of society away from politicians, bad times may be disaster or even extinction.

politicians can not solve this crisis, humanity must be energized by participation in decision making. democracy is vital, pollie-rule is fatal.

Growing rice and cotton in Australia is pure madness. Not only because of the dryness of the continent, but also because, by growing rice and cotton we are taking away much of the wealth of our immediate neighbours in Asia and the subcontinent, who need to sell their cotton and rice simply to survive.
I can't do much about the cotton, but at the supermarket I always make sure I'm not buying Australian rice.

There seems to be an assumption that long term agriculture is possible in Oz but in fact there is no evidence for this. It appears to be based apon the fervent hopes of the landless peasants of Europe and 3rd,4th and barstard sons of English arisocacy looking to create new dynasty.
There have been at lest 3 waves of people from the North coming to Oz. All these groups had some association with horticulture, the oldest rice growing was 9000 years ago in South Thailand. The last lot in, 8000 years ago difinatly knew of horticulure. There have been traces of horticulture found but these have always been attibuted to later people. Is it not possible that aborignes tried horticulture and it failed. We have no indication farming can continue as present in this country

If susan had been anywhere near real Australian farmers over the past decade she would understand how far down the learning curve she really is. The capacity to form new, fertile soils, and to increase their depth and water retention capacity has been fairly common knowledge for at least 3 decades. Stubble retention ans zero-till cropping is now very widely practiced. Our rice and cotton yields, as with most other agricultural products, are up with world best yields.

There is the odd smattering of common sense in Susan's article but it is suffering from an overburden of vacuous urban rambling disguised as contemplation. Read "The Land" or "Qld Country Life" every week for three years, and attend a dozen cattle and sheep sales in each of those years, and take the time to actually listen to a dozen people who have survived more than three drought cycles, and then come back for a chat on the real issues confronting Australian agriculture.

And then, Susan, get yourself a farm, add the mortgage that is at least double the median house price, meet the repayments over a 15 year period instead of the urban norm of 20-30 years, and then set aside 35% of your productive capacity for a wildlife refuge that no-one is willing to help pay for.

And then come and give us your opinion on the good residents of Adelaide who are still watering their lawns with water from Tamworth, Toowoomba and Tatong when every farmer downstream has had the tap turned off. And then give us your opinion on the million megalitres of fresh water that evaporates from Lake Alexandrina each year that used to be evaporated from salt water prior to the barrages.

Yes, our farmers have problems but most of them are caused by bad policy delivered by an ignorant urban majority.

Time, perhaps, to investigate in urban hydroponics. A very well developed technology, seasonality negated, lowest journey to market, maximum use of inputs, delicious product, grow just about anything... Where are the investors?

Great article, Susan. It seems like basic commonsense to suggest that we all work with the land rather than against it but, in this age when the land, animals, everything has to be exploited for every dollar we can get out of it, commonsense goes out the window. I liked your suggestion that governments and industry listen to the women, the poor, Indigenous people, those close to the land... When, oh when, will that ever happen?

Quite a good article and one that goes right to the heart of the matter considering soil health and working with natural systems are the only really feasible way of fixing a biological problem. Technology alone certainly won't do it.
Unsubscribing from 'The Land & Q.C.L.' would also be a good start. If the answers were to be found there, then we would have no problems...
Ohhh that's right, its the drought and bloody politicians that have caused all the problems. Completely out of our control, so we aren't to blame at all...
Not completely sure if the people suggested are the only ones with some answers though. Plenty of land degradation has been caused by poor people as well as the first Australians. (and dare I say it, some of them would have been women!!)
Susan, a great way forward would be to give a voice to those currently using regenerative farming practices. They are being drowned out in the media and government policy by industrialised agriculture.
They are out there (not whinging), just passionately pursuing their dreams, and creating real answers.

Good god, there is some rot in this article!

1. By removing patents, you remove the incentive to invest money in R&D, which most of the time, will lead to improved management of resources, and better ways of doing things.

2. Bangladesh supports so many from its farms because few of them reach the standard of living that we would consider absolute minimum. I dont think we should be holding them up as an example. Yes their soils may be rich, but may I kindly suggest that this is the only thing that is allowing them to support their population without starving, not their management of this.

3. Yes Bangladesh has wide flowing rivers - they have a LOT more rain than we do.

4. If we didnt invest in infrastructure (like dams etc), we would have a dry Murray-Darling now. People would be left without water, and animals would die.

5. The author suggests that immigrants from diverse farming backgrounds have much to teach us. Perhaps we can learn a few points here and there. But immigrants brought rice to Australia (which I dont see as a bad thing, but many do). This suggestion also goes against other arguments made by the author, that our environment needs good local management, which is what enables farmers to continue generation after generation without overtaxing the land that they are on. Australian farmers are considered world's best practice in most areas, and are the most economically efficient. If we are going to look at other farming methods, we would do best to seek help from the Israelis, who have to work with an environment at least as harsh as ours.

Despite growing up on a farm, this woman demonstrates little real understand of the challenges faced by farmers and their attempts to manage a BUSINESS within the constraints that they are given.

Thanks for the 'Soil & Health' link Chris.

One thing about Bangladesh's farmers are that they grow and sell their produce in a third world economy. A tonne of rice is worth a years pay there and about 2 days pay here.

What are the viable alternatives to growing cotton and rice?

Perseus, do you ever stop flogging the horse you rode in on? SH is working towards understanding the problems that your heralded commercial media largely only sell panacea's for. I hardly think your catalogue of wrongs (committed by neoliberal free marketeers, not powerless urban greens) and mistakes should be a required qualification for participation in discussion. I don't doubt there are many ingenious and bloody hard working farmers, question is are they backing a losing horse and gutting the soils and biodiversity of a continent in the process.

Soil degradation is maybe the biggest uncosted externality of commercial agriculture, a market failure that has crippled civilisations before. In an ideal world carbon trading would incorporate soil carbon, then farmers might be paid to sequester it.
But betcha Howards cowards will kiss industry's ring and include as little as they can get away with.

Before irrigation, the early explorers actually documented that the murray river in summer consisted of long pools and the boats need to be portaged.

The river mouth closed in Summer.

If the dams had not been built, this drought crisis would have hit earlier. The idea behing the dams was to drought proof the country. Unfortunately far too many irrigation licenses were sold.

It is true that there are areas which should never have been irrigated. there is a lot of land that should never have been cleared.

perseus, Country Gal, Rojo,
Your posts make the most sense, from a practical point of view.
most of the others have only urban or greenie theory to offer. Susan does say a few commonsense things but a lot is badly influenced by too many years in books and away from the land.

Farming is easy and great if you don't have to make your living from it. All you old cockies and inefficient farmers TAKE NOTE You should lock away 35% of your productive land for enviromental reasons and let it revert to natural state.

Yep, you can find an expert anywhere that will tell ytou how to do it. Fancy comparing farming in Bangladesh, or other third world country, to that in Aus. People die of starvation in those countries. Thats how bloody good their farmers are.

Drought we have, but its a while since I saw any of our citizens with arms outstreched, trying to get a dipper of grain or bowl of gruel.

Liam: neither Dr Sue. Perseus nor others can fix the problems in the MDB with their style and rhetoric. I doubt any engineers can either when thinking about our current plight up in the hills with say the Snowy Scheme.

From the ABC 666 notes today on the climate change conference at Gunning, that’s Prof. Cullen’s home town, the best we can do is “farm like a kangaroo”

I’m still wondering what we are going to eat after China had the best pick of their home grown. My suggestion is we bottle what precious drop is left.

Perseus: Both the extreme right and left burn out in their individual intensity. That leaves the rest of us watching flares over the horizon after dark.

Although Dr Sue’s dot points seem very palatable on the surface I expect the real work load still remains with people like Peter Sparks and the Lachlan Catchment Management Authority rather than academia in general.

http://www.lachlan.cma.nsw.gov.au/

For townies not living in the bush, it rained before dawn here on Sunday morning. I grabbed an old bath towel and quickly wiped down two cars left overnight at the markets to remove several months of fine dust and cat paw marks gathered at home in my garage.

It rained heavily again late yesterday afternoon so I swiftly collected all the nearly dry washing, then I wiped my shoes free of dust and debris clogged underneath. My back lawn is a mass of ant’s nests. These tiny meat eating ants attacked me in their thousands as I danced about with my wet plastic market covers the night before.

This morning everything is bone dry again in the wind except for a tiny residual pool on a rather convex corrugated shed cover over the household rubbish bins. Composting and topsoil building in this climate without substantial rainwater in tight storage is absolute nonsense

I am not going to endorse all SH's recommendations but as a former MDB landowner and a landcare coordinator, I do get tired of entrenched practitioners like Perseus and Country Gal ridiculing the messenger. Perseus bleating about someone else paying for a 30 percent bush haven or CG eulogising 'business as usual' reminds me of the landcare 10, 30, 60 rule-of-thumb. The first are the real country innovators, the second the percentage who will follow when they see how it works and the 60 are 'the dogs' who will ignore everything and just carry on mining the land for all its worth. Tas is right to post the Lachlan landcare piece regarding all the assistance available for people like Perseus to set aside a bush reserve. A few years ago the Productivity Commission recommended such largesse be only available for saving threatened species. Now you can get it for less and this attempt to attract 'the dogs' shows that these land miners, will just hang about waiting for government handouts, a free dam here, free fencing for a degraded creek there.. Talk to their local land agent who will tell them that some good shade trees will add to the price of the place - $10 000 if surrounding the homestead from my experience. 'Whisper' to their hard hooved cattle/sheep and the poor buggars would say the same for a bit of shade.

Jup, if you are going to attribute a comment to me, then please be so kind as to get it right. I was not advocating a "business as usual" approach, simply pointing out that farmers are running a business - they need to make money off it. It is a business that generally returns significantly less than most in terms of ROI.

I dont disagree that 10% of farmers (or of most business people) are the innovators - I have worked for some, and they tire themselves out constantly pushing uphill. I wouldnt agree with the remainder of your statistics entirely. There are obviously some that rape their land, but then they dont stay on there for long. Some dont manage as well as they could, but do a reasonable job given the constraints of time, money and education.

Funny, all those people that revile cotton farmers are probably unaware that most major advances in (eastern) Australian agriculture can be attributed to the cotton industry. Its an industry with high risk (a plant that just cant wait to die), and very high inputs. In the past it has also had a high return, but even so its a risky crop to grow in all but the most ideal conditions. These constraints have led to a high degree of research in cotton farming to try to manage some of the variables. As methods prove to be viable, other farming areas pick up the techniques and technologies that suit them. This includes ways of reducing pesticide use, improving irrigation efficiency, building organic matter in the soil, improving soil structure... the list goes on. But these improvements arent marketed to the general public. We just hear about the baddies.

You have to be kidding CG.
The cotton industry are masters of spin and promoting all of their so-called benefits. Even to the point of 'propoganda packs' given to primary schools.
If the irrigation sector was as effective as they are efficient then we would not have the disastorous situation facing the country that we now do.What other agricultural industry has been able to externalise its costs to the extent that this sector has?
Yes, I know about the drought. But this is Australia and it isn't the first and certainly won't be the last.
Sadly (and certainly not on purpose) most farmers are not doing the best job possible for their landscapes, & to blame or differentiate between that and profitibilty shows that education should be at the heart of any attempt to alter and improve the status quo.

Bushrat: “I know about the drought. But this is Australia and it isn't the first and certainly won't be the last” etc. “education should be at the heart of any attempt to alter and improve the status quo”. Mate; let’s ask the obvious question – education sure, but by whom? Not our current batch of academics IMHO.

Our rural reporter Sarina Locke on ABC 666 today raised again the wetting ability of parched soils, too fine now for light surface water to penetrate. It sticks like slime thought to your boots early in these cooler mornings.

http://www.abc.net.au/backyard/presenters/SARINALOCKE.htm?canberra

We then listened to a range of issues, % ground cover, length of recovery, grazing the high country, HR burning, river nature, gully cross section study and so on however Prof Thoms ANU had the idea that all rates of change today are probably different historically and seem “chaotic”.

It’s my view nobody really knows how to deal with that except perhaps the more astute living on the land.

Practical response to rates of change of various interactions in industrial process was my job for decades. Experienced as I was then I still relied mostly on the nearest operator. They usually had a good nose for trouble and were far more reliable than any set of data. We smiled as academics came and went.

Geoff Minchin from LCMA gets close to understanding the broadest range of issues and concepts at the grass roots like our Noelene from the high country. Getting useless bleached thatch and other debris back into soil (late season burning) as a long term carbon reservoir with out a lot of CO2 pollution is as yet a bit tricky for modern science.

Ask Doc Fleming at NSW Parks about their suppression of sparks.

Some Background; a group in their wisdom on MDB water futures helped remove cattlemen from the Vic Alps in the 70’s. Our natural reservoir was wet enough then to run the risk of wildfire.

Reading sudden rates of change and developing in phase responses are absolutely critical regardless of our imposed time frames.

Goodness Bushrat, you show your ignorance!!

Cotton farmers arent masters of spin, they just market themselves like any other business. You are free to take their marketing activities with as much salt as you like!! I'll take cotton marketers over McDonalds marketers any day.

You are right, this is a drought and not the first or last. But it is the worst in living memory, significantly more severe than what was to have been expected based on generations of knowledge. Dont blame irrigation farmers for the lack of water in the rivers. To start with most irrigation water used is from seasonal rains from year to year - this amount would not have been able to be stored for times as dry as this. Secondly water rates paid by irrigators help to pay for the infrastructure that is needed to supply both farm water and town water - dams. Larger dams could be built, but the greenies would be jumping up and down about that and we have a government that has a distinct lack of foresight in this area.

I dont get your point about the externalisation of costs. Not sure what it is that you are referring to. But most irrigators are effective as well as efficient. Most would be happy to contribute towards further infrastructure development to help alleviate future droughts, but are hampered by government and the greenies. Plus the blinkered view that so many have of the industry - most would cry "vested interest" - sure it is, but they would not be the only ones to benefit from such an investment. Others benefiting would be towns downstream, the environment, the economy (more production = more jobs and more money filtering through the economy).

Come and spend a little time with the industry before reviling it. You will probably be pleasantly surprised.

Bushrat, If there wasn't so much misinformation regarding cotton growing in Australia education packs for schools would not be necessary.

Cotton is grown to provide the best return possible. When water is available. If another crop stacks up equally or better then irrigators will change to that crop.

As CG says have a look for yourself. If not at least read a bit about the industry.

You could try www.cottonaustralia.com.au

Rojo,
Not a lot of information on the cotton australia website regarding any detrimental impact of over extraction, damage to ecosystems and the very real economic costs that are incurred by these unsustainable practices to downstream landholders and the environment.
Hmmm....wonder why that is.
CG, Just because you don't understand what I mean (your words) does not mean that I am ignorant or that I am wrong.For a little more understanding of 'externalisation of costs' try reading Paul Hawkens' "The Ecology of Commerce".
To listen to Malcolm Turnbull and the PM sprout about their 10Bill water plan would leave most people thinking that all farmers are irrigators, and sadly that's where all the money will go.
Lets see how efficient we can get at something that we just shouldn't be doing...