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.