RIGHT now, Australian farming has got bigger problems than climate change.
We are struggling to simply cope with climate constant.
This is the stuff of drought and flooding rains.
Take Hamilton in the heart of Victoria’s Western District – in the first 17 days of this month it was sprinkled with a fairly useless 14mm of rain.
Go a smidgin south and the Grampians have been on fire from end to end.
Keep going west – past bone-dry South Australia – and try Port Hedland. In a couple of days earlier this month it recorded 263mm.
Which just makes those in northern Queensland laugh – the first nine days of February dumped a whopping 530mm on Cairns and in both extremes caused some seriously significant damage along the way.
My old man used to say the Federal Government, or any government – with half a brain should have figured out how to pipe all the water from the Ord scheme at the top of WA down to places where it is really needed.
Like our farm.
Your correspondent has just about had his fill of all these harebrained Henny Penny’s running around and telling me, and you, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”.
I have always simply dismissed these people as the delusional, who wouldn’t know their arses from their elbows without calling for several meetings, a detailed four-year study, a peer review and then a debate on whether the methodology in reaching that decision was valid.
But for once, they appear to have got it right.
The sky is falling, just in the wrong places.
With this much H2O tumbling freely (but don’t get excited, a tax will be coming soon) from the sky in those aforementioned regions there is water for everyone and everything – in those regions.
However, at the Whacker spread we are finding ourselves spread pretty bloody thin, feeding out to stock, watching the dams shrink and waiting on the fallout of those wild storms north and west sending their last hurrah our way.
Yet, and no-one in agriculture will be surprised by this yet, we have all been here done that. Fire, flood and drought, all that the same time, just in different places.
At my house we don’t call that climate change, we call it Australia.
I recall one of the big droughts back in the ’60s, and the headmaster (no, we didn’t have principles back then, we had people we called Mr and Mrs, or Sir and Ma’am) got up at the school assembly, after we had sung the National Anthem and taken the Oath of Loyalty, and staged a schoolwide prayer to end the drought.
If he had tried that today it would have required several meetings, a detailed four-year study, a peer review and then a debate on whether the methodology in reaching that decision was valid – and all before he dared publicly suggest we might pray to care about someone other than ourselves.
And it would never have reached the start line regardless.
Instead, we would have been told it was our just lot for being colonial bastards, for clearing the land and building a strong and growing future for Australia.
Literally.
It has been able to achieve that despite the meddling of politicians and city-centric greenies who wouldn’t know what to do with a farm if they tried – but are very happy with the food and fibre it produces.
Their way of dealing with things is simply ban them in Australia, let it be someone else’s problem and happily accept poorer quality imports.
Just look at good old kneejerk Joe Ludwig, a Labor MP who in 2011 banned the live cattle trade to Indonesia. It created instant destruction and by the time it was reversed even the Australian courts agreed Canberra had got it so wrong it was unbelievable.
Now they are back and shutting down the live sheep export trade.
The rest of the sheep-producing world is rubbing its hands as once again Australia throws away another successful industry.
Well trust me folks, there are plenty of things, and people, I would be throwing away before I started trying to dismantle the Australian agriculture industry.
