10
Despite the Australian landscape having the ‘oldest, most infertile and most nutrient-leached soils of any continent’, agriculture in Australia has been very successful.[1] Australian farmers have managed to produce enough food to feed the population several times over, but while Australia’s agricultural productivity growth is high compared to that of other established food-producing nations, it has been declining over the past decade. As well as being old and infertile, Australian soils are variable, the climate harsh and unpredictable, and Australia happens to be the driest inhabited continent on earth. Not a good recipe for growing food. A 2010 report for the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council describes food production in Australia as ‘challenging’.[2] Many of those challenges are environmental.
Like other developed nations, Australia’s modern, industrial system of food production relies on the availability of lots of land, lots of water and lots of fertiliser. Unfortunately the world, including Australia, is running out of these very things. On the map it looks like Australia has an abundance of land. But in reality, only 10 per cent of the Australian continent is suitable for growing food and a lot of this land is already degraded. We have some serious water issues with farmers, industry and ‘the environment’ jostling over a limited supply. We are losing the biodiversity of plants and animals, which is important for the health of the whole system. Team this with what we now know about climate change and human impact on the globe and we have some work to do.
Australian farmers’ relationship with the landscape has always been strained. Early European settlers brought with them British cultural attitudes that shaped the development of not only Australian society and industry, but also the Australian landscape. The first thing our forebears did was to cut down the trees. This was not because trees left unsightly leaves on the lawns of Government House (although they probably did), but because they ‘created a barrier to social progress’.[3]
In nineteenth-century Britain, progress was measured by the removal of forests and their replacement with an orderly garden that was a sign of civility and social standing. The British wished to ‘improve’ Australia’s landscape by recreating an image of Britain. While Australia was originally a heavily forested, dry, brown country, the early British settlers were determined to transform the landscape into the moist green, lush—and treeless—English countryside. This mentality still exists in some sectors today. The religious ideals of the early colonists contributed to this idea and condoned the exploitation of natural resources. It was ‘God’s will’ that they should ‘advance’ and ‘improve’ the apparently untouched wasteland that was Australia.[4] They had a moral duty to do so. Contempt for all that was not British shaped the Australian farming pioneers’ environmental attitudes.
British colonists also believed that they had a God-given right to use the land’s resources to provide them with wealth. The capitalist mentality of the day regarded nature as a tool for economic success. (Perhaps this sentiment lives on?) Because there were so many trees in the Australian landscape, the early European settlers treated timber as expendable. In the nineteenth century, millions of hectares of forest were cleared and burnt without thought to the ecological damage being done.
Eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the ‘natural fertility of the earth’ covered with ‘immense forests whose trees were never mutilated by the axe’ as providing ‘both sustenance and shelter for every species of animal’.[5] This included humans. Nature would provide for us provided we worked with her, was his belief. In contrast, the British thinker of the same era, and the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, took a very different view of what gave people satisfaction and met their needs. He said our desire to accumulate more and more had helped develop science and the arts, which had ‘turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence’.[6] As Australian philosopher Peter Singer says in his book How Are We To Live? Ethics in an age of self-interest, the world has followed Smith rather than Rousseau.
Trees compete with grass, crops and livestock for water and nutrients. Removing this competition motivated the pioneer farmers and still motivates farmers to clear land today. By contrast, Australian Aboriginal society lived with the treed landscape. They managed some areas with the selective use of fire but lived in relative harmony with their landscape, as did many other indigenous cultures around the world. Land clearing was an introduced European farming practice. Broad-scale land clearing, up until recently, was encouraged among Australian farmers by government. The Soldier Settlement Schemes set up by state governments throughout Australia encouraged soldiers returning from the world wars to take up small blocks of land to farm. These schemes were not unlike the land grant schemes offered to ex-convicts and free settlers in the early days of colonisation. The conditions of the grants meant ex-soldiers had to clear the land, build fences and other infrastructure and grow crops and livestock—i.e. make the land productive—to pay off small loans. Many of the schemes failed because of the inexperience of the settlers, the small size of the blocks, lack of capital and difficult climatic conditions. These farming adventures had a great impact on parts on the landscape, many of which were arguably never suitable for agriculture in the first place.
In Western Australia, the Group Settlement Scheme encouraged migrants from Britain to open up farming areas of the south-west of Western Australia in the 1920s.[7] Large tracts of virgin forest were cleared, making way for what we now call the Western Australian Wheatbelt. Between 1920 and 1930 more than 6000 people immigrated to Western Australia and cleared 40,000 hectares of land. Settlers were paid ten shillings a day during the land-clearing phase. Many struggled to fell immense hardwood timber forests by hand, and once they had, found the poor-quality land impossible to farm. Land clearing has been a condition of many types of farm lease agreements in Australia since.[8] Land clearing continued, with government support in Western Australia, right into the 1980s. In Queensland, restrictions on land clearing have only been in place since 1999.
So what exactly is the problem with land clearing? After all, without it we would not be able to produce the amount of food on the scale we do today in Australia. It has proven vital for the advancement of our economy and our society. By its very nature, all farming must have some impact on the natural environment. This is what we, as consumers, trade off for our food.
But land clearing—or, more accurately, over-clearing—can contribute to soil erosion. When the ground cover of trees, understorey shrubs and grasses are removed, the soil is disturbed and exposed to water and wind erosion. Following heavy or constant rain, deep gullies, washouts or rills form eventually making the land inaccessible and often incapable of regrowing grass due to the loss of topsoil. Unplanned land clearing from overstocking of cloven-hoofed animals or burrowing by pest animals such as rabbits can also cause soil erosion, particularly in drought years. The dust storms that hit Sydney in 2008 gave city people a taste (literally) of wind erosion from Australia’s centre.
Given the right hydrology, the removal of deep-rooted native trees, shrubs and grasses can also cause dry land salinity. Salinity is salt. When these plants are removed and replaced with shallow-rooted (European) crop varieties there is nothing to soak up excess water from rain or irrigation in the subsoils. This allows ground water to rise, mobilising salt that is naturally occurring in many soils but usually inactive. As a result, salt scalds form on top of the ground preventing any plant growth.[9] This surface salt can then be washed into waterways, causing river water to become salty, or saline, as it builds downstream, affecting aquatic life, human consumption and irrigation.
Other forms of land degradation attributed more to constant overfarming rather than land clearing include soil acidification and the depletion of organic matter in the soil. Coastal land, which due to its higher rainfall is intensively farmed and treated with ammonium-based nitrogen fertilisers, is at greatest risk of acidification,[10] caused by a drop in soil pH. Soil pH is a measure of soil acidity or alkalinity. Plant growth removes the alkalinity from the soil, increasing its acidity. Constant cropping increases acidity more quickly. Most plants do not grow well in acid soils. Dramatic declines in crop and pasture productivity are often the only signs of soil acidification. Acid, from acid sulphate soils, can also find its way into river systems, making the water unfit for human and livestock consumption and destroying aquatic life. Acid sulphate soils release acid when the water levels of creeks and rivers drop exposing these soils to the air. This is one reason environmentalists say it is important to maintain environmental flows and water levels in river systems.
The organic content of soil necessary to hold water and support the delicate ecology of the soil is also destroyed through constant cropping. Soil biota is killed off by application of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Over time, the soil structure becomes so poor it cannot sustain plant growth.
Without pointing the finger, Western Australia has had its fair share of farming trials and tribulations resulting in some of the worst land degradation in the country. The first settlers to arrive at the Swan River in 1829 described the West Australian soils as ‘probably the poorest wheat-land soils in the world’ and ‘only of value for filling an hour glass’.[11] The new farmers could not take a hint. They were farming in sand. Australian soils were, and still are, notorious for their low levels of organic matter, phosphorus and other nutrients essential to grow crops. The European settlers were not prepared for the fragility and poor fertility of their new home’s soils. The south-western part of Western Australia did, however, have reliable winter rainfall—perfect for wheat growing. So the pioneers persisted in clearing and attempting to farm vast areas of often infertile land.
Because of the vast amounts of virgin land available in Australia, our early farmers chose to ‘frontier’ farm. This meant they would repeatedly crop a parcel of land until it was completely infertile then move on to a new block.[12] This was cheaper and easier than trying to correct or prevent fertility problems with lime, manure or any other methods they would normally use ‘at home’ where agricultural land was limited. The frontier farming mentality was prevalent throughout Australia during the first 150 years of settlement. Farming’s saviour came in the form of the fertiliser superphosphate, which was developed towards the end of the 1800s and successfully trialled on West Australian soils in 1894. Superphosphate was the difference between a decent crop and none at all in Western Australia. But breakthroughs like this only encouraged farming to forge ahead in what would otherwise have been considered unsuitable areas
While Western Australia is now Australia’s biggest wheat-producing state, its natural environment has suffered as a result of past treatment. More than 93 per cent of native vegetation in the Wheatbelt has been cleared. It is a similar figure in other agricultural areas of the state. To grow crops in Western Australian requires copious additions of synthetic chemicals and fertilisers to correct or augment poor soil. And that is on the parts that are not salt-affected. Salinity—both natural soil salinity and man-made salinity—is widespread, affecting more than half of all farms in Western Australia.[13] It has affected all of the inland water systems in the south-west with half of the state’s usable water already saline, brackish or of marginal quality. More than 450 species of plant, insects and birds are under threat due to rising salinity in the south-west of the state—an area recognised as a global diversity ‘hotspot’ because of its outstanding natural environment.[14] Buildings and roads in affected areas of Western Australia are also decaying due to salt infiltration.
The eastern states of Australia are not salinity-exempt either. The National Land and Water Resources Audit says salinity is one of the country’s major environmental problems, affecting 5.7 million hectares Australia-wide. Due to past and present farming methods, it is predicted to increase to 17 million hectares by 2050.[15] Within the next twenty years, water used to grow crops in Australia’s premier food-growing region, the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB), will be too salty to use.[16] The MDB relies on irrigation to grow one-third of all of Australia’s food and is home to 40 per cent of our farmers. Half of all Australia’s native fish live in the system. It covers 1 million square kilometres through four states, of which 3.4 million hectares are expected to be affected by dry land salinity by 2050. A salinity audit carried out by the Murray–Darling Basin Commission in 1999 predicted that water from the system would be too salty for humans to drink within 50 to 100 years. That’s a great worry when more than 3 million Australians rely on the Murray–Darling system for drinking water, including the city of Adelaide. Again, land clearing, over irrigation and intensive cropping over a long period have been a major cause of these problems.
The over-extraction of water from the rivers for irrigation use has also been blamed for other environmental problems such as acidification, algal blooms and loss of wetlands and biodiversity. During a 2009 trip to Australia, United Nations senior advisor on water Maude Barlow said she was devastated by the damage done to the once mighty Murray River due to over-extraction.[17] She commented on the sulphuric acid and saline invasion, which she could see from the air, and which was made worse by on-going drought.
Yet water taken from the river is vital to irrigate food crops, for drinking water, to generate power and for manufacturing industries. The vexed issue of water extraction from the Murray–Darling system has implications for Australia’s natural environment as well as food production. Farmers, environmentalists and government have been desperate to come up with a solution to the MDB’s water problems for many years. The Murray–Darling Basin Plan, currently in draft form, will come into effect in 2012, Federal parliament willing. It will put limits on how much water can be taken out of the system and provide strategies for improving river water quality, fixing basin salinity problems, and protecting wetland and biodiversity supported by the river system. It will also set out rules for water trading. Put simply, under this plan the government wants to take water allocations from the farmers and other users and put this water back into the river to improve its health. Understandably, the farmers are not happy.
Over the past 100 years dams, weirs and barrages have been built along the MDB river system enabling the storage of 35,000 gigalitres of water in the Basin.[18] (A gigalitre is a billion litres of water or the equivalent of 400 Olympic swimming pools.) The theory is that the more water flows through the system the healthier the environment, including farmland, will be in the future. At present the environment receives 19,100 gigalitres per year of available inflow but needs between 3000 and 7600 gigalitres more per year to be sustainably healthy.[19] The Federal government has set aside $3.1 million to buy water entitlements from willing sellers within the Basin to help enable this.[20]
The Murray–Darling Basin Plan recommends between 27 and 37 per cent of all water extracted from the Basin be returned to the rivers.[21] Unless farmers in the Basin can work out how to grow more food with less water, it follows that food production must drop. In an attempt to reduce water use, Riverland irrigators along the Murray River in South Australia, like many across the country, have invested heavily in improving irrigation technology. Being at the end of a heavily over-allocated river system, South Australian industry organisations claim they have been hit the hardest by water shortages. The mouth of the Murray River has become silted shut on several occasions during the last ten years due to lack of flow. Adelaide seems to be forever looking for its next drink.
It will be farmers who will initially feel the impact of measures proposed under the Basin Plan. Water buy backs have been underway in South Australia’s Riverland for several years with 50 gigalitres of water entitlements already bought back. As a result, 100 farmers have stopped growing irrigated crops of citrus, grapes and almonds after selling their water entitlements to the Federal government. The South Australian River Communities Group represents 3000 food producers. In its submission to the release of the Guide to the Proposed Murray Darling Basin Plan it said that if water allocations were cut by 25 to 35 per cent, an equivalent amount of food production would be lost.[22] A decade of drought and cheap imports has already forced many fruit growers out of the industry in southern states. The New South Wales Farmers Association says if the proposed MDB Plan is introduced it will cause one in three NSW farmers to leave the land and 38 per cent of those remaining to scale down the size of their businesses.[23] Farmers and industry groups such as this promote spending money on improving irrigation systems, not more water buy backs. They fear water cuts will have flow-on effects to local business and industry and will eventually see small towns, reliant on the river system, die.
As issues with the Murray–Darling Basin show, striking that delicate balance between producing food and keeping the environment intact is difficult. It is a challenge that Australia hasn’t quite met. The pioneering mentality towards agricultural development remains entrenched in the mindset of some farmers today, despite new knowledge and understandings. The rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s threatened farmers, and certainly surprised government, who could not understand why anyone would value ‘unproductive’ scrub over well-developed agricultural land.[24]But broad public attitudes to the environment have changed. Today there is an overriding concern for the preservation of the natural environment above and beyond its economic value.
It is not just economic imperative that has led to an upset in the balance of nature. A lack of understanding or an under-appreciation of how nature works has contributed too. We have already seen how removing deep-rooted native vegetation and replacing it with shallo-wrooted crops can lead to salinity. Disturbing soil can lead to erosion. Compacting soil with animal hooves and tractors can stop nutrient cycling. While farmers might not like to admit it, the farming practices and attitudes inherited from our British forebears that we more or less still use today have not meshed well with Australia’s fragile natural environment.
Unfortunately, the finer workings of landscape ecology are not obvious to the human eye. The significance of keeping native vegetation for production values as well as conservation values is not easily understood except perhaps by an ecologist. For example, boosted nutrient levels in pastures and crops from fertilisers or natural processes can cause certain insect numbers to explode. These insects destroy crops, grass and trees. Certain birds eat certain insects that eat certain crops. But to survive and be effective these birds require large connected patches of mature trees with a healthy understorey. Even though birds have wings, they are not Boeing 747s able to safely soar across continents without stopping. They need corridors of thick bushland full of diverse plant species in which to travel. Without a healthy understorey of shrubs, individual tree patches do not survive either. They suffer insect attack and dieback, and eventual die out.
Certain understorey shrubs and wild flowers also attract parasitic wasps, flies, spiders and lizards that control certain grubs and beetle larvae that attack pasture grass roots.[25] Get the picture? Mistletoe is an invasive vine which can suffocate trees. The natural control for mistletoe is Imperial White Butterfly larvae, possums and a host of birds that eat the mistletoe fruit without spreading the seed. None of these desirable species survives without a shrubby understorey
In southern parts of Australia, in particular, the aggressive Noisy Miner birds have driven out many rarer woodland birds responsible for insect control, such as the Hooded Robin, the Turquoise Parrot and the Regent Honey Eater. These small birds require a thick cover so they can avoid the more dominant bird. ‘Thick’ means you can’t see through it. For a farmer without an ecologist’s eye, that’s an eyesore. The thick canopy shades out grasses, creating bare patches on the ground (that’s a farmer’s nightmare). But it is in these bare patches that understorey seeds can germinate easily in the rich decaying leaf fall, thereby thickening the patch further. Noisy Miners and mistletoe dominance are symptoms of ecosystem imbalance. Despite what our European forebears thought, narrow tree lines and scattered paddock trees just don’t cut it ecologically in Australia.
A properly functioning ecosystem, in balance, means nature takes care of the problems we humans now treat with fertilisers, pesticides and mechanical cures. Loss of habitat from land clearing is the biggest single cause of species decline—from large mammals through to tiny beneficial insects. Unfortunately, the way a healthy, bio-diverse, natural system recycles nutrients and water, and controls pests, disease and other intricate ecological processes, remains a mystery to most. Leaps of faith are required. By nature, farmers are practical people who are sceptical of science (even though it is science that has made farming in Australia possible). Scientists, by nature, are not very good at communicating their ideas to farmers. Put government regulators in the middle and the message can become obscured. Many farmers, while specialists in commodity production on their land, are not ecologists. They see trees, shrubby vegetation, birds, animals and insects as a threat, taking up valuable grass or crop-producing areas, harbouring native and introduced pests, and making day-to-day management such as mustering difficult.
The status of the Australian kangaroo is an obvious example of nature out of balance. In Canberra, the kangaroo is a national symbol. In Coonabarabran, the kangaroo is a pest. There are more kangaroos in Australia now than at the time of European settlement. While the kangaroo doesn’t fill out the form, an annual population census is conducted each year. Kangaroos are counted by complex aerial surveying techniques. The results show there are about 25 million of them in Australia—about the same number as there are cattle. At least 2 million kangaroos are harvested each year by licensed kangaroo shooters. Despite drought, floods, fire and harvesting, the kangaroo population on average has continued to increase during the past 30 years. With agriculture’s development and the clearing of native habitat how can this be so?
The easy answer is that the sheep and cattle industries, developed in the rangelands of Australia where most kangaroos live, now provide kangaroos with a plentiful supply of water and food that the species never had access to in the past. The pastoral industry has tapped underground water supplies and made permanent drinking water available for cattle and sheep—about every 3 kilometres across the landscape. Farmers have introduced new species of pasture grasses, which increase the food available to both cattle and kangaroos. With a grass takeaway shop on every corner a kangaroo population can increase fourfold in five years.[26] Increased kangaroo numbers compete for food with cattle and sheep. Seeking shelter, they overcrowd diminished patches of remnant bush. This, in turn, puts pressure on ground cover, plant biodiversity and a farmer’s income.
Long before white settlement, kangaroos evolved as part of the Australian ecosystem. At natural population levels their soft feet did not harm the fragile Australian environment. In drought years their numbers declined. In the large numbers evident today, farmers claim kangaroos cause overgrazing and soil erosion. Environmentalists claim hard-hoofed, introduced, European grazing animals cause overgrazing and soil erosion. The farmers want to shoot the kangaroos. The animal welfare lobby wants to save them, and the environmentalists lament that the hillside is bare. Whichever way you go, the natural system is out of whack.
Environmentalists say we must work with the environment not against it. So remove the cattle and farm the kangaroo instead. This is all good in theory. Kangaroos were an important and reliable source of food for Aboriginal people before the Europeans settled in Australia. Kangaroo meat is lean and nutritious. It would be an efficient use of an abundant resource. The soft-footed kangaroo is gentle on the environment. Kangaroos, unlike cattle, do not produce methane gas that destroys the ozone layer and contributes to global warming. However, the practicalities of farming kangaroo pose challenges. Farmers say it would take 112 million kangaroos to replace meat demand for the 8 million cattle currently slaughtered each year in Australia. Containing a wild animal within fences would be difficult and unnatural. Wild harvesting, as it is done now, would create new problems of ownership for farmers as kangaroos move back and forth across the landscape. The animal welfare lobby says the practice of killing kangaroos is cruel, as the pouched young of slaughtered females must also be killed. And where is the demand for all this kangaroo meat? Are Australians comfortable eating the national emblem? Even if it was in the nation’s best interest, most cattle farmers have no desire to farm kangaroo. You can’t expect a dentist to start practising medicine or a plumber to become an electrician just because a section of society thinks it would benefit the environment.
Some farmers genuinely believe they are ‘greener’ than the ‘greenies’.[27] But unless they have a deep understanding of ecological principles and processes, and are prepared to support and protect these on their farms, they will not be capable of preserving the environment. Some farmers are not prepared to accept the involvement and advice of outside experts. They truly believe they are doing the right thing and do not acknowledge that the internal bias of the profit motive can skew their judgement. Many do not agree with (and a small minority do not accept) laws that protect endangered native vegetation such as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 or state tree-clearing laws. Mainstream farmers’ federations such as the NFF are generally opposed to land clearing restrictions, water regulation, pricing carbon, emissions trading, and pesticide-use reform. While some of these policies do cause short-term pain to some farmers, many are measures that offer long-term protection to the farmers’ resource base and future ability to profit.
There are some reactive, right-wing farmers and farmer groups fiercely protective of what they believe is their right to set their own environmental parameters for land management. Groups such as Property Rights Australia believe landowners have exclusive rights of access, use and opportunity to profit from the land.[28] Fair enough. They have paid good money for their land. But, as in all spheres of life, with rights come responsibilities. Farmers manage over 60 per cent of the Australian landmass. It is in their own interests to conserve biodiversity on this land and sustainably manage farming land. It is also in the wider public interest. Twenty-odd million people live in Australia. Government (representing this public interest) therefore has a role to ensure the land is protected.
New representative farmer groups such as the Victorian-based Environmental Farmers Network (EFN) are a breath of fresh air on these issues.[29] While it doesn’t claim to represent the majority of mainstream farmers, this organisation advocates on behalf of member-farmers who are serious about best-practice environmental land management underpinning all farming activity. They are lobbying government to increase funding for on-farm projects that protect biodiversity and research into new farming systems that don’t use pesticides and fertilisers. The EFN policies are progressive and sow the seeds of change at both the farming and government policy level.
Government also has a responsibility to ensure the farmer is adequately compensated from the public purse if necessary ‘environmental’ management practices mean he forgoes income. On a good day, managing the environment for both production and nature conservation is a big challenge. In our unpredictable, free-market farming (and natural) environment, insufficient profit means many farmers simply do not have the funds to do it well. They are tempted to take shortcuts—to over-clear, over-stock or over-crop land out of necessity for short-term returns. Declining farm profits are a bigger threat to Australia’s natural environment than are soil infertility, climate change or species extinction.
Making those profits will also not become any easier in the future. The world is running out of the ingredients needed to grow food. One of these is fresh water. In the first decade of the 21st century it point blank refused to rain. Every major Australian city experienced water restrictions. Rivers did not flow, creeks and dams went dry, small towns ran out of water, and farm water entitlements were cut. Climate change is expected to bring further water scarcity. In the future it is predicted farmers will have half of the fresh water currently available with which they will be required to grow twice the amount of food. Climate science consensus predicts that the world will have less water and four times more droughts. Some believe this will mean that within 25 years the world will not have enough water to feed itself.[30]
Even without climate change, water resources are being used up by thirsty food production. It takes 630 litres of water to make an ovendried kilogram of wheat, 2200 litres to grow a kilogram of soybeans and 1550 litres to grow a kilogram of paddy rice.[31] High protein, resource-intensive foods such as meat and dairy take even more water to produce. CSIRO land and water scientists say it takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef.[32] However, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) claims this calculation uses ‘virtual water figures’ which include all the water that falls on the beef farm. MLA says this figure does not take into account that most water ends up in waterways, dams, and in trees and plants not grazed by cattle, and claims that it actually takes between 27 and 540 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef.[33] Either way, it is a lot of water to put a steak on the plate.
We are also running out of fertilisers. Conventional farming worldwide relies on synthetically produced nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which make up nine-tenths of all fertilisers.[34] Almost all the world’s nitrogen is made from synthetic ammonia produced using natural gas. Yet the world’s supply of oil and gas is predicted to peak between 2010 and 2020. If and when this happens, nitrogen will become scarce and very expensive. Phosphorus and potassium are made from special rock. These reserves are finite and will run out. There is no substitute for phosphorus. Some scientists believe we have already passed ‘peak phosphorus’ and supplies will be exhausted within 80 years.[35] Fertilisers are responsible for tripling world food production in the past half century. Without them our current system will be lost. Never mind oil and water, some commentators predict we will go to war over phosphorus.[36]
Fertilisers present the environment with a double-edged sword. As Australian science-writer Dr Julian Cribb describes in his book The Coming Famine, the over-use of fertiliser means excess nitrogen and phosphorus are finding their way into paddocks, waterways and oceans and effectively polluting the earth’s biosphere—land, water, air and anywhere else life can exist. This happens via the farmer’s fertiliser spreader, through nutrient-rich soil being blown or leached off-farm, washed into waterways and oceans; through decomposing food-waste, intensively farmed animal waste, human sewage and toxic industrial waste. Scientists estimate we put about 150 million tonnes more nitrogen and 9 million tonnes more phosphorous into the earth’s biosphere than would occur naturally. There is concern this will disrupt the natural cycle of these elements, causing a loss of oxygen in the oceans and mass extinctions.[37]
The intensive farming of crops and animals concentrates manure and urine which, in turn, creates pollution problems. While Australian cattle feedlot operators are required by law to dispose of it diligently, when thousands of head of cattle are closely confined in small pens, the tonnes of manure, urine and wasted grain rations produced must go somewhere. The same applies to intensive piggeries and conventional chicken sheds where hundreds of thousands of animals are confined at any one time. Even with the best, most rigorous management practices employed in Australian factory farms, throw in some wet weather, machinery or systems breakdown or human error and local paddocks and waterways will be the first to wear it. Concentrated animal waste is high in nitrogen, which in small quantities feeds plants but in large quantities kills them. From an environmental perspective, the natural, even spread of animal manure across the landscape via the ruminations of free-range animals provides the best disposal method.
While mainstream farmers embrace the science that brings new technology, many farmers are sceptical of the science of climate change and global warming. In a nutshell, climate change is the gradual warming of the earth’s climate due to an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases—mainly carbon dioxide—are released by burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal). Greenhouse gases absorb heat energy and prevent it escaping into space. This results in warmer temperatures on Earth, which causes longer, hotter summers; less rainfall; and more destructive natural weather events. Global warming is believed to be caused by both natural and man-made processes, but not everyone believes the science and you can’t make them.
Research shows that an individual’s position on climate change is more likely to be determined by his own subconscious beliefs —not facts—and reinforced by his place in society.[38][39] Australian research by the CSIRO’s Social and Behavioural Sciences Group show that slightly younger, well-educated women from capital cities were the demographic most likely to believe in human-induced climate change. Beliefs about climate change are also tied to political preferences. Those who are economically and socially conservative are likely not to believe in climate change.[40] As a rule, most farmers are not well-educated, young women from the city who vote Labor or Green. They are more likely to be 55-year-old, male, National Party voters who live in the bush. We can deduce, therefore, that farmers are more likely to fall into the category of non-believers of human-induced climate change.
If this is the case, and human-induced climate change is real, then Houston, we have a problem. As we know, farmers manage 60 per cent of the Australian landscape. About 16 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia come directly from agriculture. Whether farmers believe in climate change or the tooth fairy, it is they who will be most adversely affected by climate change and most directly affected by society’s attempts to ameliorate it. It is also farmers who have the potential to do the most environmental good in the world. We need them on side.
The offending gases produced by agriculture are mainly methane from cattle and sheep (burps and flatulence) and nitrous oxide released from nitrogen fertilisers, agricultural soil cultivation and by burning vegetation. Carbon dioxide is also emitted from fuel used to run tractors and farm machinery. Methane and nitrous oxide are far more potent than carbon dioxide. Every tonne of methane gas released into the atmosphere has the equivalent warming effect of 21 tonnes of carbon dioxide.[41] For nitrous oxide it is 310 tonnes. The standard unit used internationally to compare warming effects of different greenhouse gases is a carbon dioxide equivalent or CO2-e. Even the most devout climate-change-believing farmers have difficulty accepting that it is the bottoms of their cuddly, cud-chewing companions that are causing so much harm to the atmosphere. City factory smokestacks, yes; but cows in the meadow...? Even if we can get our heads around this, doesn’t carbon dioxide make plants grow? It does, but unfortunately most plants don’t enjoy the accompanying side effects of climate change such as lower rainfall and hotter temperatures.
While the CSIRO is busy catching cow farts so the NFF can cost them, the reality is that agriculture along with electricity generators, transport, manufacturing and other emissions-intense industries will be targeted to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions produced by their businesses. The upside for farmers is that farm businesses are not only emitters of carbon but have the potential to become sequesters of carbon. Trees and other plants absorb, or ‘sequester’, carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis and are therefore carbon ‘sinks’. Farmers own the land on which trees and plants grow. The soil too has the ability to hold carbon although this is more problematic. Farmers therefore have the potential to make money by using some of their land to sequester carbon, which off-sets greenhouse gas emissions produced by their business or other industry. The Carbon Farming Initiative—legislation passed by the Australian government—sets out for farmers how this is possible. While not all farmers are willing or able to become tree farmers, the opportunity exists to make money from carbon farming.
Managing climate change will produce a mixed bag for farmers. Countries including Australia are trying to counter climate change with economic policy tools. The use of carbon pricing or emissions trading schemes puts a value on carbon emissions and encourages behavioural change to reduce the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere. In late 2011, the Australian parliament passed the Clean Energy Legislative Package that will see Australia price carbon at $23 per tonne from July 2012 and move to an emissions trading scheme in 2015.[42] Initially, only the 500 biggest emitters who release more than 25,000 tonnes of C02-e into the atmosphere each year will pay the $23—effectively a tax—on each tonne of carbon dioxide produced. The good news for farmers is that agriculture will not be included and therefore not directly taxed at this point. But farmers will feel the flow-on effects of higher costs of farm inputs created by the tax on other industries, including increased fuel, electricity, freight and fertiliser prices.
The NFF and all state-based farmer organisations are fiercely opposed to pricing carbon and say it will significantly reduce farmers’ incomes. Modelling done for the NFF by the Australian Farm Institute predicts a carbon price will increase on-farm costs by as much as 4.6 per cent for an average Australian beef farm.[43] Could this be a cue for farmers to change their production systems to less energy intensive ones?
The NFF is also concerned that putting a carbon tax on the big food processors, who buy farmers’ produce, will see this extra cost passed back to farmers. Food processors cover their increased costs by asking the consumer to pay more or by paying the farmer less. They don’t like asking the consumer to pay more because they could well buy a competitor’s cheaper product. So guess who wears it? If beef farmers, for example, are forced to absorb meat processors’ carbontax costs from further up the supply chain, research shows that this will contribute to an overall reduction of net farm income of between 6.2 and 16.5 per cent for an average beef farm.[44]
What’s more, most Australian-grown food is exported and hence ‘trade-exposed’. This means Australian food processors are not going to ask international buyers to pay more for (a carbon-taxed) Australian product when they know there is a (carbon-tax free) competitor around every corner offering a cheaper product. Without regulation, the farmer is almost certain to wear the processors’ carbon tax too—at least until the rest of the world catches up.
If Australian agriculture is included under a carbon trading emissions scheme post-2015, Australian farmers will need to innovate and change further—this time to reduce on-farm carbon emissions. Cow farts will count. They will be taxed. It will cost farmers more. But this will provide new opportunities for farmers as well. Some will embrace new technologies and management to cut emissions. Some will change their businesses, maybe farming fewer food crops and more trees. Some will no doubt leave the industry. That part-time off-farm job might become a full-time one.
Whatever happens, it will take a seismic shift, such as a price on carbon for everyone, including farmers, to realise the true environmental costs of producing our food. Such a carbon pricing scheme will mean food must become more expensive. Some foods are likely to become more expensive than others. These will include the resource-intensive, high protein-based meat and dairy products. According to Meat & Livestock Australia, it takes between 7 and 11 kilograms of carbon dioxide to produce 1 kilogram of beef in southern Australia,[45] but it takes considerably less to produce a plate of fresh vegetables or fruit.
Price may eventually change our eating habits. If the consumer can’t afford to pay for the relatively heavy carbon footprint of their steak burger, they will be forced to eat less meat and more salad (heresy to a beef farmer, happiness to a bean grower). This will involve structural adjustments and short-term pain for many farmers. It will also be a culinary cultural adjustment for many consumers. With or without a carbon tax, consumers must be prepared to pay more for their food if they want Australian farmers to grow it for them, but the proceeds from those increased food prices must be passed back to farmers.
In the long term, pricing carbon may create a more sustainable food system—financially for the farmer, environmentally for the planet, and health-wise for the consumer. Despite the NFF’s worst predictions and taxpayers’ misgivings, climate change may provide some, so far unforeseen, opportunities and benefits for Australian farmers and consumers.