November 2019

The debate around Agriculture Minister Alannah MacTiernan’s recent comments calling on the state’s grains industry to have a plan B in case of any future ban on glyphosate, unsurprisingly brought out the usual suspects who never miss an opportunity to criticise anything she says. Not that I am shy of giving the minister some considered advice myself, but some of the things I’m reading are unbecoming of an important sector that needs to have a

With a below average crop in much of the wheatbelt and a growing drought in the pastoral region those families facing steep boarding school fees next year will be wondering where the money will be coming from. We know that the cost of education has soared 61 per cent in the past decade, dwarfing the 34 per cent rise in wage growth for the same period. With school fees tracking along at double the rate

The world of drought funding gets more bizarre by the day, the latest stimulus package includes $100m for South Australia to turn on their desalination plant to generate 100 gigalitres of water that will go towards fodder. This is like using Mount Franklin water to grow hay in the desert, what’s next building desal plants at the top of the Murray Darling to top up the rivers. One phone call to Western Australia would have

Countryman 31 Oct 2019 In their infinite wisdom, the State and Commonwealth governments are marching to the beats of different drums when it comes to subsidising farm water supplies. The state government moved to end their own Farm Water Rebate Scheme 12 months ago. The scheme offered up to $15,000 every ten years to help cover the costs of dams, road catchments and tanks for farmers in districts receiving less than 600mm average annual rainfall.

Last year we had reports of camels trundling through crops near Esperance, this year we have them coming out of the desert into the rangelands driven by drought. On the surveys that have been completed there are up to 400,000 horses, 1.2 million camels, and 5 million donkeys wandering wild across Australia. Of these numbers up to a third are in Western Australia and their numbers are capable of doubling with a run of eight