June 2020

Many older farmers will remember the days when Australia manufactured tractors and harvesters, some may even have heard of one of our greatest farmer inventors Headlie Taylor, who designed both our first combine harvester in 1914 and our first self-propelled header the Sunshine W model 1924.  Post World War II there were tractor inventors including Bob Chamberlain who started with his 40K model in 1949, Upton engineering which were responsible for building the world’s largest

Many older farmers will remember the days when Australia built its own tractors and harvesters  and some may even have heard of one of our greatest investors Headlie Taylor who designed both our first combine harvester in 1914 and our first self propelled header the Sunshine W model 1924. Post Second world War there were the tractor inventors including Bob Chamberlain who started with his 40K model in 1949, Upton who were responsible for building

It’s hard to imagine that Australian agriculture would have been able to compete globally if we had stood still in the early 1980s with machinery that maxed out at 350hp tractors, 40ft bars and 30ft header fronts.  Over the past forty years the size of the largest new machinery has effectively doubled. One of the hidden forces of productivity growth in the Australian broadacre agricultural sector is the use of large modern high-tech machinery.  The

One of the great failures of the First World War was the handling of the subsequent peace by the Western allies after their comprehensive victory over the German-led Central powers. Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the London Schedule of Payments, which saw the beginning of the transfer of the 132 billion gold marks (US33 billion) in reparations claimed from Germany to cover the civilian damage caused during the Great War. The arrogance of

In the past few days we have had two decisions linked to live exports, on Tuesday the Federal Court determined that the Gillard government’s Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwick had broken the law when he banned the live cattle trade to Indonesia back in 2011. Then just a day later the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture made its decision to refuse to allow a live export ship to load 56,000 sheep destined for the Middle East, fearing