There must be an election approaching as the state government is scrambling to cover off on any areas of potential criticism with the latest one being regional transport. After three years of ignoring the state of our wheatbelt roads or the status of Tier 3 rail the Minister for Transport has thrown a bone to farmers by raising the bait of reopening the 509km of lines closed since 2014. The Ministers announcement that she has

There is no lack of economic modelling that maps out the potential for digital agriculture to increase the gross value of Australian farm production, with some trails showing potential productivity improvements as high as 25%. With these sorts of numbers, it’s no surprise the early adopters are keen to access the latest technology, but many farmers are being held back because of the lack of mobile digital coverage, reliability and speed. Australia needs more than

With the global focus on Covid-19 one thing that has surprised international health experts is the link that media opinion makers continue to make between healthy eating and organic food as a means of warding off this and other diseases. Some consumers, particularly high net wealth ones and those with a propensity to vote Green, (all too often the same people) seem to have a fixation on the magical health benefits of organic food. In

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

The political dance that commences a year out from each state election has parallels with the origins of the term ‘Cargo Cult’ which emerged across the pacific during the Second World War. As a result of the conflict, village communities had become conditioned to looking to the sky, awaiting poorly targeted parachute drops which ended up supplying local villages with all manner of war goods. Following the war, villagers then began to see strange people

Back in 1936 when The University of Western Australia established the independent faculty of Agriculture there was only one university to support the states 25,000 farm businesses. Eighty-four years later and there are now around 5,000 farm businesses, and the State has five universities with four (UWA, Curtin, ECU and Murdoch), offering competing undergraduate agricultural science and business courses. While the two oldest sectors of the WA economy, minerals and agriculture, are likely to pull