The food revolution is underway, you just haven't noticed

By Julie Francis

I find it puzzling that so many people who don’t know farming, like to tell us what needs to happen in Australian agriculture.

An article on the ABC news website, January 27th 2019, calls for a food revolution that starts with the farm. The authors, health professionals, portray the need for this revolution not just for health reasons, but to avoid ‘catastrophic damage to the planet from runaway climate change’ and ‘ongoing damage to ecosystems.’

I find it ironic that these articles (because there are many just like it) that call for less meat consumption then outline a litany of issues that have little to do with meat production in Australia, and more to do with plant based food production, food processing, and excessive consumption.

This particular article calls for ‘substantial agricultural innovation that must focus on improving efficiency and sustainability in existing farming lands; restoring degraded lands; a zero-expansion policy of agricultural land to enable natural ecosystems to thrive, and halving food waste.’

These things are happening already in Australia. Yes, more of it is desirable, but articles like this make it sound like nothing of the sort has ever been considered.

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As an example, our small farm near Melbourne produces high quality, environmentally responsible lamb. When my family bought it in the 1980s it was 100% grazing land, and running at a productivity rate of 6 dry sheep equivalent per hectare (a measure of grazing productivity), we have now doubled the efficiency and have it at 12 - 14 dse per ha. In the same time we have taken out 23% of the land for conservation and forestry. So, improved efficiency has been achieved and that’s given room for taking some land out of production. This is a small farm, where farming is not even the primary source of income for the family. Even bigger increases in efficiency seen can be seen by many full time farmers on larger holdings.

Point 2, increasing sustainability in existing farming lands: The only wildlife we would see in the 1980s on my farm were a few birds, and the odd echidna and brush tail possums. We now have kangaroos, wombats, ringtail possums, sugar gliders, koalas, a number of reptiles and frogs, a greater diversity of birds, including birds of prey. We are a net carbon sink, sequestering the equivalent of 250 tonnes of CO2e per year. Similar examples on a far larger scale can be seen and impacts measured across the Australian farming zones as a result of thousands of landcare projects since the initiative started nationwide in 1990.

And it is important to make a point here and say that it is generally easier for grazing farms (meat producers) to see these kinds of improvements, because the pressure is stronger on horticultural and cropping farms to use every square metre of land, and to avoid having trees and fencelines that disrupt the access of large harvesting equipment.

Point 3, restoring degraded lands, … although some wouldn’t have called our land degraded in the 80s, there is almost always the potential to restore ecosystem function on land that has been used for agriculture for a long period. We have protected the stream from grazing, and have established bulky perennial grasses that protect the soil from either drying out in the heat or getting pugged up in the wet, and soils now absorb all run-off, except for the most extreme rainfall events, meaning pollutants don’t run into the waterways and off the farm. Again, this kind of restoration is generally fostered on pasture based farms, and certainly broadacre cropping farms, undertaking no-till farming. However, our plant based proponents need to recognize that vegetable and fruit production is inherently not suited to restoring ecosystem function, because it requires (generally) short lived species of plants and regular cultivation of soils to grow them in. Because the nutrients are exported off the farm in the final product, a lot of fertiliser is also needed. Animal based systems can be managed to minimise nutrient loss, and the whole time the animal is on the farm it is part of the system of recycling nutrients (manure!).

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Point 4, zero-expansion policy of agricultural land. Australia is not the like the Amazon jungle, that people so love to talk about when demonising agriculture. It takes only 15 minutes to search the Australian Bureau of Statistics site and see that agricultural businesses operated over 51% of Australia’s total land area during 2016-17, down from a peak in 1975-76 of 65%. No need for alarm, agriculture is certainly not taking over the country, it is reducing in land area. The cities are doing a better job of expansion.

The fact is that Australia’s grazing and cropping area has declined from around 450 million hectares in the 1980’s to less than 400 million hectares in 2017; the sheep population has declined from around 170 million in 1990, to approximately 71 million in 2018; and Australia’s beef cattle and dairy cattle population is at a 20 year low.

Finally, halving food waste. It’s a worthy goal, but as this was included in an article about eating more plant foods, let’s just remember that plant foods are where the waste is. Meat is too high value to let waste, but more importantly, doesn’t have to be sold at a certain time. If the market demand for meat isn’t good, a farmer can keep the animal on their land for longer. This is not the case with a ripe watermelon, when it’s ready, it has to be harvested. It doesn’t matter if the supermarkets have changed their mind or dropped their prices. The other big source of waste is when a crop doesn’t get the water it needs to grow, or is damaged by frost or hail. Again not an issue in animal production. Animal agriculture can withstand at least the short term fluctuations in weather and price cycles, because of the ability to keep the animal growing on your farm and because poor weather doesn’t ‘damage’ your animal. It’s important to note that animal agriculture uses most of the waste from cropping and horticultural farms and food processing businesses. Ruminants in particular can digest plant food wastes and convert it into valuable protein. Feeding it to livestock however is often then misconstrued by those who then say ‘look at that wheat being fed to cows instead of humans’… not recognizing that it is only the failed wheat crop, that can’t be sold for bread making for human consumption, or can’t get a decent price , that is fed to Australian livestock.

In the end, the article in question calls for the government to subsidise and promote sustainable farming methods. By calling for price support from governments the authors demonstrate their lack of understanding of what sustainable agriculture means, it has become clear over the last 20 years that farming in-conjunction with improved ecosystem functions is the only way to run a profitable farm businesses. It is worth noting that the perception of farming, particularly grazing, is diminished in the public eye during extreme events such as droughts when the part-time operators are given a high media profile. What most of the public don’t realise is that around 50% of Australia’s farmers are part-time and lifestyle operators with off-farm incomes. In contrast the professional farmers must consider their paddock ecosystem function when cropping or grazing to remain financially viable. It is the reason why around 20% of Australia’s farm businesses are responsible for growing around 70% of the nation’s food.

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I do believe that farmers who are farming sustainably should be rewarded. But it is just as easy for the authors who wrote this article to promote sustainable farming themselves. By depicting the farming system as in need of great overhaul, and in need of subsidies it distorts the truth of the situation. There are thousands of farmers in our country doing the very things called for, without subsidy.

I read no reference in opinion pieces like this, to a wide range of changes taken place in the last 30 years including: the positive impacts on farm ecosystem functions from landcare farming; radical changes in cropping practice from tillage to no-tillage, conservation, precision cropping; radical changes in livestock grazing practices particularly widespread adoption various time controlled grazing methods such as holistic management, regenerative management, cell grazing and rangeland destocking; the fact there is less water used for irrigation agriculture now than in 2013 as a result of the Murray Darling Basin Plan; soil organic carbon levels are increasing across the cropping zones as a result of no-till, stubble retention and brown manure crops; in rangelands soil organic carbon levels are being increased with rotational grazing, strategic destocking, and natural bush regeneration.

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So celebrate the positive examples, encourage consumers to spend money supporting those farming practices, creating a price premium for that product. That will be all the encouragement needed for the farmers who aren’t yet undertaking these best practices. The food revolution is well underway, a bit of appreciation and recognition of it, is all that is needed to spur it on.