FWAG Abroad

A Snapshot from Down Under - Meeting the Global Food Challenge

At the start of her Nuffield Scholarship looking at the future of upland farming in Britain, Chloe Palmer reports on the pre-study conference in Melbourne.

In one of the breaks, my question to Ben, a beef farmer from Western Australia, was simple enough:
"What acreage do you farm?" I asked.
"Ahh, about 1.3 million hectares, that'll be about 3 million acres," was Ben's reply.
I thought for a moment, trying to visualise how many counties in England this might extend to and remembered farms at home that I had once thought of as large.  It wouldn't be too many years before my neighbours might find themselves competing on the world market with producers such as Ben, with little or no support payment. 

Australia is still in the stranglehold of a terrifying drought. This dominated the conference proceedings for the whole week, and also drives decision making and strategy planning across the whole agricultural industry.  Farmers are paying significant amounts of hard cash for their water, and irrigation is a fact of life for the majority. They are also considering alternative options that might provide income in a year when a severe drought could wipe out their harvest.  Running an extensive sheep operation alongside combinable crops is one possibility.  Risk management is very much the theme of the moment to ensure that businesses can survive years without rainfall.

Australians too are coming to terms with restrictions on waste, animal welfare and other environmental issues, albeit they are not as stringent as those that we in the UK have to endure.  A proportion of beef and sheep producers are starting to seek to comply with more rigorous standards over and above regulation in order to secure accreditation that will give them the green light to export to the EU.

The Aussies and the Kiwis are very proud of their largely unsupported agricultural sector and took great pleasure in reminding us Poms and the Irish of our cushioned existence.  They certainly believed that they had the moral high ground, and spent most of the week trying to convince us that they were far more business focused than any of their counterparts in the EU.  There is an element of truth in this argument, but I felt strongly that the UK and Irish farmers amongst our group were more than equal to their antipodean colleagues. Perhaps the Aussies and the Kiwis are more aware of their costs and their margins, and bench-marking is something that every business does as a matter of course.  They are very market-focused, but perhaps not so customer-focused as many UK and Irish farmers are now.  They export most of their produce and therefore do not have the exposure to consumers as individuals with differing preferences and tastes.  Without exception, every farm we visited was aiming its product at the commodity market. 

The environment is climbing up the agricultural agenda, but largely because climate change has been brought into such stark relief for all farmers.  Issues such as biodiversity, nutrient management and soil protection were alluded to, but are clearly not a top priority.   Environmental grants are available in Australia, but they are highly targeted and are locally co-ordinated, either through Landcare or through State departments. The Landcare concept, where farmer-led groups tackle local environmental issues such as salination, soil erosion and diffuse pollution, has its roots in Australia. Several of the farmers that we visited had been instrumental in setting up Landcare groups and were keen to extol the virtues of the approach, but the conference programme leaders were not keen to provide time for this theme alongside the more mainstream discussions.  I felt that this was a huge opportunity lost, as I think that the Landcare approach has so much to offer to the UK, as a genuinely farmer-led model of landscape-scale environmental management.

The Nuffield Australia conference was a fascinating and stimulating ten days.  At the beginning of the conference we were posed the question: ‘Has agriculture the capacity to meet societies' demand for food over the next 10 - 20 years?' On the final day we debated this at length, and on balance, we agreed that it does.  In order to do this, however, the industry would need to embrace new technologies but it would also have to work with countries in the third world to ensure that they could begin to feed themselves.  Consumers would also have to review their eating habits, and food waste would have to be drastically reduced.  One of our group gave us the ‘take home message' that can be applied to farmers across the world - ‘be part of the solution and not the problem'.  I hope that at FWAG, we can help you in this objective, as the environmental and economic challenges become more demanding as we move into the next decade.

I would like to thank the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and the Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust for their generous sponsorship of my Nuffield Farming Scholarship award

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• A Snapshot from Down Under