Because of Covid restrictions, we were unable again to attract a guest speaker.
So I led with the sentence, “I don’t expect to see another spring as fabulous as this in my lifetime,” because the mild and damp La Nina spring, has coincided with extraordinary cattle and sheep prices and extraordinary demand for milk.
The only other time I remember something similar was in 1973. In that year I flew in a light aircraft from Melbourne to Broken hill and then up to Alice Springs. The country was lush and alive with kangaroos, goats, sheep, goats and even camels.
But it wasn’t to last. The following year beef prices collapsed and they took several years to recover.
Presumably that was a La Nina spring too. And while this one has been brilliant, it has been complicated by Covid restraints and shortages of farm workers. A shortage of shearers for example, has delayed shearing by two months in many areas, causing problems with blowflies and barley grass and other seeds in excess in longer wool.
Some shearers are working every day of the week to try and catch up. But according to a friend I talked to at the weekend, many of them are working for cash on farms other than the ones they are on during the week, and are exhausted when they come back onto regular payrolls on the Monday.
As well, paddocks are too wet in some areas, for hay making to go ahead when it should. And the canola harvest has been hampered by wet weather too.
But not quite as badly as a cousin’s canola crop near Gundagai in 2016. Grown on Murrumbidgee river flats, it had been windrowed and was ready to be headed, when the river flooded and floated the entire crop down the river. He changed to all cattle soon after, spurns any kind of cropping and has become a regenerative farmer. But more on that later.
I think we’d all agree sheep and cattle prices are just amazing. My old home town of Mortlake runs a bi monthly store sale for up to 5500 cattle. At one recently, a Gippsland breeder paid $4540 a head for 14 PTIC Charolais cows, saying “I paid $800 to $1000 a head more than I expected to”.
And it's not unusual for ewes to top $500 a head although there has been resistance in some areas to bids above $400 a head. Lambs have been making more than $300 too.
Another aspect, super sizing of crossbreed and composite ewes, means buyers are getting more for their money though. It’s not unusual now for ewes to weigh up to 120kg each. But that means though that some sheds are being shunned by shearers.
Regenerative Farming and Charles Massey's 'The Call of the Reed Warbler'
We followed with another topic, regenerative farming, which is gaining pace around the country. I first encountered the concept at a farm field day near Tarago, between Goulburn and Canberra in the early 1990s, where a guest speaker from New Mexico was talking about it. What stayed with me is that because he grazed his farm hard before spelling it for weeks or maybe a month or two, native plants were showing up again which his elderly grandfather had not seen since childhood.
That is an important aspect of regenerative farming, but it needs to be coupled with not flogging paddocks so that there is no grass cover when a drought hits.
A well known exponent and writer about regenerative farming is Cooma, NSW farmer Charles Massy. His book, Call of the Reed Warbler, is more or less the basis of his ANU PhD. In the first week of May, 2018, I’d read the book and attended a Q&A session about it with Charles at the Sydney Writers' Festival.
I had heard an economist at a previous unrelated session about China, say that tractors had cut employment in Australian agriculture from 30 per cent to about 3 per cent in about 70 to 80 years in the 20th century. Repeating that I asked Charles what he thought and did he not think that combining tractors and computers had made evaluating no till, controlled traffic cropping and refined inputs easier and less impactive on already fragile soils. Charles acknowledged that to produce the quantities of food necessary such combinations were essential but doing it better than it had been done in the past.
Later that year I ran into an old school mate who had a farm next door to Charles’ place near Cooma. I said I thought what Charles was doing was brave and innovative. But my friend said he thought the paddocks looked dreadful.
Reflecting on that I suppose I should have said, do you expect the paddocks to necessarily look fantastic when they are growing native plants you’ve probably not seen before.
Then on September 28, 2020, the ABC presented an Australian Story featuring Charles Massy’s regenerative farming concepts. It had the following introduction.
"For five generations, Charles Massy's family rode on the sheep’s back and nearly destroyed their land in the process. When drought in the 80s and 90s almost sent him broke, the Cooma farmer switched to regenerative agriculture and watched his overgrazed land recover. In his mid-50s, Charles Massy started a PhD, visiting 80 top regenerative farmers to see what they were doing differently. That led to his ground-breaking book Call of the Reed Warbler, a plea to farmers to start working with nature. Last year, Australian Story featured the story of Charles Massey and his contribution to the area of regenerative farming... "
David Palmer
December 2021
Recommended Reading:
Massy, Charles (2017 ) 'Call of the Reed Warbler' University of Queensland Press
Tree, Isabella (2018) 'Wilding--the Return of Nature to a British Farm' Pan McMillan/Picador
Rebanks, James (2020) 'English Pastoral' Penguin Australia and (2021) 'Pastoral Song'
Pollack, David (2019 ) 'The Wooleen Way - Renewing an Australian Resource' Scribe
Follow up Viewing: published in May 2021: