The Conversation.

Chapter 1.

To start the conversation I need to take you back to April 1967.

My first job in Australia was to clean out the septic tank of our ‘married quarters’ at a farm in Coorow. I was given two, two hundred litre drums with the tops cut out, a length of rope, a small ladder and a bucket and told to get on with it.

To take away the contents of the tank I was given a tractor with three-point linkage transport box and told, with a wave in the general direction, to dump the contents of the tank ‘out on the salt flat.’

The salt flat was the rubbish dump for the farm. The farm was one of the first cleared in the district. So the rubbish dump was as museum, a decaying testament to settlement. The history of the farm was on the rubbish dump.

It was evident, even to my untrained British eyes that the salt flat was bigger than it had been at the time of settlement. It had spread. The evidence was the dead trees in various stages of mummified preservation and decay.

Standing upright, almost in disobedience of the salt and the elements, across the middle of this moonscape was the remnants of a Jam post (Acacia Acuminata) fence, which had defied the salt better than the forlorn strands of rusted wire and rabbit-proof netting that hung from it.

To my migrant British eyes it was a strange, lifeless landscape.

The pioneers had cleared the land with axes and horses. Once cleared it had to be fenced.

I found it difficult to imagine the many hours of sweat and toil that must have been spent cutting the posts and drilling holes for the wires. In the relentless heat digging into the hard red dirt with crow-bar and shovel, the holes for the posts, four metres apart and then a trench about 200 to 300 mm deep to bury the bottom of the rabbit proof netting to stop the rabbits burrowing underneath.

Just a fence? No, it was far, far more than just a fence. That old fence was an enduring testament to the strength of character and physical determination and the dreams of the fence builders — the pioneers who built the fence before they knew about salt.

Nearly fifty years later, I’ll bet it’s still there.

Since 1967 I have travelled widely throughout Western Australia and watched the landscape change. It is evident to even the casual observer that the cancer of salt is spreading across our farmland in spite of what we have, or have not done since those pioneers first erected that Jam post fence on their new farm at Coorow.

 Preamble.

It came as a surprise when I got to the end of my investigations into salinity in Australia that apparently there is no longer a defined Federal or a State Government policy to combat what I believe is our biggest environmental challenge both for Australia and more particularly, Australian agriculture.

The National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality (NAP) was discontinued by the current federal government on 30 June 2008. It has been replaced by ‘Caring for our Country.’

The response of the WA Government was to commit to continue with the State Natural Resource Management (NRM) programme in spite of the cancellation of the NAP.

I find it confusing and quite frankly a demonstration of environmental ignorance or, perhaps even worse, a glaring example of the environmental political opportunism of not only the Greens, but of all political parties in Australia that they continue to ignore the consensus of decades of research that tells us that salinity will continue to grow at a truly alarming rate on the agricultural lands and in the National Parks of Australia, half of it in Western Australia.

The green lobby successfully caused the cessation of land clearing and so enabled Australia to meet its Kyoto target. They revelled in their success.

At the same time as the revellers were rejoicing at Australia’s new environmental awareness, we were being warned that by 2050, in less than forty years, Australia could lose to salinity an area more than twice the size of Tasmania and with that loss, lose hundreds of species of flora and fauna.

The current political and social landscape is dominated by the debate on the environment. It is confusing to me and I believe worthy of discussion that those who claim to care for the environment never mention the creeping cancer of salinity in their strident claims and demands on government and society for ‘environmental’ change to ‘protect’ the planet.

There is global acceptance that there is a need for food production to increase if we are to avoid massive starvation in parts of the world in twenty to thirty years. Yet we in Australia, who produce between fifteen and twenty per cent of the worlds traded wheat and are the second biggest exporter of beef in the world, seem prepared to allow our food growing resource, our fertile land, to decline at an alarming rate.

It is inevitable as the area of productive land continues to decline so too will rural communities, amenities and infrastructure.

There is no one magic bullet to combat salt. As we shall see there has been excellent research conducted by dedicated scientists and farmers over many decades that demonstrates there are answers. All we need to do is implement that research. Make a start.

The challenge to us all is to make the unproductive salt land of Australia productive again.

The challenge for our State and Federal Governments is to find the money and demonstrate that they care for the environment. To put our money where their mouth is.

The challenge for the environmental Non Government Organisations and the politicians who claim green credentials is to admit that there is an environmental disaster going on under their noses every hour of every day of every year and tell us why it isn’t on their agenda for change and action.

The Problem.

In forty years, the area of salt affected land in Australia may well be 17 million hectares, 8.8 million hectares of it in Western Australia.

The area of 8.8 million hectares is 63% of the area, ~14 million hectares we now know as the South West Agricultural Region of Western Australia, or, to put it another way, it is an area as big as all of Tasmania. Therefore the total area of salt in Australia will be twice the size of all of Tasmania by 2050.

In Western Australia the area affected by salt is increasing at the rate of one football pitch or two hectares an hour. This rate of increase has been going on for longer than the fifty years I have been involved in agriculture.

It has been estimated that total land and water degradation caused by salinity costs Australia around $3.5 billion per annum.

To start with let us consider the facts, estimates and predictions of Kevin Goss, Future Farm Industries CRC Ltd, detailed in a paper he presented in New Zealand in 2008; CONFRONTING SALINITY: FIVE LESSONS FOR SOIL SCIENCE IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND, and;

His Excellency Major General Michael Jeffery AC CVO MC Governor General of the Commonwealth of Australia on the occasion of opening the 2^nd International Salinity Forum, Adelaide, 31^st March 2008.

 ‘WA’s Land Monitor project is arguably the most robust methodology, employing satellite data on land use and condition, and digital elevation and ground water data for analysis of trends in the landscape context…to estimate future threat, Land Monitor used longitudinal data (1989, 1996 reference points) to determine an annual rate of increase of 14,000ha. It mapped 4.4 million ha of agricultural land “that has a salinity hazard.”

Kevin Goss. Confronting Salinity:…

In my home state of Western Australia, the area of salt-affected land has been estimated to have been increasing at the rate of one football field per hour, when averaged over the past 50 years.

Major General Michael Jeffery…

It is important to remember the place that Australian agriculture still holds in the economy of Australia. We all get seduced by politicians and so the media at the size and the rate of expansion of the Australian energy and resource industries.

Australia may no longer ride on the sheep’s back as we did when agriculture contributed over 20% of the Australian GDP.

In 2009/10, the value of farm production was $23 billion, representing around 2 per cent of nominal GDP. The relative size of Australia’s agricultural industry has declined over the past 50 years, with the sector’s share of nominal GDP falling from 15per cent in 1959/60 to an average of 2 per cent over the past decade and employs about 3 per cent of the total workforce. (ABARE)

That contribution may be small, but raw and unprocessed agricultural commodities contribute about 13% of Australia’s export earnings each year. (RBA)

The fall in agriculture’s contribution to nominal GDP over the years is not due to a drop in productivity. Productivity from agriculture has increased, but has been far outstripped by the growth in the resources sector, hence the decline in the contribution of agriculture to nominal GDP.

For Australia, there is no immediate threat to the domestic food supply. Australia will continue to produce in excess of what it consumes and will therefore be able to contribute to the world’s food needs. However, Australia faces its own challenges, namely climate change, diminishing water supplies and soil degradation, agricultural labour shortages and declining productivity.

(ABARE – Global Food Security 2009. Terry Sheales and Caroline Gunning-Trant)