Feature: Farmers

The gambler

With summer yet to turn up the wick (as I write), even the southern parts of Vic farming areas are showing signs of succumbing to a drought that seems as though it will never end. Recently, I've travelled across to Adelaide through the plains of SA and across the wheat belt of western Vic and what I've seen creates a heavy heart. With something like six years of lower rainfall and higher evaporation, even the decades-old tough gum trees are showing signs of strain.

In Swan Hill, the famous giant Moreton Bay fig tree planted by Burke and Wills on their way to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860 is dropping its leaves and looks to be close to dying from lack of water. It's the biggest such tree in the southern hemisphere, about 44m in breadth. Tests have found that there's moisture in only the top 20mm of soil around the massive roots, despite heavy mulching and deep watering at a rate of 4000L per week.

When I was an apprentice, both Lake Hindmarsh - Vic's largest natural freshwater lake - and Lake Albacutya were fishing dream spots. Freshly caught redfin from these lakes were served at the Jeparit and Rainbow hotels in my grandfather's day. The lakes were destinations for swimming and beach holidays. Hindmarsh even had a yacht club. Last weekend, as locals have done for several years, I drove the 13km across Lake Hindmarsh's cracked base.

DO THE SUMS
It is fashionable to knock farmers and call them whingers who are never satisfied, but it's only those who do not understand farming who do so. Farms are expensive operations to hold and to run. I wonder if wage earners in cities appreciate what is involved.

A grain farm these days needs to be around 1215ha (3000 acres) to support a single family, and would have a capital value of around $1.2 million. A broadacres cereal farmer needs a basic set of tools to work the farm. Based on values of machines that are about two years old, these would include a tractor at $180,000, a seed drill ($80,000), a spray rig ($80,000), and a header ($140,000). A truck with a trailer for handling on-farm jobs and hauling the crop to the nearest receiver point would conservatively cost $80,000. Other small pieces of plant, sheds, field bins, plus workshop maintenance tools would run to $100,000. So, to get you started in the cereal crops farming business, the outlay would be around $1.9 million.

To prepare ground and plant a crop this year, the cost was about $70 per acre. If 75 per cent of the land (910ha/2250 acres) is cropped, that is an out-of-pocket expense of $157,500 with no guarantee of a return.

It's the sort of gamble that few people would lay odds on, but cereal farmers do it each year. The potential return for the 2008-09 summer is around one tonne of grain per acre if the crop does well, dropping to half a tonne in places where the crop is poorer. Needless to say, many places are yielding half a tonne or less for this and several recent seasons.

The harvesting exercise costs $10 per acre to run the header, with additional costs to transport the crop to a silo or a grain buyer. What is the selling price of grain? In general terms, for the current season, feed barley is worth $175 per tonne, and wheat is worth $230 per tonne - delivered to the buyer.

In some locations with very bad yields, it would cost more to run the machinery than the value of the crop, so it is left to stand or else mown and baled either for stock feed or mulch for gardens.

In drought years, with a succession of crop failures, many farmers must be thinking that it would be nice to have a job in which you know what wages you take home each week, have no overdraft, and spend less than 12 hours a day on the job. You would also be nearer to medical support, schools and cheaper fuel, and your shopping choices would be better.

For those of you who like to use a calculator, compare the farmer's income with what could be earned by taking the $1.9m and investing it at five per cent per annum. And then, when you look at the loaf of bread or the cereal in your bowl, be thankful that we have people who choose to feed us despite the easier alternative lifestyle they could have.

It puts a new perspective on people charging $100 per hour to shuffle papers, thinking that they are generating something for the good of the country. On a value-for-money basis, give me the farmer every time - especially as they battle through their sixth or seventh year of drought, gambling that they can stay on the land. If they toss it in, we'll all be hungry.