TOUGH TIMES DOWN UNDER
Drought threatens beef industry
Australians are chuffed about a huge trade deal signed with Beijing last month that will see millions of their beef cattle end up on Chinese dinner plates.
But global warming could prevent Australia from satisfying the demand for about $1 billion a year of live exported beef that has been created by China’s burgeoning, meat-hungry middle class.
Farmers in Australia’s fabled Outback are being whipsawed by a once-in-100-year drought that is forcing a large number of them to slaughter their herds now.
Destocking is a potentially dangerous temporary solution, but it does keep a little cash flowing.
“It is probably the worst that we have experienced in the more than 40 years that we’ve been at this spot, but history has it that there have been bigger droughts,” said Warwick Champion, who with his wife Rosemary works an arid 8,100-hectare spread at the epicentre of the drought.
“We’ve experienced our dams (man-made ponds) being dry before, but not like they are at the moment. Only four of the dams have small amounts left. And that is the last of our water.”
Married and working the land together for 52 years while their children now make lives for themselves elsewhere in Australia, Warwick and Rosemary are well into their seventies, but still spry. They usually run 1,200 head of Santa Gertrudis cattle, a breed developed to tolerate the extreme heat of Texas.
But these are not ordinary times in the Outback or on the Champions’ land at Longway Station, just outside the tiny regional centre of Longreach and 1,175 kilometres by road from Brisbane. There has not been any rain at all here for 20 months.
“That’s a long time to go,” said Rosemary. “There has been no run-off to replenish the dams. That is the heartbreak, really.”
The Champions’ cattle require about three kilograms of feed each per day, augmented by some molasses, but their parched land is producing no feed right now. With the sale of 100 steers last week, the couple’s herd has now been reduced to about 550 head. They are being fed oaten hay trucked in from South Australia.
Another 300 of the Champions’ cows and calves are grazing in fairer pastures more than 150 kilometres away. That practice, known as agistment, can save a herd if rain comes to the rescue. But it doesn’t come cheap. It is costing $1,200 a week for the Champions to have their cattle fed elsewhere.
The family strategy has been to try to hold on to as many young breeding cows as possible. “With big overseas orders from Indonesia and China, we’ve got no chance of supplying the world markets unless some of us have females,” Rosemary said. “You don’t just go out and buy up this quality.”
Australia had 29.3 million cattle as of June of last year and is expected to have about 26 million head next year, according to Queensland Country Life. That would be the smallest number of cattle here in nearly 40 years. Already, 46 farms in the Longreach area are believed to be seriously “stressed” economically. Some have been abandoned.
The long-term weather forecast for those who work Australia’s cattle country is grim. The interior of this island continent, which is already by far the driest in the world, may get hit harder by global warming than any other place on the planet.
This would make it more and more difficult to farm large parts of Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and especially Queensland, where 75 per cent of the state has been declared in drought.
The problem was outlined in a stark report by a coalition of environmental groups that have banded together as the Australian Conservation Foundation. It predicted Australia’s heat waves would get hotter and last longer, while rains would decrease.
Australia’s farmers face other challenges. Locusts are not a problem now, but they are every few years. Dingoes are a menace, particularly to flocks of sheep also hit hard by the drought.
On top of the drought, the Champions guess their land was infested with about 10,000 kangaroos which compete with their cattle for what little food there is to be found on the ground.
But the graziers of the Outback are as iconic as the country’s kangaroos and their tough rural lifestyle is far more endangered.
“I think there is a lot more to it than” losing a way of life, Warwick said. “It is a great big food bowl. There are a lot of city folk who just think food can be imported all the time. If they let the rural sector run down to a point where it is no more, we will have a real big problem as a nation.”
For all that, the Champions persist on Longway Station.
“You have to have a large amount of faith and belief in each other,” said Rosemary, who reckoned they could only hold out for about six weeks longer if rain does not come. “It would be very hard to do this on your own honestly. But we’ve been doing this for 52 years.”
Squinting at the sky as the couple went out shortly after dawn to feed their diminishing herd, Warwick spotted what he called mare’s tail clouds forming and remarked that this was a good omen.
“It will rain eventually,” he said. “The consequences are pretty horrendous if it doesn’t.”