COMMENT: Deputy PM’S fodder factory visit
BACK last year when former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull came to Trangie, that first time, to check out a dusty paddock, I told him about many solutions which could alleviate the problems facing farmers.
I specifically mentioned fodder factories, along with Peter Andrews' Natural Sequence Farming methods and oldman saltbush – strategies which cost relatively little but had proven themselves during droughts time and time and time again, but which had been ignored by governments and their expert advisers and agencies.
Deputy PM Michael Mccormack was present at that visit with a host of other ministers, and a few months afterwards, with new prime minister Scott Morrison, he visited a property that had been rehydrated by Peter Andrews and told the media that we needed to roll Natural Sequence Farming out across Australia.
This week, about a year on from that first Trangie visit, Michael Mccormack visited a fodder factory at a Yeoval property to meet a farmer who produces six tonnes of green, nutritious stockfeed from every tonne of grain he puts into the system.
Just two weeks ago I ran a Landcare field day at a fodder factory near Wellington which attracted 150 farmers. Dubbo Photo News ran a report soon after which got a huge response, and a video I uploaded to social media was viewed more than 158,000 times.
A field day report took up the entire back page of The Land newspaper.
A field day was covered by Channel 9's central west bureau, a news story which has racked up more than 30,000 Facebook hits.
People want their politicians supporting innovative concepts like this.
It's a shame that government, and the vast bureaucracy that goes with it, is so cumbersome, so slow to react.
I sat down to a fresh lamb roll dinner with Michael Mccormack and spent 30-odd minutes briefing him on a local rehydration project which would restore watersheds on properties from Bathurst to Dubbo.
I'm hoping the federal government will fund that project so we can prove just how well Peter Andrews' methods could work in this part of the world, and how relatively easy, simply and cheaply we could capture far more of the rainfall and daily dew and store it underground for free.
Pete believes that it would be like every property having Burrendong Dam underneath it, for just a miniscule cost to set his systems up, zero ongoing maintenance costs and no fear of losing precious water through evaporation.
Farmers would essentially be getting free irrigation from their subsoil, instead of the current engineered irrigation systems where water licences cost a fortune before farmers even get around to spending extra fortunes in both buying pumps and irrigators, and then having to spend extra fortunes on electricity or diesel every time they fire them up.
Natural Sequence Farming methods could be used to recharge Dubbo's groundwater reserves and keep them pretty topped up – then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now, where for the first time the city is facing a real prospect of running out of water.
Mr Mccormack, along with the then brand new prime minister Scott Morrison, visited Mulloon Creek near Bungendore late last year and subsequently granted $4 million to the ongoing project down there, and he said at the time that we needed to roll these methods of Peter Andrews out across the nation so farms would be far more resilient in times of drought.
Andrews rehydrated that property and received accolades from the United Nations for it being one of only five sustainable farms in the world.
I've been pushing for these and other drought solutions since the 1990s, we know they work, let's make it happen.
*Reporter John Ryan is also employed part-time by Mid Macquarie Landcare as a Local Landcare Co-ordinator, and is an elected Councillor on Dubbo Regional Council.