[insert slide 1] Thanks very much. One of the perks of being in one - - PDF document

[insert slide 1] Thanks very much. One of the perks of being in one of the driest areas of Australia is that I can come and speak to you, aren’t I lucky? Envisaging the future and dealing with the present because it is important to think about the future to how we cope with the present, because maybe we are in the future already, and lots of people say we are in the future already. Peter and I were talking over breakfast this morning and he said, “To get something in the paper these days, you’ve got to just say something really radical. You don’t say something normal or middle course.” And then the next person has to say something even more radical, and even more radical, and the farmers out there hear this radical view of the world and they worry. [insert slide 2] So let’s see if we can get some normality into this debate and say, “Okay, what’s the future – going to happen and how is it affecting us in the dry and how we farm.” So, how does one survive five droughts in seven years and three in a row, and the last three years have been – growing season rainfall of about 50 percent average. And it’s not just a prosperity or the financials that is the really big factor that effects

• farmers. Sure, it’s a significant factor, but it’s really the physical health and the

psychology of the farmers that are adapting and having to cope with those drought

• years. And to live in a rural community that has been in constant droughts, this area

is an incredibly important aspect of how people cope and how they survive and the importance of sustainable communities and towns give people the capacity to keep going and to basically prosper in really difficult times. [insert slide 3] Okay, so the challenge of drought is to be able to, as a human, to think clearly about the decisions I have to make on the farm, accept the realities, but – you know, and the probabilities of relief. To think the positives, but also see the negatives, maintain confidence and farmers are so – you know, you see some of them just drop their bundle completely and give up. So the confidence – maintaining your confidence is so crucial for the farming community – for probably any business, being able to balance optimism with caution, being brave enough to embrace opportunities. When you’ve had a number of dry years, that capacity – people always say what they would like to have done, or should have done, but to be brave and do it is the important thing – to maintain the relationships of family and have faith in the future and still be happy.

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[insert slide 4] Some communities are able to cope with very difficult times and still maintain a hugely happy lifestyle in the bush. Okay, so at Birchip, for instance, in North Western Victoria, the last seven years we have had 38 percent below growing season rainfall. And that’s the last seven years. And the last 12 years has been a growing season rainfall of 28 percent decreased, and you say we are on – we are falling down a cliff. But if you take the previous 12 years, there was a 20 percent increase in growing season rainfall and if you add the two together, you’ve actually only lost four percent

• f growing season rainfall.

[insert slide 5] So is this climate change falling over a cliff or not? And I suspect that those figures, in our case, on the law

• f averages, it is probably just strong variability. So if we take

the five year running mean for Birchip for growing season rainfall, you can see there is a lot of ups and downs and as Peter said, the little bumps and the downs are the good years that come through and the last 10 years we really have not had – we’ve had one little bump that just got a bit above average, I think, in 2001. [insert slide 6] So the next graph is, as Peter said, is this the repeat of history or is this a paradigm shift in our weather patterns, and if the last seven years are permanent, then we are in a lot of trouble. Or is this variability linked to some sort of weather cycle, and this is the bit you don’t hear much in terms of the debate. And I know a lot of private forecasters have all got a cycle of sunspots and there is all sorts of cycles. They’ve got the explanation, but the BOM are really saying – and I think we’ve really got to make it clear that they are not saying there is not a cycle, but they have not been able to really find it out yet. And maybe that is something that we really should encourage them to really find. Is this a cycle of variability, or is it climate change? So that’s a very important part of the future. [insert slide 7] So yield profit is a crop simulation model. It was based on APSIM and they have a climate change report where they are growing crops. And this is at Birchip, but they grow them all around Australia if you want to subscribe to it, and the impact of climate change on – if we grow a crop over the last 100 years based on today’s technology, you see the black line in a running mean is up and down all over the place, but you have to remember that the last 10 years have been the driest 10 year period for Birchip on record. So you know, even though it is variable, the last 10 years have

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been bad. And what we need to remember about this climate change is that it is very easy to say it is not as bad as people say it is, but really, the prognosis, particularly

• n a regional basis, is still fairly scarce – or they are not so sure.

[insert slide 8] So it actually could be a lot worse than they say. So even though I’m an optimist and always like to take the positive Alice view, you’ve really got to say that it actually could be worse. So then the interesting bit is if you look at spring rainfall – for us, spring rainfall is September / October for Birchip - you realize it is variable, going up and down all over the place, but you can see it has got a general trend for September and October rainfall at Birchip in this corner of the graph. [insert slide 9] So if you think about that, and then you think about also the November to March rainfall, you see the five year running mean is all over the place except when you get to about 1980, the five year running mean levels off. So you – we can now start to think maybe that our summer rainfall is more consistent than it has been in the past. That graph gives us a suggestion that that is the case. Now, that gives us a clue as farmers what we should do to maximize yield by making use of that summer rainfall. And already this year we have had 110 millimeters of rainfall since November. [insert slide 10] So if you then, through yield profit, simulate yields from 1977 until now, which is the red line, and 1889 to 1976 is the other line, you see that there has been a decrease in yield or probability of yield in the lower rainfall years. [insert slide 11]

• Okay. So Peter said to me yesterday, “You should always put a date on your table,

you see.” And I took the date off this table deliberately because CO2 levels, you can see here there is a CO2 of 420 and a CO2 of 460 and we are now a CO2 of 383 and so many people say it’s going faster or slower. So I decided just let’s think about when CO2 equivalents are 460 or when they are 420, and remember we are now at

• 383. And this is temperature and rainfall which was sort of said for 2030, but you can

see that the temperature on the left-hand side of the best case which is 420, there is about a half a degree temperature increase. And in the worst case at 460, it gets up to about a one degree temperature increase. And then if you see rainfall that for 420, there is a reduction in spring; August / September rainfall drops back by about 10 mls and in the 460, there is a significant

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drop of rainfall, about 38 mls of the growing season rainfall to 50. So when you see that, that is the best case prediction of CSIRO Oz Clim which has been put into yield profit, and so it gives people wherever they live an opportunity to think of what is going to happen. So if that is a best guess, let’s think about how we might cope with some of those situations. [insert slide 12] That’s the graphs – for yield for those three CO2 levels – or history at 420 and 460 and even though it does not look much, there is quite a lot of difference in yield at the 50 per cent probability. [insert slide 13] But interestingly enough, if this climate change report talks about how does stress, frost or cold stress and heat stress affect a crop at, say, Birchip. And you see that in the best case or the worst the top one which is frost in the best case, we understand that frost probably should decrease if the temperature gets hotter but in the best case it actually increases slightly initially and that is because the crops are growing faster - at the same sowing date, instead of it flowering on 1 October, they might flower on 20

• September. And the same thing happens in terms of heat shock, at the bottom.

You can see that the heat shock actually gets less as the temperature goes up, and that is because the crop is growing faster. So right through the winter, the crop grows

• faster. So that gives us also a hint of what we have to think about in terms of

changing our farming systems to cope with this new scenario. And breeders may want to slow down crops to make them grow slower, but really, that may be an advantage, that we can grow them quicker. [insert slide 14] Interestingly enough, some farmers in our part of the world have done very well over the last 10 years, and these are the farmers that have been on the sandy soils of the Northern Mallee in Victoria. And the worst soils have been those in the black self mulching soils, the beautiful black self mulching soils around Horsham and the clay based soils of the Mallee which is mostly what I’ve got. And the most adaptable have been the sandy soils of the Mallee and the red clay soils. And the point I want to make about this is you hear people say, “I want to close down that part of Australia because it’s – you know, Western New South Wales,” but it’s not quite as simple as that. To me, this is the bit that is going to determine which place will survive, or have to adapt more than others, is that it is based on sandy soils. So the greatest influence on production in dry years is soil type, in our part of the world.

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[insert slide 15] So these are two questions I think that I probably won’t answer; I could answer, or give an opinion on, but it’s something we have to take into account. What relationship is between practice required to adapt to climate change and those required to

• mitigate. In other words, what is going to be imposed on us in the future that we

have to do in relation to mitigate carbon – climate change. What role is carbon on future farm practice. I firmly believe that carbon is far too valuable to sell to anyone. I mean, it’s money in the bank. You use it to produce nitrates for your crops and I’m not going to sell mine for anything. It also costs – CSIRO did some work where it cost $200 a tonne in nutrients to produce a tonne of carbon, so why would you sell it for $40 when it cost you $200 to produce? [insert slide 16] Okay, let’s think about what changes have happened in farm practice over the last 10 years that people are adapting and adopting in relation to their farming. Obviously, water use efficiency is a key to adaptation. Conservation farming, the whole business of stubble retention, making conservation pay, it fits in that category of making conservation pay and there is a lot of farmers now who have no livestock on their farm and they just keep the standing straw and they maintain that they get a lot more moisture from that and they do. Also, the second is no till cropping, precision ag and inter-row architecture of the soil, how people are water harvesting. There is a whole series of things people are doing in terms of press wheels and – that are making crops germinate better with less moisture and are growing better particularly in this conservation farming system. The third thing is based on the fact that our summer rainfall is far more reliable, and that summer weed control is so crucial. And we’ve done some work – I mean, last year the trials at Birchip found that we doubled our yield at the trial sites from one to two tonnes per hectare by controlling summer weeds. And we’ve simulated – since 1976 to 2002 that you can get a half a tonne increase in yield by controlling summer weeds, which we have always done in a sense by cultivation. In the last 10 years we have understood about spray technologies, Delta-T. We can go out - with GPS we can go out in the middle of the night and spray when you’ve got the best of killing

• weeds. So this is one of the positives that farming practices have had on farmers

adapting to variable climate. [insert slide 17] The other one is weed management. Farmers now – it’s not a bare earth policy, but it’s got straw and things to cover it. The next one is risk management. Research now shows we don’t need to put the nitrogen on until growth stage 31. Farmers are

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putting the nutrients at last so they can get part of the season over and done with before they need to put nitrogen on crops. As we heard yesterday, opportunity cropping, what a fantastic – I mean, it’s so obvious, but people are now opportunity

• cropping. They are on the clay soils and they are diversifying into livestock because

it’s able to withstand droughts better than crops on those soils. The huge increase in diagnostic tools, yield profit, soil sampling, you know, something has always been done, but now there is a new test called the GDT test for phosphorus which is going to revolutionize our way of measuring phosphorus on farms which has an accurate prediction of effect on crops, and also the predicta B test for root diseases. [insert slide 18] Farming systems; I’ve tried to say that our growing season is changing as a result of climate change. Spring rainfalls are going to become less important. Summer rainfall is going to become more consistent. So we are going to have a changed growing season which is going to be shorter and in our BCG survey this year, we said were the three lessons you have learned, and for the last three years the major lesson they learned is to sow early. Sow your crops early, either dry sow or just get them in early and that was the biggest thing that they could do to actually increase yield, and that’s because our spring rainfalls have really been non-existent. People have changed from grain crops to hay crops. New varieties, bio technology, I mean, that’s going to make a huge difference to us. The role of livestock; there is a whole lot of things are happening in containment areas, using sheep in a factory

• system. The balance between no till and grazing is important, and there are a whole

lot of new rotations. [insert slide 19] Finally, I’m not going to talk about bio technology, because TJ Higgins talked about it this morning, but you know, dream the dream and it will happen, but it’s still 10 to – five to 10 years before we really get it, but it gives us hope and I think it’s a fantastic

• pportunity for us all.

[insert slide 20] Finally, farmers are adapting. The future of agriculture is incredibly bright and really

• limitless. We could be helped enormously with more accurate seasonal forecasts.

We need greater investment in scientific research, and one of the things that worries me about Governments putting money into EC, which I am not opposed to, but they seem to think that they do not need to put it into research. We need to continually educate farmers, as change is happening all the time and we need to increase our

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• skills. And finally, we just need to encourage adaptation to adopt and adapt to

innovation and new technologies. Thank you very much.

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