Aussie farmers earn green credentials

Australian farmers have worked hard to earn their environmental credentials after years of defending their record.

Research by the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) shows that Australians' attitudes to farming and its effect on the environment are now largely positive.

Any sceptics still believing that the men and women who grow our food and earn so much of Australia's export income don't care about the environment need only look at the programme for this week's inaugural NFF congress in Brisbane.

The 300 delegates to Australia's peak farming body's national congress attended sessions on climate change, water and its use, and genetically modified (GM) crops – all key environmental issues.

As well, awareness of environmental issues pervaded sessions on food marketing, new technologies, and the coming global food crisis.

Farmers live closer to the soil and to the weather than the rest of us – and in their environmental awareness it shows.

There was a sense of deja vu in the session on water when Peter Corish, chairman of PrimeAg and a former NFF president, told the forum that irrigators were being made to feel like they were environmental vandals.

"Many of those directly involved with irrigation feel that they are no longer the good guys any more," Mr Corish said.

"They're no longer recognised and appreciated for the jobs they create and the benefits that accrue to local communities.

"Instead they often feel reviled as the rapers and pillagers of our rivers and groundwater systems – in some cases even not much better than, dare I say it, common criminals."

To those of us living in the cities, water is something that comes out of a tap at little, if increasing, cost.

To the nation's farmers it is the lifeblood of the land. It directly affects income, their relationship with the banks and their family future.

Mr Corish demonstrated the angst surrounding the issue of the reallocation of water supplies across an entire continent, and entire population, when he said his family received government funds to build on-farm water storage in 1992, then just 10 years later irrigation work was banned in the same river system.

Policy turned 180 degrees in a decade.

That farmers become passionate about water and their costly entitlement to it should surprise no one.

Similarly they are passionate about climate change.

They have to be if they aren't to be left stranded by a phenomenon that will demand new crops, new farming areas and methods and could even mean the abandonment of land that has been farmed since European settlement.

Australians have a reputation for adaptability, invention and innovation, and they are traits likely to be much in demand as the climate forces new parameters on agricultural industries.

Secretary of the federal government's Department of Climate Change, Dr Martin Parkinson, told the congress it was wiser to address climate change, despite the incomplete science, adding that on the balance of probability, human-induced climate change was a fact.

"We're faced with a global risk-management problem and we should respond accordingly," he said.

"Even someone who is agnostic on the issue should rationally decide to take action now."

Even a sceptic of the carbon-induced theory on climate change, geologist Professor Ian Plimer, agrees climate change is happening – he just debates the reasons for the change.

From the global danger of climate change to an item on the supermarket shelf, environmental issues are affecting farming enterprises, the way they operate and react.

Shoppers are increasingly demanding cleaner, greener and ethically grown food, international researcher Professor David Hughes, of the Centre for Food Chain Research at Imperial College in London, told the congress.

Prof Hughes said consumers would pay more for premium food and drinks they think were grown in a manner that benefits the environment, was ethically produced, and made from natural ingredients.

"The green bar, the sustainability, environmental bar, is going up," Prof Hughes said.

This demand for "greener" food had ramifications for livestock and dairy producers because of issues like greenhouse gas emissions, rainforest clearing for cattle production in the Amazon and dietary concerns related to meat.

Prof Hughes said campaigns such as former Beatle Paul McCartney's bid for a meat-free Monday were gaining "real traction".

"This is celebrity-driven and it's been extraordinarily effective and purchasing behaviour has switched as a result," he said.

There are marketing opportunities at the top end of the market, but at the other end 1.2 billion hungry people are a pointer to a future requiring greater food production along with environmental sustainability.

Feeding the world was a greater challenge than climate change or the economic crisis, said Professor Julian Cribb, from the University of Technology in Sydney.

Prof Cribb said the world's food supply was already precariously balanced and demand would rise by 110 percent by 2050.

"Sustaining food production through the mid-century peak in human demand and numbers is the challenge of our age," Prof Cribb said.

"It is more urgent even than global warming or the economic crisis.

"We are now consuming the yield of about 1.3 planet Earths to maintain the human way of life.

"If the trend continues we will be needing. . . two planets by the year 2050."

He said the challenge was to double the global food supply using much less water and land, without fossil fuels, in an increasingly erratic climate.

That's an environmental issue if there ever was one.

One way to possibly fulfil Prof Cribb's 110 percent increase in demand is through genetically modified food, another issue of environmental significance that loomed large at the congress.

The GM debate is emotionally fraught and has some way to run, but it is undoubtedly of huge environmental significance.

For instance, GM cotton plantings have cut insecticide use by 90 percent and outstanding increases in canola yields could point to how to feed the planet in the future.

Finally, NFF president David Crombie leaves no doubt where the environment lies as an issue in the minds of farmers.

"(They are) issues such as world population growth and food security, the threat of a changing climate and the debates that lie behind these," Mr Crombie told the NFF.

"In fact, arable land and water are under threat from population growth and land utilisation."

Mr Crombie also said with agriculture occupying more than 60 per cent of the continent, engagement with the sector was the key to resolving environmental issues.

There are debates and arguments to come, but no one can argue that farmers in Australia are not acutely aware of the need to protect the environment.

To them, it's life itself.

- AAP