You may remember that some weeks ago the Channel 9 Sunday Program featured a documentary on salinity title ‘Australia’s Salinity Crisis: What Crisis’. While researching the dryland salinity issue, reporter Ross Coulthart got interested in land clearing issues. This Sunday (6th August) the current affairs program will feature a documentary titled ‘Woody Weeds: How Trees Can Be Bad’. I’ve just received the media release:
“This week SUNDAY travels to far western NSW to check out the claims being made by many Green groups and politicians of a looming ecological disaster being caused by land clearing.
What we find overturns many of the alarmist claims that many of Australia’s largely city dwelling environmentalists have taken as gospel.
SUNDAY reporter Ross Coulthart details the strong evidence to show that current Government policies restricting land clearing, pushed by a powerful environmental lobby, are in fact causing serious environmental damage.
As several eminent scientists reveal this week too many trees in that landscape can actually be bad for the environment.
As recently as six years ago, Australia’s peak science body, the CSIRO, was warning of the ecological threat posed by invasive native scrub – the farmers call them “woody weeds” – that has taken over what was once largely, sparsely-treed, open grasslands across far western NSW and southern Qld.
Even the Wentworth Group of Scientists, in their 2002 ‘Blueprint for a Living Continent’ warned that laudable restrictions on broad-scale land clearing needed to be clearly distinguished from the “need to control shrub invasion in the semi-arid and pastoral areas of Australia.”
As local Nyngan aboriginal elder Tommy Ryan explains, for 45,000 years these largely open grasslands were managed by indigenous Australians using fire. But since European settlement that lack of burning has caused a huge growth of invasive scrub that has taken over between 15-25% of NSW alone.
Now tens of millions of hectares of that once open grassland are effectively being locked-up by Native Vegetation laws that NSW farmers claim are excessively restricting their clearing of what they say is environmentally harmful woody weeds.
Farmers are commonly demonised as the villains responsible for broad-scale land clearing, and that’s what the farmers of Nyngan and Cobar are now accused by the Wilderness Society’s public campaign of doing.
But the farmers claim the plants and animals that evolved to depend on those open grasslands are under threat because of the very trees the Greenies are fighting to save.
And, as SUNDAY details, they have some heavy-weight scientific backing for their arguments. As former Western Lands Commissioner and soil scientist Dick Condon tells Coulthart:
“We don’t need forest. We need open space for the species that use that grassland.”
Mick Keogh, Executive Director of the Australian Farm Institute, says the evidence is there to show that the magnitude of vegetation loss across Australia has been grossly over-exaggerated. Yet the official estimates of 650,000ha being cleared a year in 1989-90 went on to become the cornerstone of Australia’s negotiating position at Kyoto, where limits on greenhouse gas emissions were negotiated. He believes that in order to ensure the reduction in land clearing occurred, the Federal Government made State funding dependent on the States banning land clearing. Keogh argues that a misguided effort to meet those inaccurate targets has led to the current highly restrictive Native Vegetation laws.
Also, current land clearing estimates don’t take into account the extent of regrowth and replanting of trees. When this is taken into account, reafforestation far exceeds even the official, exaggerated, estimates of land clearing.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I see Ross is pioneering a new form of content free-range fictional documentary, having done a series of one-sided interviews on salinity.
Hey is this the same CSIRO that had the boot put into it last time that is now “a peak science body”. And didn’t the Wentworth group get sent to St Helena, South Atlantic for crimes against salinity? But somehow now we’re citing them as a reliable source. Hmmm. Why would you trust them?
And pity for Mick’s credibility who is pulling numbers out of the ether
http://www.nrm.qld.gov.au/slats/pdf/88-91/slats8891_v13_highres.pdf says a clearing number of over 730,000 ha per year 1988-91 for Queensland alone. So the magnitude of national vegetation loss (add in NSW basically) is most likely woefully underestimated if anything.
How did the Cobar woody weeds patch get there ? Mismanagement by the grazing industry in the first place. (Or perhap the greenies secretly went out and did it planting seedlings in the dark of night!). So WHO should get the blame for the woody weeds mess? Graziers – overgrazing, lack of fire. Come on! If they want to bulldoze it and burn it back into shape again – let them. This time get some advice given they stuffed it in the first place.
All this is sham attempt to detract from other areas where bulldozers used to run horizon to horizon or from areas where regional ecosystems are now reduced to endangered levels.
Our agro-political types could at least mount a decent balanced argument instead of writing fictional nonsense.
Luke, your attempt to portray the Cobar Woody weeds patch as an isolated situation is pure desperation. Bill Burrows made it very clear that woody weed regrowth is present on 60 million hectares of woodland in Queensland and another 30 million hectares of NSW.
And yes, the dozers ran from horizon to horizon because 60 million hectares of regrowth involves quite a few horizons.
We also know from SLATS that only half of all clearing in Qld involves actual forest. That is trees higher than 2 metres and more than 10% canopy. The rest is grassland with the odd tree or just plain Tussocky and Tufted Grassland.
And surprise, surprise, most of the cleared land previously mapped as remnant is either grassland ecosystems or Mulga which has been pulled a number of times since the 1880s but which returns to remnant status before it is pulled again. It is part of a 15 to 20 year agricultural rotation and consequently involves minimal net change.
And your very selective quoting of the 1988-91 data is downright dishonest as you know perfectly well that subsequent years have been much less. But at least we know which layer of the pond you hail from.
Bolsh – Burrows has not established that – he has established that thickening does occur in a quite a number of areas – Mulga lands, gidgee, central Qld – but where’s the paper that accurately maps the true extent.
Take out 40% for regrowth – you’ll still get big numbers close to the number quoted. And a lot of regrowth is shit stuff – a sea of sticks -compared remnant vegetation. Hardly a decent rotation.
Ian – you’re now blinded by rage that you’ll manipulate anything to prove your point – very disappointed in the science quality of your answer. And ducking the endangered ecosystems again we see.
And who stuffed the Cobar ecosystems in the first place. Why we have woodland thickening is not something that the grazing industry should be proud of. It’s a sign of land degradation. Overgrazing and lack of fire.
It’s a wonder how all these ecosystems survived for millenia for so long without the bulldozer isn’t it.
We know whey graziers clear trees – 2x to 3x the beef productivity per hectare for a while. So that can then be flogged unsustainably and end up going out the estuary at 5x to 10x pre-European.
Of course the subsequent years have been less – but that was not the point – and incidentally AGO have got ALL the numbers wrong. Should have started higher and ended lower. So brickbats to all of you !
Grazing industry needs to pick up its game – the rural leadership and shrill b/s from the property rights mafia isn’t helping.
I travelled throughout NW NSW and SW Queensland in 2002 and 2004 as a grazier looking for quality grazing land. I still intend to make the move when I can purchase the property of my liking.
I crossed the NSW/QLD border at a number of differnt locations.and I gained my views of “farmer controlled” land management from this.
I understand that the clearing regulations have differed a bit between NSW and QLD for a number of years and that up untill recently QLD had fantastic “farmers rights”.
On the NSW side of the border I saw open woodlands of Mugga Ironbark with no scrub and diverse, productive, nutritious native grasses whilst next door in QLD there was recently cleared Mugga Ironbark country sown to buffel grass. Dense woody re-growth was quickly invading this cleared land.
At another border crossing I saw productive open Gidgee and Brigalow woodlands, with diverse grass and saltbush understorey change to dense Gidgee/Brigalow regrowth encouraged by historic broadscale clearing in QLD.
Further into Queensland around Bollon I saw recently cleared forests of Bimble Box/ Red box. With large trees 50-100cm trunks pushed into rows for burning (What a shocking waste! so much for private forestry!). The small remnants of these forests contained diverse grassy understorey made of of dozens of different species of grasses, but the cleared sections were all sown to dense Buffel and had dense woody re-growth emerging right throughout.
Anyone that knows anything about the history and ecology of the NSW and Queensland outback is very aware of the problem of woodland thickening. To call them weeds and work on broadscale destruction is foolish, as they are all (apart from some exotic acacias) locally indigenous species that were always present in these grassy woodlands and a vital part of their function when in balance. The problem is the density of the regrowth, which is why it needs THINNING!
Like luke has pointed out this thickening was caused by inappropriate grazing and lack of fire(maybe). I’d like to add broadscale clearing, both historical an current as the main cause of dense woodland regrowth.
Doing more of the same and allowing broadscale clearing will make the problems worse. Recent clearing is almost always combined with the sowing of introduced weeds like Buffel grass or cultivation and cropping or both and this will cause accelerated degradation of the grassy woodland ecosystems and probably render them unrecoverable.
As a passionate grazier, it pains me to see so much fantastic natural grazing country destroyed by egotistical farmers who continue to live in ignorance and contempt for their own country and people who are trying to work to restore and sustain it’s health.
The new regulations concerning native vegetation clearance clearly allow for dense regrowth thinning, so what the hell is the fuss about? Thinning combined with improved grazing management and revetation of NATIVE grasses will help to resore the natural open grassy woodlands.
Michael – at last a voice of moderation and concern. Any thoughts on encouraging perennial grass species and any possible roles for planting saltbush.
I would love to get some of you theorists out to my mates place near Walgett. When I last talked to him, he was grazing 5500 sheep, 250 cattle, about 25% of his normal level, & 30,000 roos.
His only weapon against them is to eliminate water, but a lot of damage is done, before they are driven out of an area. A thunder storm can then produce enough standing water for them to get in another month of damage.
He has had one 9,000 acre paddock locked up for 5 years, with no water supplied to watering points, & it is no better now, than when he destocked it. Some of his place has not had enough grass to carry a fire, to suppress the woody weeds, for more than 10 years.
He is not very complimentare about people who want to stop roo culling.
Luke,
The woodlands that still have pockets of intact grassy woodland vegetation (ie. the ones that haven’t been completely stuffed by broadscale clearing and cultivation), still have pockets of healthy long-lived perennial grasses and or saltbush shrubs and scattered old growth trees.
These pockets are rapidly shrinking due to high grazing pressure and further re-growth filling the place where the perennial native grasses have been weakened (ie. we need to act now). Once the re-growth thickens, this often results in the death of the remnant (old growth) trees, which leaves what I’m calling “Grazing induced Scrub”. The difference between this king od scrub and the scrub that follows cultivation of the land is that the grazing induced scrub still has a soil base that will contain most elements (but certianly not all) of the natural grassy woodland ecosystem, making them much easier to restore.
You can usually find what should be the natural density of the trees in grazing-induced scrub by locating the dead or sometimes living veteran (Old growth) trees. People often try to claim that so much has changed that it’s impossible to know how it used to be. But this is crap we’ve only been stuffing around with these rangeland for 150 years the evidence of their prior tree density is still very obvious in most cases.
To restore these places I believe it’s a matter of enhancing these pockets, thinning the dense re-growth from around them and controlling the total grazing pressure(I admit this could be very difficult and costly)
Once the competition (dense regrowth) has been thinned and the grazing pressure controlled. You have to ensure that these grasses are allowed to flourish following periods of good warm season rainfall. (warm season because most of the long lived grasses are C4 grasses). In some instances grazing of off season (winter) growth can help to maintian moisture/nutrient levels and increase the vigour of the warm season perennials. As the pockets of good country increase in size and health there rate of spread also increases and we may start to see perennial grasses out-competing jevenile trees, without the need for any further expensive thinning.
Once the long-lived grassy components are restored, fire as well as grazing may prove beneficial in some systems for maintaining grassy health. I seriously doubt the scorching of woody seedlings had much to do with the maintenance of the open grassy woodlands in these rangelands, at least not at the drier end of the spectrum, as woody seedlings cannot compete with healthy long lived grasses anyway. I’m more inclined to think that fire played a role in allowing seedlings to establish. I’ve seen places where 2m high Cypress pine juveniles have been killed due to moisture competition with Themeda sp. and there was no fire involved at all. At the other extreme have seen numerous examples of where cool burning resulted in significant woody seedling establishment. (No doubt this varies in different parts of the contry)
The economics of this waiting game are difficult to budget on, so it’s no surprise, even if the farmers believed strategic thinning would work, that they would continue to resort to drastic measures in an attempt to achieve rapid economic gains (hence the need for vegetation regulations). I feel government needs to come to the party by increasing their level of assistance to allow for the nescessary feral animal and domestic animal management and the strategic selective thinning of the woodlands. I presume some of this kind of assistance is already available, but it certainly needs to increase or at least be better promoted for any significant restoration to begin. Another good way they could help would be to assist with low interest loans etc for grazier who wish to purchase such land to restore by appropriate means, rather than letting it all slip into the hands of the big guns with the bulldozers and buffel seed.
“………nescessary feral animal and domestic animal management ”
Should have read:
“…… nescessary feral, NATIVE and domestic animal management”
To be fair I know why graziers are reluctant to burn – few opportunities as Hasbeen and Michael suggest. then if you do burn and it turns into an El Nino summer – that’s the last grass you’re going to get and you’re buggered. Anyone bitten here inevitably becomes anti-burning fairly quickly.
Hasbeen I sympathise with anyone who has a roo problem. Perhaps some of these high tech watering points that differentiate between roos & sheep may offer some hope.
Michael do you think there is a way to bridge the bush/city divide on vegetation management. What’s required? Good news demonstrator properties? Better rural leadership? Whole new philosophy. What do we recommend anyone with rampant woodies actually do?
Michael do you think there is a way to bridge the bush/city divide on vegetation management.?
hmmm…. Move McLeods Daughters to Cobar?
The usual restricted view from inside your own backside, Luke. I have been on the SLATS steering committee for some time now and can advise that the detection of regrowth over time is quite within the science but it has never been within the DNRM budget. All the government wants is a total clearing figure to scare the punters with.
The photographic record for the entire country goes back to 1953 with some going back to 1937. My own place goes back to 1942.
So it is quite possible to produce an unambiguous set of overlays that will show both positive and negative vegetation change on at least a decadal level. I have been calling for this for more than a decade but the political will has never been there to provide a budget for the conversion of past photographic data into a format consistent with the current satellite data sets.
So your question, “but where’s the paper that accurately maps the true extent?” can only be condemned for its gross cynicism.
And you still don’t get the point. If 40% of clearing is regrowth then 60% is mapped as remnant. And about 40% of clearing is also Mulga pulling and mulga pulling does not get done until it is “ready” which means it is 15 to 25 years old and has already achieved remnant height and extent. Furthermore, if 50% of clearing is also grassland (non-forest) ecosystems then this grassland clearing and Mulga pulling in rotation MUST constitute the overwhelming portion of remnant clearing.
And therefore, the actual clearing of remnant forest that the urban punters have been led to believe is widespread, is actually minimal. Forest clearing is either regrowth clearing or rotational clearing.
But this government and its minions have no interest in any truth that does not support their objectives.
And by the way Michael, that is a great little story that must make the barbie worlders purr with contentment. But if you were what you claim to be, and were seriously looking at investment opportunities in both NSW and Qld then you would know that there has been no significant difference in clearing regulations between the two states for the past century.
I know. I have property in both states and have been closely involved in the progress of both sets of policy for the past decade. SEPP 46 began in 1995/6 in NSW with clearing exemptions for regrowth and other clearing only under consent. Ditto for Queensland but with no clearing of endangered ecosystems. And for the record, the total ban on broadscale clearing was implemented in both states only months apart.
Now you wouldn’t be trying to mislead the readers of this blog with a fabricated load of departmental bull$hit, by any chance?
And the claim that thinning is still allowed is another partial truth because the legislation rules out any clearing with two dozers and chain. But any other method is totally uneconomic.
Furthermore, in the arid lands where most of this clearing is taking place the natural canopy cover was from 5 to 15%. And when thickening on this sort of country is returned to 10% canopy cover by strip clearing (the only option without importing Indonesian labour at $5 a day) this means a 90 metre wide cleared alley with a 10 metre wide retained tree line.
This would mean 15 passes with a single dozer with 6 metre blade or one pass by two dozers with a chain. It will take about 1/7th the time at about 1/7th of the cost.
The option of two 45 metre alleys and two 5 metre wide tree lines is at the lower end of the economical use of two dozers. Two passes by two dozers is still 2/7ths of the cost of a single dozer. And it also leaves a gap that is much less than the kind of spaces that woodland dependent species routinely cross.
And that is why the codes and regulations under the Queensland Vegetation Management Act have been deliberately removed from the protections accorded to all citizens under the Legislative Standards Act. For there is no way that the current prescriptions (they do not even qualify as exempt instruments let alone as proper regulations) would pass the regulatory impact process that all states have in place to ensure that measures are just and equitable.
This government has conspired to avoid the need to comply with key principles of democracy and justice.
“And the claim that thinning is still allowed is another partial truth because the legislation rules out any clearing with two dozers and chain. But any other method is totally uneconomic.” (Quote Ian Mott)
Ian,
Thinning is still allowed, broadscale clearing is not.
The cleared landscapes that you describe comprising of 10m or 5 metre wide rows of thick woody vegetation and 90m or 45m strips of unbalanced agricultural pasture weeds (ready to be grow woody weeds), does nothing to restore the natural grassy woodlands. You are describing the temporary restoratioin of a “canopy cover percentage”. The fact that your new canopy cover percentage will be made up of scrub instead of old woodland trees, you seem to conveniently ignore.
I wonder on what basis you claim selective thinning is uneconomical? Have you tried it?
You might be surprised how far one person would get with a well intentioned poison axe in a day.
They will probably get as far or further than they can with their follow up total grazing pressure management and recovery of native perennial grasses.
Restoration will take time, if you really can’t be bothered or the economics don’t add up for you, sell your land that’s a very economical choice.
Michael, the fact that you can even ask the rhetorical question about whether selective thinning of woodland thickening is uneconomic, makes it clear to me that your association with actual farm management is tenuous at best.
It so happens that I was able to observe selective thinning with Bill Keruish’s poison axe at CSIRO’s Orbost Workshop on regrowth management in 1999. The conclusions were that this was only economic at locations where the timber value of thinned stems was sufficient to recover a major portion of the cost of treatment.
It was totally uneconomic in locations, like brigalow and mulga lands, where there is no market for the thinned stems and no future timber value of the retained stems.
If you were a farmer, as you claim to be, you would already know exactly what the cost of clearing by various methods were. You would certainly know the difference between what $200 worth of manual labour can do in a day and $200 worth of twin dozers can do in an hour.
You wouldn’t make a farmers armpit.
And as for Luke with his continuing plucking of erosion multiples from thin air, give it a rest. If sediment loads are so bad from all this environmental destruction you claim is taking place then how come Lake Alexandrina, where all the erosion from the entire Murray Darling catchment Must end up, is still the same depth as it was in 1920?
Yes this lake is only an average of 3 metres and one of the main reasons for building the Barrage was to increase the depth from 2 metres to improve navigation. So if sediment loads are of any significance, anywhere in the catchment, then it would show up in the Lake.
So where is it, Einstein? Or is it flowing up hill and over the Great Divide into the Great Barrier Reef?
Ian my dear chap, have you ever heard of deposition? And my 5x etc comments were directed back at the Burdekin example. Of course you could check how the river bed on the Ward is going these days if you really must ask about MDB. Lake Alexandrina indeed ROTFL.
As I said before – don’t worry about the water quality if you don’t care – think about your decreasing soil resource in the paddocks.
So Ian you have a real live grazier here telling you that bulldozer clearing is a prime cause of woodland thickening. Oops !
And you still haven’t explained how all this woodland thickening occurs in the first place.
Ian,
Over 40% of NSW is comprised of the western division which comes under the western lands act. We have had vastly different rules for clearing and cultivation to Queensland, and they still are.
Clearing and cultivation are dealt with as separate issues.
I believe there are some instances where the dozer may be relevant, but also agree with Michael that if only the symptom is addressed then the “problem” of woody weeds will not go away.
Thickening is caused by pasture depletion by the Minister’s ‘roo herd that is never de-stocked at anywhere near appropriate levels as we enter drought cycles. This herd continues to graze down pasture long after graziers have either de-stocked or switched to supplementary feeding.
But neither of you can sidestep the issue of where and how the clearing is being done and the fact that the simple publication of a single clearing figure, without identifying the circumstances and vegetation type, is a gross misrepresentation of fact.
We have both Michael and Graham claiming that “if only the symptom is addressed then the “problem” of woody weeds will not go away”, but still you persist with this misrepresentation that clearing is, in most part, original habitat destruction rather than simple, on-going pasture maintenance that can be detected by satellite.
So spare us the red herrings.
Ian,
The original habitat was most likely rainforest, or maybe before that it was sea weed…who knows.
You won’t read me claiming that we need to keep original habitat (whatever that is) intact, as my belief is to also have an effect on the landscape, albeit a mutually satisfying one between the ecology and ecomomics. You must have a bigger cheque book then me if “the dozer” is just an ongoing part of pasture management.And I’ll guarantee that “ol’ Mother nature “has a bigger one then you. There are more effective means of dealing with the problem Ian then your current way of thinking will allow you to comprehend.
Kangaroo’s are an issue, I’ll grant you.
But that’s all…and certainly not a complete hinderance or even an impediment to correct pasture management.
Ian,
Just drive around any stock route or main road that is fenced off and tell me where you see the most grass.
On the roadside or in the neighbouring paddock??
It will become quite obvious to you that roo’s are not are main problem.
Also, I just drove around my place last night and covered a lot of the 17,000 acres and counted less than 20 kangaroos. With the limited rain we have had the ‘green pick’ is coming away nicely, and yet I’ll be looking for a good Spring or early summer before I contemplate re-stocking.
“We also know from SLATS that only half of all clearing in Qld involves actual forest. That is trees higher than 2 metres and more than 10% canopy. The rest is grassland with the odd tree or just plain Tussocky and Tufted Grassland.” (Quote Ian Mott)
Ian are you suggesting that the clearing of native grasslands is less of a crime?
This seems just a little counter-productive as cleared grasslands are much more vulnerable to invasion by woody vegetation.
I thought the broadscale clearing that you are so fond of was supposed to be helping to restore native grasslands?
How dissappointing.
Queensland has 60 million ha of woodland and about 105 million ha of non-woodland (grassy ecosystems) and the lumping of the two types of clearing is grossly misleading because it is invariably assumed to be forest clearing.
The long term average clearing from 1991 to 2004 is 390,000ha of which 195,000ha is grassland clearing and 195,000 is woodland clearing.
This grassland clearing represents only 0.185 of 1% of the total grassland area. So even if it all involved conversion of native grasses to exotics, and these exotics provided no ecosystem services to any of the original grassland dependent species, there would still be 50% of it left in 270 years. That does not represent a threat and it certainly does not represent a crime worth trashing fundamental legal principles to prevent.
We also know that 34 to 40% of total clearing has been Mulga lands in a rotational grazing system that has minimal impact on the long term vegetation cover. That is, about 150,000ha of what can be assumed to be primarily woodland ecosystem, not grassland. And when that 150,000ha is deducted from the total of 195,000ha of woodland clearing we are left with only 45,000ha of other woodland clearing that may or may not be regrowth.
And that 45,000ha is only 0.075 of 1% of the 60 million ha of woodland, and at this rate, 50% of it will still be there in 667 years. Any suggestion that this might constitute a statistically relevant process, let alone a threat to ecosystem health, is ludicrous. And it is certainly not an event worthy of criminalisation in association with the trashing of fundamental legal principles.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
By the way, anyone who cares for the truth can refer to Table 5 of the latest SLATS (2003-4) to observe how Luke quoted from the highest (and least reliable) clearing data for 1988-91 but ignored all the subsequent years in the same table that showed an average of only half of the figure he quoted.
Graham, what a cop out to imply that only gondwana landscapes are original cover. Original landscapes are those present prior to european settlement, in existence since the last ice age, and the conditions to which the current suite of species have adapted too under firestick management. And in the absence of sufficient retained fuel loads due to woody weed dominance, the only serious alternative is the dozer.
The reason more grass is found beside roads is because the pavement shifts its rainfall to the verge to produce an artificial water surplus which is exploited by the vegetation. The same applies to unsealed roads but to a lesser extent.
And your ‘coverage’ of 17,000ha is hardly conclusive, or even informative. Even a circuit around the perimeter of 170 square km would be 54km which on a typical farm track would take two hours. And even a maximum 100 metre wide arc in the glow of headlights would only amount to 540ha or only a 3.2% sample. And even if it involved extra crew with side spotlights the method is known to identify less than 5% of the animals that would be detected by overhead infrared scan.
So it would seem that you routinely base your farm management decisions on one thirtieth of one twentieth of sweet FA. Good luck.
Christ Ian,
How’s the blood pressure…
Funny how that “water off the road effect” can go out to about 100m at times, and then stop right at the fence.
Must be a water proof type of wire…
And about the prior landscapes, my inference was that my focus and concern is about getting this ecosystem to what I think is most economically and ecologically best,not argue about what it was, and I don’t really give a damn what your slanted view on the world is. I’ll take advice and opinions off more positive people thanks.
If I can drive forty klms and only count 20 roos then they are hardly in any numbers to worry me. If I can’t grow enough grass to satisfy some kangaroos, without it being a major issue then I’ll give the game away. I like to see a few about and so do my tourists…
You can extrapolate the figures out however you like Ian (we know you like to do that)but me, I’d rather not give myself the heart condition.
By the way, I do agree with your views on the rainwater tank debate.
We have only had water trucked in here once in the last twelve months to supplement us and only measured 275mm for that period. (usual average 400). That’s with an average of 8.5 people per night and utilising five 5,000 gallon tanks. Toilets, garden and washing machines on river water.
Hey, .0016 of sweet FA must be good enough.
Ian – get a grip. 88/91 was for the period being discussed in the lead-in. Stop ducking and weaving. And what’s wrong with the 1988/91 analysis vis a vis the other analyses. You’d be good in a dogfight – throwing flares and metal chaff out galore. And now laying smoke.
You also fail to mention the south-west is land degradation city after the Burdekin. So much for responsible land management – can’t grow enough grass as it’s stuffed – now knocking down mulga in desperation. But am I trying to stop you – no – just reflecting on land management sustainability which is the real issue.
Touche, Graham, my posts may appear to be soaked in bile to the Luke’s of this world but I can assure you there is a very big difference between my ‘blunt’, my ‘grumpy’ and my ‘angry’.
But as for poor old Luke and Michael, the real numbers will eventually tell the full story of deliberate part truths provided by government to demonise the farming community to make predatory government seem acceptable. And it will be the SLATS and Herbarium boys in the witness box when the class action swings into gear. Until then, thats the metre you can hear ticking away.
Ian – don’t mistake passion for the debate as aggression – we’re just having a robust discussion here – and yes as you say the real numbers will eventually tell the full story. That’s the problem.