From Cosmos (3/3/24)…
Forget the partisan hype, Aust farmers are preparing for the extremes of climate change
Australia’s farmers are “doing amazing things” and rising to the climate challenge by adopting a deep level of strategic thinking to almost everything they do, according to a new survey on resilience in agriculture.
Charles Darwin University doctoral student David McKenzie interviewed 22 farmers across eastern Australia to track their experiences and responses. He reports the challenges they face are immense.
“We didn’t have any rain through those three years of winter… That’s never happened before,” a Queensland cattle farmer reported. “We had two winters without any frost – that’s never happened before.”
Extreme heat waves, drought, and floods are washing over the country at an increasing rate.
And they bring with them increasingly regular social, economic and ecological disruption.
One survey respondent said even in a good year, “everything now seems to come all at once.”
“(We) get massive dumps of rain that last for one month, then it will leave us for four to five months at a time, so we’ve basically set our grazing business up to harvest that rainfall event,” a NSW mixed farmer explained.
