An un-balanced sheet for Australian farming
Around 80 per cent of Australian agricultural profit comes from just one per cent of farmland, an economic assessment has shown.
The study, by CSIRO Land and Water, was concerned with agricultural returns over the five-year period up to and including 1996/97.
Two-thirds of agricultural land made a loss, the study found.
"This starts to raise questions about whether we are farming Australia as efficiently as possible," said researcher Dr Stefan Hajkowicz.
Part of a broader effort to help land managers decide how to make money from farming at the lowest cost to the environment, the study's results will feed in to the National Land and Water Resources Audit.
Begun in 1997, the Audit aims to provide a comprehensive information base for natural resource management. It involves CSIRO, along with other State, Territory and Commonwealth government agencies, in collecting a range of assessments of water use, landscape health, catchment condition, resource economics, soil health and agricultural productivity.
The information collated so far has resulted in detailed nationwide maps of profits from agriculture, estimates of land degradation costs, assessments of soil erosion rates in catchments such as those along the Barrier Reef, analyses of nutrient inputs and losses, and assessments of landscape productivity.
This data helps direct effort land management efforts targeting environmental funds, for example, to where they're needed most.
The economic study highlighted the cost of land degradation problems such as acidity, water pollution and salinity. These costs are not necessarily limited to farmers: salinity costs, for example, may be felt in urban areas through damage to roads, rail, houses and water infrastructure.
The concentration of agricultural profits in a small area of agricultural land highlights the need to develop profitable land use activities other than food and fibre production.
Agriculture's contribution to GDP has fallen from around 30 per cent at the beginning of the last century to around three per cent now, while employment in agriculture over the same period has fallen from almost one-quarter of the workforce to around five per cent. Yet agriculture still occupies about 60 per cent of Australian land area.
According to Dr Hajkowicz, it's vital that we begin thinking about the best ways of using our landscapes.
"Can we start to employ farmers as natural resource managers?" he asked.
"Instead of supplying food and fibre, farmers could and many already are supply clean water, biodiversity and beautiful landscapes."