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Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

reuters.com

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Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#21

Post by exaltedsnail »

profsummergig wrote: post #15
dinkblam wrote: post #5

> Australia has among the lowest agricultural subsidies other countries would be wise to adopt that, but there is zero chance of that happening.

They kind of have free land available to anyone who wants to farm. Maybe that helps. Land is a huge expense in places with high population density (e.g. India). Australia also produces a huge amount of high-quality mangoes. In the desert. Respect. They're very very strong on water management.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Arable farm land is very expensive here.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#22

Post by defrost »

profsummergig wrote: post #15
dinkblam wrote: post #5

> Australia has among the lowest agricultural subsidies other countries would be wise to adopt that, but there is zero chance of that happening.

They kind of have free land available to anyone who wants to farm. Maybe that helps. Land is a huge expense in places with high population density (e.g. India). Australia also produces a huge amount of high-quality mangoes. In the desert. Respect. They're very very strong on water management.

The land isn't free and arable land with good water is hard to come by.

Mangoes are not grown in the Tanami or Great Sandy Desert. They're not grown around Kalgoorlie (that relies on piped in water from far, far away), etc.

   Mangoes (Mangifera indica) are predominantly grown in the Northern Territory and Queensland, and when combined, produce approximately 95% of the total national crop. Mangoes are also grown in Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.
from: https://www.industry.mangoes.net.au/who-we-are/our-industry/

crop map: https://www.industry.mangoes.net.au/resources/resources-libr...

The areas they are grown have tropical rainforest (Qld), vast Wetlands (those parts of the Northern Territory with fresh water crocodiles, swamps, etc), annual monsoons (Kimberley), etc.

But yes, we do have on point water management.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#23

Post by porjo »

profsummergig wrote: post #15
dinkblam wrote: post #5

> Australia has among the lowest agricultural subsidies other countries would be wise to adopt that, but there is zero chance of that happening.

They kind of have free land available to anyone who wants to farm. Maybe that helps. Land is a huge expense in places with high population density (e.g. India). Australia also produces a huge amount of high-quality mangoes. In the desert. Respect. They're very very strong on water management.

> They kind of have free land available to anyone who wants to farm.

Australia is vast and empty. In the interior, rivers are few and far between and the landscape is flat and featureless. Any 'free' land is going to be essentially desert. Even if you could grow something on it, you wouldn't want to live there.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#24

Post by pseudo0 »

robbiep wrote: post #10
mike-the-mikado wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other countries would be wise to adopt that Until they can't import food and can't feed their people

In the US and much of Europe, the subsidies are to NOT produce, not to produce more

A lot of it also gets turned into biofuels or sent to third-world countries as food aid. That could easily be rerouted in a crisis scenario, if domestic food security became an issue.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#25

Post by slavik81 »

pseudo0 wrote: post #4
skywal_l wrote: post #2

"The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only." Norman Borlaug Nobel Prize lecture [0]…

A bit ironic to quote that considering how the speech was 55 years ago, and the green revolution is going stronger than ever. If anything the crisis of the next 50 years will be the economic and societal pressures crushing the childbirth rate in Western countries.

It's terrifying that 96% of all mammalian life on Earth is now human beings and our livestock. We might be able to feed more people, but habitat destruction is already the greatest threat to most wild species. Humans are doing fine, but the toll on everything non-human has been enormous. We are living through one of the greatest mass-extinction events in Earth's history.

I don't fear famine, but I worry about what we're doing to our planet.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#27

Post by 9rx »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #16
robbiep wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US and much of Europe, the subsidies are to NOT produce, not to produce more

And in the US, a lot of the subsidies flow towards food that isn't edible without processing - soybeans and field corn as opposed to sweet corn. Why? Because they've always grown it. So the subsidies encourage them to keep on growing it instead of diversifying into more competitive or higher value crops.

The subsidy is received by way of reduced insurance premiums. While that does make insurance affordable where it mightn't otherwise be, the rate of reduction is the same across all crops, so the insurance is made equally affordable no matter which crop you grow. Thus, for all intents and purposes, we can completely ignore the subsidy and simply focus on the insurance as that is ultimately what you are suggesting is significant. After all, if the subsidies were taken away, all it would really mean that you theoretically couldn't afford insurance anymore and would do without.

But what is significant about insurance? Since no good discussion is complete without a car analogy, let's go there. Say you always drove a truck. By your logic, auto insurance encourages you to keep driving trucks. Which suggests that if you could no longer get auto insurance, you would start driving a bus/van/car/whatever instead. But what makes you think that? If auto insurance disappeared for some reason, why wouldn't you still keep driving trucks as opposed to buses/vans/cars/whatever? There is probably a reason why you started driving trucks in the first place that doesn't go away even if insurance did.

In the case of corn and soybeans, there is a really good reason why they are grown so much: Because that's where the market is. It is what people want to buy. They are the most competitive and highest value crops in the regions they are grown.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#28

Post by AngryData »

dinkblam wrote: post #5

> Australia has among the lowest agricultural subsidies other countries would be wise to adopt that, but there is zero chance of that happening.

I disagree, food subsidies are the only alternative to the granary system, or foolishly counting on food imports. Agriculture is an industry with notorious slim margins, but yield can vary up to 30% year to year just on random weather patterns and often effects large areas at once. Combined those are a recipe for an eventual shortage unless you pay to over produce. A farm running on 2% margins on a good year can't risk planting 10% extra if they might not be able to sell it and will take it all as a loss, and so farmers without decent subsidies would only try to produce up to the current demand and not a bushel over it. And if a large agricultural area experiences a bad year, as we have seen happen historically many times over, and everyone was already only planning to barely meet demand, all of a sudden you have a food shortage and people starve. And on top of that weather patterns across the globe are changing and becoming less predictable. Famines essentially became nonexistent in places with decent crop subsidization, but in places without it that still rely on large granary stores shortages still happen.

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#29

Post by lmpdev »

profsummergig wrote: post #15
dinkblam wrote: post #5

> Australia has among the lowest agricultural subsidies other countries would be wise to adopt that, but there is zero chance of that happening.

They kind of have free land available to anyone who wants to farm. Maybe that helps. Land is a huge expense in places with high population density (e.g. India). Australia also produces a huge amount of high-quality mangoes. In the desert. Respect. They're very very strong on water management.

I mean it’s very very much not free

You can buy and sell x-year leases from the crown. Any with a commercially viable site sell for just below or even more than freehold land (depending on supply)

Farming logistics also works radically differently than in America: the reason our farms are orders of magnitude higher larger than American ranches spatially is because it’s only somewhat profitable at the largest possible scales

The valley I’m from originally (The Tweed) is cane country, and not a single company is viable independently. Hell we only have one mill left nationally that’s not-megacorp owned (note we have no land leases though, it’s all freehold where I’m from)

Re: Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

#30

Post by lmpdev »

quitit wrote: post #26
dinkblam wrote: post #5

> Australia has among the lowest agricultural subsidies other countries would be wise to adopt that, but there is zero chance of that happening.

and those subsidies go predominantly into R&D rather than propping up fragile businesses

My university has a good anecdote here

Not sure about this year but either two or three years ago over 90% of the University of New England’s grant money (over $20MM) was from the School of Agriculture

I hate many aspects of the Australian economy (especially our lack of economic diversity) but having world-best tech for farming isn’t one of them. America is still leaps and bounds behind us in many different subdomains of Agriculture and Mining

Australia is weak for only really having primary industries, but we sure are very optimised for it

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