Silo art

This is a guest post by Mark Dober who operates a newsletter out of the town of Castlemaine, Victoria.

A spectre is haunting Victoria, the spectre of Silo Art. In farming districts across the north of the State silo-sized images of farmers, kids, whefiields, sheep, trains and cars, Anzacs, and cricketers have been appearing. The Silo Art phenomenon first began in Western Australia in 2015. At last count there were 49 works of Silo Art across Australia. More are on the way.

Tim Bowtell’s Silo Art at Colbinabinn, Victoria. Photo: Mark Dober

These massive works find their home in very small and quiet towns. These towns have commissioned highly professional street artists – Australian or overseas-based – to design and paint the Silo Art. Various spokespersons for these projects have said that the main purpose of these projects is to encourage tourism to their town.

I would think most people in our State know of the existence of Silo Art, though perhaps few have seen it, due to its being in out of the way locations. Though I live in regional Victoria it was only when I made recent trips to Wagga Wagga to make work for my Murrumbidgee show at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery that I saw examples of Silo Art. These were at Colbinabinn in central Victoria and the Yerong Creek water tower in NSW (see photos).

Both of the artists who made these works come from a Street Art background (an art form which has been fostered in Australia by Melbourne’s international reputation for Street Art). Artist Tim Bowtell, who made the Colbinabinn work, lives in Benalla. His mural is colourful and realist, though with a slightly cartoony quality. It is also nostalgic, celebrating country living and transport in bygone times. The Yerong Creek water tower mural was made by the Melbourne based street artist who goes by his tag name Heesco. Again, the work is colourful, slightly cartoony, and nostalgic in its celebration of traditional icons of Australian identity such as Anzacs, cricket, and sheep farming. These two works of Silo Art, characteristically of this art form, trade on sentimentality.

Heesco, Yerong Creek water tower mural, NSW. Photo: Mark Dober

But Bowtell’s and Heesco’s murals are not of the photorealist style more typical of Silo Art. An example of this more representative photorealist style of Silo Art is the mural at Wirrabara, South Australia (see photo below) made by the artist who goes by the tag name Smug. He is Australian born but operates out of Glasgow, Scotland. In the Wirrabara mural the farmer is represented as a type, and an understated heroism pervades the work. The artwork attributes generalised qualities to the farmer who is seen to personify dedication, integrity and independence. The mural enables the viewer to clearly read the work as a celebration of farming.

Murals like these are likely to be well received by much of the public who see them. Partly this is to do with subject ma\er, and partly to do with their realist/photorealist style. That photorealism is popular with the general public is attested by the track record of the winners of the People’s Choice – almost always photorealist works, and often sentimental – in contemporary portrait prizes such as the Archibald Prize. If the extremely high number of likes that the street artists who do Silo Art get for their work is an indicator of popularity, then the level of interest and support for their work is astounding (check out these artists’ websites). It seems we’re talking about two quite different, even opposing audiences for this art. On the one hand a young, mainly urban demographic who relate to Street Art and express their support with likes on social media (few seeing the actual work). And on the other hand an older age demographic who do not relate to Street Art but who identify with the nostalgic imagery, content and values – the subject ma\er - of Silo Art. This audience is represented by the crowd, many of whom appear elderly, milling about the coach in the photo above.

For all its popularity in some quarters (and for different reasons) can Silo Art be valued for its artistic merit? Indeed, could it be that Silo Art is kitsch? If so, would this necessarily mean that Silo Art is bad, especially considering that kitsch is self-consciously pursued by some contemporary artists, including the world’s biggest money earning living artist, Jeff Koons (Koons, like all high achieving artists who indulge in kitsch, brings a protective screen of irony to his work).

If Silo Art is kitsch, by what criteria can it be fairly described as such? A crucial criteria of kitsch is obviousness. America’s most famous post-war art critic, Clement Greenberg, said ‘In kitsch, nothing is le^ to the viewer – everything is given and obvious’. While Silo Art conforms to this description, by its very nature as mural art it presents its themes in a direct and legible way. For these Silo Art murals are a collaborative effort and the artist is working to a brief: he (usually they are a he) has been commissioned by the local town council who want the mural to project a specific narrative that is celebratory of community values and the town’s rural identity.

Indeed, community consultation may be intrinsic to the design process: the artist’s proposed design for the Yerong Creek water tower was seen as unsatisfactory by many of the locals (too garish and cartoony) and was significantly modified.

Smug, detail of Silo Art mural, Wirrabara SA.

Another criteria of kitsch is sentimentality. Certainly there is a nostalgia to Silo Art imagery, and nostalgia and sentimentality can be close cousins. Yet the characteristic realism of Silo Art – an illustrative realism reliant on photo sources – can express sentiment as much as sentimentality. Dignity, hope, love, admiration, belonging – sentiments solicited by Silo Art – are expressions also found in the greatest art – in the work of Vincent van Gogh, for example. By contrast, sentimentality is mawkish, cliched and superficial. Whether Silo Art is expressing sentiment or sentimentality will vary from one work to the next (as each artist has their own ‘style’) and viewers’ assessments will likewise differ.

Personally, Silo Art is not to my taste. Too illustrative and visually jarring. The murals strike me as incongruous in these small, quiet towns. I feel they compromise the sculptural integrity of the silos, which have an appealing form, presence, meaning and significance all of their own. Breaking the flat horizon line like ancient Sumerian ziggurats, silos are a singular and dramatic feature in the flat farming landscape, and they don’t require a mural makeover that confuses their sculptural and functional identity.

Nevertheless, Silo Art does have something to say of which we should take note, for while it is promoted as a tourism drawcard, Silo Art is also a unique expression of the cultural identity of the agricultural regions of Australia. It promotes ‘good self-esteem’ and community pride in what are often struggling towns (drought, poor harvests, declining population and services).

And there is a larger point to be made here that pertains to the art world. Have you noticed that we don’t see much (if any) contemporary art in metropolitan or regional galleries that addresses the themes of Silo Art? That is, the themes and values that rural communities identify with as already noted. True, regional galleries do make a point of showing work that addresses their local regional landscape, but this work rarely, if at all, engages with the values and themes expressed in Silo Art. (‘Community Art’, typically by local amateur artists, is shown from time to time by many regional galleries, particularly the smaller ones, where qualities associated with Silo Art, such as nostalgia, can make an appearance).

Having said this, and recognising that the art world is not monolithic, I have come across exceptions. For example, Swan Hill Regional Gallery Director Ian Tully has spoken to me of his keen interest in encouraging professional artists to engage with the local rural landscape. To that end the gallery has established an ongoing program, the Acre Project, which is an artist residency program on farms in the Swan Hill region.

Though I question the artistic merit of Silo Art, I recognise that it is a bold and ambitious reminder that another Australia – today a marginalised culture that occupies much of the territory of habitable Australia and an important referent of our national history and traditions – wants to be seen and heard.

A free kick given to the CCP by the loony left

It seemed as though people were so intent on overthrowing the government that they’d do without representative democracy, the very thing that allows them to comment so vocally on social media. A fairly toothless response by the Chinese government to the feds’ abrogation of Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ agreement with the CCP was greeted by a round of catcalls from the gallery. 

China’s decision to suspend talks that most people on social media never knew existed made the news on Thursday and the crowing was audible across town. But if you were Chinese such behaviour would be simply impossible because the CCP monitors Chinese social media and suppresses activity of which it disapproves. People’s understanding of realities that govern the lives of millions of people are blanketed by a myopic hunger for revenge on an administration whose election – in mid-2019 – is still regretted by a healthy section of the community.

You find all sorts of strange ideas if you spend any amount of time watching what passes for debate these days. The word “debate” must be used loosely as there is no order in the proceedings such as you find, for example, in federal Parliament. One person makes a statement and another person jumps in to rubbish it in a way that makes discussion impossible. Seasoned journalists who engage in this environment occasionally and openly celebrate the ability to block people from seeing what they write.

The Communist Party of China, meanwhile, presses on with its long-term program of shutting down all debate that it itself does not want. It has used its consulates in Australian cities to harass advertisers of local Chinese language newspapers who still pay for ads, when the Party takes exception to a story that runs. Its chosen delegates open up their own newspapers and run the Party line, making sure that the message from Beijing is communicated widely. It makes life difficult for Australian journalists working in China, and sometimes these individuals choose to leave the country rather than risk incarceration. Books full of their thoughts have just been published in Australia. ‘The Truth About China’ by Bill Birtles can be bought now in bookshops and at Amazon. There’s also ‘The Beijing Bureau’ written by a number of foreign correspondents.

So it’s not that there’s no information, it’s just that people refuse to look. Yet they still spout their vague opinions criticising a government that has been forced to negotiate a tortuous path by the CCP. The Belt and Road initiative was just the latest in an ongoing financial relationship that includes the sale of multiple assets to Chinese companies. And remember that each of these concerns must have a senior executive who is a Party member, so that Party discipline is maintained along the entire value chain.

About four years ago I was working on a story that never got published. The story was about Asian investment in Australian agriculture. In the process of researching the article I found a number of different plays that were part of the continuing economic relationship between China and Australia. Here are the non-land plays worth over $100 million.

Here are the land plays worth over $100 million.

The non-land plays worth under $100 million:

The land plays worth under $100 million:

And finally the smaller plays, worth under $20 million:

You can see from looking at these tables that the biggest investor at the time – my research was mainly conducted at the end of 2017 – was China. That might’ve changed in the intervening years but China will still be a major player in Australian agriculture today. What the Twittersphere ignores is the fact that the government here still allows Chinese companies to buy assets in Australia – despite the fact that the reverse is impossible. An Australian company that wanted to buy, say, a shipping port on China’s eastern seaboard, would not be allowed to complete the transaction.

When it comes to China, two sets of rules apply. China wants to profit from the global consensus but it wants to do so on its own terms. For its companies and for its government there is one set of rules. For everyone else there is another set of rules. The loony left supports this settlement because it is solely focused on the small picture. In its eagerness to remove the Morrison government from power it ignores the facts and sticks to a line the Party applauds because it is in its interest to see the Liberal Party – which has so warmly welcomed Chinese ownership of Australian assets – criticised. Twitter is doing the Party’s work for it.

In The Field, number 05: Drone mapping

Recently we met Emma Ayliffe. She is the farmer who is using strategic tillage to enhance soil health, reduce evaporation, and remediate compaction on her farm. You can read that story here.

Emma and partner Craig have been making decisions around what they can do to improve the health of their soils. In their low rainfall environment ensuring that they have the soil structure to store moisture and support plant growth in the driest of times is critically important.

Everything they do is about trying new techniques and tools – based on research – in their environment so that they can ever improve, be better stewards for their land, and ensure they can feed and clothe the world well into the future. 

Today we’ll take a look at Emma’s use of advanced technology – specifically, drones.

The challenge

Actually, there are several challenges Emma has overcome. 

Weeds use moisture that might otherwise be used by crops, and they also harbour insects and disease, so it is important to minimise their occurrence. To maintain the best ground cover and to control weeds chemicals are needed for application. But chemicals cost money and reduce soil health. There is also the danger of chemical resistance if you use them too often on the same piece of land – the paddock.

The solution

A drone is sent up over paddocks to find green areas indicating that weeds have started to grow. This is a photo taken in the field showing Tristan Stevenson from StevTech launching the surveillance drone.

Sending a drone out with a camera attached that transmits a video of the fields lets Emma pinpoint the areas that need spraying. The resulting data maps the weed population and allows her to turn it into a green area map. 

The following photo shows the StevTech ute with the drone on the ground in front of it.

Chemical costs are kept down as they are spraying only a proportion of the total paddock. Emma can also often look at using higher value chemistries that may be cost prohibitive if she and partner Craig had to spray it all. 

The following two images shows weed cover of paddocks. In the first image, drone mapping produces a 95 percent saving of chemicals.

In the second image, drone mapping produces an 83 percent saving of chemicals.

Data from the mapping that the drone completes is then sent to a computer in the spray rig allowing the rig operator to target chemicals to conform precisely to hotspots where weeds are concentrated. In the following image, which shows what is displayed in the spray rig during application of chemicals, the olive green circles on the screen are the weeds being sprayed. 

“The great thing about this technology is that we can utilise the machinery and systems that we already have, so don’t have to spend a lot of money on new equipment,” said Emma in an email.

In The Field, number 03: Beneficial use of domestic waste

The first post in this series was published on 24 November last year. The post you are reading is an abbreviated version of a story that may, in future, be published on my personal website. Research for the story was performed in April and May 2012 after which publication was halted when the commissioning magazine closed.

In Sydney in the 1980s, “Bondi trout” was a term redolent with meaning. Sydney’s waste had been piped to Bondi since the 1880s, a time when, over a period of 10 years, the city’s population grew from 220,000 to 750,000 and, “the old and very primitive sewerage system was breaking down under the increased load,” wrote architect Morton Herman for his 1956 book, The Architecture of Victorian Sydney.

“There was a period there where before they built the ocean outfalls, where they were discharging sewage at the cliff face,” said Paul Darvodelsky, who at the time was managing director of Pollution Solutions and Design. Our interview was conducted by telephone in April 2012. “When we say at the cliff face, it was a metre off. And it was horrible.”

Tim Moore who, from 1989 to 1992, served as environment minister in the Coalition government led by Nick Greiner, made a statement on the news one day in 1990 that Sydney would not discharge any more sludge into the ocean. In future it would be treated to remove most of the waste and then the resulting liquid would be piped to outfalls placed, at the bottom of the ocean, away from the coast.

The challenge

What to do with the solid waste that would remain on land became a question for managers and scientists, initially within the NSW Environmental Protection Agency. Then within NSW Agriculture (now part of the Department of Primary Industries), which developed a guideline.

“What they did then was develop a document and they looked at the US regulations and they took all available Australian research and fed that in,” said Darvodelsky. “It all went through that and it went through a stakeholder process, and they came up with a document. They also identified shortcomings with the US regulation and ended up with a regulation which was actually much stricter than the US regulation.” Each state developed its own regulations, beginning in 1997 with New South Wales.

While producing viable material was achievable you then had to convince farmers to use it. But the cost of managing biosolids produced by is largely assumed by municipal water authorities.

The Australian Water Association (AWA) said that the average cost for biosolids management was in the order of $300 per dry tonne but Darvodelsky said it was more like $700 per dry tonne. Added to that cost for water managers was the cost of disposing of biosolids, which Darvodelsky said was about $300 per dry tonne. It is given to the contractor at the treatment plant gate. “The range of that is $150 to $500.” Then there are transport costs.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) estimated the value of biosolids to farmers to be between $66 and $300 per dry tonne. “Beneficial use costs are almost always expressed in cost-per-wet-tonne, or as-is, and the average cost is about $75 to take it from the treatment plant and have all the systems and management in place to reuse it,” said Darvodelsky. “They’re getting less than $5 per [wet] tonne back from the farmer.” Wet tonnes – “as they’re working with it” – are about five times larger than dry tonnes.

The solution

Darvodelsky said that biosolids don’t command much of a price at the farm gate because of the inconvenience. In 2012, Brendon Clarke Arkwood Organic Recycling out of Gatton, in southeast Queensland, was charging farmers $2.50 per wet tonne.

Arkwood sources biosolids from coastal communities from as far south as the Tweed and up as far north as Noosa. “All up it comes to about 340,000 [wet] tonne a year,” Clarke told me in May 2012 on the day I met him in Cecil Plains, west of Toowoomba, in southern Queensland.

The following photo shows an Arkwood spreader applying the biosolids to a field owned by Cecil Plains cotton and grain farmer Graham Clapham. The biosolids are trucked to the field where they are to be used and dumped on the ground. A front-end loader is used to tip them into the hopper. At the back of the hopper two toothed screws spin rapidly, flinging out the material so that it lands on the soil.

There are strict regulations controlling how biosolids can be used and a 2009 report (Australian and New Zealand Biosolids Partnership - Review of Biosolids Guidelines) put out by the AWA says that the higher the quality of the biosolids, the fewer restrictions are placed on their use.

Clapham manages the nutrient levels in his fields and applies biosolids to his crops “when the opportunity presents itself”. “It mineralises quite fast,” said Professor Mike McLaughlin, of the University of Adelaide. “You do get an immediate benefit and a residual benefit for up to two or three years after.” 

Clarke said you get higher crop quality with biosolids compared to using inorganic fertiliser. “There’s a massive difference. On your best soils like these black soils here, you normally end [up with] around a 20-percent better yield, or your quality – particularly with protein in grain – is higher, is quite a lot higher, without exception. It’s always the case. As your soil quality declines – so when you go out [west from Cecil Plains] towards Milmerran, on your lighter soils, or the other side of Cecil Plains – the proportion of increased yield goes up. So, you start around that 20-odd percent on this type of soil [and] we have seen as much as 300 percent, on poor-quality soils, particularly down the east coast.”

“We run a program on our farm that we call nutrient bank,” Clapham said. “It’s a self-made thing, I guess. We do it in conjunction with our agronomic advisor. What that enables us to do is to keep track of the nutrient levels in our soils without actually physically testing them, you know, taking a soil profile and getting it analysed. 

“So, what we do is we have a starting point of what’s in there. Sometimes that’s determined by soil analysis. And from then on – and we’ve been doing this for probably eight years now – we keep track of what we put on and we keep track of what comes off, and there’s a little bit of basic knowledge and a bit of science around mineralisation and effects of floods and effects of irrigation and that sort of stuff. And we’ve got it down to a pretty fine art.” 

The following photo was taken of some of Clapham’s cotton plants growing at the side of a field. Clapham was harvesting the crop on the day I visited his farm, which relies solely on water from precipitation.

In The Field, number 02: Balancing the grass budget

‘In The Field’ is a series of blogposts designed to give farmers a bigger voice in the broader community. The first post in the series was published on 24 November last year, and the series will run for as long as I can source suitable content. Any farmers operating in Australia who want to participate can send me a photo taken on their property and descriptions of how, in their working lives, they face challenges. An exchange of questions and answers would result in a final draft. 

Gus Whyte and his wife Kelly operate a 12,500-hectare property they own, Wyndham Station, and lease another 19,000-hectare property. They graze cattle and sheep on both properties, which are located in New South Wales 80km north of the Victorian border, in the direction of Broken Hill. They are on the Great Darling Anabranch, an anabranch of the Darling River which separates from the main stream just below Menindee Lakes and joins the Murray River further south.

This is a photo of Gus on a motorbike taken by Heidi Wright in 2013 on Wyndham Station.

The challenge

The Whytes have a number of interlinked challenges around drought/dry-time management. The last good general rain in the area was in September 2016, with only scattered thunderstorms and showers since then.

One challenge is to conserve a reasonable level of ground cover – grass that has been able to survive the drought – and to preserve the integrity of the landscape long-term. Earning a living from raising livestock shouldn’t mean damaging our land, says Gus. “The Land is our most valuable asset.”

Another challenge is to manage the breeding stock. Gus says that time, thought and effort have gone into the genetics of their stock and maintaining this resource is important so that once it rains again they can restock to more profitable levels. Retaining stock genetics is a long-term goal. 

And there’s a third challenge: until it rains these farmers must support their family and ensure that all in the household maintain their equilibrium and thrive. “Now,” Gus says, “it’s about keeping us in a good frame of mind so good decisions can be made.”

The solution

If the river floods the Whytes can grow crops on lakebeds once the waters recede but this may only happen every 10 to 15 years so, essentially, they run a grazing business. 

Using a grazing chart that combines rainfall data as well as paddock records, these farmers identified the drought early and started destocking in November 2016, so were able to get good prices at market for some of their animals before prices went down. Most other graziers started to sell stock in mid- to late-2017, so the Whytes were ahead of the curve. They have heavily destocked and now have only 10 cattle as well as a flock of 2400 sheep.

They take time to identify the next mob of stock to sell, a mob with “one foot on the truck”.  Gus and Kelly both completed a course delivered by KLR Marketing School, so understand the concept of “selling your grass to the highest bidder” (making sure that you retain the best stock for the feed you have available).  

Gus calls it keeping a “grass budget” which, he thinks, is something he estimates not five percent of graziers do. He says it is about reducing the demand on the grass as grass supply decreases and maintaining a stocking rate to match the carrying capacity (SR=CC) of the land. 

“Not living beyond your means,” he adds. By making constant small decisions early it relieves much of the pressure when feed runs out, and when you need to make a significant decision.  “There is no doubt that the biggest gain in a grazing business comes from matching stocking rate to carrying capacity,” Gus wrote in an email, "yet this attracts very little attention.”

Gus supplements income deriving from the family’s main operation by doing other work. He emailed: “Currently I’m doing a small amount of off farm work facilitating a community group in the Menindee area as well as a number of community roles in our region and industry. This work brings in a small amount of money and the main role is to keep achieving and maintain a good frame of mind so that good decisions can be made when times are tough here, also we can be ready to take our business forward when it does rain.”

Environmental water flows in the Murray-Darling river system

On 5 September the Weekly Times, an august rural newspaper now owned by News Corp, ran a story on its website about farmers in southern NSW throwing into a river an effigy of Minister for Water Resources David Littleproud, a conservative. It’s not what you’d normally expect from farmers, but the drought is cutting deep in the bush.

This post ultimately has its roots in expressions of outrage on Twitter in April that I discussed in a 24 April blog post titled ‘Water buybacks and pressure from social media’. Following up from what happened at that time, on 8 July the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) ‘4 Corners’ program aired its ‘Cash Splash’ episode, which elaborated on concerns raised by people on social media. As a result of this program the level of outrage visible online again spiked.

This episode of the program was criticised by the ABC's ‘Media Watch’ program not long afterward, and I took note when that happened. The main reservation the host of ‘Media Watch’ voiced was that ‘4 Corners’ hadn’t consulted widely enough. They hadn’t, for example, talked with the National Farmers’ Federation to produce material for the show. ‘Media Watch’ found, as a result, that the show had been tendentious and biased because it was unrepresentative of the broader community affected by the drought, which started in 2017.

In the middle of July I saw a tweet from a farmer from Wentworth, a town in southern NSW near Mildura, that was a retweet from a farmer named Jeremy Morton, who lives not far from there but to the east. Morton grows rice and other grains, and raises cattle and sheep, and his tweet contained an image from the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office that had been used in a presentation one of its officers had made at a community meeting in Deniliquin.

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder was set up, as a result of the Water Act (2007), “to manage water acquired by the Australian Government as part of a suite of national water reforms, including the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.” This description comes from the CEWO’s website.

Here is the image that went up on that July day and that appeared on Twitter because Morton snapped a photo of it with his phone. This table doesn’t make much sense unless you know what you’re looking at, so I’ll give an explanation of it in what follows.

The table in the photo is split into two sections and it shows the total amount of water available for environmental flows that is held by different institutions in two areas. One area (the top three lines) is the NSW and Victorian Murray River. The Murray, as everyone knows, forms much of the border between the two states. 

The first line in this group of three lines shows the CEWO’s holdings of environmental water, or water that is not to be allocated for irrigation but that is to be allowed to flow down the Murray to South Australia and, after there, to the sea. The second line shows the environmental water that is held by other institutions: those controlled by state governments. The final line in the group of three is the total for the two categories of environmental water. This is water that is currently held by these organisations. 

The second group of three lines shows the same information but, this time, for the Southern Connected Basin, which is a larger area that comprises the first area (the NSW and Vic Murray area) as well as other rivers such as the Murrumbidgee and the Goulburn. The following image, from the website of the Murray Darling basin Authority, shows the extent of the Southern Connected Basin.

The total amount of environmental flows available for the southern reaches of the Murray-Darling river system is, according to the CEWO, 750 gigalitres or 750 billion litres. This is an amount equal to the amount of water that can fill 300,000 Olympic-size swimming pools and it is half again as much as fits in Sydney Harbour. When I spoke to Morton, he said that 15 years ago this amount of water would not have been set aside for environmental flows but would have been available to be used for irrigation. 

What is striking in this table is that, even though there is a severe drought, water is being added for environmental flows due to purchases funded under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Another thing Morton told me is that when the Commonwealth buys water from farmers the money has to be used to build infrastructure to improve the efficiency of water used on farms, so the money farmers get from the government is not just going into their bank accounts to be used on irrelevancies.

A total of 2750GL in water entitlements was committed under the whole of the federal Basin Plan toward environmental flows. This is made up of 2100GL that the federal government owns as entitlements bought from farmers, as well as 650GL contributed as a result of allocating money to the states to implement different ways of managing water and to build infrastructure. For example, work currently being undertaken at the Menindee Lakes will add 100GL to environmental flows.

A water entitlement is like a piece of property and the allocation is like the rent that derives from leasing it out to a tenant. Even if you have an entitlement, if it doesn’t rain you might not get any allocation in a given year. Just in the same way as, even if you own a property, you won’t get rent if it’s not leased to a tenant.

Water for irrigation was capped in 1995 at the level of development that applied in 1993-94. To ensure irrigation water use was at or below the cap the state governments instigated rules to limit water use such as capping announced allocations to 100 percent of entitlements (not more) and setting volumetric limits for accessing unregulated river flows which were previously unconstrained.

The following chart, which is from the Murray Darling Basin Authority's 2010-11 Annual Report, shows the cap targets for (x-axis) the years from 1997 to 2009. It shows the quantity of water for the cap targets (green line) and the actual diversions farmers made for their irrigation operations (yellow line). The y-axis scale shows volumes measured in gigalitres. You can see that, over the period in question, the amount of water diverted for agriculture has halved to comply with cap targets. The other thing that is noticeable in this chart is that diversions have equalled cap targets or have even come in under them.

Morton wrote in an email that the states erred on the side of caution when setting the rules and between 1997 and 2018 cap credits, or under-use, accrued to the tune of 19,000GL. A drier climate during this period contributed to this level of credit owing to farmers. But on 1 July this year the 19,000GL of cap credits were extinguished as the new Basin Plan water sharing rules came into force. Many of the rules that underpinned the accumulation of the 19,000GL cap credits have been carried over, Morton went on, and irrigators think that new rules are too restrictive. 

A peak body for irrigators in the region, the NSW Irrigators’ Council, released a press release on Thursday 12 September about a request it had made of Littleproud not to take what it said was an additional 2000 gigalitres of water to use for environmental flows. This is in the form of limiting access to water, not the purchase of entitlements, and is viewed as a diminishing of the rights of irrigators without compensation.

The reason irrigators asked this is because the council said the federal government’s actions would harm regional communities not merely by removing water from its use on crops, but also from towns that need water for residential and other purposes. Letters about this matter have been sent to Littleproud and the relevant NSW government minister in recent weeks. 

“This is extremely complex policy,” Morton wrote in an email. “It’s only now as the water sharing plans (the rule book for managing water in each river valley) are being finalised that irrigators are certain that the rules will limit water extracted for irrigation to a far greater extent than the Basin Plan intended.”

He went on: “The way the water sharing plans are written the cap credits are being claimed as planned environmental water (PEW). The plans explicitly state that PEW cannot be extracted for irrigation thus locking in the cap credits as PEW.” The problem as Morton sees it is not what happens when, as currently, there is no rain, but rather what happens when it does rain and there is abundant water in the Murray-Darling basin.

Odd shots, 01: Fires in Brazilian rainforest

This is a new series about the strange ways that people online go about blaming the media for society’s ills. I don’t know how long this series will go for, but the trope is so common it’s actually unremarkable. The series title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

23 August

The day before I had seen a tweet from an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) journalist that said something along the lines of, “People have read in the media about the Amazon fires and then are complaining that the mainstream media isn’t covering it.” This journalist had actually covered the fires herself for the public broadcaster and on that Wednesday she expressed puzzlement due to people’s comments about her profession.

Then on Friday I saw a tweet from a journalist who lives in Portugal named Rita Vaz da Silva (no relation). It was part of a thread and I will put the whole thing here so that you can keep up with the meaning of this episode of ‘Odd shots’.

Misinformation on what is happening in the Amazon/Amazonia is insane. On social media is total chaos, no respect whatsoever to the facts. The worst of it all is watching the mainstream media disseminate stuff they see on social media without verifying any of the info, sources. 

One of the reasons this misinformation is spreading is actually reassuring. This is one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of the world. For reference, it takes at least 15 hours to go from Santarém to Manaus by boat. It's impossible to drive to most places. 

The fire count is slightly above average in some states - Amazonas and Rondônia. But the virgin rainforest isn't burning like most people think it is. It's mostly slash and burn agriculture and fires near populated areas. This is nothing new and has been happening for decades.

The final tweet in the series was published at 6.48am on this day, Sydney time. A bit later, a woman who routinely lambastes the media and who has over 15,000 followers, named Denise Shrivell, retweeted a tweet from an Australian author named Jess Hill that said, “I know the media has close to zero interest in South America, but given the catastrophic fires burning right now in the Amazon may accelerate the climate crisis, maybe it’s time to start paying attention?” Denise added for her followers the comment, “Anyone seen any mention of #AmazonRainforest in Australian media?” I replied “ABC has covered it.” Denise didn’t respond to my tweet and when I retweeted the thread from Rita da Silva with a tag so that Denise would see it, she also didn’t respond.

Her silence was not surprising considering the extent of the information blitz the day before. Here are just a few examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about. One person who tweeted was French President Emanuel Macron, saying, “Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest - the lungs which produces [sic] 20% of our planet’s oxygen - is [sic] on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let's discuss this emergency first order in two days!” With its charmingly original English his tweet had been retweeted 13,000 times and had received 36,000 likes when I checked the stats. It came with a photo showing jungle burning, but it wasn’t clear when or where the photo had been taken. If you saw the tweet and looked at it uncritically, you would think it was a recent photo of the Brazilian rainforest, but this was not stated.

Another tweet came from a journalist I follow named Miriam Cosic, who included in her tweet an image containing the following text:

The lungs of the Earth are in flames. The Brazilian Amazon – home to 1 million Indigenous people and 3 million species – has been burning for more than two weeks straight. There have been 74,000 fires in the Brazilian Amazon since the beginning of this year – a staggering 84% increase over the same period last year (National Institute for Space Research, Brazil). Scientists and conservationists attribute the accelerating deforestation to President Jair Bolsonaro, who issued an open invitation to loggers and farmers to clear the land after taking office in January.

The text was from, allegedly, an outfit with a handle “ourplanetdaily”, but it was hard to know for sure who had put the information into the public sphere and whether the facts that it retailed in were actually true or not. I found a Twitter account named @OurPlanetDaily but it hadn’t put up anything since 7 November 2017.

Another tweet from an Irish campaigner named John Gibbons contained an image that was a map of Brazil showing fires in red on a green background. His tweet read, “So many #Climate emergencies worldwide, it's hard to keep up. But #AmazonRainforest burning is stand-out global disaster. Every red dot below represents a significant fire.” The locations of the fires were not, as expected, in the areas where the heaviest forest exists, in the northwestern part of the country, but closer to the south. As with the other information that had been put out on Wednesday 22 August by so many people, there was no indication where this image had been made or who had made it.

There was a tweet from a US outfit called the Sunrise Movement that contained a video showing what appeared to be an Indigenous woman (with elaborate headdress) standing in dark countryside and pointing to burning vegetation behind her. It was impossible to know when and where the video had been taken and it was even unclear what kind of vegetation the fire was consuming.

Later, I saw a photo in a Vox story published online on Thursday that featured fires burning in different countries. There was one photo that purported to show a fire in Brazil, in the Amazon basin. The photo was put up by a person with the handle @mohsinkazmitakepictures on Instagram and shows some vegetation burning in the foreground, part of what appears to be a field used for agriculture (which corroborates what da Silva had said). In the background is the forest margin. On the guy’s website the same photo is found but there is no caption to say when and where it was taken. There are other photos that might have been taken in Brazil but nothing that could be described as rainforest burning. You can go to his Instagram page to find the text that he published with the photo described.

Then, on 23 August at 9.46am, da Silva put up a new tweet containing the same image that Macron had used in his tweet. She said in relation to this photo, “I tracked down the granddaughter of Loren McIntyre, the photographer who took this photo everyone is sharing. An old image, pre-2003, of a fire in Pará. I'm dying to DM her to know what she thinks of all of this.”

I checked the ABC News website but could find no story about the Brazilian rainforest fires there, nor on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. But I did a Google search and found an ABC story by a journalist named Claire Knox (who might have been the person mentioned in the first paragraph, above) that had gone up on the web on Wednesday with the headline, “Record wildfires raging through the Amazon can now be seen from space.”

The story had a photo in it showing burning forest but there was no textual gloss accompanying the photo and it might have been a stock image. The story quoted the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) of Brazil, the same source that Cosic’s tweet had used. There was also a photo that looked as though it had been taken from space that was captioned, “Satellite data captured on August 13 shows fires in the Amazon creating a dome of smoke over South America.” The photo was taken from space and appeared to show smoke from what could have been fires in the central western part of the country, an area which could have been in either of the states of Rondonia or Mato Grosso. The caption also said that the photo had been supplied by a person named Santiago Gasso, but who he is or where he works was not disclosed. The photo itself might have provided substance to the claim that rainforest was burning but it wasn’t at all clear if you just looked at it without any accompanying narrative. The story also said:

Since last Thursday, [the INPE] said satellite images spotted 9,507 new forest fires in the country, mostly in the Amazon basin, home to the world's largest tropical forest — a habitat seen as vital to countering global warming.

Now, if you accept the truth of the photos in this story (two of which were probably from the archives) and the message in the headline and the information from this (to me) previously-unknown “space agency” then you might think that rainforest was burning in Brazil.

A Guardian story dated that Friday with an image containing information sourced from NASA showing fires in the country appeared to add substance to the claim, but the image (which the Guardian made) showed most of the fires were not (repeat: not) in the Amazon basin.

Corroborating what had appeared in the satellite image put on the ABC’s page, there were dots on the Guardian’s image showing fires had been burning in the central west of the country, but (also corroborating what was shown in the ABC’s satellite photo) more appeared to have been lit in Paraguay and in Bolivia. There were also dots on the Guardian image showing fires burning in the east of the country, an area in which, going by the ABC’s satellite image, no smoke was present. The text on the web page didn’t actually add anything to corroborate the information, already mentioned, that had been sourced from the NISR. 

Then I saw a story that was linked to in a Guardian opinion piece by a Brazilian journalist named Elaine Brum. The story in question was on the website of an organisation called Science Alert and was originally published on the website of Business Insider. It is by a journalist named Aylin Woodward and it contains an image from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency, that shows some smoke from fires in the central west of Brazil. Part of the image includes the Amazon basin but Bolivia is in the centre of the photo, which was taken by a satellite. There are some plumes of what looks like smoke that have their sources in different areas of Brazil but in its first paragraph the story says: “Since August 15, more than 9,500 new forest fires have started across Brazil, primarily in the Amazon basin.” As in the image in the ABC story the smoke is heading southwest. The photo is dated 12 August.

A bit later I saw a story published yesterday from Business Insider titled, ‘Brazil's climate change sceptic government says warnings about the fires consuming the Amazon are 'sensationalist,' 'hysterical,' and 'misleading'.’ It contains the following to back up its claims of widespread rainforest fires:

The government is painting itself as the subject of an international smear campaign as activists and political leaders around the world urge action and decry state policies that have allowed increased clearing of the forest for farming and logging, which has likely been the source of many of the fires.

“Likely” but they’re not sure. The lack of evidence doesn’t stop the outlet adding its two cents’-worth to the campaign though. But let’s pause and consider for a moment what da Silva is not saying. She’s not saying that there is no burning of rainforest going on in the Amazon basin. What she is objecting to are the unsubstantiated, uncorroborated claims of widespread rainforest destruction using fire by the international media and by others, including politicians like Macron. It’s no surprise that a politician would lie for effect or to achieve some secondary goal unrelated to the issue in the case. But it is a bit more unsettling when the media feels a duty to follow people like Macron, blindly and without asking questions. 

Many of the images that I saw in a Guardian video on another of its web pages might easily have been vision of wildfires rather than fires that had been intentionally lit in order to clear land for agriculture. The following chart from NASA shows, for example, that wildfires are common at this time of year in the state of Amazonas. The trend for 2019 shown here is not significantly different from the lines for any other recent year. Unsurprisingly, this information was published from da Silva’s Twitter account.

Given the left’s hatred of the Brazilian president in Brazil and elsewhere, this kind of story was catnip for progressives. But if you have a more critical mind you might think, especially taking into account what da Silva had said, that the whole thing was just a massive beat-up. I am open to persuasion if evidence of large-scale burning of rainforests in the Amazon basin can be produced but so far there is nothing like this available anywhere. 

The thing about this case is that rather than not covering what appeared at first blush to be a major international story, it turns out that the media had uncritically repeated allegations without bothering to find anything substantial to back up its claims. So the media was to blame in the case of the Brazilian forest fires, but not for the reasons given by Shrivell and others.

[UPDATE 10.44am, 27 August 2019]: So today the Guardian actually does some real journalism and gets a guy on the ground in Rio de Janeiro to do some phoning. He finds some bureaucrats in the environment department to say (on deep background; they won't give their names) that their organisation had evidence of some fires deliberately lit to clear forest in order to make land suitable for grazing or for cropping (it's not stated which) in the state of Para. The fires started burning on 10 August, which coincides with a photo taken from a satellite showing some smoke over the west of the country on 12 August (see below). The point of origin of this smoke could easily be in Para. The image was copied from the ABC story mentioned in the above blogpost.

Water buybacks and pressure from social media

Twitter has had another conniption, this time about what it thought was maladministration by a government minister in relation to water buybacks on the Murray-Darling river system. This new cause celebre was labelled, naturally enough, “watergate”, following the pattern that demands that every government scandal has to have “gate” in the label used to refer to it in pubic. In response many people put a water droplet icon on their Twitter profiles to show they were angry. The Guardian picked up on the story after it had initially been covered by some members of the ragtag collection of "indie" media outlets that are available online.

The first Guardian story I read on the issue showed that the federal Dept of Agriculture responded to journalists (even though we are now in the caretaker period due to the upcoming federal election) and the minister involved, as well as former National Party leader (and former Deputy Prime Minister) Barnaby Joyce, commented on the record. In the story, South Australian senator Rex Patrick was quoted asking for a royal commission. People might remember that this is the guy who wants to shut down the cotton industry with a blanket ban on growing the crop.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media copped a flogging (even though the ABC News channel carried the story on Monday morning and other news outlets later picked up on it, including the Herald Sun and the SMH). Journalist Michael West, who runs a blog where he publishes stories he has worked on, followed the money trail and got a lot of support online from people in the community. This kind of comment is typical (it went up in the #auspol hashtag on Monday 22 April at 9.45am): “Brilliant, thank you Michael for your unwavering courage and stand for the truth.. Sadly, it is a rarity, amongst so many others in your profession. We are with you..”

The main thing that seems to have incensed people was that the company behind the scheme to sell water allocations to the government had its base at the time in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven. The other thing exercising people’s imaginations in this case was the intrinsic link between the buybacks and the Murray-Darling river system, a part of the world that had been so visible in the news earlier in the year when, due to the drought in the eastern states, fish started dying in the Darling River near the NSW town of Menindee. The Caymans link was the smoking gun the mob needed in order to see a conspiracy requiring prosecution, like a criminal trial. It was like the night of the long knives all over again.

People like Patrick and the Greens leader Richard Di Natale are opportunists who see a mob assembling and then see a benefit for themselves. If they can get in the good books of this disparate collection of voters, they think to themselves, their political prospects might improve. So they start talking to the media and getting their names into tweets and into stories. The Guardian sees potential paying subscribers in the mob so they set up a live blog to cover the unfolding drama. In this case they put Gabrielle Chan, a reputable journalist who wrote a book about rural Australia that appeared last year, in charge of the feed. One or two reliable journalists put the water droplet icon in their Twitter profiles, but I didn’t see any journalists who are part of the mainstream media who did.

Over the course of the day on Monday I had conversations on Twitter with three different people who displayed different levels of outrage about the “scandal” but none of them was able to show me that there was anything untoward in the purchase of the water allocations from farmers that were at its core. A second Guardian article on the same day, in the afternoon, also contained no new news as to whether anything wrong had been done. After Barnaby Joyce appeared in an interview with Patricia Karvelas on the ABC’s Radio National channel in the evening, the Guardian ran another story which, as before, failed to make any case of wrongdoing. Melbourne’s Herald Sun ran a story late in the evening but I don’t have a subscription so I couldn’t read it.

On Tuesday morning the Guardian ran another story, and the SMH ran one too in which the following appeared: “Critics say the government paid too much for the water and that it will not produce environmental gains.” The new Guardian story found no evidence that this was true but it said on the other hand that the deal between the department and the company that sold the water rights was tainted by the use of ministerial fiat (Barnaby Joyce was the minister at the time).

So instead of maladministration the media has uncovered, completely by accident, a case of corruption (potentially so, in any case). A suspicion that Angus Taylor, who is now a government minister, profited from the sale because he might have been associated with the company that sold the water rights, was not substantiated but there might be more revelations because there will be an enquiry by the federal auditor-general that has been ordered by the current agriculture minister. This move takes some of the heat off the government because the enquiry will doubtless be held after the federal election, which will take place on 18 May.

This particular case reminds me of the way that the Paladin “scandal” played itself out on social media earlier in the year. But where Paladin was not pursued by the mainstream media, they gave a lot of attention to events in the watergate case. The Paladin case centred on a company that had provided services to the government on Manus Island, where Australia used to operate a refugee camp and where a number of refugees the country has so far refused to accommodate are still living (in the general community). As in the present case, the mainstream media picked up on the story but they showed that there was nothing untoward happening that would require a minister to step down or anything as dramatic as that.

The main point to take away from all this is that many people don’t trust the mainstream media to cater to their needs, and prefer less reliable outlets that have proliferated in recent years, outlets that they personally identify with because these outlets are not in the mainstream. They read (and sometimes pay for) the stories these outlets publish on the web and promote links to them in their tweets, retweets, and with likes and comments.

The water buybacks case was very personal for a lot of people furthermore because of what happened to a person named Ronni Salt, a Twitter user with the handle @MsVeruca who had her account suspended due to legal action initiated by Angus Taylor. Another person on Twitter who had a letter sent to her by Taylor’s lawyers was Margo Kingston, a freelance journalist who is working to get a number of independent candidates elected in Coalition-held seats at the upcoming federal poll. Kingston posted the letter she had received on Twitter and people rallied behind her as they had rallied behind Salt. Salt’s account being reinstated was cause for general celebration.

What you see in operation on social media in fact is the same dynamic that led to the emergence as a political force of One Nation, a party that attracts the protest vote, a segment of society constituted of people who feel disenfranchised and left out of “the system”, and who are looking for a champion to take up their cause and to give them a voice. The progression of events – from a few tweets by an individual on Twitter, to a steady flow of stories in the mainstream media that are embarrassing for the government, to an official enquiry – has been instructive to watch because in the current case (unlike in earlier cases) the sustained attention has unearthed something that deserves to be remarked on.

Most of the time, the mob is left baying at the moon. The watergate case proves that consistency works. If you cry wolf often enough, eventually a wolf will appear. In fact the case, which saw people explode with outrage time after time as each new nugget of information appeared in the public sphere, showed Twitter behaving just like a stopped watch, which of course we all know is correct once a day. But for each case like watergate there are 720 others that are like Paladin where all the chatter produces a lot of heat and little light. It was notable also that in the end the biggest revelations in watergate arrived via the mainstream media, where they could actually have an impact on the broader community. That is to say, an impact in the lives of people who do not use social media all the time.

In The Field, number 01: Pretty green stripes

‘In The Field’ is intended to be a series of blogposts that will run here as long as I can source suitable content. Farmers operating in Australia can send me photos of their farms and descriptions of the steps that they take to overcome problems that they face in their routine working lives. An exchange will likely result in some questions and answers. I don’t know how many of these posts will be produced but I have long felt that farmers needed a bigger voice in the broader community.

This is a barley field on a farm managed by John Stevenson outside Lockhart, a town situated in the Riverina in southern NSW, between the Murrumbidgee River and the Victorian border. “Some of our barley meets the strict criteria of correct grain size, colour and protein content to be used for malt production ([a] key ingredient of beer),” John told me via DM.

“Our barley which doesn’t meet [those] criteria is mainly used as stock feed, either within Australia or overseas. Barley is an important ingredient of feed rations across many parts of the livestock sector. There is usually a $30-40/tonne premium for malt barley but this varies with supply and demand.” So John earns more money if his barley is of a quality that enables it to be used for brewing.

Malting is a process whereby grains of barley have water added to them and are allowed to germinate, but then they are dried to halt the process before it completes. The partially-germinated barley is called “malt”.

The challenge

Removing weeds from cropped fields so that the moisture stored in the subsoil is not wasted by their growth. 

“The barley was harvested two weeks ago,” John told me, referring to the photo (above) he had sent. “The grain has been removed and some of the straw has been baled to feed cattle at a reasonable cost. Following a very dry year November has been wet. Not all of the grain is collected in the harvester and there is always a proportion of grain ‘loss’. 

“As you can see this lost grain germinates and effectively is now a ‘weed’.”

Keeping moisture in the ground is critical for farmers to succeed and, if left to grow, weeds will use moisture that would better be preserved for the crop to come the next year. “The biggest limitation to our crop production is moisture and we are able to store moisture in the soil for next year’s crops. The green rows you see are actually using/wasting next year’s crop water. If we don’t control the weeds the soil will dry out completely in these strips.”

John explained that subsoil is everything below the topsoil. “Our hot summers generally dry out the top 30cm of the profile. The moisture we carry forward for the next crop is below that level. Our roots can grow down to 1.8-2m on some of our soils.”

The pretty green stripes in the photo are actually bad news, but how to remove weeds?

The solution

“We could dig them out (known as ‘cultivation’) but this removes the valuable mulch which protects the fragile soil surface from wind, sun and rain,” John told me.

“Our modern-day alternative is glyphosate, a chemical which is in the press a lot these days. I have been using glyphosate for this purpose for nearly 30 years and it has revolutionised sustainable farming.”

Glyphosate was developed by the chemical company Monsanto and was marketed under the product name Roundup but is now produced by many companies around the world. But why is digging out the weeds a bad idea?

John explains that “cultivation” is digging out the weeds, like a gardener would do with a spade or a fork. But it can be destructive of the topsoil. “Our topsoil is only 5cm to 10cm deep and very prone to erosion if exposed to the elements. The mulch is a thin layer of crop residue on the soil but also the standing crop residue from this year which is about 150mm high.” So the stubble that is left in the field after the harvest protects the topsoil that has to be in good condition in anticipation of the next year’s sowing.

John also told me that cultivation destroys soil structure. “Soil particles are bound together by the soil microbiology and there are important drainage channels through the soil made by decaying plant roots and soil-borne insect life.”

Force of nature

I’m seated on the toilet and I think of God. When you’re enthroned and the mass of solids is exiting your body, and then when you are cleaning yourself, the odour of the soil rises along with the aromatics like methane. And there’s something else in there as well: it’s the smell of the seashore at low tide, when you can scent the corruption that is part of the harbour’s natural processes.

The earth is musty and odoriferous. Each tablespoon of earth contains billions of living organisms, and it is the chemical processes that they engage in related to the plant germplasm – the seeds – that then turn into growth, that are the source of all our wealth. Soil organisms supply chemicals such as nitrogen to the plants, which in turn provide things like sugars to the organisms in the soil. There are mycorrhizal fungi – often extracted and sold to restaurants as truffles – that grow very large on the back of this kind of symbiosis.

It is sometimes said that the reason that everything living on Earth exists is because there is a foot-deep coating of topsoil covering it, and because it rains periodically.

Farmers know about the management of chemical profiles in the soil because their prosperity relies on it. The waste you flush away is piped to municipal treatment plants where pathogens are removed, and the resulting biosolids are loaded into trucks and transported to fields in the inland, where special equipment is used to fling it out onto the turned ground, where it reenters the food chain, closing the circle.

Farmers pay money for this and there are companies set up in Australia just to do this. There are currently about 310,000 dry tonnes of biosolids produced annually, which the Australian Water Association, a peak body, says amounts to over half of the biosolids produced in Australia. There are regulations in each state and territory controlling how and where biosolids can be applied to land for fertiliser, but the supply is never enough to satisfy demand and farmers must also buy chemical fertilisers that are made from crude oil and from minerals mined from the earth, to feed the cities that rely on them for food. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are essential for plant growth and therefore for humanity’s physical well-being.

But while farmers belong to a group of people who are among the world’s most dependent on science and its applied branch – technology – they are also among the most socially conservative of people, which is why I always think of God when I am moving my bowels.

In 2013 I was at Scotts Head on the NSW north coast visiting an avocado farmer who had built his operation on sand. Not far from his farm the ocean rolls onto white beaches that are the resort of tourists. Laden with ripening fruit, his trees stood in rows in soil so dark it was evident that he had chemically enhanced it using a variety of substances, including liquid taken from a 44-gallon drum sitting at the back of the orchard next to a shed. The drum contained a soup, with organic material in it including fish bones, that he kept on-hand and accessed when he thought the trees needed a bit of help.

Inside his house I saw a computer set up in one room and a youth – the farmer’s son – was sitting at the screen watching a weather system approaching from the east. He gave the family regular updates about the atmospheric pressure and the wind strength, data based on a vast array of scientific instruments and deriving from powerful computers operated by the government. I knew the family was religious because of a small message that was framed and hanging on a wall or else standing on an incidental table near the front door where I waited.

When I had finished gathering the information I needed for my story, I got back in my car and drove north, heading for Grafton, where I had booked a motel room to stay the night because I planned to visit another interview subject the next day. As I was driving, I noticed the creeks were running very high under the bridges over which my car passed. The rain had been heavy but it wasn’t continuous; now it had stopped but the effluvia threatened the highway’s integrity. I drove on, heading through a forest of huge eucalypts that swayed violently in the rising breeze. There was not another car on the road, going in either direction, so if a branch from one of these trees fell on the car, I thought to myself, there would be no-one to help. I wondered if my phone would even get reception in this remote place. Probably not, I concluded grimly as I gripped the steering wheel.

But I reached Coffs Harbour unscathed and phoned ahead to cancel the booking at the motel in Grafton. Exhausted, I booked into a motel in town where I could recover from the afternoon’s nervous tension. I would still make the interview the next day, but I would just have to drive from here, I thought, instead of from Grafton. The man I was to meet the next day imported a chemical substance used in agriculture and he had lined up a meeting for me with a macadamia farmer in the hills just outside Lismore. The avocado farmer was also a client.

The mercurial natural environment and its vagaries make farmers reliant for their psychic well-being on such traditional notions as God, notions that many city-dwellers like me had abandoned a generation earlier. The unknown and the unpredictable always pressing in on them – like the afternoon cyclone that struck the north coast that day – they must coax production from the soil, and while they use technology with the same ease with which they pull on their boots, many still cleave to the old ways because they need all the help that they can get.

TV review: A Taste of Landline, episode 2, ABC (2015)

Another episode packed with useful and appealing information starts with a segment on the specialty fruit and vegetable market in South Australia. Talking to a chef as well as growers and distributors allows the programmers to examine in detail the supply chain of produce in the state. One of the items the distributor sources especially for one of their client chefs is pomelos, an Asian fruit with a lot of pith that is not usually associated with an Australian diet. As chefs look outward to international cuisines for ideas the use of such items in local restaurants has to expand.

The second segment in the program takes us to the Darling Down in Queensland for a debutante ball where a local tradition risks being dropped because of a lack of interest among young people. Most young couples might balk at the idea of square dancing and a supper of cold sandwiches and a cup of hot tea but the people in the community of Gowrie Little Plain enjoy the event and come out in numbers paying a $10 entrance fee. The young couples who turned up for the event were enthusiastic. This segment shows metro viewers something of the traditions of rural Australia in a sympathetic and informative way without making any judgements.

The third segment of the program focuses on seaweed, which is potentially a lucrative crop for acquaculturists in Australia. The producers introduce us to a marine ecologist, a medical researcher and a chef, each of whom is working to find new ways to use seaweed in their industry.

The final segment looks at the deregulation of the unpasteurised cheese industry in the country, and so in addition to talking with cheese makers and dairy farmers - including one dairy farmer who used to work as a chef - we get to listen to a representative of the local food standards body.

Once again, the producers of the show have approached the job of storytelling by asking "what kind of angle will appeal to metro viewers". But rural and regional viewers, especially farmers and fishers, can also get something useful out of the program because it helps them to see the links that might exist in the value chain from paddock to plate.

TV review: A Taste of Landline, episode 1, ABC (2015)

ABC TV shows it is capable of innovation again in this first show of a series designed to bridge the media divide between city and country. I don't often quote subtitles in the titles of things I review, but I will in this case. The hashtag the ABC decided to use to promote the program on Twitter, #frompaddocktoplate, sums up the impetus behind the effort and I have to say that I think the producers have got the mix pretty right.

I think I have a track record when it comes to bridging the media divide that separates metro and rural communities. When I started writing stories for agricultural magazines in 2010 the first topic I chose was the peach, and that included looking at the history of the fruit in the west. Landline has done exactly the same thing in the piece in this program dedicated to the Angas breed of cattle, going back to the start of cattle propagation in the colonies and trying to document in some abbreviated form how the breed overtook the more traditional beef cattle breed - the Hereford - in Australian domestic meat markets.

It's a gallant first episode from an imaginative Landline team at the ABC. I could see how they made their choices of interview subject, for example, based on the appeal of those subjects in metropolitan markets. The use of Costa Georgiadis in the segment on the town of Felton demonstrated how eager the producers are to make this program fly in metro areas. I also chose Costa once - on the suggestion of an editor - for a story about community gardens, and I even travelled from southeast Queensland to New England to do the interview. The ABC has thrown their significant resources at this new series in order to achieve something full of appeal to metro viewers; Costa has a large following already in metro markets.

Watching this episode made me hope that it will flourish and succeed. It made me think back to all the good times I personally had writing those stories for magazines that were designed to bridge the metro-rural divide - a distinction in the media space that noone really attempts to bridge even today - and so I remembered some of the stories I wrote during those years, with fondness. You can see the stories on my website if you're interested.

I remembered the struggles among other things. There was the story about a new hybrid breed of tomato being developed by the Queensland government and a private company. For the story I wanted to get the view from the other side as well as telling the story from the point of view of the scientists, so I got in touch with someone from an heirloom seed company and captured his views on the trusty voice recorder. I remembered telling the government department of this new direction the story was taking - because when I had originally spoken to the primary scientist I had told him that it would just be the story of the new seed breed - and how they had asked me to kill the story. I didn't do that, of course, but it was quite amusing for me to come up in this way against the hard edges of a debate that has gone on for decades, and looks set to continue raging in some parts of the community for as long as we sell tomatoes in supermarkets.

There's no doubt that the Landline producers will come up against issues of a similar nature to this as they go on to make succeeding episodes of the series for their traditional rural viewers, and for their proposed viewership in metro markets. I personally wish them well. I tried to bridge that deep divide between metro and rural for years. If my experience can function as any kind of assistance to the good people over at Landline then I'm happy.

Milk powder shortage the tip of the iceberg

News that a specific brand of infant formula was being snapped up off supermarket shelves by enterprising Chinese residents and shipped back home to China caught a lot of people by surprise. But the demand for high quality and reliable Australian produce is only starting and is going to get more intense. We saw that Swisse Vitamins was recently purchased by a Hong Kong company. Other Chinese companies are buying heavily into Australia's farming properties in an effort to supply what is mooted to be booming demand for quality produce in future.

Australian companies are not doing what they can to deal with this demand. I wrote about this issue several years ago in an effort to spark debate around the matter of food, which even then it was obvious the Chinese were very interested in.

The thing is that Australian companies are largely insular and risk averse. The enterprising Chinese businessperson will go to lengths we find hard to understand to satisfy what they see are big areas of demand in the Chinese market. In order to get in on the act our businesses have to be linked to the sources of information, which are largely in Chinese language. We need people working in our businesses who know where to go for information, and who know how to interpret what they read there.

The baby formula boom was just for us the first inkling of a huge demand there is hiding latent in China, and businesses who can effectively tap into that demand will do well in future by anticipating such buying cycles.

Indonesian cattle land purchases in the Top End are quid pro quo

I thought it was a bit odd when not long after the election result was clear and Tony Abbott started to pursue the priorities he'd set out before the poll, that a story about plans for Indonesian companies to purchase Northern Territory cattle properties appeared in the media. Then less than three weeks after the election more stories emerged, with Abbott's Jakarta trip scheduled to go ahead the following week (this week). Now Barnaby Joyce, the agriculture minister who had eretofore been loudly protesting against such sales, has executed a neck-snapping backflip on the issue, and has moved in behind them.

It's been clever maneuvering by the Indonesians. After the Labor government shut down the live cattle trade to Indonesia in June 2011 Northern Territory cattle producers never really recovered as importers kept quotas well below levels that obtained before the crisis. As a result local property prices dropped sharply. In step the Indonesians, wallets in their hands. And with the new interest from Indonesia in purchasing cattle properties, property values will recover.

During his visit to Jakarta, Abbott slammed the previous government over its unilateral move to stop the live trade, in a concession to his hosts that cost him nothing. Now he has brought Joyce into line, allowing him to assign credit for the backflip to Northern Territory cattle producers themselves who, Joyce says, want the sales to go ahead. Of course they do. But it's fascinating to watch Joyce shift so rapidly from the agrarian socialism he has always believed in, to a spot in the limelight situated significantly closer to the main action taking place in the seats reserved for the supporters of big business.

Abbott has for his part moved closer to Julia Gillard's "Asian Century" template. The PM very loudly announced that a bevvy of business people would go with him to Jakarta in an effort to drum up trade between the two countries. Which is how it should be played. There are heaps of business opportunities available in Indonesia for smart Australian companies. Those who complain about the fact that an Indonesian company owning cattle land in the NT would pay no tax on live exports are missing the point. It's short-sighted and parochial to simply equate the national interest with tax receipts. Farmers and those living in rural communities know that foreign investment often brings with it higher levels of capital inflow as new owners work to improve properties in line with their wider business strategies.

Australia relies on foreign investment in so many parts of its economy that it simply could not function at the level its citizens have become accustomed to without it. Beyond this aspect of the case, however, is the simple quid pro quo. If Abbott wants Australian companies to prosper in Indonesia - where the population has now reached 250 million and where the same middle class that asks for Aussie beef commands significant, and growing, discretionary cash - then he has to be willing to allow Indonesian companies to pursue their own best interests on Australian soil. This is how the diplomacy of business works. And I would far rather see the quid pro quo working to the advantage of Australian businesses than merely underpinning Scott Morrison's silly and xenophobic asylum-seeker policies.