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RURAL REVIVAL
By Brad Collis
On his high country run below snow-capped ranges, Nimmitabel grazier Don Bonthrone has become a rebel with a cause - his farm a front line in an agrarian revolution that may forge the most far-reaching change in Australian agriculture this century.
Don has joined the fight against all the history, politics and science that for much of this century has consigned Australia's most fertile and well-watered farmlands to provinces of poverty and social deprivation.
In the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, Don Bonthrone has become a wheatgrower. Urban dwellers might wonder at the significance, but this is the first time since European settlement that farmers in Australia's southern high-rainfall zones - those areas most environmentally suitable for intensive, high-yield agriculture - have had a high-value cereal crop to grow in the colder, wetter regions.
This one scientific achievement - a high-rainfall 'feed' wheat - has the capacity to revitalise districts that have for decades been the most economically depressed, and in time may return to numerous dying towns and hamlets their sons and daughters, their schools, banks, post offices and hospitals.
"It's a revolution whose time has come ... a rare coinciding of a new high-yield industry with strong market growth for the product," says the Australian Wheat Board's Australasian marketing manager Tony Russell . Russell says the projected feed grain demand in Australia by 2000 is 11 million tonnes a year. It has already doubled from four million to eight million tonnes since 1984-85 due to the growth of the feedlot and other intensive livestock industries.
This year will be Don Bonthrone's fourth crop and he is convinced it will dramatically alter the economic base for high country farming as more graziers gain the skills to plant the new wheat.
An example of the potential that such cropping has is two summers' ago Don harvested a crop that yielded 4.3 tonnes a hectare in an area officially drought-declared. Average yields in Australia's traditional wheatbelt are about 1.5 tonnes a hectare.
The wheat board is particularly enthusiastic, although this contrasts with its previous trenchant opposition to a wheat industry in Australia's high-rainfall zones, and Tony Russell admits there is still strong opposition from traditional quarters.
The advent of this new industry has been rapid, and driven largely by the desperation of southern woolgrowers. Two years ago farmers like Bonthrone relied entirely on grazing and its unpredictable wool, fat lamb markets and cattle markets.
These limited options made southern and highland holdings typically small, often financially marginal, and pitted the NSW tablelands, southern Victoria, Tasmania and deep south-west of WA with numerous pockets of hopeless rural poverty.
The development of a high rainfall wheat for these farmers results from the determination of one man -- a maverick Canberra-based CSIRO scientist, Dr Jim Davidson, who has defied wheat industry authorities for almost 20 years in his quest to breed a cultivar for southern and coastal regions.
In the end it was individual farmers, in particular a band of rebels in southern Victoria who have started a self-help group, Southern Farming Systems, who sought out the scientist's new varieties and started to grow them without waiting for official industry permission. Their defiance may now change the whole profile of southern agriculture in Australia. Agronomist Richard Trethowan says the high-rainfall wheats will give southern, highland and coastal graziers their first viable alternative to wool.
"It will insert a new economic base which should arrest and eventually reverse the trend of small family farmers selling up, their surviving neighbours getting bigger and rural communities getting smaller," he says.
"These crops will generate the cash that will enable traditional graziers to diversify and intensify their agriculture."
Given the cost over the years to secure the mainstream wheat-sheep industry in Australia's arid hinterland, the struggle by generations of high-rainfall farmers on what is arguably Australia's best farming land is a perplexing irony.
But when William Farrer bred a short-season spring-summer wheat for Australia's hot, dry hinterland in 1900 it drew the nation's farming psyche to the sweeping "wheatbelt" and fixed it there.
When a Victorian grazier, Bruce Wilson, and seven others in the wool-based western district decided four years ago to trial Dr Davidson's new wheats, they were dismissed, like the scientist, as dangerous radicals.
So the eight "rebels", as they saw themselves, formed their own self-help group, Southern Farming Systems. They were backed by the philanthropic Vizard Foundation established by television entrepreneur Steve Vizard.
Similar groups are now emerging elsewhere in the high rainfall districts of Victoria, NSW and WA, and the original stone-walling from the traditional sections of the wheat industry has now turned to enthusiastic support.
Their initial opposition was due to Dr Davidson's wheats - christened 'Lawson' and 'Patterson' - being 'red' feed wheats and possibly prone to stem rust (a risk Dr Davidson argues no longer exists). Publicly the AWB was also worried about contaminating its hard-won white milling-wheat exports with the 'red' wheats. But privately there remains an unspoken fear that if this breeding breakthrough leads also to a quality milling wheat (as high-rainfall farmers intend), the vastly superior yields in wetter areas will challenge the very existence of some of the country's established wheat-growing regions.
Average yields in the semi-arid broadacre zone are one to two tonnes a hectare. Expected yields in the high-rainfall belt are six to nine tonnes a hectare.
The turn-around in official attitudes has come with the realisation that the fastest-growing grains market in the world is feed grains for the intensive livestock industries in Asia where increasing affluence is shifting diets towards diverse, high-protein meats.
Dr Davidson has subsequently made a dramatic transition from pariah to hero. Professor of plant breeding at Sydney University, Don Marshall, says there is something of the 'prophet in the wilderness' in the 20-year story of Dr Davidson's research.
"Despite sustained scepticism and antagonism he was determined to do something for the poorer areas, which he knew had the potential to be the most productive and profitable. The high-rainfall regions have been on the fringe of Australian agriculture when they should have been at the heart."
Emeritus professor, Jim Quirk, from the University of Western Australia's Faculty of Agricultural Science and Plant Nutrition, describes the new high rainfall wheats "as an achievement of national significance".
He says the new wheats and the diversification they will open up for farm managers should increase the value of plant and animal products from Australia's high-rainfall zone by at least $2 billion a year.
Dr Davidson's lone quest began in the early 1970s when he was working as a CSIRO pasture agronomist in southern NSW.
When the wool market crashed and plunged farmers dependent on wool - largely the high-rainfall graziers - into another financial crisis, he says it was clear that improved grazing techniques weren't the answer to the suffering he was seeing.
"What was needed was an alternative to wool," he said. Davidson says the distinguishing feature of the high-rainfall pastoral zone is that it has had no significant crops and has been dependent on meat, dairying and wool. Average farm incomes have always been historically low.
In the 1970s this zone also contained 50 per cent of Australia's farmers and sociological reports on their future and the future of their communities made disturbing reading. "Many were barely surviving yet they were in the zone which I believed had the most potential. Australians forget that the highest wheat yields in the world are achieved in the UK -- in a climate similar to our high-rainfall zones. So I started to explore wheat-growing opportunities for these areas."
Davidson was rebuffed from the start. The CSIRO allowed him to pursue his research but was pressured by the industry at large not to provide funds.
"The establishment regarded me as a heretic ... I became a leper," he says. For nearly two decades, Davidson's sole supporters were two southern NSW farmers, Richie Southwell at Bredbo and Andrew Roberts at Cootamundra who provided land and equipment for trials.
Davidson's aim was to breed a dual purpose wheat -- one that could be grazed during the winter when feed was in short supply, and then recover after grazing to produce a high-yield grain crop. He finally succeeded.
"Well, there was a real furore and I was told flatly by the NSW Agriculture Department that they would never allow the red wheats to be released. But it's only the seed coat that's red and I thought it sensible to distinguish between the winter feed wheats and the white-coated milling wheats from the wheatbelt."
Davidson says the opposition from wheat industry bureaucracies stemmed solely from the fact he was cutting across tradition: "People who get to the top of these organisations are people who don't rock the boat ... and so naturally continue the traditions."
Today, Tony Russell says the Wheat Board is committed to developing a high-rainfall wheat industry.
"But it won't happen overnight. These farmers have new skills to learn and there's a new industry infrastructure to put in place - but it is a significant development for the nation." For Jim Davidson, the defining moment of acceptance came earlier this year when he was invited to a field day organised by Bruce Wilson and Southern Farming System's agronomist Bruce Whiteman.
Graziers from across Victoria's western districts turned up, enthusiastic and optimistic about the first real alternative to wool that most have ever had. Jim Davidson, on the eve of his retirement, was hailed a hero: "In the past I've been lucky to attract 10 or 20 farmers to a winter wheats field day. This time there were hundreds. It truly was the most exciting day of my career."
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NOTE FOR EDITORS.
More information:
Brad Collis, 03 9687 4645
mobile 0412 107412
e-mail: collis@eis.net.au
The article's author, Brad Collis, has passed the Australian rights to this article to CSIRO.
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