Fields and Herons

My school bus used to take a circituitous route around the Western District of Victoria. It passed through tiny towns that were artefacts of times past when butter factories were common, each town had a baker, a cobbler, a tailor, a blacksmith. The fields were large and the long, dead grass stood white against the brown-breaking-green of Autumn's new growth. Small coffin troughs stood near windmills. Cow tracks fanned out from watering point and gate. Haystacks full of small square bales - the size dictated by how much a strong man could carry - and there was almost always a pony in the home paddock.

Down the back of the farm, there were acreages of unimproved pastures. Undrained swamps. Stands of gums, tussocks - even kangaroos and emus. The boom of the bittern could be heard at night and the White Faced, the White-Necked, even Great White herons and sometimes even Brolgas stalked surreally or stood utterly still, balanced precisely on their reflections in the marsh.

In the early eighties, a lot of dairy farmers went to the wall. Sold up. Property bought by their more progressive and energetic neighbours. The farmers who stayed had plans. They knew how to maximise production of litres/kilos per hectare. They drained and dammed, cleared and planted, fenced, ploughed, cropped and sowed down the best pasture species available. They installed vast troughs, tracks to cope with the passage of so many hard cow hooves. They rode four wheel motor bikes instead of ponies and named their cattle such idyllic things as 'Red Tag 976'. Not that they were at all bad to their livestock, but there was a diminuition of relationship between individual animal and owner.

It has been ten years since the small, shallow pond I called 'White Heron Swamp' was filled in. Kids passing that point in their school bus will not look for the herons. They will not even likely notice the slightly paler patch of grass where the pond used to be. They see an efficiently kept paddock rather than an absence of habitat.

I thought that there was a balance that could have been struck. I'm still soppy enough to believe that there is room for both fields and herons.

Farmers are like coorporations - obliged to provide returns to the shareholders. Only the shareholders are sitting in a high-chair with cereal in their hair and calling them 'Dadda' or 'Mum'. And the returns take the form of simple living costs. They are not wantonly destroying the environment to screw extra profits out of the land - they are simply doing what they must to survive.

I believe that the differentiation between agriculture and environment is artificial and nonsensical. Saying that farmers are harming the environment is like complaining that loins are killing gazelles. It's not the activity that is harmful - it is the degree to which sustainability of the activity can be achieved that's important. We need a certain amount of agriculture.

Tangent:I recall someone (perhaps in ABC Press Club Luncheon) saying that they'd been in a discussion with an economist who had said that (some country) should not bother going to what he saw as the outrageous expense of looking after the agricultural sector because it was only 4% of GDP and the country could stand to lose it. /Tangent

I say: Protect farmers = protect the environment. I'd even go so far as to propose that farmers should recieve some base payment from the government/people that could be saved and used for approved purposes. If the particular industry sector falls on hard times, there are the funds to diversify. Or to sustain them through without having to sell off irreplaceable bloodlines. Or to invest in an eco-friendly farm redesign and overhaul.

Seperate from that, how about funds to buy back (or rent in perpetuity) areas of farmland that are of ecological value? How about compensating farmers who have land that they cannot legally clear, but that the government will not buy from them. (There are instances of this, where the farmer has purchased blocks covered with scrubby re-growth - having checked with the appropriate authourities that they would be free to re-clear it, then the law changed and the farmer is stuck with land that cannot be cleared and farmed, and is worth 1/10th what they payed for it.)

Ah, it would be lovely to have infinite taxpayer dollars to distribute at my whim.

But I believe that farmers are the environment, the ecology. When the land is stressed, they are stressed, so when the land most needs their stewardship is when they are least able to perform that duty.

Protect farmers, protect the environment.