University of Adelaide research: Why farmers are leaving the Murray-Darling Basin
University of Adelaide research shows why farmers are leaving the Murray-Darling Basin and it’s not what you think.
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Rising temperatures and falling commodity prices drive more farmers out of the Murray-Darling Basin than reduced irrigation allocations, University of Adelaide research shows.
The detailed analysis of two decades of data on communities in the Basin is published this week in the international journal Climatic Change.
Lead author Professor Sarah Wheeler says it’s important to understand why farmers are leaving the land, in order to develop better policy and help rural communities adapt.
“What our model did was to include as many different variables as possible that may be influencing movements of farmers within local areas,” she said.
Her team sourced data from every Australian Bureau of Statistics Agricultural Census and Population Census from 1991 to 2011, a 20-year period including the Millennium Drought, the development of the Water Act (2007) and water buyback schemes.
Then they matched it to other datasets including climate risk measures, rainfall, temperature, water diversions, commodity prices, unemployment and urbanisation factors, to model the changes in farmer numbers in local areas over time.
“It is increases in temperature that is most significantly associated with decreasing farmer numbers within the basin,” Professor Wheeler said.
“Water extraction, which is an irrigation variable, was found to have no significant influence.”
That may come as a surprise to many, because the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, reduced irrigation allocations and water buybacks are often blamed for rural community decline.
But Professor Wheeler says the result reflects the fact most (75 per cent) of the farmers are dryland agriculture, meaning they are dependent on rainfall for crops and pastures.
“They don’t extract water for irrigation purposes,” she said.
“So changes in water diversions are not necessarily going to be influencing the majority of farmers in the Basin.”
The study predicts that another half a degree increase in temperature by 2041 would more than halve the number farmers remaining in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Professor Wheeler says previous research has shown that when many farmers sell their water entitlements, they either change to dryland (rainfed) farming, or maintain the same level of production because they had surplus water, or adapt in other ways.
“What we must do to help our rural communities is take note of the proper evidence and develop policy around drought, climate change, rural economic development and water use that leads to comprehensive strategies for real solutions,” she said.
“The belief that we can solve the Basin’s problems by simply building dams, taking water back from the environment for irrigators, and stop it being ‘wasted’ by flowing out to sea is a fallacy.
“New policy must consider the real long-term drivers of farm exit and take a multi-faceted, investment approach. We need to recognise our farmers are facing a drier, hotter future, and plan accordingly.”