Why a drought is a scarring event that never quite leaves you

Drought may be part of life on the land but it’s no less heartbreaking when it happens.

Belinda Keats and her son Jack droving a mob on the stock route near Cloncurry in October 2013, when the drought was setting in for northwest Queensland. Picture: Supplied

You know things are grim out west when you can buy a sheep for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Wethers selling for $3 a head at Dubbo saleyards recently are enough to put a lump in the throat of any hardened grazier. The hot westerly winds have been bringing little but dust, and landholders are in a race against time to sell animals they can no longer feed. A grave sense of foreboding has settled in west of the Great Dividing Range. El Nino is upon us.

The run of stellar seasons always meant there was going to be much further to fall. The national beef cattle herd count had peaked at about 29 million, the highest in a decade, when the bony fingers of drought once again began reaching out across the plains earlier this year. Destocking at that level has caused a spectacular oversupply and sent livestock markets crashing. The price of young steers has dropped below $1 a kilogram and it can mean only one thing.

Drought may be part of life on the land but it’s no less heartbreaking when it happens. The devastation of selling 60 years’ worth of painstakingly selected genetics you won’t live long enough to rebuild. Your life’s work gone to hamburgers. Worse, the fate of the animals not worth carting to the saleyards. And a centenarian gum tree giving up the ghost just for good measure.

As a child during the millennium drought I remember cracks in the earth so big they could swallow a boot or provide an easy escape for a fat brown snake. You don’t forget the faces of the adults hanging on the weatherman’s every word. The muddy bathwater. Mum droving a mob on the stock route day after day in a last-ditch attempt to keep the nucleus of the herd. The lasting sense that any rain is a miracle and inwardly scolding myself even now for wishing away a rainy day. The oft-repeated refrain “There’s always money in mud” still comes to mind in an extended period of wet weather.

A drought affects every facet of life on the land. It is a scarring event that never quite leaves you.

The millennium drought broke in most areas with a La Nina event in 2011 but was followed closely by another serious dry spell in which large tracts of land in the interior were drought declared by late 2013.

I was working at the ABC’s Mount Isa bureau as the drought worsened, hitting landholders in northwest Queensland who had not had enough time to recover from the millennium drought.

There simply was not enough fat in the system to tide them over another dry spell. The banks came knocking and graziers were forced to walk away from properties that had been in their family for generations. Corporate farm ownership changed hands with increasing frequency as investors grew weary of the prolonged periods of low returns. That drought ended in an enormous flood in 2019 that drowned much of the livestock that had managed to survive the dry conditions.

Now, just four years later, those graziers are looking down the barrel of an El Nino.

A criticism commonly levelled at landholders is poor planning – hanging on too long in the hope of rain and not destocking sooner. Not moving stock to higher ground soon enough. But the weather events are coming thick and fast, with increasing ferocity, and almost impossible to plan for. Incompetent landholders have long since walked away. Only the best of the best have been able to survive recent decades with a sprinkle of good fortune. It’s not just getting rain, it’s rain at the right time.

Rain begins to fall on drought and fire-ravaged country near Tamworth in 2020. It’s not just getting rain, it’s rain at the right time. Picture: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

It looks as if this impending drought will show us once again how Mother Nature can crush even the best-laid plans. The dry hit suddenly this time and amid compounding external factors such as high interest rates that curbed domestic spending on meat products. With lacklustre domestic markets, exporters turned to international markets, which in turn also plummeted under the weight of Australia’s excess supply. The descent was sudden. It was raining and then it wasn’t. The result is drought prices before drought is declared. A farmer remains exposed to unparalleled climate and price risk.

How much the government spends on drought relief and droughtproofing measures is really a question of who do we want running our farms. Large corporate enterprises, foreign and locally owned, have sheer scale, diversity and geographic spread that increase their resilience in increasing climate variability. Much more vulnerable to drought are the smaller to medium family farms, often limited to one locality and with few options to diversify. What they lack in size they can typically make up for in skill and knowledge.

Sheep drink from a water trough in a drought-affected paddock on a property near the outskirts of the northwestern New South Wales town of Boggabri in 2019.

While corporations may have structural advantages in riding out climate variability, the downsides of often transient management lacking generational knowledge are well documented. Continuity of family farm ownership generates long-term efficiencies and advantages across weed, pest and pasture management. It’s knowing the country, the nuances of the flora and fauna that populate the land, the best way to tackle the vermin, how far to push the pasture in which paddock. Being totally invested in the ability of that property to support generations to come is a characteristic of agricultural management that has made Australian farming what it is today. It is worth protecting.

Corporations will continue to play a vital role in Australian agriculture, but they remain largely unable to synthesise the sense of stewardship and connection to the land common in family farm ownership. There’s an unavoidable difference between owning a farm and being paid to run one.

Connection to country is not limited to the Indigenous population. Farmers’ attitudes to their land extend far beyond simply seeing it as a utility and well into the spiritual domain. Such is their connection to the land that Indigenous elders have been known to entrust them with the location of sacred sites and traditional knowledge to be passed down.

When the black clouds roll in across the plains and the seasons boom once again, the climate issues that plague Australian agriculture will fade quickly, only to resurface with the next inevitable drought. If we want to protect local food producers and the national wealth they generate, continuity of policy and commitment to the agricultural sector will be critical.