GENERATIONS GO FARMING
Bill quotes Gary McCaugh, a local friend and farmer he regards as a guru of growing. ‘Gary will tell you that cropping with
chemicals is like drinking coffee – twenty cups a day will do you harm, a few cups will probably enhance your life.’
This analogy describes the attitude of farmers, particularly older ones, who operate towards the ‘biological’ end of the
spectrum that is ‘conventional’ farming. Farmers like Bill and Gary represent a generation of farmers, now in their 50s and
60s, who can’t be fitted into handily labelled boxes. They are practical and flexible thinkers who use what they can to get a
crop out of the ground and make a buck – depending on the weather, the market, the condition of the land, and the capital,
equipment and friendships they can command.
THE ELDERS
Pre-1970s, before the oil-based, industrial agribusiness model ramped up, these blokes were involved in growing crops with
their elders in systems where livestock and weeds were always part of the mix, and spelling and rotating paddocks and
growing pasture for animals common farming practices.
As farming became increasingly industrialised, cropping practices changed and chemical use increased. Initially, inputs were
cheap and the returns encouraging. Bill: ‘When I first started farming in the 70s, superphosphate was $30 a tonne; now it is
$350 a tonne.’
Yvonne Marsden, who farms Merinos for wool and meat up the road from Yanget, remembers that in the 1990s farmers
received a rebate of 30c a litre when diesel was 90c a litre. In 2014 the 30c rebate is still in place, but diesel is $1.60 a litre
and rising.
As oil prices go up, the industrialised farming techniques begun in the 1970s are no longer affordable for many farmers, and
problems arise from weeds developing resistance to herbicides and the increasing acidity of the soil from years of acid-based
fertiliser use. The generation of farmers who have seen the best and the worst of chemical usage need to be constantly
adapting and experimenting to meet the challenges of today.
27