The future of farming
One future of farming is fewer farms
of a much bigger size run by families or
corporations – but at the other end of the
scale we are seeing the rise of the micro-farm.
These mixed stock and crop enterprises are
about a degree of self-sufficiency, a search for
a healthy lifestyle and the potential to develop
income streams. In these days of ever-rising oil
prices, the hobby farm might be about to take
its rightful place in the sun as an important
regional food producer, and backyard
endeavours will come into their own.
Yvonne Marsden’s take is that as broadacre
agricultural practices keep trundling down
the road to becoming massive industrialised
monocultures of cropping, the gap between
broadacre/livestock farms, like her farm and
Yanget, and backyard organics is actually
closer than it has been for a long time due to
the lowering of input costs.
THE AJANA RUN
In early April several runs were made up to Ajana (the site of Bill’s old
farm, inland up near Kalbarri) to bring some of his equipment back.
On one such journey I drove the pilot ute with a trailer loaded with augers,
heading up a three-vehicle cavalcade. Geoff drove Bill’s old beast of a truck
with a bin on the back that would be used to re-seed and re-fertilise the
tractors out in the paddocks, and Bill sat in the middle in Rod’s little Indian
tractor, the Mahindra, hauling a 4 Row Trash Culti-Drill, affectionately
known as a ‘culti-trash’. Not much was legal about this procession so we
cut across farms and down country lanes to come into the back way to
Yanget. A 100-odd kilometres that took over six hours.
In mid-April a trip was made out to a clearing sale east of Nabawa to bring
in two field bins in anticipation of a good spelt crop.
FIXING MACHINERY
Back at Yanget, Geoffrey had taken on the role of mechanic for a month
and decided that parts on one of the culti-trashes, a thing with hips the
width of a shed, needed rewelding.
Geoff was uneasily aware that Bill would cheerfully haul the machinery
as it stands and had stepped in to make sure that it was all up to scratch
before seeding began. He brought with him the air of a tradesman used to
things being shipshape and was immediately up against i