Guest contribution by Eric Worrall
You have to read the fifth paragraph to see what the government is actually reporting, is good news, agricultural profits have increased.
According to ABARES, climate change costs each farm an average of $ 30,000 a year
ABC Rural /
From national rural reporter Kath Sullivan
According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES), Australian farms have lost an average of nearly $ 30,000 in profits per year over the past 20 years due to climate change compared to revenues in the second half of the last century.
Important points:
- Farmers lose an average of $ 29,200 per farm each year due to changing climatic conditions
- The latest report from ABARES says that growers are adapting to the weather and growing more with less
- It predicts that the average farm size could increase as farmers face the challenges of climate change
In its latest report, ABARES notes that the 2001-2021 drop in rainfall compared to 1950-2000 resulted in an average 23 percent or $ 29,200 drop in farm profits as the risk of farmers getting very low yields doubled on climate variability.
However, it also found that the productivity of Australian farms had increased significantly, with large-area farmers producing almost 30 percent more than in 1989.
ABARES executive director Jared Greenville said the investigation showed that In the same period of time, the grain farmers had increased their productivity by 68 percent despite the weather challenges.
“New technologies and practices mean that farmers are able to grow crops with lower rainfall than in the past,” said Dr. Greenville.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-07-29/abares-climate-change-costs-30k-per-farm-/100331680
Even assuming the decrease in rainfall is due to climate change, the technological improvements fueled by fossil fuels are obviously more than compensating for the rainfall deficit.
ABARES itself admits that there is a lot of uncertainty about long-term climate trends.
Climate change impacts and adaptation on Australian farms
Authors: Neal Hughes and Peter Gooday
introduction
In the past few decades, Australia has seen a shift towards higher temperatures and lower winter rainfall, which has had a significant impact on many farmers. Despite these trends There is still great uncertainty about the long-term effects of climate change on farms. This article introduces the latest modeling from ABARES, which studies the impact of recent and possible future climate changes on the profitability of Australian farms. It also introduces productivity trends, showing how farm adjustment has so far helped offset the effects of hotter and drier conditions.
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Read more: https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/products/insights/climate-change-impacts-and-adaptation
In my opinion, the attempt by the Australian ABC to formulate this as a call for climate protection is absurd.
The only solid evidence is that fossil fuel technology supports growing agricultural profits. Precipitation has decreased over the past 20 years, but that could be a natural variation – Australia’s paleoclimatic history is a patchwork of natural mega-droughts and random long-term climate shifts.
What we must do to ensure continuous improvement in agricultural productivity is support and protection of the technology that enables increasing profits. We need to make sure farmers have access to affordable fossil fuels and make sure that climate-obsessed bureaucrats are forced to give farmers the space to do what they do best – run the land.
Of course, a few more water infrastructure projects could help maintain productivity during droughts instead of wasting more and more tax dollars on useless renewable energies.
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