by Chris Jackson, Export Manager UK TAG
First published in Milling and Grain, May 2016
Last month I wrote my column as I travelled through India and then on to the Philippines. Since then, my travels have continued through Australia, Vietnam and Thailand where I witnessed agriculture go from one extreme of subsistence farming to another of agriculture on an industrial scale.
In Australia, you are also reminded that farming is totally weather dependent. For instance, the rains have so far missed parts of the Northern Territory and Queensland where livestock are starving and reliant on food deliveries of hay and straw from New South Wales just to keep alive vital breeding stock; with all other animals having either been slaughtered early or died from starvation.
For stock farmers, losing livestock is one of the worst blows that you can suffer when they are nurtured like family. For arable farmers and our urban cousins, this is a fact not understood and can be devastating. It matters not the breed of the cattle, sheep, goat or pigs, their breeding is always a lifetime’s commitment.
Recently, we saw the efforts of the New South Wales farmers who were attempting to alleviate the pressure on their colleagues by sending the biggest ever peace time convoy of trucks laden with forage to the area.
In southern Queensland, the harvest of sorgum is now getting started I think earlier than usual so we hope that the yields are not depressed. In central New South Wales there is a different story where rice yields are proportionate to the amount of rains that they have experienced. However, where we see the price of water exceed the price of land, without water crops or animals cannot survive as we saw earlier in this article.
Read the full article in Milling and Grain HERE.
First published in Milling and Grain, May 2016
Last month I wrote my column as I travelled through India and then on to the Philippines. Since then, my travels have continued through Australia, Vietnam and Thailand where I witnessed agriculture go from one extreme of subsistence farming to another of agriculture on an industrial scale.
In Australia, you are also reminded that farming is totally weather dependent. For instance, the rains have so far missed parts of the Northern Territory and Queensland where livestock are starving and reliant on food deliveries of hay and straw from New South Wales just to keep alive vital breeding stock; with all other animals having either been slaughtered early or died from starvation.
For stock farmers, losing livestock is one of the worst blows that you can suffer when they are nurtured like family. For arable farmers and our urban cousins, this is a fact not understood and can be devastating. It matters not the breed of the cattle, sheep, goat or pigs, their breeding is always a lifetime’s commitment.
Recently, we saw the efforts of the New South Wales farmers who were attempting to alleviate the pressure on their colleagues by sending the biggest ever peace time convoy of trucks laden with forage to the area.
In southern Queensland, the harvest of sorgum is now getting started I think earlier than usual so we hope that the yields are not depressed. In central New South Wales there is a different story where rice yields are proportionate to the amount of rains that they have experienced. However, where we see the price of water exceed the price of land, without water crops or animals cannot survive as we saw earlier in this article.
Read the full article in Milling and Grain HERE.
The Global Miller
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