Australian farmers have always been forced to adapt to variable weather patterns, but developing climate change trends indicate a rise in extreme events, say climate and agricultural scientists.
Wayne Meyer, professor of Natural Resource Science at Adelaide University, says it is a “continuation” of adjustment over 200 years, but with the recent fluctuations in extremes, it is becoming more challenging for farmers.
“We have done it before, but now we have to adapt more quickly,” Prof Meyer said.
On Australia’s east coast, after a decade of drought and soaring temperatures, the floods are washing away dreams of a farming future as fast as they had sprouted.
Inland areas of Queensland and New South Wales have been declared flood emergency zones, while Victoria and South Australia are seeing the effects on their northern borders.
“I never thought I would say it, but I am sick of the rain,” North Queensland farmer Laska Greenhill told The Epoch Times after years without so much as a drop on her land.
Further south, in New South Wales, Goulburn, Mulwaree, Cowra, Coolamon and Tamworth have been added to a list of 37 local government areas declared natural disaster zones.
“It is devastating,” says Tony Wass, 67, a farmer who has lived his whole life in Warren Shire, “Australia’s Wool and Cotton Capital”, in New South Wales near Dubbo. “For people having gone through a decade of drought, then to be looking at having one of the best harvests possibly ever and then to have that snatched away – it’s just heartbreaking,” he told the Meat Trade Daily.
While the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) has predicted record grain yields this season, many farmers say their grain crops are too wet to produce much more than animal feed and the ground is so waterlogged that it is difficult to move a cow, let alone a vehicle.
From Fires to Floods
With the heat of the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria still palpable, Prof Barry Brook, from Adelaide University’s Environment Institute, puts the extremes into perspective by noting that in less than two years, Adelaide residents experienced three extreme heat waves (over 35 degrees Celsius) – a 15-day heat wave in March 2008, a 9-day event in Jan/Feb 2009 and another 9-day event in Nov 2009.
“Statistically speaking, it’s astronomically unlikely that such a sequence of rare heat waves would occur by chance, if the climate wasn’t warming,” Professor Brook writes on his website BraveNewClimate.
And now there are the floods.
It has been “pretty dramatic”, says Prof Meyer. “I can’t say that it is a result of longer term trends, but these extremes from one to another are not unexpected [according to] what is predicted for climate change,” he said, adding that we could expect more extreme events.
Dr Blair Trewin from the National Climate Centre said that Australia is heading into record rainfalls for the spring season, but these trends are not abnormal for the La Niña and El Niño wet and dry cycles.
“We have experienced something vaguely similar to this before,” he said. “If we look at the year of 1956, there was a very strong La Niña effect that saw the Murray flood.”
However, Dr Trewin notes that weather patterns in north-west Australia and southern Australia fit the climate change model, with the north-west experiencing increasing rainfall and the south increasing dryness.
In the south-west of WA, dry conditions are driving sheep farmers to announce dramatic reductions in their ewe flock size next season, says a meat and livestock report released this week. Of those WA farmers surveyed, 90 per cent rated weather conditions much worse than in 2009.
