[insert slide 1] Thanks very much. One of the perks of being in one - PDF document

IAN MCCLELLAND [insert slide 1] Thanks very much. One of the perks of being in one of the driest areas of Australia is that I can come and speak to you, aren’t I lucky? Envisaging the future and dealing with the present because it is important to think about the future to how we cope with the present, because maybe we are in the future already, and lots of people say we are in the future already. Peter and I were talking over breakfast this morning and he said, “To get something in the paper these days, you’ve got to just say something really radical. You don’t say something normal or middle course.” And then the next person has to say something even more radical, and even more radical, and the farmers out there hear this radical view of the world and they worry. [insert slide 2] So let’s see if we can get some normality into this debate and say, “Okay, what’s the future – going to happen and how is it affecting us in the dry and how we farm.” So, how does one survive five droughts in seven years and three in a row, and the last three years have been – growing season rainfall of about 50 percent average. And it’s not just a prosperity or the financials that is the really big factor that effects farmers. Sure, it’s a significant factor, but it’s really the physical health and the psychology of the farmers that are adapting and having to cope with those drought years. And to live in a rural community that has been in constant droughts, this area is an incredibly important aspect of how people cope and how they survive and the importance of sustainable communities and towns give people the capacity to keep going and to basically prosper in really difficult times. [insert slide 3] Okay, so the challenge of drought is to be able to, as a human, to think clearly about the decisions I have to make on the farm, accept the realities, but – you know, and the probabilities of relief. To think the positives, but also see the negatives, maintain confidence and farmers are so – you know, you see some of them just drop their bundle completely and give up. So the confidence – maintaining your confidence is so crucial for the farming community – for probably any business, being able to balance optimism with caution, being brave enough to embrace opportunities. When you’ve had a number of dry years, that capacity – people always say what they would like to have done, or should have done, but to be brave and do it is the important thing – to maintain the relationships of family and have faith in the future and still be happy.

IAN MCCLELLAND [insert slide 4] Some communities are able to cope with very difficult times and still maintain a hugely happy lifestyle in the bush. Okay, so at Birchip, for instance, in North Western Victoria, the last seven years we have had 38 percent below growing season rainfall. And that’s the last seven years. And the last 12 years has been a growing season rainfall of 28 percent decreased, and you say we are on – we are falling down a cliff. But if you take the previous 12 years, there was a 20 percent increase in growing season rainfall and if you add the two together, you’ve actually only lost four percent of growing season rainfall. [insert slide 5] So is this climate change falling over a cliff or not? And I suspect that those figures, in our case, on the law of averages, it is probably just strong variability. So if we take the five year running mean for Birchip for growing season rainfall, you can see there is a lot of ups and downs and as Peter said, the little bumps and the downs are the good years that come through and the last 10 years we really have not had – we’ve had one little bump that just got a bit above average, I think, in 2001. [insert slide 6] So the next graph is, as Peter said, is this the repeat of history or is this a paradigm shift in our weather patterns, and if the last seven years are permanent, then we are in a lot of trouble. Or is this variability linked to some sort of weather cycle, and this is the bit you don’t hear much in terms of the debate. And I know a lot of private forecasters have all got a cycle of sunspots and there is all sorts of cycles. They’ve got the explanation, but the BOM are really saying – and I think we’ve really got to make it clear that they are not saying there is not a cycle, but they have not been able to really find it out yet. And maybe that is something that we really should encourage them to really find. Is this a cycle of variability, or is it climate change? So that’s a very important part of the future. [insert slide 7] So yield profit is a crop simulation model. It was based on APSIM and they have a climate change report where they are growing crops. And this is at Birchip, but they grow them all around Australia if you want to subscribe to it, and the impact of climate change on – if we grow a crop over the last 100 years based on today’s technology, you see the black line in a running mean is up and down all over the place, but you have to remember that the last 10 years have been the driest 10 year period for Birchip on record. So you know, even though it is variable, the last 10 years have

IAN MCCLELLAND been bad. And what we need to remember about this climate change is that it is very easy to say it is not as bad as people say it is, but really, the prognosis, particularly on a regional basis, is still fairly scarce – or they are not so sure. [insert slide 8] So it actually could be a lot worse than they say. So even though I’m an optimist and always like to take the positive Alice view, you’ve really got to say that it actually could be worse. So then the interesting bit is if you look at spring rainfall – for us, spring rainfall is September / October for Birchip - you realize it is variable, going up and down all over the place, but you can see it has got a general trend for September and October rainfall at Birchip in this corner of the graph. [insert slide 9] So if you think about that, and then you think about also the November to March rainfall, you see the five year running mean is all over the place except when you get to about 1980, the five year running mean levels off. So you – we can now start to think maybe that our summer rainfall is more consistent than it has been in the past. That graph gives us a suggestion that that is the case. Now, that gives us a clue as farmers what we should do to maximize yield by making use of that summer rainfall. And already this year we have had 110 millimeters of rainfall since November. [insert slide 10] So if you then, through yield profit, simulate yields from 1977 until now, which is the red line, and 1889 to 1976 is the other line, you see that there has been a decrease in yield or probability of yield in the lower rainfall years. [insert slide 11] Okay. So Peter said to me yesterday, “You should always put a date on your table, you see.” And I took the date off this table deliberately because CO 2 levels, you can see here there is a CO 2 of 420 and a CO 2 of 460 and we are now a CO 2 of 383 and so many people say it’s going faster or slower. So I decided just let’s think about when CO 2 equivalents are 460 or when they are 420, and remember we are now at 383. And this is temperature and rainfall which was sort of said for 2030, but you can see that the temperature on the left-hand side of the best case which is 420, there is about a half a degree temperature increase. And in the worst case at 460, it gets up to about a one degree temperature increase. And then if you see rainfall that for 420, there is a reduction in spring; August / September rainfall drops back by about 10 mls and in the 460, there is a significant