The way we were....

The Australian landscape has been irrevocably change, some would say damaged, by over 200 years of agricultural practices. The indigenous Aborigines were not crop or livestock cultivators and lived off the land and with enormous respect for their natural world. Modern Australian agriculture is now closely linked with the fragility of our natural resources and though the Murray Darling may take decades to recover at least we are taking protective and restorative measures. In the past policies were reactive as mainly European farmers tested the limits of the land and their own innovations.

The first settlers cultivated the land by hand, well not their hands so much as the availability of cheap (free) convict labour. This was the case into the 1820s and though ploughs may have been introduced in 1797 they were horse drawn until well into the 1930s. The land was heavily timbered and had to be cleared before heavy ploughs broke the ground. Typically 1.6ha of land could be prepared a week. In 1876 a South Australian, Richard Bruyer Smith, invented the stump jump plough with a hinged mouldboard and share such that they rose over any obstructions in the ground.

Seed was sown by broadcasting and then covered using a harrow until about 1910 which seems extraordinary given Jethro Tull had invented a seed drill in 1701. The first Australian designed and made seed drill dates from 1895 and a Quirindi farmer made a combined seed and fertiliser drill in 1917.

Early farming systems were shifting as trees were cleared, burned and the land cultivated. When yields fell the farmer moved on to repeat the process on virgin forest. Really quite primitive and as late as 1826 in NSW one writer called NSW farmers ‘slothful and negligent’ in comparison to the ‘persevering industry and intelligence’ of their British counterparts. The agricultural practices meant marginal land had to be cropped as ‘good’ land became infertile and that yields fell until about 1900 when superphosphate and new varieties coupled with better fallowing and crop rotation practices kicked in.

In some ways not much has changed in the last 80 years of Australian farming systems and machinery. It has only been in the last 20 years that land resource management and planning have become essential to protect those resources and maintain productivity. Soil erosion and drought have been major mind concentrators. While Daramalan’s 70 acres of Graza oats are not on anyone’s radar we at least direct drilled to protect the soil structure and rotate our crops and sheep regularly. Next step may well be a permaculture/organic approach.

More on sheep, the real story of Goulburn, soon...