This is quite a thorough article, but I am concerned that it does not adequately consider the full impacts of climate change and global heating.

I read that the land Down Under will be hit rather hard, affecting our food production as the world gets hotter.

Our amazing civilization is built on carbon energy, but pumping all that extra carbon into the air is now proving catastrophic.

We could have entirely avoided the carbon crisis, if we had started building solar power stations in space in the 1970s, as was possible.

The oil barons won that propaganda war and kept us sucking on the black liquid like there was no tomorrow.

We could fight our way back to a safe Earth, if we used our resource bonanza to build solar power stations in space, to directly access the unlimited energy-well of our star.

With unlimited stellar energy, we could create a whole new dimension in Australian agriculture.

With stellar energy we could desalinate any volume of ocean water and pump the liquid gold to any location, allowing a vast increase in agricultural production.

With stellar energy we could also extract excess carbon from the biosphere, to win back a safe Earth and reprocess the carbon back into a useful resource.

If we act swiftly, the period of the crisis can be relatively short, but the damage can still be immense, especially from heat and ocean acidification.

Should algal blooms in dying oceans begin releasing toxic hydrogen sulphide gas that can kill life on land and destroy the ozone layer, we may need to build protected environments for living and food production, simply to survive.

We may have a use for extracted carbon, as a building material.

Constructing solar power stations in space will also launch industry beyond Earth and as Gerard K. O'Neill described in his 1977 book 'The High Frontier', we could grow food in a full range of environments in space ~ on an industrial scale.

Australia's future food production need not be confined to Earth.

We may first need to get all that oil propaganda out or our ears, so that we can begin to see the amazing potential of stellar energy, on Earth and among the stars.

Kim Peart
http://www.islandearth.com.au/

...his missing link is profitability and is a primary reason why hundreds of farming families continue to make the wretched and heart-breaking decision to leave…

Penny is spot on, my family is agonizing over this right now. Two farms, one station, all four adults in the partnership working off-property in order to continue to run the properties and to live. Some people worry about having to subsidize farmers when the situation is in fact the reverse: Australian farmers are subsidizing the nation's eating and, indeed, agricultural export income.

Prior to the industrial revolution it was many peasants supporting a small nobility - these days I feel I am part of a (increasingly exhausted) small peasantry supporting many (increasingly oblivious) nobles.

http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/its-official/ ...

Some Q&As to ponder.

Q. Productivity gains for an individual farm or farmer are seen as a good thing (doing more with less), but what happens when productivity gains are shared by all farmers across the industry, and all are 'doing more with less'?
A. Prices fall - a win for consumers and at best no gain (but usually a loss) for farmers. As price takers selling into a saturated market, farmers will lower prices to reflect lower costs of production to remain competitive.

Q. Given that Australian farmers are price takers, what happens to them if the well intended state and national pushes to end/reduce food waste are successful, and some 30 to 40% more food becomes available on the market?
A. the prices farmers receive for produce will be lower.

Q. Assuming that live trade is eventually banned and the animals are slaughtered and processed in Australia, a large percentage of that meat will end up on the domestic market, so what happens to the prices farmers receive for livestock in Australia?
A. the prices they receive for their animals will be lower.

Q. Assuming the well intended pushes for urban agriculture are successful and 20% of fruit and vegetables are produced in backyards and community gardens (it was 40% during the "dig for victory" campaign), what will happen to the prices farmers receive?
A. the prices they receive for produce will be lower.

Q. What happens top farmers when peak oil/energy takes hold?
A.. Costs of production will increase.

Q. Under all projected climate change scenarios what will be the impact on farmers?
A. Cost of production will increase.

Q. Farmers manage some 60% of the Australian land mass, what is the impact of well intended legislation to provide ecosystem service and stewardship functions?
A. Costs of production will go up as ecosystem services are increasingly brought on to balance sheets.

There are many more examples of the coming systemic failure of industrial agriculture. The plight of our food system and farmers will not be addressed by business as usual or well intended technological fixes, nor improvements to productivity. In fact unless tackled holistically all linear reductionist solutions will simply make matters worse.

There are so many articles written these days by scientists who should be able to analyse data and interpret it far more accurately. This is one of them. To start with this article fails to address the major factor limiting crop and livestock production in Australia - profitability. Dr John Williams, a Melbourne based wheat marketing specialist told last year's Global Agribusiness conference in Perth that "It is not under-supply and high prices that is ruining grain producers and causing high occurrences of emotional anxiety, regret and avoidance, but rather excess global supply and continual low prices relative to farm input costs, which is worsened in many countries by high currency exchange rates, farm debt, subsidies, price controls, government ‘buffer’ stocks and export bans."
Williams also made the point that current "wheat prices should be currently above US 1500 cents per bushel instead of lagging around US 600 cents per bushel, if inflation had been considered in price determination."

The authors use of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) misrepresent what is happening in this indicator around the world. While it is true TFP has leveled off if not declined in Australia, in most other countries outside of Africa it has increased considerably adding to world food output. One of the key scientist involved in determing TFP, Dr Keith Fuglie, Economic Research Service USDA recently wrote "there does not appear to be a slowdown in sector wide global agricultural productivity growth. If anything, the growth rate in global agricultural TFP accelerated, in no small part because of rapid productivity gains achieved by developing countries, led by Brazil and China, and more recently because of a recovery of agricultural growth in countries of the former Soviet Union."

Like Williams, Fuglie says a long period of declining real prices for commodities has encouraged farmers particularly in developed countries like Australia to find "better opportunitied for their capital outside of agriculture".

As for the authors suggestion that China will become a major market for Australian beef (other than primals required by five and six star restaurants) the evidence is unconvincing. Dr David Hughes, Emeritus Professor of Food Marketing, Imperial College London told the Perth Agribusiness conference that while global meat consumption increased by 16 million tonnes between 2007 and 2012 most of the growth was in emerging countries and was for chicken. In fact, beef share of global meat consumption declined as did sheemeat, while poultry and pork increased.

Another team of researchers led by Dr Jesse Ausubel at the Rockerfeller University New York USA has analysed the elements contributing to the use of land for world crop production, including population growth, rising affluence, improved diets, and the performance of farmers. When all these are taken into account in each country Ausubel contends that over the next 50 years, "the prospect is that humanity is likely to release at least 146 million hectares" from cropping back to Nature.

It is becoming increasingly clear with world food supply and demand that productivity needs to be discussed in terms of the reality facing farmers, consumers and the environment in individual countries. Generalisations are misleading and are too often used to foster the causes of vested interests, particularly those associated with research, plant breeding and political policies (the Federal government's National Food Plan Green Paper is a classic example).

The stable population party is as delusional as the proposed 40 million population ...

Erik ... the reality is that factual data is not possible as it may run against corporate government policy ... the following is from a thesis I just completed.

'In July 2008, oil reached $147 a barrel (Reuters, 2008) the price of fuel and food rose to such a degree that food riots took place in roughly forty countries (CNN.com 2008), causing regime changes in some. The global financial crisis (GFC) was a shot across the bow, as some two months later; it became apparent that financial institutions had borrowed far into the ‘energy future’ only to realize that such energy does not exist, and that at a certain point the EROEI goes negative.

Australia’s has limited oil reserves and forecasted to run out around 2020; Australia is the number 1 importer in the OECD (crudeoilpeak.info 2011).

We have limited time to set in place U-PODS to, at best, to create almost neutral self-sufficient community structures.

Australia’s food security poor; 70% of the seafood comes mostly from Asia (The Drum, ABC TV, 2012); fruit exports worth $446 million compared to imports worth $2 billion; nut exports achieved $207 million / imports $267million and vegetable exports worth $313 million versus imports of $651 million worth (abc.net.au/rural news 2012).
Changing weather patterns worldwide and increasing domestic demands, countries we import from have an obligation, enforced by street protests, to supply their population first, we are at risk and this will be compounded

Evolution of coupled socio-ecological systems could be characterized by a sequence of relatively stable yet rapid transitions of these configurations of three ‘socio-metabolic regimes':
a) hunter-gatherers, b) agrarian societies and c) industrial societies

The suggestion is that two-thirds of the world population is currently within a rapid transition from the agrarian to the industrial regime, and that many current global sustainability problems are a direct consequence of this transition and interestingly, that industrial society is at least as different from a future sustainable society as it is from the agrarian regime.

So the challenges of sustainability are fundamental to the re-orientation of society and will not be achieved through the implementation of technical fixes; global resource use (material and energy flows, land use and water) proved that the notion of eco-efficiency will not be sufficient in achieving sustainability.
Haberal et al. (2011) supports a requirement to transition to a new socio-metabolic.

"Over 50% of Aus wheat and other grain end up as stock feed" - might be accurate but it does not follow that Aus producers are therefore and always selling at unprofitable prices. Wheat is bought from the farmer at prices that depend on the quality of the grain and also on the local and world supply. When world prices are low , the grain can be stored and later sold if the price has improved. We need some detail about all this. And of course many "other grains " are specifically grown as stock feeds. The change from wool production to grain cropping in many districts has been driven by the higher profitability of cropping. The biggest influence on grain profitability is the weather - seasonal variations , and adoption of better agronomic practice is probably the next most important factor . The fate of farmers is in the hands of the gods it often seems ( weather gods , mainly) but the amazing resilience of family farming in Aus is also worth examining. I'm a retired farmer of meat cattle and lambs in a reliable rainfall district so perhaps I'm more optimistic than some. However I think blaming ENGOS for all farmers' ills is a cop-out : after all farmers have demonstrated that adopting new/better techniques they can do well with considerably less irrigation , for example. the article is a broad brush summary of production and productivity changes and the big picture on world trade. It didn't deal with "peak oil " or environmental issues in detail - these would be issues for a different article one supposes.