COUNTRY MATTERS
NOT every dairy farmer is the victim of deregulation. Not every dairy farm has plummeted in price. The rich river flood plains of the southern Riverina have been a strong growth area for dairying in the past few years.
The asking price of $3.95 million for the Glenkids dairy operation is hardly an indication of an entire industry on its knees. The operation, set up five years ago, never went on the quota system for drinking milk.
The owners, a mixed group of farmers and business people, made a decision early on to go for the production of manufacturing milk, the product keeping nearby Victorian dairy farmers well in cream.
A recent report from the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics showed that while incomes for dairy farmers in Tasmania and Victoria are expected to increase, for those in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia the opposite is true, with some losing up to a third of their income.
More than 100 Queensland and 200 NSW dairy farmers have left the industry since deregulation last July. The hardest hit areas are Dungog and Gloucester in NSW and Biggenden, Kilkivan and Monto in Queensland.
Glenkids in the southern Riverinais the other side of the story. It is an aggregate of two adjacent properties, Glendale and Kidsdale, which are mid-way between Blighty and Deniliquin. All but a few hectares are flood irrigated and lasered for efficient irrigation with recycling of run-off water. The vendors have preserved many of the magnificent redgums and greybox which characterise the region. Hundreds of extra native eucalypts have been planted.
When the property was purchased in 1996 it was a traditional family dairy farm milking around 250 cows.
More than 1000 cows are now being milked via two rotary dairies, with production for the year expected to be in excess of six million litres and gross returns forecast to be better than $1.75 million.
"The decision at the time of purchase was that the writing was on the wall, that deregulation was inevitable," owner-manager David Beca said.
"As a result we moved to build systems that would succeed at lower milk prices.We have had bi-annual valuations and I do not believe deregulation has affected our asking price. Deregulation has made us all one market.
"We are right in the middle of a feed growing area which makes our feed costs as low as anywhere in Australia."
Agent Gil Silby of Finley describes the Glenkids operation as "a peep into the future".
"It has scale, it has a professional staff who can stay on and it is profitable," he said.
"There will be full financial disclosure to genuinely interested parties. The southern Riverina is seeing strong growth in milk production, and there are six half-million-dollar rotary dairies being built within a 20km radius of Finley. These families have no fear of the Victorian competition just across the Murray River."
Although the state of the Murray River has received a lot of negative publicity in recent times, Murray Irrigation Ltd is keen to point out the $153 million farmers have contributed to environmental programs in the past six years. This has been topped up by $28 million contributed from the Natural Heritage Trust, thelargest community-based project under the scheme.
Earlier this month Federal Agriculture Minister Warren Truss attended the Murray Irrigated Farm Competition Open Day, an event designed to promote best practice. This year's winning farm was Nick and Nicola Ellwood's winter cereals, canola and rice property Zennor south of Jerilderie.
MURRAY Irrigation, which includes 2500 properties covering more than 750,000 hectares between Finley and Deniliquin, originally was government owned and was the first major irrigation scheme to be privatised in NSW -- in 1995.
The organisation assures prospective investors they are not buying some environmentally damaged salinity-prone country with water tables out of control, but into an area where there has been consistent tackling of environmental problems over many years.
More than 1.1 million native trees have been planted, management programs for remnant vegetation introduced and more than two-thirds of the district's farmers have been involved in farm planning and building farm water re-use systems. Water table rise has been stabilised.
Environment manager for Murray Irrigation Geoff McLeod said the company and its shareholder irrigators have a co-ordinated long- term program to protect theagricultural productivity of the region.
"It is self-evident that farmers are the single most motivated people to protect their own country," he said.
"The potential threat of salinity, which can completely destroy formerly productive land, has been the motivation for the company and the region's farmers to invest such large amounts of time and money."
