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The recent rains in this area have been fantastic but there's a sense of fate hanging over the good start to the season.
But first, the good: I can't recall seeing a better start to the season and after years of patchy, intermittent and inconsistent falls, which have seen some paddocks parched while neighbouring farms receive a deluge, it's great to see everyone get a good taste.
The problem now is to negotiate the rest of the season with many scientists and agencies forecasting dry times for much of the year's remainder, an el nino horror scenario.
The main thing that concerns me is Australia's general lack of preparedness for dry times despite the fact we continually talk about how many dry times this island continent experiences.
We've had endless funding ploughed in to endless studies on this subject and many people have made careers out of researching our climate variability to death, yet we've never had any sort of viable and consistent response, no national leadership to ensure we, as a nation, can be resilient during those often extended periods when it doesn't rain.
I'm a long-time supporter of Peter Andrews and his Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) methods and have seen how droughts have never bothered any properties where he's been able to complete his works.
With little rain over five-year periods, these farms have remained lush, resilient and productive - yet our mainstream agencies have managed to prevent this sort of practical common sense approach from being taught and adopted across the country, in fact, many of these measures to drought-proof farms are deemed illegal by bureaucracy.
Instead we put reactive drought assistance measures in place which many people say have such strict criteria that they can't apply.
We pay subsidies for fodder and stock transport when that money could be used, with foresight, to set these farms up so they don't need support during dry times.
I'm working with a large group of scientists and researchers to try and make sense of why common sense strategies like NSF, despite proven on the ground, can't transcend into the bureaucracy and become instruments of actual public policy.
NSF isn't the only workable method out there, with many ideas being demonstrated on the ground which rehabilitate, regenerate and revitalise the fragile topsoils of Australia.
A couple of generations of over-ploughing, over-grazing and blanket applications of synthetic fertilisers and chemical sprays have so diminished the biology, that any attempt to grow crops and grasses is like a hydroponic experiment, it all works ok if you just add water.
If we get the carbon into our soil, it increases the water-holding capacity so the grasses and crops stay moist even when there's a shortage of precipitation, and the working biology in the soil means we get the basic premise is simple - if you can improve the biology of your soil it means humans and animals get the advantage of nature's goodness instead of having that subterranean life all killed off before it reaches the food chain.
There's another huge benefit in this for farmers - if we can get all that goodness back into our soil it will improve the nation's health.
Rather than people forking wads of cash for all sorts of expensive supplements to replace what should occur naturally in the food they buy, they'll get all that and more every time they eat.
Distilled into a nutshell, why are we allowing our soil bank to be destroyed and the health of our population to rapidly decline, when all we have to do is restore the natural balance that existed way before all these immune deficiencies and allergies became commonplace?
We exist now on an input intensive farming paradigm where the companies providing high-level 'scientific' advice to governments have a major stake in increasing market share every quarter - if our farmers don't buy these products, the companies go broke.
I was at a field day years ago when an agronomist was asked why the stems of a barley crop were hollow and he replied that the farmer needed to spray the crop to combat a pest.
A biological adviser looked at the same straw and said 'Your paddock has a calcium deficiency'.
One system was offering advice, the other had something to sell. Until we get the foxes out of the chicken coop at the highest levels, we'll all be the poorer for it. And while ever farmers are forced to use huge inputs just to grow a crop each year, where their soils are so unbalanced they need rain at critical times just to survive, the mental health in the sector will always be on a knife edge.