A FARMING friend from Woomelang once said to me that “no other job puts $150,000 on black or red then has to wait six months to find out if the gamble has paid off”.
That comment stayed with me. Because it captured the nail-biting and precarious nature of life on the land.
Lately we’ve had plenty of rain, and wheat prices have been good. But diplomatic challenges with China, worker shortages, and pandemic-related supply chain issues have plagued our industry.
And now, to that dynamic mix, we add the growing outbreak of Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Indonesia. Right on our doorstep.
At this stage, authorities are saying that our quarantine systems are working.
As I’m writing this, there is no live FMD virus in Australia.
There hasn’t been since May in 1872.
But it’s hard to relax given its proximity to Australia, the number of Australian tourists returning from Bali and the sheer magnitude of the consequences if FMD was somehow able to slip through our quarantine defences.
If FMD took hold in the Mallee, it would be devastating to our agriculture industry, and equally catastrophic for our tourism industry.
We only need to think back to the FMD outbreak in the UK in 2001. Six million cows and sheep had to be destroyed over an eleven-month period, and their tourism industry crashed.
Yesterday I spoke with an adviser from the office of Victorian Agriculture Minister, Gayle Tierney.
I set out the requests that had been put to me by our local livestock industry. Those requests included a pre-emptive cull of feral pigs in our National Parks, and dedicated truck wash stations at border locations such as Cullulleraine and Murrayville.
The Minister’s office acknowledged our requests and gave assurance that appropriate measures would be rolled out and escalated in line with the level of risk over the coming months.
The key message to me was that we should be alert but not alarmed. My message to them was don’t gamble with the Mallee.
