'Critical Breaking Point?' The effects of drought and other pressures on farming families

Birchip Cropping Group

‘Critical Breaking Point?’ The effects of drought and other pressures on farming families Final report of the twelve month study

May 2008

Foreword I have great pleasure in providing this final report on a project that goes to the heart of what our rural communities in the Wimmera Mallee have been dealing with; drought and long term dry conditions.

This project was made possible by the input, honesty, co-operation and generosity of sixty farming families across the region, and in particular of the twenty families who worked with us for an extended twelve month period. Without these families, we would be none the wiser in understanding the true challenges of operating an agricultural business as a family in the Wimmera Mallee. The report reflects the issues, emotions and challenges families have been, and continue to, deal with. We are passionate about our community and thank all those who worked with us to progress our understanding of the impact of drought on families and communities. We also thank those in advance who will work with us to implement actions which address key issues identified in the report.

Initial support came from the Tattersall’s George Adams Foundation for the first phase of the project – a critical enabler to get the project off the ground. The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation recognised the value and unique opportunity to track the on-going impacts and issues that take place around drought, and thus provided essential financial resources for the second phase.

This support enabled the project to succeed and gain unprecedented interest within the regional agricultural community.

Our regional capacity has been strengthened via the use of local interviewers who have developed skills and knowledge to contribute to social research and community development into the future. This project was led by Dr Lauren Rickards of RMCG, whose skill, knowledge and understanding is evident in the sensitive and insightful interpretation of interviews and issues.

We encourage you to read and take note of the findings, to work with us and with our communities to address the issues raised and recommendations made in the report. In order to facilitate greater understanding and improve our role in social research and community development, we welcome your feedback.

Regards

Alexandra Gartmann Chief Executive Officer Birchip Cropping Group Inc.

The Birchip Cropping Group (BCG) is a farmer driven organisation actively involved in research and extension across the Mallee and Wimmera in Victoria. The BCG is an independent registered research authority (RRA) focussed on providing farmers and farm communities with the latest information on new agricultural practices and technologies.

BCG was formed in 1992 to improve the farm incomes of its members and of the regional farming community, to bolster broader community vitality and to provide practical solutions to farm production constraints. This is reflected in the mission statement: "To improve the prosperity of farming and rural communities." The group now includes 500 farming family members and works with a diverse array of research investors, collaborators and industry partners.

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Acknowledgements Without the professionalism and dedication of researcher Dr. Lauren Rickards (RMCG) this project would not have delivered the high quality and insightful comments it has. I would like to express my appreciation of the vital assistance provided in this project by the interviewers Ingrid Taylor, Noreen Jones, Larissa Patton, Jen Baker, and the project coordinator Margaret O’Keefe.

Most of all, we would all like to thank the farming families who generously shared their experiences with us. Thank you.

Alexandra Gartmann, BCG

Disclaimer:

The Birchip Cropping Group Inc (“BCG”) makes no warranties regarding merchantability, fitness for purpose or otherwise with respect to this report. Any person relying on this report does so entirely at their own risk. BCG and all persons associated with it exclude all liability (including liability for negligence) in relation to any opinion, advice or information contained in this report and any consequences arising from the use of such opinion, advice or information to the full extent of the law, including but not limited to consequences arising as a result of action or inaction taken by that person or any third parties in reliance on the report. Where liability cannot be lawfully extinguished, liability is limited to the re-supply of the report or payment of the cost of resupplying the report. You should seek independent professional, technical or legal (as required) advice before acting on any opinion, advice or information contained in this report.

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Table of Contents Executive Summary

5

1

7

Introduction 1.1

Aim of report ............................................................................................................................................. 7

1.2

Background............................................................................................................................................... 7

1.3

Methodology ........................................................................................................................................... 11 1.3.1 Study design................................................................................................................................ 11 1.3.2 Part One ...................................................................................................................................... 11 1.3.3 Part Two ...................................................................................................................................... 14

2

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19

2.1

Overview ................................................................................................................................................. 19

2.2

Key Findings of Part One ....................................................................................................................... 21 2.2.1 The drought is having a widespread and significant negative impact on farming families ........ 21 2.2.2 The type and severity of its impact varies .................................................................................. 25 2.2.3 The primary impact is the worsening of pre-existing problems.................................................. 34 2.2.4 The drought has raised questions but stalled decision-making for many farming families ....... 46 2.2.5 Responses to the drought have had negative and positive effects on communities ................. 52 2.2.6 There is a high degree of dissatisfaction with the financial assistance system ......................... 57 2.2.7 Attitudes to social assistance vary widely................................................................................... 62 2.2.8 Longer-term and strategic intervention is wanted ...................................................................... 65

2.3 3

Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................ 69

September 2007

72

3.1

Overview ................................................................................................................................................. 72

3.2

Key Findings ........................................................................................................................................... 74 3.2.1 After a period of hope, stress was rising again in September.................................................... 74 3.2.2 The threat of further drought is having a significant impact ....................................................... 77 3.2.3 Some people are losing faith in nature and farming................................................................... 80 3.2.4 Risk has been approached in a wide variety of ways this season ............................................. 90 3.2.5 Many farming families are looking to increase their off-farm income......................................... 97 3.2.6 People are questioning their plans for the future...................................................................... 100 3.2.7 The rural community is fatigued and fragmenting .................................................................... 107 3.2.8 Assistance has been utilised and is needed............................................................................. 117

3.3 4

Conclusions .......................................................................................................................................... 123

February 2008

126

4.1

Overview ............................................................................................................................................... 126

4.2

Findings ................................................................................................................................................ 128 4.2.1 Last season had a neutral effect on most families’ financial situations ................................... 128 4.2.2 The coming year instils a wide range of emotions in people.................................................... 132 4.2.3 There is growing anger about input costs and farmers’ relationship with agribusiness .......... 142 4.2.4 Most farming families are trying to take a more risk-averse approach .................................... 146 4.2.5 The question of whether to leave farming is less prominent but of ongoing relevance for some .... 157

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4.2.6 Most are positive but concerned about their communities ....................................................... 165 4.2.7 Financial assistance is accepted and welcomed by some but not all ...................................... 173 4.3 5

6

Conclusions .......................................................................................................................................... 177

Discussion and Conclusions

180

5.1

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 180

5.2

Principles: what have we learnt about drought? .................................................................................. 180

5.3

Issues: what are the main issues farming families are facing? ........................................................... 181

5.4

Trends: what are farming families choosing to do? ............................................................................. 183

5.5

The interview experience...................................................................................................................... 185

5.6

Conclusions .......................................................................................................................................... 186

Recommendations

187

6.1

Recommendations from Part One of the research .............................................................................. 187

6.2

Additional recommendations from Part Two of the research............................................................... 188

References

190

Appendix 1: Interview Questions

193

February 2007 .................................................................................................................................................. 193 September 2007............................................................................................................................................... 195 February 2008 .................................................................................................................................................. 198 Appendix 2: Summary table of drought financial assistance

200

Appendix 3: Evaluation of the research process – feedback from interviewers and interviewees

203

Feedback from interviewees ............................................................................................................................ 203 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 203 What interviewees gained from the experience ................................................................................... 203 Feedback from interviewers............................................................................................................................. 206 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 206 What interviewers gained from the experience.................................................................................... 206 Interviewers’ reported strengths ........................................................................................................... 206 Interviewers’ reported challenges......................................................................................................... 207 Feedback on Training........................................................................................................................... 207 Interest in further social research ......................................................................................................... 207 Summary of advantages and disadvantages ....................................................................................... 208

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Executive Summary The aim of this research is to gain a better understanding of the pressures upon, and experiences of, farming families in a time of drought. Based on in-depth interviews with farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region of north-western Victoria, it uses an unprecedented longitudinal approach to track the experiences of farming families during a time of drought and - it was expected and hoped – a period of drought recovery.

Understanding the perspectives, concerns and decision-making of farmers and their families at a time when options are restricted by financial circumstances and when confidence has been weakened by a series of dry seasons is vital. The situation and decisions facing many farming families are complex and fraught. Yet, little is known about what exact pressures farming families perceive or how they are responding. Little is known about what their goals for the future are or what obstacles they see in the way. Thus, little is known about how they could best be assisted.

This study is based on two phases of research. Part One interviewed sixty randomly selected farming families during severe drought in February 2007. Part Two involved two follow-up interviews at six monthly intervals (September 2007 and February 2008) with a subset of twenty of the sixty farming families (representing some of the younger and older families of the original sample) interviewed in Part One. The interviews were conducted using a unique local interviewer methodology.

Eleven main trends emerged from the research: 1. Virtually all farming families are eating into their physical, financial and personal/emotional reserves to cope with the drought and will continue to need to do so if drought continues; 2. For most farming families, the effects of drought will remain with them for years after the drought ends; 3. The majority of farming families are persevering and have not been pushed to leave farming, although most have had to alter their personal and professional plans and most have engaged the question of whether to leave and will continue to re-engage it over coming years; 4. There are strong differences between the circumstances and outlooks of farming families and these differences appear to be widening in some ways; 5. Regardless of how severely a farming family’s financial situation has been affected by the drought, they have been and will continue to be affected by drought indirectly as it exacerbates other issues, affects those around them, and throws a veil of uncertainty over the future; 6. Farming families’ awareness of and sensitivity to the risks involved in farming has escalated and many are adopting what could be a permanently more conservative approach to production, marketing and income protection; 7. The default position for a minority of farmers is optimism and the proportion of people who share this outlook swells at the start of each year when the potential of the new season is still unknown; BCG & RMCG

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8. Some people’s outlook on farming, climate and the world in general has been fundamentally darkened by their experience over the last few years and they now suffer from high levels of anxiety irrespective of weather conditions; 9. People remain committed to their sector and communities, but struggle with multiple demands upon them and are being forced to focus on their own needs to cope with the effects of the drought; 10. The vast majority of small rural communities are facing serious issues of declining active populations and services and this is negatively affecting the wellbeing and resolve of the farming families that help make up those communities; and 11. Financial assistance is now welcomed and accepted by most but will continue to aggravate negative responses among some for the way that it conflicts with their belief in self-help.

Overall, this research highlights how drought is exacerbating the already complex issues facing farming families today. By adding another layer of unpredictability and eroding their physical, financial and social/personal reserves, drought is heightening the uncertainty and risk many farming families are dealing with. This research highlights the commonalities and the diversity between farming families as they cope with this situation and different life stages, and documents both the anxiety and resilience different individuals, families and communities are exhibiting. It brings to the fore the importance of the wider rural community for farming families and the impact of challenges in this arena on farming families’ decisionmaking. It details the dangerous positive feedback cycles that can emerge between issues as well as the rapid rises in optimism that can result from small improvements in conditions.

In sum, this unique, extended snapshot of a community under stress provides important insights for others experiencing drought and attendant pressures.

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1

Introduction

1.1

Aim of report The aim of this research is to gain a better understanding of the pressures upon, and experiences of, farming families in a time of drought. Based on in-depth interviews with farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region of north-western Victoria, it uses an unprecedented longitudinal approach to track the experiences of farming families during a time of drought and - it was expected and hoped – a period of drought recovery. It explores the various ways individuals, families and the community have been affected by the drought, their concerns about the future and their attitude to various types of assistance. ‘Explore’ is a key word here because very little is known about the social effects of drought on farming families or their rural communities. It is in order to best address our lack of understanding about the type or extent of the impacts of drought that this research is both in-depth and broad-scale. It is also only the second study of drought to examine the situation in real timei.

The Critical Breaking Point (CBP) research is based on two phases of research. Funded by the Tattersall’s George Adams Foundation, Part One interviewed sixty randomly selected farming families during severe drought in February 2007. Funded by the Australian Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, Part Two involved two follow-up interviews at six monthly intervals (September 2007 and February 2008) with a subset of twenty of the sixty farming families interviewed in Part One. This group represents some of the younger and older families of the original sample, who were selected in order to allow us to further explore some of the particular challenges that farming families at these stages of life are facing.

Another unique aspect of the CBP research is its use of members of the Wimmera Mallee community as interviewers. Trained in interview technique and ethics, these local interviewers have been able to build their and their communities’ research capacity through their participation in the project, while providing an inimitable ability to empathise with their interviewees.

1.2

Background Agricultural communities throughout Australia are experiencing multiple and growing pressures. From drought to terms of trade, rural depopulation to distorted images in the media, farming families are arguably dealing with greater levels of pressure, and perhaps stress, than ever before (Gray and Lawrence 2001).

One of Australia’s main broad acre cropping and grazing zones - the Wimmera Southern Mallee Region in north-western Victoria - is currently experiencing the worst drought since records began. Following approximately 10 years of dry or drought like conditions, rainfall for the 2006 year was generally between 40% and 60% of mean annual rainfall, with some centres recording their lowest levels ever. Inflows to the region’s water storages have declined from 315,000ML/yr to 84,000 ML/yr since 1996 and the region’s storages are now down to a record low of approximately 4.5% of total capacity (WDA 2007). The region’s agricultural production - which normally produces more than half of Victoria’s total grain crop, oilseeds and pulses (DSE 2004) - has been severely impacted. A recent State of the Region report states that in 2006 the drought resulted in an 80% reduction in grain

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production and 40% reduction in livestock production. Economic modelling suggests a total loss of $1.047 billion of regional agricultural output, and a further loss of $130 million from other sectors (WDA 2007).

Over the last twelve months (2007) the area has experienced some dramatic climatic shifts (Figures 1-3). Considerable rainfall in April/May 2007 brought the 6 month rainfall decile for February – July to an average/above average level. An equally sudden shift from late July then took the region back to dry conditions, spelling the “collapse” of the growing season and the continuation of the drought.

Figure 1 Rainfall deciles for Australia for the 6 months preceding the first round of interviews

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Figure 2 Rainfall deciles for Australia for the 6 months between the first and second round of interviews

Figure 3 Rainfall deciles for Australia for the 6 months preceding the final round of interviews

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While such statistics give us a sense of the physical and economic status of the region, what does the drought mean for farmers and their families? Understanding the perspectives, concerns and decision-making of farmers and their families at a time when options are restricted by financial circumstances and when confidence has been weakened by a series of dry seasons is vital. The situation and decisions facing many farming families are complex and fraught. Yet, little is known about what exact pressures farming families perceive or how they are responding. Little is known about what their goals for the future are or what obstacles they see in the way. Thus, little is known about how they could best be assisted.

To help answer this question, BCG commissioned the following in-depth report into the effect of the drought on farming families in the region. In doing so, the organisation is responding to a general and growing need for research into the social effects of drought on Australian communities. While significant, studies on this topic to date have been small in number and scope (see, for example, Alston 2006, Alston and Kent 2006, Anderson 2005, Stehlik et al. 2000, Stehlik 2003). Internationally, there is also a serious lack of knowledge about the social, cultural and psychological effects of drought (or other slow-onset disasters) on communities and individuals (Zamani et al. 2006). Thus, this study contributes more than an analysis into the situation of a single region; it contributes to our understanding of what the World Disasters Report lists as the deadliest disaster of the last decade (Walter 2004).

An individual’s or group’s vulnerability to a disaster depends on the social, economic, political, cultural and environmental context in which it occurs. As Ziervogel et al. (2006) argue, to understand agricultural producers’ vulnerability and adaptation to drought and climate change, we need ‘to unravel the relative importance of climate-related stresses within a highly complex field of dynamic transformations, uncertainties and risks’ (p. 303).

For this reason, in this study we situate our investigation of the effect of drought on farming families within a wider exploration of the other often longer-term stressors in their lives.

Drought is often simplified in representations – and policy - into a monolithic event or experience (Botterill and Fisher 2003, Botterill and Wihlite 2005). But this research seeks to explore the particular ways in which it is experienced by different families and businesses.

Ambiguity exists around drought due to the gradual and contested character of both its onset (relative to rapid onset disasters like fire) and, often, its decline. In addition, drought has multiple causes and can vary in type, timing, extent and severity. It is important to note the distinction between meteorological drought (when precipitation is substantially diminished relative to evaporation and transpiration), agricultural drought (when soil moisture is inadequate for the needs of a particular crop at a particular time) and hydrological drought (when surface and subsurface water supplies are substantially reduced). A further class of drought is socio-economic drought, which is when social or economic demand for water outstrips supply and often affects the health, wellbeing and quality of life of communities (NDMC 2006, Zamani et al. 2006). All of these types of drought have relevance to this report, as do the three types of impact drought can have: physical; economic; and social.

Overall, the focus of this report is on the multiple ways that drought is understood and experienced by a group of people whose livelihood is particularly affected by it.

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1.3

Methodology

1.3.1

Study design As described above, the CBP research consists of three rounds of in-depth interviews with farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region. The first round of interviews was with sixty randomly selected families. The subsequent two rounds of six monthly interviews were with twenty of the original families. These families were randomly chosen from among those of the original sixty families who are at the earlier and later stages of their farming careers. Combined, these two-hour interviews provide a unique data set of farming families’ experiences and decision making over a twelve month period.

1.3.2

Part One Research questions In each part of the CBP research, a series of questions were designed to loosely structure the interviews. Presented in Appendix One, these questions progressively build on topics over time.

In February 2007, the main research questions were: How are farmers and their families being affected by the drought?

What pressures do they feel they are under?

How are they being affected by these pressures and by their accumulative effect?

How much control do the farmers and their families feel they have over their situation, and how well equipped do they feel to manage change?

What are their attitudes towards and plans for the future?

What actions are they taking, or thinking of taking, in response to the perceived pressures and why?

To what extent do they identify with the Wimmera-Mallee rural and agricultural communities and with the agricultural sector as a whole?

What help would be of most benefit to these farmers and their families?

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Sampling strategy Sixty farmers and their families were randomly selected from across the Wimmera Southern Mallee region that BCG operates within. Interviewees were not screened to select only those “badly affected” by the drought. Rather our intention was to interview a randomly selected sample of farmers and their families from across the region to ascertain how they have been affected by the drought, including those who feel they have been only negligibly affected.

The Wimmera Southern Mallee region was covered by roughly basing interviews around six loosely defined districts across the region, centred around the towns of: Birchip; Jeparit; Quambatook; Kaniva; Nandaly/Sea Lake; and Marnoo/St Arnaud. This approach allowed us to ensure a relatively even coverage of the region, divide the sample and travel demands between interviewers, and use local phone books from each area to draw our sample from.

We did not design the sample in this way in order to compare responses between six “classes”. The use of the centres is pragmatic and is not based on any a priori assumptions about them other than that they roughly cover the region of interest. Any number of other areas could similarly have been used to investigate experiences within the Wimmera Southern Mallee region.

Using the local phone books, and beginning at entries beginning with A or N or working from the back of the book, every 12th name was selected until 25 names had been selected. Local expertise was then consulted to determine whether those on the list were farmers. In cases where 25 farmers had not been selected on this first round, the process was repeated, but pinpointing every 5th name listed in the phone book. When a list of 25 farmers was achieved for each area, an introductory letter about the research was sent to the first 20 on the list, inviting them to be involved. The remaining five names on each list were kept as backup.

The day after the letters were received, every third person on the list was phoned to ask if they would like to participate in the research. If they did, interviews were scheduled. This was repeated until 10 interviews were scheduled for each area. As many members of the household or farm business were included in the interview as possible, including children.

Table 1 outlines the gender and approximate age of the 108 interviewees involved.

Table 1 Demographic profile of Part One research participants

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Age (years)

Male

Female

Total

< 20

1

0

1

20-35

5

3

8

35-50

25

17

42

50-70

33

23

56

> 70

2

0

2

Total

65

43

109

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Interviewer training A key to this research was using local interviewers. This not only helped to illicit more insightful information, but provided the interviewers with listening and research skills they can use elsewhere, including in further research in their community. Four suitable, local people, including two BCG staff members, were recruited for the task with the assistance of BCG. They signed a contract with BCG including a confidentiality clause and were remunerated for their work.

Interviewers were trained intensively in qualitative research and interview technique during a day long workshop. This training covered topics including the recognition and use of qualitative data, subjectivity and objectivity, the ethics and power relations of research, the emotional impact of interviewing and self-preservation techniques. Interview techniques were also taught and practiced using a combination of theory and role plays. How to encourage the participation of all members of a group interview was emphasised. The interview questions to be used to guide the conversations with interviewees were workshopped and refined and an interview prompt sheet was developed.

All interviewers were accompanied on their initial interviews by the trainer and debriefed on the process. The trainer was also available for debriefing during the entire interview period.

Each interviewer kept a journal during the interview period to record their reflections about the process, including how they were progressing as interviewers and coping with the interview content. At the completion of all of the interviews, all the interviewers came together with the trainer for a half day debriefing.

Field work Interviews were conducted over a two week period in February 2007. Interviewees were phoned the night before their interview to confirm the arrangements. Interviewers conducted approximately two-three interviews per day. Each interview was semi-structured and lasted on average two hours, with the shortest being approximately one hour and the longest being over four hours.

Differences in interview times reflect the organic character of semi-structured interviews, where the aim is to gently guide but not dictate the shape of the interview. Interviewers sought to develop a relationship of trust with interviewees, giving the latter a safe space in which to tell their story and describe their experience. Used in recent research into the social impacts of the economic downturn in the Riverland agricultural region (Bryant 2007), this approach is more like a discussion than a survey (Herbert and Rubin 1995). In contrast to testing and measuring pre-conceived ideas about a situation, which can miss essential insights by crowding the interview space with questions, the interviewer is open to what interviewees’ perceive as relevant and important. The outcome is richer and arguably more honest and realistic data, with themes emerging in a “bottom-up” manner (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2000, Neuman 2001). Such an exploratory approach is highly appropriate for studying a topic area about which little is known (Silverman 1997), as is the case for the impact of drought in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region.

Interviews were recorded on digital recorders and downloaded onto laptops each evening.

After each interview, interviewers recorded notes about the interview in a notebook. As a safety precaution, they also texted a BCG staff member to let them know the interview had been completed successfully.

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Interviewers gave each interview household a small bag of lollies as a sign of gratitude for their participation. A thank you letter re-iterating the ability of interviewees to withdraw their permission to use their story and inviting them to offer follow up information if they desired was also left with each household, along with a list of sources of drought assistance.

Analysis Interviews were fully transcribed and, in conjunction with the handwritten interview notes, were analysed systematically by working through them and building a progressive code of key themes. These themes were then mapped in mind maps and tables, based on a grounded theory approach that prioritises data-driven and inductive conclusions (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2000, Glaser and Strauss 1967, Glaser 1993). In keeping with this methodology, themes were re-tested against transcripts in an iterative process until the key findings emerged.

Semi-structured interviews produce qualitative data. As indicated above, the value of such data lies in its richness, realism and the relationships it reveals. It allows us to better understand a situation by listening to the voices of those experiencing it. In the process of bringing together and interpreting individuals’ experiences, however, it can be possible and helpful to reduce some qualitative data into quantifications. This can be done for a topic as long as the ambiguities contained within such reductions are appreciated and are not prohibitive. It is also crucial that the act of attaching a number to a theme is not taken to mean that that theme is more “real” or “important” than those that are unquantified (Silverman 1985, 1993). The simplicity of statistics has a habit of distracting from more difficult but vital subtleties in a discussion. It is also important to recognise that, given the differences as well as similarities between the structure of semi-structured interviews, topics are not evenly discussed across all interviews. Where a topic is discussed in all interviews it is done so in the context of unique conversations (Herbert and Rubin 1995). Overall, the process of assigning often complex and ambiguous responses to rigid countable categories in a post hoc manner is artificial and should be done sparingly. Nevertheless, to understand a situation, particularly one to which we need to respond, it can be helpful to quantify the “size” of some of the problems confronting us by measuring the commonality of responses across a sample. In this study, this was done for a number of the more clear-cut and dominant themes.

1.3.3

Part Two Research questions In September 2007, the main questions were: How have things changed for interviewees over the last six months?

What decisions have they made and how are they feeling about them?

What pressures do they feel they are currently under?

How are they being affected by these pressures and their accumulative effect?

How much control do they feel they have over their situation and how well equipped do they feel to manage change?

What assistance have they received over the last six months and what assistance would they like to receive?

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What are their attitudes towards and plans for the future?

How does their stage of life affect their experiences and outlook?

In February 2008, the main questions were: How have things changed for interviewees over the last six months?

What decisions have they made and how are they feeling about them?

What pressures do they feel they are currently under?

What is their current mental outlook? How do they think this has changed over the last 612 months?

Has their approach to farming changed over the last 6-12 months and if so how and why?

What are their attitudes towards and plans for the future?

What assistance have they received over the last six months and what assistance would they like to receive?

What changes have they seen in their local community and how has this affected them?

How did they find the research experience and what feedback do they have on how the results should be disseminated?

Sampling strategy The 60 randomly selected farming families interviewed in Part One were divided into those who are at the early, middle and late stages of their farming careers; in other words, those who are generally trying to expand, consolidate or wind down their farm. This subjective assessment resulted in groups of 18, 17 and 33 respectively, with 9 families spanning the expanding/winding down categories because of multiple generations. Farming families representing the expanding and/or winding down groups were then randomly selected and approached by letter and phone to participate in Part Two of the research. This led to 16 farming families agreeing to be involved, including 4 who are multi-generational. A further 4 randomly selected farming families from the ‘consolidating’ group were involved to bring the sample to 20. These families consisted of 43 interviewees (Table 2).

Table 2 Demographic profile of Part Two research participants

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Age (years)

Male

Female

Total

< 20

0

0

0

21-35

5

4

9

36-50

10

8

18

51-70

7

7

14

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> 70

1

1

2

Total

23

20

43

Interviewer training As mentioned earlier, a key to this research is the use of local interviewers. Although these interviewers only interviewed families who are not personally known to them to help ensure the anonymity of interviewees, they were nevertheless able to connect with interviewees in a way non-locals are not. Equipping them with the skills to conduct careful interviews is also an important example of capacity building for the region.

To optimise continuity in the research, the same interviewers were used in Part Two as in Part One to eliminate an unwanted element of variability. Two of the original four interviewers were used given the smaller number of interviews involved. These interviewers received a refresher course in semi-structured interview technique before each round of interviews, including feedback on their performance in previous rounds of interviews and reflection on the challenges they had experienced during the interview process. Interview questions were also workshopped with them.

Interviewers were supported during the interview process by having the trainer available to debrief with them at any time. They also used journals to record their feelings about the interviews to help them deal with the difficult subject matter they were often dealing with.

Field work Interviews were conducted over a two week period in mid-September 2007 and in early February 2008, using the same process as laid out for Part One. Interviews were conducted in interviewees’ homes and ranged in length from one to three hours. As in Part One, they were digitally recorded and fully transcribed and interviewers wrote additional notes on each interview after it was completed.

Where possible, interviews were conducted by the original interviewer to build on the original rapport established and enhance confidentiality for the interviewees. As only two out of the original four interviewers were involved, however, some families were interviewed by an interviewer new to them. This actually enhanced the quality of data in a different way, by avoiding the trap of assumed knowledge and encouraging interviewees to reflect afresh on their situation.

Analysis Interview transcripts were analysed in combination with interviewers’ notes using a progressive process of coding, as explained for Part One. Emergent themes were iteratively tested and sorted until the main key findings were derived.

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In some cases percentages are attached to a specific finding to highlight an interesting point such as a difference in response between age groups or genders. However, it must be recognised that these statistics are based on a small sample size and are not necessarily representative of the larger farming family population from which the sample is drawn. In addition, the semi-structured style of the interviews means that while the presence of a theme in an interview is indicative of its importance to the interviewee(s) involved, it does not follow that the absence of the same theme from an interview with different interviewees indicates that that theme is not important to those interviewees. Rather, the conversational style of the interviews means that slightly different topics were covered in each interview.

While some topics or responses emerged as significant in the interviews by virtue of their repetition among interviewees, not all interviewees had an equal opportunity to discuss it.

Thus, the absence of such a topic from a particular interview may reflect the unique trajectory of that interview more than the intervieweesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lack of interest in the topic.

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Part One

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2

February 2007

2.1

Overview The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of the impact of drought and other pressures upon farming families. Funded by the Tattersall’s George Adams Foundation, it used in-depth and broad-scale empirical research conducted in severe drought conditions in February 2007 to explore the pressures farmers and their families were experiencing, how they were responding, their concerns about the future and their attitude to drought assistance measures. Trained local interviewers conducted two-hour interviews with sixty randomly selected farmers and their families. These interviews were fully transcribed and analysed for key themes.

Eight key findings emerged from the data: The drought is having a widespread and significant negative impact on farming families For the vast majority of interviewees, the impact of the drought on their lives is direct, moderate to severe, and intimately tied to financial performance of their farm businesses.

Serious depression is not common but is present and many reported a loss of enjoyment and confidence in farming.

In many cases, this 2006/07 drought year is especially difficult because five to ten years of previous dry/drought conditions have eroded people’s financial, physical and emotional reserves.

The nature of farming, and for some the financial position they are now in, means that future recovery will be slow.

The type and severity of its impact varies People’s experience of the drought varies widely according to the geographical heterogeneity of drought conditions and their different sensitivities to such conditions.

The degree to which people have been affected by the drought appears to be influenced by a number of factors including: financial position; enterprise type; distance from services; stage of career; age; and gender.

The primary impact is the worsening of pre-existing problems It is the combination of the drought and other pressures that is important.

Vulnerability to the impact of drought is related to three main areas of pre-drought stress in farming families’ lives: trends in the agricultural industry; processes of rural decline; and unwelcome messages in the media.

Interviewees described four industry trends as pressures on their farm businesses: agriculture’s terms of trade; the need to pursue economies of scale; debt levels; and the increasing technological and management complexity of farming. The impact of these pressures, particularly the rising costs associated with the first, has been worsened by the drought.

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The demographic changes and loss of services associated with rural decline were frequently mentioned by interviewees as serious issues in their lives made worse by the direct and rippling effects of drought.

Negative portrayals of rural life in the media and discussions about climate change are sources of angst for some individuals. The prevalence of them and the anxiety caused are both exacerbated by the current drought.

The drought has raised questions but stalled decision-making for many farming families Many farming families are asking themselves what they are doing in farming.

The combination of the drought and other pressures is delaying some retirements out of farming.

The decision to stay or go, and what to then do in either case, is being stalled by a sense of uncertainty and lack of options, made worse by the drought.

Responses to the drought have had negative and positive effects on communities The loss of farm incomes and employment caused by the drought has had direct and negative economic effects on local communities that feed back to farm families.

Besides accelerating rural decline, the drought has had positive and negative direct social effects on communities.

Caring, searching and judgemental forms of social surveillance are evident at work in local communities. These have been intensified by the drought.

There is a high degree of dissatisfaction with the financial assistance system The criteria used to judge eligibility for financial assistance are a source of angst and anger among many farming families.

The implementation of the assistance system is also the source of much frustration and disenchantment.

Attitudes to social assistance vary widely Reflecting different coping strategies in relation to stress, while some people benefit greatly from drought-induced social initiatives like educational seminars and concerts, others prefer a more problem-based approach to assistance.

Assistance focused on highlighting problems caused by drought is not helpful for some people.

Reflecting the existence of social surveillance, there is a high degree of resistance to psychological counselling.

Longer-term and strategic intervention is wanted Underlining their uncertainty about what to do, most interviewees did not have specific suggestions about future intervention needed.

Reflecting anger at the divisiveness and perceived short term-ism of the current financial assistance eligibility criteria, many interviewees called for more widespread and longer term financial assistance.

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Business management and financial planning was most commonly identified by farmers as a significant gap in the knowledge and skill set.

Assistance coping with underlying issues of rural decline is wanted.

Overall, this research suggests that the impacts of drought on the Wimmera Southern Mallee region are multi-layered, widespread, significant, long-term and growing. As its ripples spread through the community, reinforcing other waves of change, its accumulative impact is growing at both individual and collective levels. The effect of the drought on farming families cannot be isolated either from pre-drought pressures or from community level processes or individual level decisions. The resultant complexity adds to the uncertainty that characterises the occurrence of drought, and which is one of the main psychological impacts of it. Psychological/social/emotional effects and financial effects are tightly coupled not only to the physical phenomenon that drought superficially seems to be, but to each other. These two levels and the attendant coping strategies point to two important areas in which assistance can be provided.

While for some individuals and communities the drought remains a simple albeit painful bump in the road, for a growing number of others it is becoming a major turning point, albeit one at which many seem currently stalled. Combined with the ongoing accumulation of drought effects, the “pause mode” that many farming families were in as they face a future that seems both predetermined and unknown, means that it is likely that the drought’s ultimate impacts were not yet apparent. It is therefore critical that this research is not interpreted as a summary of the effects of “the drought” on farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region, either at one point in time or for the drought in general. What this research does provide are some vital insights into the experiences of a significant number of farming families in the region. It is now up to government, business and other organizations to maximise their sphere of influence and respond.

To end, four recommendations were presented. In short, these are: That more support is provided immediately to abate the accumulating effects of drought.

That information to aid farming families’ decision making is developed and extended effectively to them.

That effort is redoubled to address the process of rural decline in small towns.

That further research is conducted into a number of identified topics, including the ongoing effects of and decision-making around the drought, and vulnerabilities and improvements that emerge from it.

2.2

Key Findings of Part One

2.2.1

The drought is having a widespread and significant negative impact on farming families All interviewees reported being negatively impacted by the drought in some way. As a group, the dominant message from the farming families interviewed is of the significant difficulties the drought is causing them. Although the type and severity of the impact varies (as we discuss in the following section), the broad geographic extent of the drought and the collective experience of underlying vulnerabilities to its impact mean that the vast majority of

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interviewees are feeling its direct effects. While 5% of interviewees reported only being impacted by the drought indirectly through its effect on others, for most interviewees the impact is first hand, moderate to severe and intimately tied to the financial performance of their farm businesses. The following quotes give a sense of the situation: ‘It has made things tough… there’s a lot less money going around’.

‘It’s cutting our throat’.

‘We’re way behind the eight ball as far as making money with wheat’.

‘Our farm is probably just on the edge of tinkering, tinkering to fall over’.

‘Decades of hard work have just been quickly eroded’.

‘We’re pushed into a corner’.

‘We’re treading water’.

‘It’s always been a lifelong ambition to put my own farm together… I’d never thought of selling. But, last year, is probably the first year. Business was shocking. I thought, I just can’t do this anymore…’

‘This last year has been a real shock to us because we have never got nothing before, not in 40 years... It was very different, a bit scary, an insecure sort of feeling’.

‘It makes you appreciate what the settlers went though’.

As illustrated throughout the report, people mainly described the negative impact of the drought in terms of the increased financial pressure and uncertainty it has introduced to their lives and the resultant reductions in their wellbeing. Illustrated by the way some people talked about being in a ‘money drought’, although drought-like conditions are largely shared by all farming families, the consequences of such conditions for them are multiple, unique and dependent on the other pressures they are under.

One important way in which the total impact of the drought on the various aspects of people’s lives is expressed is in how they are feeling. One interviewee described it as ‘just a heavy feeling’. Many others used the word ‘frustrated’. Associated with this, over half (53%) of farmers reported a loss of job satisfaction and enjoyment as a result of the way the drought and other pressures are distorting their experience of farming.

‘I’m just losing interest. I just haven’t got the enthusiasm anymore’.

‘The fun’s gone out of it’ ‘Its hard, there’s less confidence, less fun’.

‘I’ve been starting to feel quite down’.

‘You just think, well do you really have to be working at this pace forever? Especially when sometimes there’s nothing at the end’.

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‘I’ve found it a real confidence destroying event this year. I heard someone else who is a born optimist say that he has totally lost confidence in this business this year – and that’s the effect it has had on me’.

Many interviewees reflected on the emotional impact they have observed in others. As one said: ‘I was very concerned for a couple of my neighbours and just sort of said: “We’ve got to get out and have a hit of tennis”. “Oh no”, they said, “I should be on the header”.

“No, I think it is time to have a couple of hours off and have some fun, fellowship and relax”. “Yes, alright” they agreed. And so off we went. Because it was having a toll then I think…’.

‘On the outside he copes, but he is very withdrawn. It’s a bit of a worry’.

Generally it seems that, as one interviewee put it: ‘Everybody gets depressed when it doesn’t rain’.

The above quotes point to an awareness of mental health issues in the community. As discussed in a subsequent section, such awareness has been heightened by the drought.

To an extent, this awareness has led to bemusement among the farming population, as they struggle with the discrepancy between their experiences and the more extreme reactions they hear about in the media and through other channels. Yet, it does also seem that the need for such awareness has also risen. Not only do some of the quotes above point to warning signs, but 12% of interviewees mentioned experiencing clinical depression.

‘I’ve suffered a bit of depression. Yes, they tucked me up in bed for a couple of months… woke up and it was two months later…Then I went back to work…’.

‘I had a period the doctor defined as depression. Couldn’t do anything, didn’t want to do anything… It was a dark time… a real shock’.

‘He [her husband] has had a bit of a bout…’.

Others mentioned experiences of women suffering depression and young men committing suicide among their family or neighbours but they did not attribute it to drought.

The impacts of drought accompany but are not in perfect sync with climatic conditions, either in timing or severity. Interviewees’ description of the current drought period – loosely defined - fell into three main timeframes: 10-15 years; 5 years; and 1-2 years. While more specific ‘drought years’ are identified within these periods, the periods reflect how long interviewees’ have been experiencing dry or drought like conditions and/or its associated results, contingent of course on how long they have been in farming and what benchmark they use.

‘Since 94 it’s been lean’.

‘1996 was the last time we had good rain’.

‘It’s droughted every second year for 12 years. There’s been six droughts, six years when we didn’t get any crop…’.

‘We were married 10 years ago and in that time we’ve had no rain’.

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‘We’ve been married 10 years and most of those years have been drought. Every year we’ve had a baby has been dry’.

‘Well we’ve had 10 dry years… but we’ve been lucky here because we’ve had a break… But some spots really haven’t had a break… They’ve had a hiding. They’ve had a real hiding’.

‘It has been a bit of a money drought for the last nine years and there has been terribly below average rainfall’.

‘It’s been going close to about 10 years’.

‘It’s the last 5 years that things have turned bad. Up until 2002, things were still reasonably OK… But since 2002 we’ve had 3 droughts in 5 years and… the other 2 years have been average or below, depending on where you are. So that’s really set everyone back. It’s been the last 5 years’.

‘This has been the toughest period. You talk to the older guys too and the statistics will tell you that with all the other droughts there has always been good years in between. But in this particular area there hasn’t been any since 2002’.

‘Every second year since we started [6 years ago] has been a complete wipeout’.

‘Our drought goes back to 2002 because we haven’t had a recovery… There hasn’t been any savings or any boost of income since 2002’.

‘Last year was the first year that probably people… did not go ahead and sow…

Whereas other years, they would’ve put it in and hoped for rain. But that hope’s gone… because the years had been tough leading up to that’.

‘We’ve been fortunate that we’ve had a lot of good years here so one bad year amongst them isn’t going to put us back that far… For the people who have had two or three years of dry, it’s a different story’.

‘This is the first year… there was [no germination] there. The ground was as bare as this table’.

‘This is the year that has affected us more financially… This is the first year that we’ve had to go to the bank for an overdraft’.

As some of the above quotes illustrate, it is generally the frequency or constancy of dry years – whether each year has been individually experienced or recognised as a drought or not – that is making the current situation especially difficult. Interviewees described how their financial, physical and emotional reserves have been depleted over the preceding years. As one commented: ‘I’ve been through a few droughts now… and this has been the worst time we’ve had because there hasn’t been a year where you can recover. The other major droughts that we had seemed to have record crops follow them. But this time there has been no recovery at all as far as cash is concerned’.

One of the most notable things about the current drought is that physical reserves of water have been exhausted or are near to exhaustion. As a participant commented: BCG & RMCG

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‘We’ve been in droughts before but we’ve never been in a drought without water’.

Although tanking in bought water is an option for some, another pointed out that with low financial reserves: ‘you can’t afford to run out of water, that’s the thing’.

Not only is the onset of drought gradual, but so is recovery from it. Many interviewees stressed the long time period it is going to take them to ‘bounce back’ from the setback. One stated that: ‘It will be years down the track before I reckon we actually recover from it and get ourselves back to where we were before the drought’.

Some of the recovery time is dictated by the unavoidable lag time in farming between rain, producing a product, and receiving an income. There is no way to side step or speed up the natural growth processes involved in agricultural production. So, as an interviewee put it: ‘They are promising that El Nino is on its way out… but that’s still 12 months away for money. Even if it rains, just because you get 4 inches of rain, it might help your tanks and it might help your dam or whatever, but it’s not going to bring you any money for a while’.

Indeed, as discussed further below, acting to produce a product in response to rain incurs instead immediate and significant financial costs.

Another interviewee discussed how the resilience of his business has been eroded by the disruption to his multi-year plans. In particular, he described how his plans for new plant have been put behind schedule: ‘We’re paying a tractor off at the moment. And we were supposed to have just made the last payment… but we’ve refinanced the payment. Then after that you’d normally look at updating something else. But now that’s not going to happen for a couple of years… So the plant is going to suffer because of that… And then the maintenance that comes through with the old machinery is another added cost’.

This and the comment before it about debt point to the ‘traps’ that a seemingly temporary setback like drought can draw farmers into. While the event itself may pass, the actions they have taken in response, such as taking on more debt or delaying the purchase of necessary equipment, can set in place a cycle of spiralling costs associated, for example, with servicing debts or maintaining old equipment. As discussed further below, it is in part because of this that some farming families indicated that they may not ‘bounce back’ from the drought at all.

Before considering this, let us first look more closely at the impact of drought and how it varies.

2.2.2

The type and severity of its impact varies In contrast to the seemingly never-ending expanse of dry paddocks that characterises the drought, the type and severity of its impact varies from the regional down to the farm scale.

Indeed, its impacts are uneven not only between locations but between businesses and individuals. This is in part the result of the patchiness of drought conditions, which arise out of the combination of weather and soil type. But it is also the result of differences in sensitivity to the impact of such conditions. For, as mentioned above, the extent to which a drought is a disaster is highly individualised and depends on people’s complexity of circumstances. Interview results suggest that the degree to which people have been affected

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by the drought is influenced by a number of factors: financial position, enterprise type, distance from services, stage of career, age, and gender. We will look at these in turn.

A businesses’ pre-drought financial position is critical in determining the financial impact of the drought on it. Such a position is obviously the result of multiple factors. Some of those mentioned in interviews as important are a business’ level of: fixed assets (particularly land); liquid assets, including off-farm investments; off-farm income; diversification; and debt. The way in which these influence one’s ability to survive the low-income period of the drought, however, is not simple.

On the one hand, factors like land ownership and off-farm income seem to place one in a more secure position. As some respondents commented: ‘I think we’re on a different level because we own land’.

‘It’s all right if you’ve got a wife or a partner with a second job and you’ve got a second income coming in’.

‘We’ve been affected but we haven’t been affected as much as someone who’s straight farming because we’ve had a bit of outside income’.

‘Strong businesses here are not necessarily huge sized businesses, they’re medium sized businesses with a lot of old farm stuff that creates passive income’.

Conservative and/or successful financial management in the past also increases security. A large number of respondents reported that they are surviving the drought by living on savings accrued over previous years. For example, two couples explained that to survive the drought: ‘We are dipping into everything that we’ve earned, that we’ve saved, over the last 20 years. We just have to - we’re drawing on that. We’ve sold off shares, we’ve got rid of a managed fund… We’re sort of supporting ourselves through it’.

‘We’re using money that was put away each year…for building our house’.

The corollary of this is that a high-risk (or unsuccessful) financial management approach utilising large amounts of debt seems to exacerbate one’s vulnerability to the financial impacts of drought. As one farmer commented: ‘I’m quietly confident because we are not really that far in debt’.

On the other hand, it is widely perceived that the governments’ financial assistance system (discussed further below) acts in part to reverse the advantage of savings or current income.

It does this by classing those with such resources as ineligible for assistance relative to those without them or those with large debts. Thus, while current financial security is advantageous to begin with and decreases people’s vulnerability to the immediate effects of drought, by forcing people to reduce their savings, the financial assistance system reduces their relative advantage. It was suggested that this erosion of their savings may ultimately make such families more vulnerable to the financial impact of the current drought and, significantly, those to come.

Some farmers also attributed their ability to cope with the drought relative to others to their specific type and distribution of enterprises. Diversification across geographic areas and enterprise types (eg sheep as well as crops) was mentioned by those who have adopted BCG & RMCG

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such approaches as helpful in coping financially with the drought, as such approaches spread the risks involved. The relative advantages of animals versus cropping was a common discussion point. The outcome is that in drought animals such as sheep seem to provide a degree of guaranteed income but also add the problem of water requirements.

Intensive animal industries were described as especially vulnerable to the water shortage associated with the drought, but as relatively secure thanks to the constancy of their income.

Those with animals mentioned that efforts to ‘drought proof’ their farm by putting in a tank or pipe system or buying a tanker has reduced or would reduce their vulnerability to drought.

Relative to animal work, cropping provides a more volatile income but less drought-induced work. A down side is the expense of the equipment involved. A number of interviewees expressed relief that they do not own or are not in the process of paying off a large amount of cropping machinery. As one explained: ‘When you’ve got equipment you’ve got to earn money because there are always costs involved’.

Some croppers hailed storage silos as a saviour for allowing them to try to maximise the price they received for their grain. The merits of different crop types were also discussed extensively. A quote sums up some of the main approaches that seem to reduce a business’ vulnerability to the financial impact of drought and other external forces like volatile markets: ‘It’s risk management… Like, on-farm storage, I suppose we try to increase that every year if we can, though it’s going to be hard this year. But we’re doing that I suppose, instead of just relying totally on selling grain at harvest time… We’ve also been trying to manage our prices in marketing - hedging and stuff - so that we don’t have to rely on price at harvest time… If the water was there, we’d probably have more sheep, just to spread our risk a bit more… And the whole idea of having those three properties, is just to spread the risk’.

For those most financially affected by the drought, distance from services can become a critical issue because of the cost of petrol. A significant number of respondents reported trying to reduce the amount of money they are spending on travel. As discussed further below, this problem is being exacerbated by the reduction in available services and activities in smaller centres as the financial impact of the drought flows through to small businesses.

Petrol cost was also reported as an obstacle to off-farm employment and involvement in community organizations and events, the absence of which can worsen the financial or emotional impact of the drought. This issue particularly affects those for whom the relative cost of travel is greatest because of their physical isolation and reduced income.

Stage of life also seems to be an important factor in determining the impact of the drought on farming families. This is in part due to the relationship with financial position discussed above. Those early in their farming careers are often carrying high levels of debt because they are in a period of rapid expansion and/or are lacking the infrastructure and economies of scale to cope. As explained above, while this often makes them more eligible for assistance, they are – as the assistance system recognises - more vulnerable to the immediate financial impact of the drought, having very little room to move. Thus, combined with the difficulties brought about by the drought, young farming families are hit with a double whammy. As some older interviewees commented:

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‘If it’s a young farm just starting on its own, its in a very weak position with what’s happened…’

‘You feel sorry for the young wives with kids because you know there’s just a lack of money…’.

‘It seems like the young families are the ones that are struggling the most out of the situation because when they want to be growing and expanding they’re not able to which is hard’.

‘It would definitely be good to have new families come in but they would have to have so much money now to take over’.

Young farming couples generally supported the above assertions, particularly if they have entered farming by buying in. As some said of their position: ‘Because we’re young, and re-investing like I said, we’re putting it back into the farm, and we haven’t been putting much money aside…so we haven’t got a lot to fall back on’.

‘Without a doubt, we are fortunate to be able to farm here… We had the [family] capital base to be able to go farming… I had friends that wanted to farm and couldn’t, or who are trying to but struggling…’.

A number of younger farmers interviewed are also having to travel away to work, often for extended periods of time, which has significant repercussions for their family. As one woman said of her husband’s regular three month absences to work in contract harvesting: ‘I hate X being away and the kids hate it, but it’s something you’ve got to do… The kids sometimes get a bit resentful and hard to handle, because X is away’.

Younger farming families also face the psychological blow of experiencing a long drought at this early stage in their farming adventure. A number of respondents expressed their concern that young farmers – strongly needed in an industry with a median age of 50 in 2001 (Barr et al. 2005) – will be put off by their experience of so many poor years first up.

‘I see kids who have come home, particularly in the last few years, and honestly it must be heart breaking for their families, and you know their young wives, and they’ve got young families… You know, things looked good, and then, now, they’re out having to shear, you know, to make money, and the wife’s having to work and put their kids into childcare. And here they were, they wanted to come up to, theoretically, this idyllic lifestyle, but they’re just probably digging a bigger hole for themselves’.

‘There are some really sad stories… A lot of the young fellas around here I know, the younger generation, guys who look 30, well they’ve never seen a wet year since they’ve been on the farm. So you wonder…’.

Quality of life and cost of living are also arguably more pressing issues for young families, where the needs of children and partners who are perhaps new to farming and rural living need to be considered. Interviewees in this position mentioned, for example, worrying about employment opportunities for their partners and where to educate their children. While many interviewees described the lifestyle advantages of rural and particularly farm living for children – BCG & RMCG

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‘As a kid, it was great…. You could do whatever you want… Down the back paddock, chasing rabbits… It was a lot of fun’.

- now there is more uncertainty about the relative costs and benefits of such a childhood environment. As the above interviewee and others explained, for one thing, when they were growing up in the country, ‘there were a lot more people around’ and with them, services like more local schools. One mother described her hopes and concerns: ‘I do hope that we can bring up our children here in this town and still have the farm…

I do want to stay… But only if you can offer your children a good lifestyle and not struggle for every dollar… They’re very happy now, but small towns can also be very hard on kids growing up’.

Children’s awareness of the financial pressure their family is under was mentioned as a concern by a number of people. This awareness comes in part from sacrifices they themselves are being forced to make. As one interviewee said of his children: ‘[In the past] if they’ve wanted something - they haven’t always got it – but, you know, they eventually would get it. But now it’s just “No”’.

This is despite the fact that, as another interviewee stated: ‘Parents are sacrificing things now to let their kids think that things are fairly normal’.

As one woman said of her son: ‘I went to buy them ice-cream and he said ‘Don’t you know its a drought?!’.

A couple of interviewees mentioned that their teenage children are showing signs of depression and stress. Those nearing university age are often very aware of the sacrifices their family will need to make to send them to tertiary education. As one farmer and father noted: ‘The hardest part of our next ten years, I reckon, will be getting them through uni…

Yeah, that’ll be our hardest task… We’ll just assess where we are, see what we’ve got and what we haven’t got and…I dunno…’.

Some of those who were to start university this year or last have been especially hit by the impact of the drought as their expected income from working the harvest over summer has not been available.

‘You feel sorry for them, because if you have a big year, the kids leaving school going to Uni, they can make big dollars at harvest time, and then they’re set up for Uni. And if they have a bad year - just that year that they’re in between Year 12 and Uni - it can mean all the difference. So you sort of feel for them. If you’ve got kids going through, you’d hope to have a big year cos they can make some money to take’.

‘Generally [our son] works for us over harvest driving the header. Well of course that didn’t happen this year, so he had no income over the Christmas period this year, like all the jobs for all the kids who do that sort of stuff to try to get a bit of money’.

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Some teenagers have deferred university to work in order to become eligible for Youth Allowance, which their university experience will rely on in the absence of adequate family income.

‘A large amount of kids actually deferred so that then when they go to Uni, that they get all the benefits… In an 18-month period they’ve got to earn $17,000, so that when they go back to Uni they get all the allowances… And that’s their reason for deferring, which is pretty sad. Their parents are encouraging them to do it, because they need the assistance… But then when they deferred, they haven’t gone back to Uni’.

Conversely, some interviewees mentioned that the drought has encouraged their university age children to continue studying or to find a job (often in the city, mines or shearing) rather than returning home to the farm as they had intended. With many family farms struggling to financially accommodate more than one generation irrespective of the drought, the loss of income caused by the drought has postponed some families’ plans for co-working on the farm business.

Besides young people, those reaching retirement age also seem to be particularly vulnerable to the impact of drought. Older farmers are often in the opposite financial position of young farmers – with low debt and substantial savings – having been putting money aside to act as their superannuation. To have these savings – which they need to retire on - ebb away during the drought threatens to fundamentally alter their plans as they are forced to keep working for an unknown period, often with fading health and diminished energy. For these farmers, the issue is not having enough money to stay in farming; it is having enough money to get out. As some commented: ‘A whole lot of them [in their 60s] say “As soon as I get enough money I’m selling the farm”… As soon as they get enough money to buy a house…’

‘He thought he was going to retire and have all this money to retire with, and because he chose to work one more year, you know, that is gone… Everything he had worked for and saved for his retirement is gone’.

‘I thought we’d be able to hang onto the land and lease it, but these past few years have sort of made that plan come unstuck’.

‘I think we’ve got to hang in there til we hopefully get a few good years and we can bring some optimism back into the whole retirement thing’.

‘I thought when the kids left we were into our last 10 years of farming and we could just stack [our savings]… But with this money drought… we’re just paying our way, treading water, you know… I don’t think there’ll be a retirement age in this house’…

The uncertainty – and anger at the government’s financial assistance approach – created by this situation is discussed in later sections.

Having a hard-earned retirement slip away seems to compound the loss of motivation that some farmers and their partners are experiencing. As indicated in the section above, a significant number of farmers seem to be feeling frustrated and mentally exhausted.

Contributing to their stress is the overload or underload of work associated with the drought.

Some farmers reported working longer hours in the drought due to the burden of taking on the work previously done by employees or contractors, of water carting and monitoring, or of BCG & RMCG

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taking on off-farm work. They often mentioned reducing their out of work commitments, which heightens their vulnerability to the psychological impact of drought by limiting their sources of non-work identity and esteem.

Other farmers, such as ‘pure croppers’ with no stock to cart water to, reported struggling “to keep themselves busy”. Perhaps reflecting differences between agricultural enterprise types, this contrasts with the study of drought by Alston (1995), who found the drought only increased the amount of farm work research participants had to do. In this research, those experiencing an underload of work typically commented that, while they were or had been enjoying to a degree the rest time, this benefit had diminished as the drought has dragged on. Besides stress caused by the loss of income, most seemed keen to minimise the disruption to their normal daily activities. Some farmers explained: ‘If there’s no rain and you’re not even cropping… there’s nothing to do. It is hard to make yourself go out fencing or go out…it’s hard to make yourself work. But often you’ve got to do something to keep yourself busy’.

‘You don’t do any more than you have to because you don’t want to spend any money’.

‘I think most people are just trying to deal with it by not spending too much money.

Just sort of doing maintenance and fixing fences up – keeping busy without spending too much’.

‘Motivation is really a problem in a year like this. You’ve just got to find things to do. I mean, there are always things to do, but you’ve just got to see the purpose of it all’.

‘I guess the hardest thing that I find at the moment is that capital investment into new tillage equipment or new machinery is not warranted… I would like to upgrade things but there’s just no value in doing it. Being a progressive farmer all my life I find that the hardest thing… That’s the hard thing in our situation, to be progressive without spending money’.

Disruption to normal routines, activities and associated plans and goals can be a significant source of stress, particularly in terms of our occupation. As work psychologists emphasise, work provides us with more than a means of providing for our physiological needs. It provides us with an important source of identity, social role and interactions, and sense of purpose and achievement. Underlining the strong internal drive of many farmers, the above quotes point to how some interviewees are trying to maintain their sense of self through remaining as involved in their normal farming practices as is possible within the climatic and financial constraints they face.

Most women in farming families are closer to experiencing an overload rather than an underload of work. Women are another group demonstrating high levels of exhaustion and frustration. The vast majority are working off-farm as well as the work they do in the home. In addition, while none of the females interviewed seem to identify themselves as farmers as such, many work part-time or casually on the farm, either outside or in the office. While some have always been in off-farm employment, others (especially older women) have gone back in the last few years as a result of financial pressure or have increased the amount of work they are doing. As some interviewees explained:

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‘A lot more women are working now you know, and some by choice and some not by choice. Some are doing jobs they’d probably prefer not to do. But we all weren’t educated like the kids now, so you know… A lot of them are doing cleaning jobs and that sort of thing, whereas probably years ago they would’ve been playing golf or bowls or tennis or something like that’.

‘With the exception of probably one that I can think of - and that’s because she’s got two very young children - every farmer’s wife I know works’.

‘Without the drought I’d definitely be working, just not as many hours’.

‘I would never not work in these situations’.

Off-farm work commitments often involve career compromises and extensive commuting, as well as complicated juggling acts to manage farm-related, family-related and other commitments.

But, pointing again to the particular impact of the drought on young families, women who are ‘stuck’ on the farm with young children seem to be among the worst affected, missing as they do the opportunity of temporarily leaving the farm for work. Part of the problem is that living on a farm can involve restricted living conditions due to limitations imposed by physical isolation. As some women described: ‘And then I finished up on the farm here, raising children! I like to think that I have a fair bit to do with the farm. I do all the office stuff and try and do some of the marketing… as much as I can with the kids… I enjoy it on the farm… But it does get, can get, pretty lonely though. I feel like I’m a bit tied to the house a bit with the little kids… I mean I was brought up on a farm but... sometimes I would like to step away from agriculture because it hasn’t been that rewarding of late and just do something different’. ’Well at times I do feel isolated… I look forward to him coming in for coffee. It sounds terrible but if I am here all day… I look forward to them coming in for coffee or lunch so I can have a bit of a chat with someone’.

‘Its been dry since I have been here so it seems worse… But, yeah, look, I miss the city. Its quiet and I miss my family friends and being close to water with our nice climate. But still up here I’ve got the kids and I don’t really have time to be pining over my past’.

‘I’ve never really been from the country. I lived in my own little cocoon in Melbourne…

So it’s a bit different. Like, you don’t really hear about [news] for 2-3 days… And I wouldn’t have expected such a bad climate’.

In addition to the isolation, some women also discussed the physical impact of living in a drought-stricken rural area. Pointing in part to the fact that it was only female interviewees for whom the experience of being “close to nature” in a rural area relative to a city is new, some women commented on the heat, dust and dryness associated with the drought. For recent arrivals, coming to live in such an environment can represent a significant sacrifice: ‘It’s a big thing for city girls to come to the country… I suppose if you love somebody you’ll do whatever it takes. But once you’re settled in it’s a bit like “oh what have I got myself into, this weather, this drought”… Yeah, so, it is hard…’.

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‘I’m not really into the heat and dust and that sort of stuff. But that’s just where we are.

And we’ve probably had some bad years, so that probably doesn’t help much…’.

A number of interviewees expressed their sadness at losing gardens to the drought, whether their own or those of others.

‘I was trying to keep a little bit going, next to the house… But it’s got too hard. So, that’s disappointing… Silly, I know, but I just wanted a bit of life around, you know. It’s so dead out there…’

‘I think that’s all a bit depressing, not having a little bit of greenery around’.

‘Some farm gardens have been absolutely magnificent… 100 years old, absolutely beautiful… and the women have put a lot of work into them and to see them die, well…’.

‘Everybody’s garden is dead. You know, you go into town and it looks terrible’.

‘I’m usually quite busy in the garden but now there’s really no point, it’s all dead, so there’s a bit of lack of motivation’.

These quotes illustrate that just as beautiful gardens can lift our spirits – indeed, because they can – images of dead gardens can be a strong depressor. Not only can gardens provide aesthetic and environmental benefits to their owners, but they are often used or interpreted as part of the “public face” of the owners. So when a garden dies, associated with the loss of the personal enjoyment of a garden is often a sense of shame, regardless of the fact that no fault or blame may be involved.

Also affecting some women’s experience of the drought is the often-mentioned financial irrationality of investing money into a farm house; a situation that is to the fore when there is financial strain on the farm business. A woman commented with frustration on the competition for funds between house and business: ‘It’s frustrating, they’ll go and buy a new header but they won’t buy a new house. The farm comes first’.

Yet, like the health of the garden, the quality of the house environment does make a difference to the quality of life of women who find themselves needing to spend substantial amounts of time at home. As a new comer to the farm environment explained: ‘It also gets back to where you’re living and what sort of house environment you’re in and that sort of stuff too. If you’ve got an air conditioner or if you’ve got a reasonable house to live in, that helps’.

Overall, the drought is having many types and degrees of impact on different kinds of businesses and people. The circumstances of some farming families and individuals mean they are more directly affected by the drought than others. But even those who feel they have been negligibly affected by a lack of rain or loss of productionii are experiencing the wider effects on the community. They are also subject to the “background” pressures that we now discuss.

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2.2.3

The primary impact is the worsening of pre-existing problems The above discussion illustrates how the impact of drought is primarily experienced as the worsening of pre-existing problems, such as financial strain, work pressures or feelings of isolation. Such factors influence both people’s vulnerability to the impacts of drought and the shape of those impacts. For, as many interviewees explained, it is virtually impossible for them to isolate the specific effects of drought on their lives. As one interviewee put it: ‘You can’t go out and say “Well the drought has done this or that or something else”’.

Rather, as another stated: ‘It puts pressure on all areas’.

So, what are the areas the drought puts pressure on? This study suggests that at a collective level there are three main, inter-related areas of pre-existing stress: trends in the agricultural industry; processes of rural decline; unwelcome messages in the media.

Industry trends It is well known that the agricultural industry is undergoing a period of rapid restructuring.

This reduction of farm numbers and growth of average farm size is being encouraged by a number of industry characteristics, four of which repeatedly emerged in interview as important in the experience of farm families during drought and beyond. These inter-related factors – agriculture’s terms of trade, the pressure to pursue economies of scale, the debt levels carried by many farms, and the increasing technological and management complexity of farming – were described in ways that show them to be significant challenges for many farm businesses. Just as a lack of rain or stored water influences the “health” of a farm business, so too do these other “environmental factors”. How well a farm business is able to cope with them in turn largely shapes its ability to cope with the increasing financial pressure and complexity that drought brings.

By far, the most serious pressure upon farm businesses seems to be agriculture’s terms of trade. Every interview mentioned the problem of the ‘price squeeze’ for farm businesses: the high cost of inputs - such as stock, seed, chemicals, petrol, labour, equipment and, increasingly, water - relative to income. As one farming couple explained: ‘The pricing is going up all the time, like the price of fuel has just gone up and up and up… I think we’re in a squeeze at the moment. I really, really do’.

‘The expense of our chemicals – that’s another problem. Our chemical bill would probably be $80,000’.

Others stated: ‘It’s not so much the drought as the escalating costs’.

‘The big problem now is the high costs’.

‘It’s the cost of operating a farm that’s the problem…. The costs are now scary. They are scary’.

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‘It’s not getting any easier. It’s getting tougher to try and make a dollar, you know, because of the costs’. ‘[Even if we have a good crop] we still didn’t have any money because of the cost.

Just the cost of putting the crop in alone, that’s the biggest thing’.

‘You hear people talking about direct drilling and you think that sounds terrific - til you get your spray bill… You won’t wear out your equipment, but it will cost you a fortune in sprays’.

‘Nowadays everything is more mechanised and it’s costing more to run everything and that’s where the pitfalls come in’.

‘It’s harder to actually have a good year now… The cost of machinery now is getting ridiculous, and it’s hard to make that sort of money to pay for all that sort of stuff’.

‘How much input you need in your cropping program – that’s one of the big things…

That’s another thing that happened last year - up to the drought everything was going along well and then everyone put all the inputs in and then it just folded at the end of the year. That’s where it hit hard because you have spent all your money getting there’.

The increasing expense of inputs, which is perhaps especially apparent in cropping, creates two issues for farm businesses: the need for adequate cash up front in order to grow a product; and the need to produce a substantial quantity of product and/or receive a decent price for the product in order to simply cover the cost of the inputs. During drought, this already significant challenge is increased.

Many interviewees reported that their lack of income in previous years is severely limiting their ability to ’gear up’ for this year. Some have gone into debt for the first time or have increased already substantial debts to cover these start-up costs. The lack of return these farmers have received in recent years points to the low levels of production they have typically been achieving, with some indicating that production has been down for 10-15 years, as mentioned above. While some interviewees have received good prices for their products in previous years due to drought-induced shortages, some have not. Those selling sheep, for example, have recently been faced with generally poor prices due to a flooding of the market by farmers seeking to avoid having to pay for feed and water to keep their stock in drought. One of the main incentives for maintaining at least core breeding stock during a drought, however, is that the input cost of replacing them once the drought is over can be prohibitive. Overall, the cost of inputs influences not only how resistant a farm business is to the impact of a drought by dictating in large part the financial consequences of a drop in production, but it influences how resilient a farm is following drought. That is, it influences the degree to which a business can ‘bounce back’ from the impact of drought.

One of the favoured ways to try to decrease economies of scale. As indicated above, the substantially over recent decades (Barr et al. expressed a keen awareness of the pressure on Some stated:

the relative cost of inputs is to pursue average land area of farms has grown 2005, Taylor et al. 2006). Interviewees them to expand their business operations.

‘The secret of farming is we keep buying land - just keep buying land’.

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‘There’s more pressure on everyone to buy land ‘cause we either stay in it and stay viable, or get out’.

‘You can see that the bigger farmers are getting bigger. They’ve obviously set themselves up in areas to be able to do that’.

Purchasing or leasing additional land is a further cost for businesses to bear. Some interviewees indicated that exacerbating this situation is the rise of corporate farms, who can out-compete smaller operations by offering more for land, pushing the price of land up. As one interviewee explained: ‘If a young bloke is having a crack, you don’t want to be competing with a big company… So I guess that makes it harder for a young bloke who is wanting to have a crack and buy some affordable land… You can’t really compete with a superannuation company who doesn’t care whose money they are spending – they are just spending it’.

The competition posed by large companies is often worsened, he explained, in drought conditions because such businesses are relatively less affected by the immediate financial impact of the drought.

‘You have to invest a lot of money to get into [farming]. You have to be willing to say: “Right, in 10 years time, I’ll do well then…”. And in fact the first few years might be bad, a set back, which is the kind of thing that is happening now… Whereas big companies come in, ones with a lot of equity behind them, and they’re happy enough to come in because they can handle the long haul… But an individual can’t do that’.

A number of interviewees also commented that corporate farms contribute little to the local economy as they purchase many of their inputs from elsewhere, often in larger centres such as Melbourne where they are cheaper. As one put it: ‘They go in and deal with the head office and get all their chemicals cheaply or whatever… Its big corporates dealing with big corporates’.

The cost of inputs and land mean that many farm businesses are carrying increasing levels of debt. With debt comes the unremitting pressure of regular interest payments, regardless of fluctuations in one’s income. Given that the slower a debt is paid off, the more interest ultimately needs to be paid, an inability to pay off the principal loan can trap farm businesses in a downward financial spiral they may struggle to escape from. For the reasons discussed above, such a situation is made more likely by drought conditions. Numerous interviewees pointed to the burden of debt payments as the main pressure they are under. As some stated: ‘I just dream of being out of debt and in the black again’.

‘Debt, that’s the problem. It has just crept up and gotten so great now’.

‘We’ve absorbed the new [drought-induced] debt into the business … but you get to the stage where you can’t absorb too much more… It’s very dangerous, at a dangerous level’.

‘People seem to get down a lot more than they did in the old days… I think because of the risk debt level… At one time you used to own, but now you owe’.

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‘Even with no money coming in you still have the expense of putting that crop in each year. So I guess, you know, you borrow more for that…’.

‘It’s all ok at the moment, but you wouldn’t want to borrow much more... A lot of people will have to borrow money to get a crop in this year though. A lot of people will have to borrow and it will make it really hard for them’.

As discussed further below in the section on assistance, debt burdens are the reason interest rates are of such concern to many farmers.

The final characteristic of the contemporary agricultural industry acting as a pre-existing stress upon many farm businesses - and thus increasing their vulnerability to the impacts of poor conditions like drought - is the increasing complexity of farm management and technology. While many farmers increasingly use consultants for specific advice, modern agriculture demands a highly sophisticated level of technical and business management expertise of farmers as they filter and synthesise advice from a growing array of sources. As an interviewee contemplating retirement commented: ‘That’s another reason for getting out: the machinery’s got too complicated. You know, like everything’s computerised. Some people are just naturally technically minded, but… I have learnt to get on the internet. That’s probably as far as it goes’.

Computer skills are demanded not only in the technical arena, but in the office. A number of interviewees mentioned the move (albeit partial) in grain marketing to multiple sellers and a futures market as an area they are concerned about. Marketing in general and managing offfarm investments such as share portfolios also arose as areas of expertise that some farmers feel currently ill-equipped to handle. The technical and management complexity of farming is exacerbated by drought in a number of ways: the decreased applicability of some recommended changes, such as marketing when there is little to market; an increased area of complexity to consider in decision-making, such as climate forecasting; a decreased financial capacity to purchase advice or implement changes about the increased complexity mentioned in the previous point; and an often decreased mental capacity to do the same, due to stress-induced exhaustion. An interviewee reflected the first point in a comment about his newly graduated son: ‘If it doesn’t rain, it’s not going to work. Whatever he’s learnt, it’s not going to make any difference’.

The upshot of the above industry changes is that at a business level alone many farmers and their families are experiencing a significant and even unbearable amount of pressure.

The following quotes sum up how many are feeling: ‘There’s a lot more pressure now… there’s certainly a lot more pressure on us all’.

‘We’ve been banging our head against a brick wall for a while and getting nothing back’.

‘There’s just not enough money in the whole job now. There is no real reward for what you’re doing’.

‘If you have a really bad year… when you get down to the bottom line at the end of the year you normally say “Oh, we’re still going, still OK”. But now… It’s just, it’s not easy, it really isn’t easy’.

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‘Everything has caught up. Whereas in other years, it was bad, it was usually only one problem at a time’.

‘I just feel that they were in deep enough before the drought hit, and the impact of the drought on top of that… well…’.

‘15-20 years ago you could afford to have a drought, but now you just can’t – it takes too long to recover from it’.

It is only in the context of this “background” situation that the impact of the current drought can be assessed, for it is through this situation that the drought impact is being experienced.

A further “background” situation shaping the lives and experiences of farming families is the state of the rural areas. Let us now look at how this situation is not backgrounded in the lives of farming families or their experience of drought but is constitutive of them.

Rural decline In discussing their lives and the effect of drought on them, interviewees frequently mentioned two inter-connected elements of “rural decline”: demographic changes and loss of services in rural areas. Like those discussed of the agricultural industry, these trends are worsened in various ways by the direct and rippling effects of drought conditions.

As a group, interviewees expressed concern about four demographic changes occurring in their living environment: depopulation; in-place ageing; a growing gender imbalance; and the in-migration of lower socio-economic groups. Intimately tied to the rationalisation of farm numbers, the depopulation of rural areas is a widely recognised phenomenon in Australia and rural areas internationally (Gray and Lawrence 2001, Hugo 2005). Many interviewees demonstrated that for them depopulation is not simply a distant theory or trend. Like the abstracted notion of “Australia’s terms of trade” - or even “drought” - the sterile phrase “depopulation” refers to a key and often distressing part of many farming families’ lived experience. It is about the erosion of their local communities as friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances leave to live elsewhere. It is about the ripple effects of having less people in the bank, in the café, at the school, on the football team, with the consequent loss of some of those services and activities. And it is about a sense of being left behind, of being part of a threatened, diminished and even spurned way of life.

The following quotes illustrate the phenomena and the effect it is having for those “left behind”: ‘We’re a bit light off for neighbours that’s for sure’.

‘The town is a hell of a lot quieter these days’.

‘That’s the saddest thing, the population decline’.

‘Because people have moved away… he’s drifted out of the social life. He’ll go and get the mail and talk at the Post Office but that’s about it… You go to the pub for tea or something, but there’s not many people’.

‘People get older and retire so there’s not as many people around… I don’t think the town will ever get bigger; it will probably only just get smaller. We’ll probably be lucky to have what we’ve got here’.

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‘Things have changed that much in the last 10 years. 10 years ago if you had your CFA book out then I could draw just about every second house that had somebody living in it, but now the farm has been sold and most of the houses are empty, and falling over and that sort of thing. And that is just in the last 10 years, who knows what the next 10 will bring. Especially if we keep having these dry years. Some people just get jack of it, and some people are jack of it now, well most of them. And people are going to give into financial pressure and all that… It’s a bit daunting really’.

Nationally, depopulation is not occurring evenly across the rural population. Rather, disproportionate numbers of young people are leaving rural areas and/or are not coming to live in them as older people die or leave to retire. Combined with a low birth rate, the result is a rural population skewed towards older people (Barr et al. 2005). Interview results provide support for the existence of this trend: ‘There’s a generation missing now’.

‘The older farmers that haven’t got anyone coming up, a son or daughter coming up, they are getting out now, I think… So, it’s just, you can see that there are people leaving’.

‘Certainly the farms are getting bigger and people are selling out, packing up. Kids aren’t encouraged to come back on the farms because there’s not enough there. All it is, is worry and everything. Some of the sons are saying, “No I don’t wanna be a farmer”. They’ve seen what it’s done’.

‘There’s probably not that many farmers who are in their 20s anymore. That age group – there’s not as many coming back. Whereas our age group [mid 30s], we had a fair influx of people coming back, which socially was pretty good. But certainly now, I can’t think of a farmer who is under 23… We’re by far the youngest around here’.

‘If we left, our parents would say “what’s the point?” [of staying]. Then, all of a sudden you might have a young generation, the medium generation and the older generation all move to Geelong or whatever, and that affects the town. It does happen. It happened last year…’.

‘We seem to be one of the younger ones here, and we’re in our sixties!’

‘When I first came to the farm, there were a lot more people my age. So it was quite good… There was a lot of people in town… played footy, it was such a life then, it was quite good…A percentage of people who were then are still here now… But people come and go. It’s amazing how people come into the community, stay for a few years, you get along pretty well, then you don’t speak to them again and someone else comes along, you muck around with them, don’t see them again…It’s more the younger ones doing that… The thing is, now no one fills the gap…no one else comes along… In another 10 years… I don’t really like to think about what might be the case then’.

‘The other family that left, they were sort of living 5 mile that way… We had a lot to do with them through the kids. We were starting to have a lot more to do with them, so it was a bit sad. We had them around for lunch one Sunday and… he stood up and said ‘we’re going to sell the farm, its going to be in the paper on Tuesday’. And I thought ‘geez’. You think, it’s another family gone, another 3 kids off the bus. That’s the worst BCG & RMCG

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part, because every time someone leaves its fewer and fewer people on the bus. And we were sort of looking forward to having another kid the same age as X to be able to pick up after school or whatever. Just to have a neighbour to share the trips with. One could drop them off and the other pick them up. Or even just to have a little friend to come over and play. Which is what it used to be when we were kids. I had people that I used to ride motorbikes with, you know cousin’s places and friends places and that.

And now there is hardly anyone, and I feel sorry for these kids as its not going to be as social when we were growing up you know’.

Another national trend supported by the reported experiences of interviewees is the disproportionate loss of women from the rural population. We have already seen above some of the challenges facing women living on farms and how these are exacerbated by drought. Work by Alston and Kent (2005) suggests that most women who leave rural areas are young and are not returning because of a lack of desirable educational and employment opportunities, reflecting in part the traditionally male-dominated character of agricultural and rural industries and in part the loss of services in rural areas (discussed further below). An interviewee’s comment that a neighbour’s daughter ‘has shifted and started again’ because ‘she thinks there’s no social life’ in the town also underlines the positive feedback loops that are set in train as the effects of losing young people and women from a community on those left behind encourages further losses in the future. One of the results of this progressive loss of peer groups is that: ‘there are far too many single blokes on farms’.

Countering in part the departure of young and female members from rural communities is the arrival of newcomers from urban areas. Numerous interviewees commented on the inmigration to their local towns of families and individuals who – being, it is believed, predominantly reliant on government payments for their livelihood – are attracted by the relatively cheap housing in such locales. Despite their communities’ struggles with depopulation, interviewees’ reactions to the change strongly suggest that existing town inhabitants are not celebrating this influx of people as a means of restoring their precarious community structures. Rather, it seems that the new residents are perceived as a further threat to the survival of the pre-existing communities because of what appears to be their different attitude to the very notion of community. Referred to colloquially as ‘ferals’ and ‘dole bludgers’, what is striking is how consistently these ‘different’ newcomers were identified by interviewees, both as a homogeneous group (despite few obvious links between them), and as a problem. Some interviewees explained their concerns: ‘There’s a… how do I say it?... lower socio-economic group… There is a real divide – it’s like there’s them and there’s us…. A lot of them come into the town and they just don’t get involved… They don’t understand the community, like the way it works. You get in and you work and help out, but they just kick back’.

‘They come to the area and they take everything, they demand everything, and put nothing back’.

‘I find that those people don’t really support the town very well’.

‘They are not community minded’.

That is, it is perceived that the new arrivals to many rural communities do not value the same things about the community as those already there or, if they do, it is felt that they do not understand or are not prepared to give what is needed to maintain those valued attributes. With communities struggling to cope with the changes wrought by the selective BCG & RMCG

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depopulation processes described above, a cultural clash between the new inhabitants and the diminishing number of established ones no doubt seems especially painful to the latter.

By speeding up the demographic processes involved and encouraging calls for more community spirit and cooperation than ever, the drought is exacerbating the clash of cultures at a number of levels.

One way in which the newcomers generally do contribute to the community is by feeding (government) money into the local economy. This brings us to the second main aspect of rural decline mentioned above: the loss of services in rural areas. As a result of supply and demand economics, businesses in rural centres – agricultural and non-agricultural businesses alike – are suffering from the inadequate levels of patronage, and in some cases employment, which flow from population decline. As found in the State of the Region report for the Wimmera Southern Mallee cited in section 1.2 above, the pressure on nonagricultural businesses in the region has been substantially increased by the massive fall in agricultural production caused by the current drought.

Interviewees expressed a keen awareness of the pressures on local businesses, which are after all often their place of off-farm employment or run by friends and acquaintances. It is for this reason (and the cost of travelling further afield) that many try to demonstrate a degree of loyalty to them, although they also explained that the apparent cost savings of shopping in larger centres is a necessary consideration as well. Despite this support, a sense of fatalism about the demise of at least some local businesses was also expressed. As these interviewees put it: ‘You can’t get any fuel in town. There’s just basic things at the shop… It’s not a nice place to live’.

‘If you’re only making just above wages and you’re not allowed to be sick and you’re not allowed to go on holidays, you have to ask - is it worth it?’

‘If you lose something in town, there’s no reason for something new to start up…

There’s no reason to start up a new business in X. There’s not even public transport in town. If you were going to start up a new business, the last place you would look would be X… A couple of years ago it might have been different… but people don’t want to come here to work… Why would they?’.

Coming back to the influx of a lower socio-economic group into many towns in the region, the cheap housing that is the apparent attraction for them is not what such communities want to be known and valued for, particularly given that the availability of such housing signifies their population decline. Rather, they want people to be attracted to their area by the quality of employment and social opportunities. Yet, those who have arrived are perceived as disinterested in both and, furthermore, it is feared that their arrival makes the area less attractive to those who may take up such opportunities, thereby hastening the loss of such opportunities from the community.

Schools play a central role in rural communities, providing: a core service to the population of families - especially young families and young individuals - that such communities want to retain and attract: an important source of employment of a type that often appeals to women; and a hub for community activities and sport. Because of this, the status of such schools is often taken informally as a litmus test of the health of the community. This was evident in the discussion of schools and the reduction in their size and numbers in the region by interviewees. One woman commented, for example: BCG & RMCG

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‘You can see that the school has it’s lowest numbers ever. There’s no pre-school this year because there’s not enough young children’.

A general loss of services and associated long-term rural decline is a real worry for interviewees. Beyond schools, people specifically expressed disquiet at the decline of medical services, which are important in supporting an ageing population.

‘We haven’t got a doctor here anymore… And there are no ministers at either of the churches now and the participation is very low’.

‘When I was a kid… it was a fairly thriving little community for a long time. Then [retired farming couples] sort of took that next step [to bigger towns]. Now they’re taking an even bigger step and they’re going to Horsham or Bendigo or Ballarat, Echuca. They’re going for the next size town because if they need medical things they’ve got it there…’.

As discussed in a subsequent section, the loss of voluntary organizations and activities, which are also important in supporting an ageing population, is also of great concern to many interviews.

Interviewees are aware of the difficulty of pointing at a single cause for the changes described above. In particular, they are aware that while the pressure on schools and other organisations is intensified by changes brought about by the drought, there is a more pervasive demographic decline at work. As two remarked: ‘The schools are getting small, but I don’t know if that’s to do with the drought or to do with the shift’.

‘People are certainly leaving and shops have closed over the years… I don’t know if you could blame that sort of thing on the drought’.

Overall, there are multiple causes and effects at work. Some of the trends caused by and contributing to the decline, structural ageing and change to local populations that the drought is exacerbating are represented in Table 2 along with an indication of where in the Wimmera Mallee region they were reported to be at work. In general, the issues discussed above seem to be relatively pervasive throughout the region, although the town of Birchip appears to be something of an exception. Important positive situations, like the reopening of a takeaway food shop at Jeparit and the employment supplied by the retirement home in Minyip, are also listed below.

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Table 2. Examples of social trends reported to be at work in Wimmera Southern Mallee region and where they are occurring

Negative trends

Example trend

Area(s) in reported*

Loss of local sports clubs (or merging with another area)

All except town of Birchip

Loss of small businesses

All except town of Birchip

Loss of medical services

Minyip (Marnoo area)

Loss of ministers and congregation of churches

Quambatook area, Jeparit area, Watchem (Birchip area), Sea Lake area

Burden of community committees declining number of people

Positive trends

falling

on

which

trend

was

Quambatook area, Minyip (Marnoo area)

Decline in school numbers or quality

All except towns of Birchip and Corack (Birchip area)

Cultural clash with new low socio-economic group

All

Loss of tourists and community activities due to dry lakes

Sea Lake area, Jeparit area

School numbers and quality steady

Birchip area

Sports and other clubs/activities well-supported

Birchip area – general finding; Lubeck (Marnoo area) – general finding; Serviceton (Kaniva area) – golf club; town of Quambatook – log cabins built by volunteers

Strong local businesses/services

Murtoa (Marnoo area) – general finding; town of Birchip – general finding; Minyip (Marnoo area) – Retirement home; town of Jeparit – takeaway shop re-started; town of Quambatook – health service

* This table is not comprehensive; it provides examples only. These examples are heavily coloured by random differences between interviews arising out of the different topics interviews covered. It is essential that an absence of response is not to be taken as an absence of the phenomenon from an area. Responses also reflect the subjective opinions of interviewees, which may not only be disputed by others but are often based on far smaller areas (local towns) than the loose geographic areas used in the sample design. Where a response is clearly more geographically specific than the six areas used in the sampling (Birchip, Quambatook, Jeparit, Kaniva, Marnoo/St Arnaud, Sea Lake/Nandaly), a more precise town is named. Where one of the centres used to label the six centres is used, unless otherwise noted, it refers to the general area, not the town specifically (eg “Marnoo area” in the table above refers to the sampling area centred on Marnoo and including other towns like Rupanyup, not the town of Marnoo only).

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Interviewees also raised an issue that results from rural decline and other pressures including drought: negative portrayals of rurality in the urban media. These images are unwelcome and a source of stress for some interviewees. The issue of and debate about climate change is also a source of concern for some.

One thing viewed as both cause and effect of rural decline is negative portrayals of farming and rural areas in the media. While some interviewees are disinterested in the issue, for others it is a source of anguish.

‘What I really hate is the ads on telly where they depict a farmer as broken down with a dreadful old hat and a flannelette shirt on and that really upsets me. That’s the impression that they’re giving off about farmers. Nowadays farmers have got to be business people and I think some of these television ads have a lot to answer for’.

Key to the frustration is the media’s emphasis on problems in its coverage of rural issues, playing up nostalgia for Australia’s pioneering past in which tough conditions are celebrated while also implying that urban areas are superior. Dramatic images of the drought are the quintessential example of rural hardship, heightening some interviewee’s frustration at general attitudes towards rural living. As one farmer commented: ‘Because it’s pumped up by the media, I think some people think we’re living under a bit of tin’.

The media’s emphasis on the problems facing rural areas involves a keen interest in how rural people, and especially farmers, are coping. Comments by a number of interviewees suggest concern that the focus on the needs of rural people can morph into a focus on how “needy” rural people are. That is, in a context in which self-reliance is strongly valued and encouraged, there is concern that rural people and their apparent neediness become incorporated in people’s minds into “the problem of rural areas”, that those living in rural area become represented as part of as much as victims of the problems they are facing. The consequent association between rurality and neediness can be a source of embarrassment, as indicated in the remarks of two interviewees: ‘It gets me, that stigma that farmers are all just whingers’.

‘Like, the ABC in the morning: you just turn the radio off. They’re good, but how long until the city people have had enough and say “We’re sick of hearing about this?”’.

The over-emphasis on and distortion of problems in rural areas by the media is resented for slighting rural identity and for tarnishing the appeal of rural areas to potential new entrants, visitors or supporters. It is also resented for its lack of effectiveness. For, despite the headlines about how hard life is in agriculture and rural areas, there is a perception that very little is being done to address the main issues (as discussed further below). The result is that combined with the sense of anger and injustice that portrayals of rural life engender in some interviewees, there is also a sense of hurt. As one interviewee said in reply to the question of what it feels like to be a farmer in Australia today: ‘Unwanted… Yeah, unwanted’.

Another problem associated with the media and exacerbated by the current drought is debate about the existence of climate change. Among the 30 interviews in which the topic arose, 30% of interviewees stated they do not believe in climate change and some seemed BCG & RMCG

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upset and even offended by suggestions that the drought may be part of a more permanent change.

‘They’re telling us that everything’s going to get hotter and drier and that isn’t helping because most of us are in a terrible frame of mind anyway and you need all the positive things, not the negative…’.

‘It makes you wonder but we can’t answer it… If you believe everything you hear on the wireless then you wonder… Actually with what I’m hearing on the wireless, I just turn it off.’

‘We think about it. The kids worry about it more than us. I think we’re just trying to be optimistic and hope that this dry spell is just a dry spell… I’m just hoping’.

While some interviewees are firm in their belief that climate change is not happening, the current drought seems to be raising the possibility of it among the 50% that stated they do not know what to believe. The drought also seems to be cementing belief in climate change among the remaining 20% of interviewees who discussed the topic. As one farmer commented: ‘This drought has been a real doozee. None of the other droughts have been like this… I’ve always though there will be a good year after a drought but after this year I think there are no guarantees anymore… We can’t deny climate change is happening… We might get more rain next year but it’s going to be less than what we would have got if it hadn’t been for all this greenhouse gas’.

Overall, the possibility of climate change and the thought of more frequent and severe droughts is a source of worry for many interviewees. Combined with the length and severity of the current drought, the prevalence of discussion about climate change is highlighting the potential for a further dimension of uncertainty in the already unpredictable realm of weather that farming families are uniquely exposed to.

To understand the effects of the drought on farming families, it is critical that we understand these background issues. Both in the agricultural industry and rural areas in general there are serious pressures at work that determine the avenues through which vulnerability to and the experience of the drought’s impacts are expressed. While many interviewees underlined that they are remaining optimistic about their own and their communities’ ability to survive and recover from the drought, and some are defensive about representations to the contrary - as seen above – in many cases there is mingled with the defensiveness a thread of doubt.

Just as the drought has inspired the media to focus, unhelpfully, on the problems of rural areas, so too has it inspired some farming families to focus on such problems and the associated challenges they pose for their future. We now turn to explore this sense of questioning, ambivalence and decision-making.

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2.2.4

The drought has raised questions but stalled decision-making for many farming families For farming families, the drought can be imagined to be like a large bump in the road. For some of them, this bump - while being an unpleasant experience that may have damaged their mobility and shaken their confidence - has nevertheless not changed their course. For others, however, it has raised questions about whether they are on the right path. Slowing them down, it has opened their eyes to potential forks in the road, to other routes they could or may need to take, either now or down the track. At the same time, it has created a sense of limbo and stalled their desire or ability to choose one direction or another.

A strong theme that emerged from the interviews is that many interviewees and others they know are asking themselves what they are doing in farming. Induced by the drought’s escalation of the challenges they face, some farming families are asking the question that thousands of such families have asked over the last few decades: should we stay or should we go? As some stated: ‘You wonder what you are doing here’.

‘You have your bad days and you wonder what the point is’.

‘You look at the drought and all that and you think “Do I want this for my children?”’

‘We’re considering whether we are doing the right thing’.

‘You kind of think, “What are we doing now?”. If it’s going to be like this for the next ten years is it worth the struggle?’.

‘I think people are just, I mean, just sick of it, basically. And I guess they’re all in a similar stage of life, although some of them, the younger ones, just see it as another set-back. There’s more talk of getting off the farm. Everyone is thinking which else they could do. There’s a lot more of that kind of talk, mainly from the women, probably’.

‘We’ve had a lot of dry years and that’s changed our life and it’s probably changed a lot of people’s lives. I think of picking up and leaving right now…’

‘They’re good businessmen, but they’re shocking communicators. I’m always saying, “What do you want to be doing in five or ten years?” (Imitates husband) “Oh I don’t know, whatever”. But you can see it’s playing on his mind… It’s probably playing on all our minds’.

‘You just think, what are you doing this for? Yes, you’re doing it say because your son wants to come home on the farm but you know, what is he doing it for? What is he busting his guts for, you know, after a while?’

‘You often ask: “how do you keep going?” And when you bail out, do you bail out when you still have some money and assets to be able to do something else, or do you wait until the ship sinks and you’re thrown off your land almost? We’re not in that position yet but… as a city girl you kind of think “how long do you put up with this?”’.

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Some of this questioning is induced by the stage of life people are in. Those nearing retirement age are naturally turning to consider their future outside of fulltime farming. As one older farmer mused: ‘What we will do with the land I don’t know… If I stop farming, I don’t know whether I let the land or what… We are pretty attached to this place and we will probably stay here… This is home and we never ever thought about buying a house to retire into like a lot of farmers. If I’d have had a son on the farm, then it would have been different and we could have bought a house in town and I would have just kept coming out here every day. But as we are on our own here, we will probably stay…

But we’re not getting any younger, so we’ve got to soon think about what we’re not going to do’.

But the drought has introduced a new urgency and angle to the questioning. As mentioned in a previous section, for some of those near retirement age, the drought is raising the question of “how and how soon can I get out?” as much as “do I want to get out?”. By diminishing their income, it is delaying their retirement. As the following illustrates: ‘We’ve probably had a few sleepless nights wondering whether we should or whether we shouldn’t. If we had had a good year, we would have just gone ahead with it’.

‘If I won Tattslotto, I probably wouldn’t bolt straightaway, but it would be pretty close’.

A couple explained their thinking: ‘We’ve always enjoyed a challenge, you know. We’ve sort of bought more blocks and then you spend time fencing them and tidying them up… But we haven’t had that opportunity lately, or the pleasure’s gone out of it or something. We haven’t got the money to put into it I suppose. We’re not sort of moving on… So we’re thinking of getting out’.

Partner ‘Look, I enjoy change – which you’ve got to really push the limits – but its harder to change now than it used to be… You’ve got to have young people out there having a red hot go. That’s the way – to make a real go of it… But you know, too often you see, well farmers around here that have probably been winding down for 10 or 20 years and I don’t know, but its not my idea of how to do it. We’ve just got to get out’.

The question of retirement involves family as well as financial dynamics, including the often fraught issue of farm succession. Anxiety about a lack of resolution about the future of a family farm is being exacerbated in some cases by the drought. While a few younger interviewees described themselves as waiting for the older generation to move over or leave the family farm – in some cases as the older generation tries to earn the financial capacity to retire - a number of interviewees of retirement age also described themselves as waiting. In this case they are waiting for the younger generation to come home to the farm or to decide whether to do so. As farmers in this situation commented: ‘I sort of thought I’d be retired by now, but X says he’ll come home soon. We’re waiting for his sake’.

‘I’m locked in. Waiting for the boy to settle down’.

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‘I’ve got three boys… And they told me never to ever sell the farm, that one of them will come home to take on the farm… It is a bit depressing… I don’t know what I’m doing’.

In the meantime, these farmers and couples are having to keep working, and for many of them the drought has meant that this has recently involved losing rather than making money to retire on.

The pressures at work in the agricultural industry described in the previous section are also combining with the drought to trigger some people to consider leaving the sector. Some interviewees are weighing up the financial considerations of staying on the farm, with awareness that at the far end of financial difficulty one can be forced off the farm. As one said: ‘If next year is dry, then you have to go deeper into debt. You have to work out how much deeper into debt you want to get – the extra amount per acre that it’s going to cost you to service that… It really wouldn’t be a choice – you’d have to go deeper into debt… So, then the question is: is it worth it?’.

The perceived lack of choice mentioned in this quote is a common theme in interviews.

Many farming families feel their futures are constrained by a lack of options: ‘Eight or nine years we’ve had lean year, not droughts, but lean years. And when we had a good year then the grain buyers made it a lean year for us because they wouldn’t give us anything for our grain - so there’s another lean year... I can’t see it altering… I think we are going to be finding the same thing if it becomes a bit better season… So we are in a quandary here as to what to do’.

‘The bloke [from Rural Finance] turned around and said “Look, if we have another year like we’ve just had, things are going to be pretty bad”. Not like he wasn’t telling me anything, but - what am I meant to do?? Tell me, what is my alternative, other than selling out? You know, what do you do? You know, you could sell your machinery, you could sell your stock, but you would only get half their value… I understand what we’ve done, but I also ask, what’s the alternative? I don’t know what to do’.

‘I’m going to have a bit of a battle keeping the financial situation going… If it comes to the crunch next year… I’ll shut down and hopefully sweet talk the bank and go and get a job somewhere. I might go to the mines or somewhere you can make a heap of money. I won’t go to the bloody city… But there’s no point thinking about selling up because no one’s going to want to buy it anyhow I don’t think. So I don’t know…’.

As seen in the above quotes, associated with a perceived lack of alternatives is a sense of not knowing what to do. The future seems both predetermined and unknown.

Uncertainty about the future stems from the multiple sources of uncertainty in farming that interviewees frequently mentioned, such as weather, climate change, other environmental factors, environmental and biosecurity regulations, prices, the value of the Australian dollar, interest rates, bank policy, drought policy and government policy in general. For some, the outcome is a sense of lacking foresight into, control over and/or an ability to cope with, the future.

‘I don’t know. It’s all unpredictable’.

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‘We’ve got no control over it at all. It’s Mother Nature’.

‘It’s really out of our control because it’s so dependent on the weather as to whether we’re going to make anything or not’.

‘It doesn’t matter how good a farmer you are unless the wind is blowing the right way for you or you’re going to have adversity’.

‘It’s a gamble… If you sat in front of the fire and you flicked $50 notes in and you hope - “Are we going to get it back or aren’t we going to get it back?”. It’s a bit like that really’.

‘Are we going to survive?... The sun will still come up tomorrow and the sun will go down. What will happen in between, I don’t know’.

‘You never know what’s around the corner… You can have ambitions, but not strong ambitions’.

‘We do think about the future and one day building out on the farm. That would be a great dream. I don’t know, I suppose the last 10 years haven’t really showed that the dream is going to come along’.

‘Even though all these consultants or those fellas always say “What’s your 5 year goal?” and all that sort of stuff, I think that that many things change, if you haven’t got the ability to change what you think then you can’t cope’.

‘The stock market seems unreal at times. It just doesn’t seem real, but anyway’.

‘We’re price-takers not price-makers so we just have to take what is given to us’.

‘The markets are all over the place and you’ve got absolutely no idea of you know…

You think you’ve going to get something and you don’t. You know, down the track wool drops another 100 cents when you think it should go up 100 cents… So frustrating’.

‘If we did have a great year, we might just get the same out of if we were having an ordinary year… You don’t really get the joy and the benefit out of a grain crop because its financially unstable… Its very hard to budget from one year to the next not knowing what’s going to be at the end’.

‘It’s hard because you live a different way now don’t you? I don’t know, it’s just so uncertain. It’s the stress of it all…. You can survive on credit, but then if it gets much worse, a lot of people are going to have to go. We may be one too, I don’t know’.

‘Some of the things you do are governed by the money available to you, but it’s more of a, I don’t know, it’s the uncertainty of the future rather than a lack of availability of money… We can all go and borrow money to do things and if we needed a new house tomorrow, we would. But, I guess there’s less excitement in those sorts of things, you know overseas travel or you know, big renovations to your home or building a new workshop or things… I guess development things, you know, whether they be personal or business, take a bit of a backseat in a time where you’re just uncertain about what’s happening’.

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The combination of uncertainties they have to deal with in agriculture seems to be making many farming families question its reliability as a source of livelihood. As a result, many are reappraising the rationality of staying in the industry. The current drought has profoundly intensified this process of questioning. At the same time, given the at least traditionally temporary nature of droughts, people are waiting to see when it will end and how they recover financially from it before acting. As one person said: ‘No one wants to make an ultimatum decision at the moment’.

Agricultural factors are not the only ones determining people’s decision whether to stay on the farm or not, especially for the farming family as a whole. Aspects of rural living were variously cited by interviewees as both reasons to leave and reasons to remain. One woman who is fed up with rural living commented, for example: ‘If something happened to him [her husband], I’d be gone tomorrow because what would be the point, you know? I think I’m just now sick of having to get in the car every time you want to go somewhere. It’d be nice just to call round to your friends place and have a coffee or even if you wanted something at the supermarket you know’.

Others pointed to the rural community and environment as reasons to stay: ‘Last year… I thought, yes, I could pack my bags and move on, not just then but generally I thought that. I could adapt and move other places…. Some days you think anywhere would be better than X… But as things got really tough… we had all this support… If we moved to Geelong or Melbourne or went mining or whatever, you know, there’d be none of that…Sometimes you can take that for granted until you look at it like, well, this will not be here if we go to another area… But when it comes closer, a bit more of a reality, it’s not as easy to do that’.

‘I could pick up and leave right now but X loves it here, having some space’.

Close on the heels of the question of whether to stay or go is the question of what one does in either situation. Those who are considering leaving particularly face the issue of what they would do, especially if they are not looking at retiring. Contributing to the sense some farming families have of being locked in to their current situation and constrained by a lack of options and uncertainty, is the lack of employment alternatives some farmers perceive themselves to have if they were to leave farming. As some interviewees stated: ‘You think… perhaps we could sell up and go. But then, what else would you do?’

‘The trouble is, if you’re a farmer and you’re really only a farmer, you go to someone looking for a job and they say, “What are you? A farmer? Oh, OK…”. It doesn’t really inspire much, you know’.

‘What do you do if you get out? My husband’s intelligent but he didn’t pass Year 11…

He’s a very good farmer and he can operate lots of machinery and chemicals and all that sort of stuff, but he hasn’t got any certificates that would be worth anything, so…’.

‘The thing is I - well X tells me I'm sort of due for, not due for the scrap heap, but the fact that I haven’t got a lot of qualifications, you know, all my qualifications are here.

You know, if I, even if I said “Righto, I’ll go up to the mine”, other than perhaps drive a truck, you know, there’s probably about ten people who would be in front of me for a BCG & RMCG

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job, because they’ve got a ticket or a this or a that, you know, whereas I’ve got none of that. I’ve just got, you know, life skills and, and all that sort of thing...'.

This aspect of the sense of lacking options carries an undertone of self-reprisal. It is probable that this contributes to the loss of confidence we saw in a section above that some farmers are feeling. By contrasting the skills used in farming to those needed in other jobs and seeing only limited overlaps, farmers and their partners are effectively emphasising how different farming is to other occupations. Combined with the sense of insecurity about the farming profession that the drought has triggered (described above), farming can be mentally categorised by people as out on its own as an inferior rather than a superior (or simply different) occupational choice. Whether one is considering leaving farming or not, the belief that one couldn’t do anything else even if one wanted to is a further blow to confidence and motivation. This kind of thinking seems to be worse for those who are older because the older generation is less likely to have qualifications to fall back on, many employers practice ageism, and an inconsistency can exist between the relatively physical jobs an ex-farmer may be contemplating doing and their level of energy or bodily ability to do them.

For those who want to stay in farming the drought has also raised many questions. For some, the drought is obscuring the future as shorter-term priorities fill the view. Most responses to questions about future plans were prefaced with “I don’t know…” and ended with simple though not easy goals such as ‘get out of debt’, ‘become financially stable’, or ‘get through the next 12 months’. For many, previous priorities such as expansion or handing their children a debt-free business or new house have been replaced with more immediate concerns about financial survival. As one younger farmer explained: ‘Probably one of the reasons we’re where we are now is during the good years, we were actually expanding. So we were kind of, weren’t putting money away in FMD’s and all this type of thing. Cos we were still expanding, and our machinery was catching up with that expansion and that type of thing. So, like we’ve gone from probably wanting to expand, to now it’s just to survive kind of thing’.

If people’s ambitions have not been curtailed by the drought, their belief in their current approach may have been. A significant number of farmers indicated that they are questioning their approach to farming, both in terms of enterprise type and specific practices.

The desire to change is often restricted, however, by the continuation of the conditions that have inspired the desire: ‘Ideally, we would - you know, you see people in other businesses who are just absolutely going gang-busters and that’s what I find most frustrating. There are things we need to change here… But the options are just so restricted where there’s not water to even diversify out from grain and livestock basically’.

A number of farmers referred to the issue of future water supply as a motivator and concern.

As one stated: ‘My biggest concern is the water situation. You know, we’re really in dire straits.

That’s my biggest concern’.

Some farmers described the measure they have been putting in place over the last couple of years to decrease their reliance on water, particularly externally provided water. Others mentioned what a change they expect the new pipeline to make to their businesses.

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Perhaps the most common change so far implemented by farmers is the habit of questioning the decisions and the “rules” they previously made them by on the farm.

‘Every decision you make, financial decisions, you think “should I or shouldn’t I?” you know’.

‘You sort of think twice about everything now. “Will I go and rip that paddock up?

We’ve had 30 points of rain, will I go rip it up? No, I had better wait until I get 60 points of rain”… Whereas before you would think: “Yeah we need that paddock, let’s go rip it up”. And you would whiz out and do it’.

‘The whole thing has changed… We’ve turned our business upside down just to try to find a recipe to get through’.

‘Now you just don’t, you wouldn’t do it. You might have the money there but you don’t know what the next year’s going to be like… Its like living with uncertainty’.

‘I think guys that have been around a while, you know they may actually have suffered mentally more through this time because they have spent most of their farming life following a set of rules which now don’t work anymore’.

In sum, the current drought seems to have triggered many farming families to ask fundamental questions about their direction. In addition, it has added difficult new questions to the mix. The result is that many interviewees seem to have a profound sense of insecurity about the future, regardless of whether they want to stay on the farm, leave the farm, or wait to make a decision. Even if the current drought turns out to be a temporary cyclical event, it seems that the heightened awareness of uncertainties and changes made in response to the questioning that the drought has encouraged could change quite permanently the outlook of many farming families.

2.2.5

Responses to the drought have had negative and positive effects on communities Economically and socially, local communities have experienced changes as a result of the drought. Economically, these changes have been overwhelmingly negative as the drop in income in the farming sector flows through to other businesses and organizations in the community. As seen in previous discussions and below, interviewees confirmed that they have pulled back on their spending.

‘We have cut back huge the amount we are spending’.

‘It’s basically a work of art or whatever you want to call it not to spend money… to close the job down’.

The recent WDA report on the Wimmera Southern Mallee region (WDA 2007) confirms the impact of agricultural production losses on the regional economy. Being solely reliant on agriculture, agri-businesses are worst hit. As a farmer explained about large agricultural machinery expenses: ‘People aren’t rushing anywhere repairing things… They’re deciding not to spend that money… Those businesses are suffering… so that has a big effect on the town’.

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Another group heavily reliant on agriculture is farm workers. These too have been impacted by cost cutting on farms. As one farmer explained: ‘On the financial side [farm labour] has been a bit hard to warrant at the moment because things have been pretty tight’.

The spending and employment connections between farming and the rest of a local economy are complex. Just as small businesses and farm employees are reliant on the income of farming families, for some farming families income is partially reliant on employment in small business. When a drought cuts the amount and pace of money flowing through a local economy as is happening in the Wimmera Southern Mallee – an economy already weakened by pre-existing pressures - it can set in place a dangerous positive feedback loop. Although no interviewees reported losing off-farm employment as a result of the drought, as noted above some did mention that opportunities for such employment are limited, which further restricts the options of those considering making off-farm income their sole income.

The drought has also impacted the social activities of local communities. This effect has been not only indirect, via an acceleration of the processes of rural decline described earlier, but direct. It has also been both negative and positive. On the one hand, it has negatively impacted community events and organizations by diminishing the amount of energy, time or money that some farming families have to devote to such activities. As some commented: ‘I think socially for me the drought tends to make me want to stay at home more because I don’t really want to talk to other people’.

‘It sounds anti-social but when you’re working so hard and have the kids, and things are so hard, it gets too much… Sometimes you have to look after your own wellbeing’.

‘That’s one of the hardest things in the community now – to get people together and to get motivated to go out and join in with functions’.

‘I just didn’t feel like facing people … I reckon I’ve probably had 3 or 4 months of that down in the dumps type stuff and you just don’t want to go out. So it just depends when things come up…’. ‘[People are] less involved I feel. You know, you’d think they would be more involved but I think people are loathed to maybe chip in or you know… It’s almost like stepping back. Everyone’s becoming, you could almost say, more isolated in a way... In general I’d say that they’re retreating into themselves a bit’.

Besides the fact that some people simply have a lack of time or energy to contribute to social activities, psychologists note that increased alone time can be an important coping strategy (Grivas et al 1999). Some individuals and families need such space to focus on solving the problems they are facing. Introverted personality types also need time to themselves to restore their energy (Grivas et al 1999). Problems emerge when there is too much isolation and an inability to communicate or interact with others develops (Davison and Neale 1990).

While the drought has had some negative social effects, it is important to note that, on the other hand, some positives have also emerged. To begin with, while some interviewees mentioned a deterioration in their relationships with others, some mentioned that going BCG & RMCG

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through the tough time represented by the drought had brought them closer to others, such as their life or business partners. As one commented of his brother: ‘We have a good understanding of each others’ abilities and personalities and I guess a better one now through a few tough seasons’.

Numerous interviewees also reported that they feel community activities in their area have improved throughout the drought period. They described how people have turned to such activities both for distraction and to give and receive support. For example: ‘A lot of people have just been doing other things [besides farm work]... A bit more bowls and a bit more other stuff, just to keep their minds distracted… More social stuff and voluntary stuff as well I think, which helps’.

‘We make sure that we stay connected. We get out and mix a lot because there are people that are needing a bit of support and we just all do it together’.

‘Small towns do have their little disadvantages… but what goes with it is the closeness and coming to help. You need it’.

‘A lot of friends, they’re probably so caring and understanding because everyone is going through the same type of conditions and we all live about here and want to look after each other in the end’.

‘There’s always something you can do. And it’s not just financial – it can be all sorts of stuff, community service and that sort of stuff. You can always help a certain amount of people’.

‘You get a lot of support because in X you know everybody... I always say when I come back from somewhere, thank God I live here’.

‘We do socialize a lot, with the footy club and all that, and I think that is good in a way ‘cause everyone sits down and you do talk very openly with each other. Even though you spend money when you’re there, it’s more helpful to be out socially than… sitting at home and having a drink and worrying about it, or something’.

‘Actually it’s been a terrific year in that way, it’s brought the whole town together and everything’.

Reflecting the emotion-centred coping strategies some people utilise in the face of stress (Grivas et al 1999), these comments underline that, as one interviewee noted, ‘people need people’ in times of stress. Social support helps deal not only with stressors, but with the emotional effects of them. As we have seen in previous sections, some communities seem better placed than others to provide desired support and social outlets.

Both isolation and social activities can encourage unhealthy behavioural responses to stress. One interviewee noted a rise in drinking as a result of the drought: ‘You notice when people are stressed - they’re drinking more… And we’re probably all going through a phase of thinking that way. I mean, we’re not alcoholics or anything but you turn to things, you know, when you’re worried and that, and you notice other friends are… You think, “Oh, I’ve just got to stop”, you know… “It’s just not the way to handle things, so, pull yourself together”...’.

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Noticing what friends are doing is another aspect of how stressors like drought can affect social interactions. Interviewees illustrated how the drought has heightened people’s “surveillance” of one another. As we now discuss, this surveillance represents looking to others in caring, searching and judgemental ways.

One of the results of the emphasis on the mental health of rural individuals by the government and media seems to be an increased degree of watchfulness within rural communities. Stemming from a desire to help – as well as an intensified fear about, and sense of responsibility for, the mental health of family and friends - some interviewees described how community and family members are now watching each other more carefully to ensure each other is OK. As one interviewee stated: ‘It’s a good thing, absolutely… People are looking out for each other’.

Some of this caring surveillance is the result of learning more about mental health through awareness-raising campaigns and some is the result of increased direct experience of the problems. As one farmer commented: ‘You really don’t know what depression is until you meet someone that has been through it’.

While important and well-intentioned, caring surveillance can become a cause for concern itself. Not only can “watchers” feel stressed by being “on guard” for others’ wellbeing, but “the watched” can feel suffocated and defensive by the increased attention. Ironically, both situations simply feed the problem.

A second form of social surveillance that seems to be increasingly at work during the drought is a “searching” of one another as people seek to better understand their own situation by benchmarking and learning from others. Many interviews indicated that people are benchmarking one another in order to try to position their own experience in relation to others and thus better understand it. An important part of constructing our social identity, such ranking is of particular importance during periods of stress and change when one’s identity and social standing is under threat (de Botton 2006). For example, an interviewee indicated that the drop in financial status they have recently experienced has raised the issue of “are we poor?”: ‘When do you actually say you’re poor? If you’re getting an income from one week to the next and you’re only living from one week to the next, then you’re struggling, but… that’s the life of a farmer isn’t it?’

As the above quote indicated, if we are suffering from difficulties, it is a comfort to know that others in our social group are too. Interviewees illustrated how we seek reassurance in not being differentially affected: ‘It’s not quite as distressing when you know everyone else is in the same situation’.

‘I don’t mind my neighbours having good crops as long as I have them too’.

‘If everybody were in the same situation, that would at least be something. We don’t hear about everybody else though – they could be millionaires… We don’t know, we just don’t know…’.

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For, it is not only our absolute conditions that determine the quality of our experience, it is our relative conditions. As the following comments indicate, it is a relief to know that we are not “the worst off”: ‘You can always look around and there is always somebody worse off than yourself.’

‘We probably felt fortunate last year rather than – it was disappointing but we still felt very fortunate’.

‘We always think too - you know we talk about it often - if we had another couple of dry years, we always talk about that fact that there would be a lot of people go out the door before us, a heck of a lot go out the door before us’.

The above suggests that even when problems – like natural disasters - are not self-induced, some “blaming the victim” mentality remains and those affected are consequently burdened not only with the problem but guilt for suffering its effects. As discussed later, this issue is particularly fraught in the case of drought because of conflicting interpretations about how unavoidable its impacts are.

Searching surveillance is also used to try to derive principles from others’ experiences to guide our own decisions. Such a learning style is particularly applicable to farming where research has shown farmers’ preference for “learning from experience”. A farmer described the process: ‘You watch each other and try and learn off each other. You don’t rank each other… but there’s a lot of comment about what everyone’s doing… If someone’s doing something differently, everyone’s going to know exactly what they’re doing… “He’s doing this… If that’s going to work maybe I could do it on my farm” sort of thing’.

‘I think it’s pretty important to look over the fence, we don’t do enough of it. A lot of the time you don’t face the same issue as someone 100km away from you, but somebody 3km away from you does, because your soil type and your current climate and that sort of thing is so similar’.

The relatively isolated character of farming means that many farmers rely heavily on farm media to glean information about other farmers’ experiences. One farmer was described by his wife as using the Weekly Times as “his bible” - as a rule book. This reliance on the media makes farmers especially sensitive to representations in it, as we saw in the discussion of negative portrayals of rural life above. Learning from one another is also especially important in the current drought situation given that the complex decisions many farming families are facing are clouded by uncertainty. As we discussed above, normal “rules of thumb” (eg. a drought year is followed by a good year) have been broken, leaving many farmers unsure as to what to believe or do. In this situation, watching others and ‘learning from their mistakes’, as one interviewee commented, is an important and rational strategy.

Social learning about how to deal with “personal” problems like financial difficulty, family conflict or depression, however, is limited by people disguising its effects. As an interviewee commented: BCG & RMCG

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‘It can seem to work well over the fence, but you don’t know what actually happens in their house and in their environment. They’re not about to come over here and dump on their family. And that’s the thing – no one will generally dump on their family, so I think a lot of the conflicts are internal, but no one ever knows about it’.

The privacy that retards social learning about “personal” issues is maintained despite the commonness of such issues and their collective worsening by a shared experience like drought. Part of the motivation to disguise such problems is that their “personal” nature threatens to set you apart under the surveillance of your peers. Not only does this invite a poor “ranking”, but a more antagonistic form of assessment, as we now discuss.

The third kind of surveillance that interviewees pointed to is of a more judgemental character. Reflecting one of the downsides of living in an (increasingly) small community where anonymity is difficult, and reflecting the way that some individuals feel threatened by changes occurring around them, including those accelerated by the drought, individuals’ behaviour can be the subject of value judgement by others in the community. This is evident above in interviewees’ descriptions of the behaviour – and values – of members of the lower socio-economic group that have arrived in their town. It is also evident in the astounding number of times cars were mentioned by interviewees. As one explained: ‘The car thing is a big status thing’. In an environment where machinery is of more-than-average interest, the quality and age of one’s car is a powerful symbol in agricultural communities. People’s status but also values are judged by how often they update their car. In a period of shared difficulty like the drought, people are keen to not only avoid standing out as more severely affected than others, but to avoid standing out as less affected and frivolous with money.

The following comments illustrate the role of one’s car in this: ‘We’re not going to buy a new car until the drought breaks because we don’t want people talking about us’.

‘If you did have some money to buy a new car in this environment and there’s somebody really struggling to get through… It can create a bit of a division in the community. … That’s the reason why I wouldn’t want to have a smart car’.

As we discuss below, judgemental surveillance of each other’s spending, particularly on cars, has also been intensified by the drought thanks to the government’s financial drought assistance system.

2.2.6

There is a high degree of dissatisfaction with the financial assistance system When it comes to government assistance, interviewees are generally ‘assistance wise’, demonstrating a broad awareness of the financial drought assistance on offer (summarised in Appendix 2). There is a greater range between those who have had first hand experience of the assistance process and those who have not, at least yet (Table 3). Some of the latter have self-assessed themselves as ineligible (sometimes based on past attempts at getting assistance), with some pointing to their assets and some to their off-farm income. A small number have not applied on principle, either stating that they do not agree with farm assistance or that they do not want to take it from those they believe are worse off. As one said, ‘I’m not a hand out man’. Another mentioned ‘my father won’t take help, and they probably need it more than we do’.

Table 3. Responses of interviewees about their experience of financial assistance (N=56) BCG & RMCG

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Have Applied

Have not applied

Successful

Unsuccessful

Application being processed

Selfassessed as ineligible

Do not want assistance

Intending to apply

28%

34%

13%

11%

5%

9%

Of those who have applied, 34% have been ruled ineligible. There is an immense amount of anger about the criteria used to judge eligibility. In particular, there is frustration that those who have made past financial sacrifices to avoid excessive debt are now being penalised for their efforts. As interviewees put it: ‘The people that have looked after themselves are the ones that don’t get it’.

‘Those who have looked after themselves and put a bit aside are not eligible’.

‘I don’t see why they discriminate against those who have put themselves in a better position by having off farm investments and trying to cater for super down the track’.

‘We’ll be discriminated against because we’ve saved money’.

‘I’ve saved money and we’ve put money into shares and I think we’ll be discriminated against when it comes to the interest subsidy because I’ve saved that money’.

‘It’s us honest and hardworking people that can’t get a cent’.

‘I can’t get any assistance because I have a working wife’.

‘We can’t get assistance like the big guys can, that’s what I am really savage about’.

‘They just throw money up in the air and only some people get it. That really gets under my skin… It hurts… The government says they won’t do it again, but they do it every time’.

‘We keep hearing about how much drought aid is out there for us, but we get sick of hearing it because we know that there’s none out there for us’.

‘Everybody had a drought last year, nobody had an income. I can’t see why they discriminate between some that have put themselves in a bit more of a positive position by having off farm investments and trying to cater for your superannuation down the track. And you get penalised for it while the ones who haven’t made any effort to get any off farm investment or to spread their tax risk…It can create some divisions’.

‘I don’t want assistance to be cut but I want to see it go to the people that need it’.

Many expressed the sentiment that assistance should be available to all farm businesses.

People are upset that the assistance scheme is creating divisions in their community. As BCG & RMCG

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mentioned in the previous section, this divisiveness is illustrated by the way in which the expenses of those who do receive assistance are judged for appropriateness. A sense that some who are receiving assistance are abusing the privilege is creating anger and what one person called ‘an undertow of whispering’. For example: ‘You hear of some people talking about their new 4WD and then you hear they got the aid. They get the aid but they spend it on things that are not really relevant to what they should spend it on… Some people certainly know how to play the system that’s for sure’.

‘I know a family who each went out and bought themselves a new ute and thought it was a joke!... Of course it was unfair and I don’t think it reflects well on anybody, honestly’.

‘One guy got it and it was a hefty sum and he’s never home, he has every weekend away, whereas we have to dip into everything we’ve saved’.

‘Those who get assistance are those ones that go away for holidays and get new cars… I don’t think that that is what it should be for’.

‘The accountants must tick the wrong boxes… I don’t see how you could afford to go on holiday if you’re as bad as the criteria that we’ve seen’.

‘Some people might genuinely be in trouble, but some farmers are going and getting themselves in trouble’.

‘I think farmers can be fairly judgemental on people that are getting subsidies… But once you have been in the situation yourself you’re a lot more understanding of other people who have been there as well’.

Inconsistencies between people’s demonstrable “signs of need” (such as the age of their car or farm machinery) and their eligibility for government assistance add to the widespread belief that the assistance scheme is unfair.

In addition to anger at the assistance system, there is anger at the way it is administered by Centrelink. Interviewees expressed frustration at the amount of detail required of them. Also unpopular is the frequent advice that applicants attend Centrelink in person. This can be inconvenient and expensive for many farming families who often live a considerable distance from the nearest Centrelink office. As one stated: ‘I love it when they say, “If you just pop in to your nearest Centrelink office…” When it’s a two hour round trip to just pop in!’.

Furthermore, this requirement heightens the emotional toll of the process on families. By placing or at least threatening to place their financial situation on display to an extent in a situation in which privacy is often highly valued and social surveillance is prevalent as mentioned above, making attendance at a Centrelink office a compulsory part of the application process heightens applicants’ already significant anxiety about the situation.

Numerous interviewees commented that they found the experience embarrassing. This embarrassment stems not only from their drop in income relative to their accustomed social standing and perhaps peers, but the apparent comparability it creates between their financial situation and those they do not count as their peers, namely those who routinely rely on Centrelink payments. As some interviewees stated: BCG & RMCG

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I feel like we shouldn’t be there. It’s not for people like us.

I felt embarrassed sitting there. You could see that a lot of people in there had never worked and never wanted to work… I hope I never have to go back there.

That was a horrible experience just being in that building… I just thought “I’m not going to be them”… A back door would have been good!’

These comments suggest that some of the resentment towards the lower socio-economic newcomers living in some towns stems from a fear that farming families may be associated with them through not only geography, but through experience and dependency. By tightening the overlap of these groups’ lives, the drought – via the administration of the financial assistance system - is fuelling this fear among farming families and thus the emotional toll involved.

Other frustrations with the administration of the financial assistance process primarily concern the timeliness – or lack of it – of the assistance. First of all, there is the process of declaring regions Exceptional Circumstances areas. The area identified by the government as South Western Victoria – which overlaps to some extent with the Wimmera Mallee region of interest in this report – was not declared an Exceptional Circumstances area until 3 March, 2007. All other regions of Victoria were EC declared by October 24, 2006 (www.ruralfinance.com.au). Some interviewees, such as those near Kaniva or St Arnaud, found themselves or good friends on the wrong side of the administrative boundary between the ‘exceptional drought’ in the Mallee Northern Wimmera area and the ‘unexceptional drought’ in the South Western area. These farmers and a wide variety of others expressed anger about the apparent arbitrariness of the declaration process, with ‘some guy sitting in the city drawing lines on a map… [and] determining our future’.

Another concern about the timeliness of assistance is the length of the application process.

This is both in terms of how long it takes to put together an application – compounded in some situations by inconsistencies in advice received by Centrelink - and also the waiting period to receive a decision and, if successful, the financial assistance. As one interviewee commented: ‘I think that they’re too slow coming through with interest subsidy. We had someone come and sit with us to fill it all out and we thought it would come through before Christmas but it still hasn’t come through’.

Many interviewees indicated that they felt the slow-moving pace of the process is out of touch with and insensitive to the urgency of the problems many of them are/were facing. As another put it: ‘It’s here and now that people want help’.

Many of those that received some financial assistance were grateful to receive anything. As some stated: ‘It all helps’.

‘We would have been lost without the help, we really would have’.

‘We’re just so grateful that Exceptional Circumstances is being offered because, you know, we just managed to get over the line and keep fighting all the way’.

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‘The big thing for us is that EC has come through… so that stabilises everything and gives us time to catch our breath, try and grow a couple of crops and get rolling again’.

The amount of financial assistance offered, however, was raised as an issue by some interviewees. A number commented that after all the wait, the amount they received seemed terribly small. As one said: ‘I think it is not very dignified that you put in all this work and at the end of the day all you get is a Health Care Card’. One interviewee mentioned that although the assistance is enough to keep a family going, it is not enough to help them make the kind of significant change they need to get out of their difficult situation and onto a new trajectory, so perpetuating their sense of being in limbo.

Overall, the question of financial assistance is highly emotive. It seems to evoke a cascade of questions, each of which adds to feelings of internal conflict for those involved. First of all there is the issue of how people feel about agriculture receiving financial assistance. A small number of respondents stated that they do not agree with it because other industries do not receive it. This inter-industry level view is then followed by a focus on who within agriculture is benefited by the system as people compare who is and is not judged eligible. As seen by the comments above, there is a strong desire for the system to be internally just and frustration that it is not. Finally, the focus seems to turn inwards as each family and individual faces the issue of whether to apply for assistance and whether they are eligible.

Compounded by the critical gaze directed at the agricultural industry in general, this stage of the process seems to raise ambivalent and uncomfortable feelings about receiving assistance, as people feel they need to but also, out of a sense of pride, do not want to.

Those that have received assistance generally expressed great relief and gratitude for it, but a keen awareness of the eyes of others means that the assistance often brings with it a sense of fear, humiliation and defensiveness.

A fear of visibility is behind most interviewees’ lack of interest in receiving financial assistance in the form of subsidies for school expenses like excursions, or the hampers offered at Christmas time. While most seem to appreciate the sentiment, they do not want to be seen as desperate enough to take the offers up. Indeed, some were insulted that others felt that they may need such assistance. Reflecting the kind of benchmarking and judgemental surveillance discussed in the section above, ‘there’s a bit of a stigma about it if you need help’. As other interviewees commented: ‘Small towns can be judgemental… And that’s why people have been afraid in the past to say “yes, we’re on a Health Care Card”…’.

‘There’s still that stigma, I must admit. Like, um, we’ve got a Healthcare Card, but I don’t like to… Like at the doctor’s surgery the other day I paid for it because that’s just me. I know that sounds terrible but you’ve got the whole waiting room sitting there… I think that’s what’s hard in a local area’.

Interestingly, a farmer who has suffered depression noted: ‘I guess after going through depression… the things I used to be concerned about, like having a Health Care Card or whatever, I couldn’t care less about any of that.

Whatever is there that helps you stay on the land… I just take whatever’s there, go for it, use it, stay on the business, make sure the locals are paid’.

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Having had the “personal” issue of depression revealed to the community, this interviewee seems to have developed a degree of immunity to the concerns about surveillance that are still held by many.

A number of interviewees indicated that they have used such financial counselling services or mentioned that they are thinking about using such services. Although still marked with a degree of stigma – as seen in an interviewee’s reference to them as ‘shrinks’ and anothers comment that he has ‘the will power to get by without them’ - such services increasingly seem to be seen as a rational response to the difficulty of planning for the future in the current conditions, including overcoming the bureaucratic hurdles needed to receive financial assistance. One of the effects of the drought is that it seems to have focused people’s attention on financial management. Associatively, it has raised their awareness of gaps in their knowledge and forms of assistance available. One couple that has used a financial counsellor stated that she was ‘absolutely brilliant’. Others were similarly complimentary of help they have received from Rural Finance. It is because of such a positive experience that one interviewee made the following recommendation: ‘I’d like to see money go to more… financial consulting people, like O’Callaghans or something… If there was money available for that - just to sort of challenge my views of thinking of how we’re going - cos I’m sure, well there is, there’s heaps of faults that need to be fixed. So, it’d be great if there was money available for that, a business consultant to look at your business and point you in the right direction a bit… Just to say “where do you go from here, are you going in the right direction or is it not viable?” Question your decisions I guess… I think when you’re in a drought, everyone knows their figures way better than they do in another year, they completely across what’s going on, so it’s a good a time as any to go in there…’.

The desire to be “pointed in the right direction” reflects the way many farming families are questioning their futures. Another interviewee raised another valid concern about the future: ‘Next year if we’re not in the drought, and yet we’re still recovering from the drought… that’s going to be really tough. Because they will cut the support after the drought’s finished… yet that sort of support needs to stay there for some time’.

Such a comment highlights that the government’s reactions in response to drought contribute to the uncertainties that drought raises for farming families. In particular, it highlights uncertainty about the government’s underlying commitment to the agricultural sector. As one farmer commented: ‘We get the feeling that government couldn’t give a damn about farming’.

Thus, despite its loud proclamations of financial assistance – and indeed, perhaps worsened by them – at least some farming families are waiting not only for the drought to end but to see what the government will do in response to a return to “normal” conditions.

2.2.7

Attitudes to social assistance vary widely While the majority of interviewees agree that financial assistance should be offered – indeed, should be offered more widely than it currently is - there was far less agreement among interviewees about the need for community initiatives like seminars or concerts where benefits are perhaps less tangible. The topic raised strong opinions on both sides, with some in support and some opposing them for various reasons. Other respondents,

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some of whom have been going to such events and some of whom have been ignoring them, are indifferent as to their value.

Approximately 34% of interviewees indicated that they appreciate information provision about mental health issues and sources of help available. Others, however, demonstrated that they are uninterested in or upset by such initiatives (42% and 24% respectively). For some people, the latter is because they are uncomfortable thinking and talking about “negative” topics and feel that such conversation is overdone and unhelpful. For others, it is because they feel insulted by the assumption that their mental health needs attention, reflecting an awareness of how they might be being watched, whether in a caring or judgemental way. For example: 'I went to one of the meetings with those speakers and they started talking about social pressures… I went to the pub half way through. I didn't want to hear that rubbish'.

'All these do-gooders going around reminding us that we need cheering up etc… To me its just reminding us to, you know, be depressed… I couldn't get out of there fast enough'.

‘In some ways it has brought people together I guess, but people don't want to talk about it all the time, and so they don't want to come'.

'Its to the point of saturation… A lot of people are switching the radio off because they don't want to hear about it anymore'.

‘They are good but they’re depressing as well. We’ve stayed away from some of them because they go on and on about the drought and we don’t want to talk about that… If anyone is actually depressed I think they would feel it’s making it worse’. ‘[They told us] to make sure your neighbour is all right... Well, we had a neighbour who had worked with us that committed suicide… They were pushing stress and suicide and I don’t know if that was necessary’.

‘They’ve pumped it up – they’re sort of pushing it too hard I think. People sort of deal with it and go through with it but there’s been a hell of a push with the depression.

The way they talk it’s as if we’re all going to go out and hang ourselves… I mean, it’s hard to know, people could be suffering worse than you think I suppose, but it’s one of those things that’s fairly hidden.’.

Reflecting their preference for problem-solving rather than emotion-centred coping strategies, others expressed frustration that funds are not being used on what they see as ‘more beneficial’ and long-lasting initiatives. Highlighting the surveillance of how community representatives – as well as individual families – spend money, these critics argued that the money would be better spent on buying water for sports ovals, fixing collapsed tennis courts or research and development on drought-resistant crops.

Concerts are another important type of social assistance on offer. They also appeal to some people but not others. As seen in the section above on community level effects, some people (30%) commented on how much they have enjoyed the increased social activity inspired by the drought and how they have benefited from community spirit building events.

An organiser of one such event commented that: BCG & RMCG

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‘This year was bigger and better. It was a get together as a community which was good. Everybody’s happy to do that’.

In actual fact, it does not seem that everyone is happy to participate in drought related community events. As for informative seminars (which are often combined with concert type events), some interviewees (34%) expressed concern that they represent poorly allocated money: ‘If they're going to spend money they shouldn't spend it on concerts. It might make you feel good for four hours but in a couple of days you forget about it'.

‘I wouldn’t bother getting the car to go in because its just another trip into town, you know?… I don’t really know that’s what needs working for. But we’re not your average… maybe if you had kids…I don’t know what sort of help people are looking for but I imagine most people are busy enough… I don’t really know’.

‘The Shire gets given money by the government to help people with the drought and cheer them up and I personally think that’s a real waste of money. I mean the evenings are nice and you sit around and have a nice casual time but, such a waste of money’.

One reason community level socialising is not favoured by some interviewees is because they prefer to spend time alone when stressed, as mentioned in the section above. Another reason is that people seek their social support in other ways, such as through smaller social gatherings: ‘To me, I think people are better off to have social evenings within their own groups, you know… They can help each other by… let everyone know that, you know, everyone is in the same boat… To me, it’s the little communities within the community that are important’.

‘We just recently had a few neighbours over for dinner one night and to me that’s probably more beneficial… But, then, I guess if people are worried about… If they’ve got family and are feeding the family and everything, I s’pose you can’t be entertaining too many…’.

A final reason some people are disgruntled about the rise in community spirit building exercises is that they see them as a form of the surveillance that has been discussed. One farmer’s comment indicates his sense of caring surveillance of his wellbeing: ‘I have been to a few of them [concerts] because if you don’t go people think you are at home slitting your wrists’.

Another interviewee implied that judgemental surveillance is applied to those who do not attend – and do not talk about the drought: ‘It’s kind of like, if you don’t go along and drought is not what you talk about then you don’t care or something like that. When its not even the case at all. If you don’t talk about the drought then its kind of like you’re just really casual and you must be going ok, and that’s not the way it is at all. It’s a bit of a mind game going on I think’.

It is a real disappointment for organisers though to not receive the support of community members in their own efforts to support the community. As one organiser remarked: BCG & RMCG

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‘It is very disappointing when you put these shows on and some families you think are going to be there don’t even turn up and support the community… I just hope that they stop and think about themselves and why they should have been there… We want to put great things on for the locals’.

Another type of initiative to help locals cope with the drought is psychological counselling. A few respondents (13%) discussed their experience of such counselling, mostly based in the past and all positive. Interviewees in general seem aware of but disinterested in such help.

The dominant response (66%) was that “I don’t want it but it should be there for those that do”, while 21% believe it is simply of no help. Pride seems to be the main obstacle to engaging with counselling: ‘It’s a hard one. The help’s there but people are very proud too. You don’t like to…’.

‘I think people also, which is probably a bit sad, that they’ve got good ways of covering up [depression]… In the smaller towns, people still have pride’.

Related to pride, some mentioned that, were they to need it, they would be concerned about the confidentiality of locally available services.

Finally, it was noted by a couple of women that the counselling services available seem to be slanted towards men. Reflecting the burden placed on many women as the “guardians” and recipients of their partners’ and families’ mental health, one woman commented that she would like to see a marriage counsellor and another stated: ‘I feel that the way they paint it, it always sounds like its, you know, support for the farmers. It always sounds like it’s the male that they’re there to help – you know, the bloke’s who are feeling its tough. And I don’t question that at all, but I also think that there a lot of women who have to put up with that second-hand – to try and support the husbands and be cheerful and keep the kids going and manage a limited budget. I think there’s a lot of women who need probably as much if not more than the men… it would almost be nice if they did a ring around and said “look, we just want to drop in”, because I think a lot of people wouldn’t go and approach… you know, ring up and say “I need counselling”, but if someone came they’d find a lot to say and sort out perhaps who needs more help. Because there’s some scary cases out there of people, you know, really struggling’.

This brings us back to the point that the impact of the drought reaches many people; and reaches them differently. As we have seen, current assistance, while useful, seems to reach only a subset of those who are affected and addresses only some types of impact. As we now discuss, some interviewees described what needs they feel are still unmet.

2.2.8

Longer-term and strategic intervention is wanted When asked about what they most need, the ubiquitous response from interviewees was rain and lost income. As one farmer said about the latter: ‘People ask “what do you really need to be helped?”. Just the $700,000 that we missed out on last harvest (laughs), that’s basically all we need! You’re not going to get that, but that’s basically it. The interest rate subsidies and the health care card,

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they’re really good… but it’s not $700,000, you know. Basically that’s what we missed out on because of the weather’.

Beyond rain and income, many interviewees (73%) stated that they do not know what is needed more generally. This common response points to the indecision that many are feeling in relation to their own lives. They do not have the solutions; rather they want assistance finding them. It also points to how such individuals generally do not have the opportunity to gain a “birds eye view” of the agricultural and rural environment, or in many cases a close knowledge of what those around them are truly experiencing. They do not feel qualified to speak on behalf of others or to give an overview of the issues. Instead, by pointing to their awareness of but lack of understanding of over-arching needs of their sector and communities, interviewees implicitly point to the leadership role they hope government and other organizations will play.

Some interviewees did suggest specific interventions. First of all, attention was given to reconfiguring current forms of financial assistance. As implied in the discussion of the topic above, there is a strong wish for business and family assistance to be more widely available.

This reflects two things. One is the desire to avoid the divisiveness created by the current model. As it stands, the current model does not simply have a neutral effect on those who do not receive assistance, it has a negative one. This is because of the strong role that individuals’ relative financial position to others plays in constructing their social identity, as seen in how people benchmark themselves relative to others. By those around you having their financial position improved thanks to financial assistance, you are, it can feel, disadvantaged. This felt effect can then unhelpfully exacerbate the occurrence of judgemental surveillance in the community. In addition to this felt effect, the current system’s lack of equity is disliked for the very real financial effect it is having on those presently living on savings. Being penalised by the system is particularly difficult to accept when you have worked hard to place yourself in what you feel is a relatively sensible and admirable financial position. It is also difficult to handle when you can see the erosion of your current financial reserves in the absence of any assistance decreasing your options for the future and your resistance to future droughts and other pressures. The current system’s creation of these immediate and future problems is seen as ignorant, uncaring and unstrategic, and numerous interviewees emphasised that a blanket approach to assistance would be more appropriate and ultimately effective.

The other call in regard to financial assistance is for any such intervention to take into account the long-term character of the financial impact of drought, given the costly outlays, income lags and, frequently, the extent of the financial deficit involved in farming. In addition to the families that need immediate assistance to cope with acute financial situations, all would benefit from assistance in coping with the more chronic situation that is being emerging. As a result, some interviewees called for an extension of current assistance into the future or the introduction of different longer-term measures. One farmer, for example, focused on the additional cost of water he is likely to encounter as long as drought conditions affect catchment storages, irrespective of whether there is average rainfall on his farm: ‘Water is going to be our biggest issue in the next 12 months… They won’t run the channel system unless the Wimmera Mallee storage gets up to 12%. Well at the moment, it’s only about 4%, so even if we get an average rainfall, it mightn’t get up to that 12% and we might still be looking at an average rainfall here on the farm side of things, but still get no water, so we might be looking at trucking water in for another 18 months yet. It could be a good 18 months before we do get a dam run…and we’re BCG & RMCG

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going to be relying on carted water... So whether maybe they want to do the tank rebate again and people can go and buy more tanks and put them on sheds, that’s going to help us out… And whether the government could even subsidise half rate or something to get water carted out, that could be something they look at, that would be money well spent… They’re two things that they could look at in the future, as a way to help…’.

Another farmer suggested low-interest loans over a number of years are needed to help his family business ‘come out of the hole’: It’s only begun. A whole 12 months is in front of us and whether it rains, it’s green, the water, it doesn’t matter. No money’s coming for 12 months. So I would like Howard to offer us what he offered us in 1982. And that was not a gift, but a loan… over, say three years at least, on at least 4% interest or under… I’m not after a gift, I’m asking for something that we’ve got to pay back so we’re all financed... Otherwise we’ll never come out of a hole. I can’t see us coming out of the hole... Forget about interest subsidy, we need just a straight out loan, a loan to be paid back in three years’.

Although quite different, these suggestions both illustrate awareness of the fact that the financial impact of the drought is going to linger long after the rain returns. Farming families are holding their breath not just for average rainfall, but for any subsequent cheques.

Furthermore, they need consecutive years of good cheques to help them achieve their predrought security. Interviewees emphasised the benefits of a long-term approach to financial assistance in recognition of the endurance that will be needed.

Long-term improvement also characterises the second type of specific intervention suggested by interviewees, which is assistance with business planning and financial management. Interviewees indicated that they would value boosts to this kind of assistance both for the immediate, strategic improvements it would make to their businesses and for the skills and knowledge it could involve them acquiring. Both of these effects would help those involved to reduce their vulnerability to the effects of future droughts and other pressures. As one woman explained: ‘I’ve probably been thinking a little bit more that we need to look at some financial advice, not just because I worry about the farm enterprise now, but I wonder and plan for the future. That would be how we would look at financial planning, would be to plan for our future… X has for 30 years very capably managed our farming decisions... But we have been saying for quite a few years now we need to purchase a house somewhere just so that, if things sort of go “kaput” on the farm, at least we might have a house that we can go and live in’.

Another emphasised the value of and need for rural financial counsellors: ‘I think the rural counselling is terribly important because I think, particularly around here, the majority of farmers really don’t know their business to the degree that we really need to now. I have spoken to a couple of guys that have rural counselling in the past and they said it’s just turned their businesses around and suddenly they started looking at it completely different and started realising that there are these” KPI’s” and you can fine tune your business. One guy around here was on the verge of going broke and selling up, and now he’s on the verge of retiring but he’s got assets and he’s doing okay. If it wasn’t for him he said he would have been finished...The rural counsellors - there are a lot of people using it and there’s probably BCG & RMCG

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more demand and we probably need more rural counsellors out there so I think it’s an important part of the drought funding. I think probably the best money spent is on those rural counsellors from what I see and look at others...it’s hard to sit down and do your finances but it’s an unfortunate fact that if we are to remain it’s either you get somebody to do it for you or get a handle on it yourself.’

More specific recommendations point to the need to enhance some farmers’ skills and knowledge around business-based topics like computers, superannuation, pricing, succession, off-farm income and risk management. As some stated: ‘I think what I would find helpful… would be in the lines of money management, even farm planning, budgeting type things, and doing it on the computer. Not just doing it in your head or in a book or whatever, but actually doing something so you can bring it up on the computer and say: “Oh look, this is going like this, so we need to change our spending on that”. Like I know… there are programs out there, but as for finding them and using them, I’d be at a bit of a loss’.

‘I’d like to be more up in computers and that but I just detest… I have a problem with the office...I used to do the bookwork too when it was simple and quick, but now…’.

‘Someone needs to guide farmers on how to put their savings into superannuation funds and negotiate this assistance equation’.

‘Probably pricing information is a bit thin these days, a bit more information on that would be alright.’

‘I think we could do with one of those succession counsellors or whatever, just to get us talking about it, you know, give us some idea of what we can do. But a certain member of this family would never go, so…’.

While a few interviewees mentioned needing advice in more technical or production-based areas, the strong message is that the foremost gap farmers perceive in their knowledge and skill sets – and thus ability to cope with difficulties like drought – is in the area of business and financial management. Perhaps reflecting the fact that business management emerged as a central topic in agricultural education after many of the interviewees had finished studying, the continuing dominance of the natural sciences in agricultural research and development, the expectation that adequate technical extension is readily available, and farmers’ recent focus on financial figures rather than production problems, it is growing the financial reserves and robustness of the business that is the primary concern of many interviewees at present.

The final area of recommended intervention tackles the larger question of rural decline and drought effects on rural communities. Like the previous two points, the assistance suggested has a financial flavour. One interviewee proposed, for example, that people working in towns more than 100kms from large rural centres are subsidised in order to help halt the population decline of small towns. Another suggested providing the grants committees of small towns with assistance in bringing in more grants and acquiring longer-term support for the towns. The potential role that Bendigo Bank could play in providing such support including assistance to local organizations and sporting clubs was mentioned in recognition of the positive effect it has had on other communities. Overall, assisting small communities was presented as a strategic response to assisting farming families in direct and indirect ways.

The above expressed needs reflect and add to the needs implicit in the previous sections.

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improve their own situation, little less the situation facing their sector and communities at large. We turn now to some recommendations about how others can best help, after drawing some conclusions from the preceding discussion.

2.3

Conclusions In summary, this report has presented eight key findings about the effect of the current drought on farming families: The drought is having a widespread and significant negative impact; The type and severity of its impact varies; The primary impact is the worsening of pre-existing problems; The drought has raised questions but stalled decision-making for many farming families; Responses to the drought have had negative and positive effects on communities; There is a high degree of dissatisfaction with the financial assistance system; Attitudes to social assistance vary widely; and Longer-term and strategic intervention is wanted.

These findings urge us to appreciate: the complex, accumulative and long-term character of the drought’s effects. We have seen that the effect of the drought on farming families cannot be isolated; it is impacting all aspects of their lives. It is having a complex and accumulative impact by acting through the many pre-drought pressures upon them, as well as through the introduction of the water and climatic stresses that they are uniquely exposed to. This complexity is apparent not only at the level of families, but at the individual and community levels, where vulnerability to the effects of drought varies according to the particular degree and combination of pre-existing stressors that are at work, whether that be isolation, the difficulties of inter-generational transfer and co-management, the loss of friends and family from one’s local area, a lack of social and educational opportunities, rising costs, escalating debt, growing technical complexity, a perceived lack of political priority, or concern about climate change, for example. This intersection of issues creates a lack of definitiveness about what is “the effect of drought” and what is the effect of other pressures, which adds to the uncertainty and concern many feel about the future. Not only was the start of the drought indeterminate and not only is the end of the drought unpredictable, but the question of what pressures will be relieved and what pressures will continue once it is broken is unknown, at the community as well as the farm level.

We have also seen in this report describe how, far more than being a merely physical phenomenon or problem, drought is primarily experienced by farming families as financial and psychological/emotional/social pressure. As for all individuals, these two aspects are tightly coupled. For farming families, however, this coupling is especially apparent thanks to the enduring inseparability of their business and family futures, the unavoidable interconnection of the wellbeing of farming and rural communities, the pre-existing problems facing such communities in the financial and social spheres, and the way the cultural idiosyncrasies of rural life can heighten the emotional impact of one’s financial problems.

This coupling means that addressing financial pressures can create emotional and social benefits, just as addressing psychological issues can help to improve financial performance.

As we have seen, different people have different preferences for which type of problem is tackled directly and problem-solving and emotion-centred coping strategies are both evident.

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As many people perhaps build up to full problem-solving mode, and as the multi-faceted effects of the drought accumulate, it is likely that the ultimate impacts of the drought are not yet apparent. As we have seen, many farming families are in pause mode. They are watching and waiting before acting, and no matter how much we may want to predict and prepare for the future, we cannot know the content of their eventual decisions, whether any change will be piecemeal or dramatic, or what their subsequent situations will entail, for they do not know themselves. It would be a serious mistake to interpret a snapshot of the current situation – as represented in this report or elsewhere – as “the effect of the drought”, just as it would be a serious mistake to focus only on “measurable” effects like lost income or farm sales. Given the way the futures of rural communities depend on the combination of individuals’ decisions, the uncertainty present for each individual and farm family is magnified at the collective level. At the same time, as members of those rural communities, farming families make decisions that take into account, at least to an extent, the way others’ decisions (such as whether to stay or go, to participate or not participate in the community) have impacted or may impact on them. This can lead to the snowballing or negative, spiralling feedback loops that we have seen arise as demographics and opportunities interact. In a sense, uncertainty about the future can be replaced by a sense of inevitability, as seemingly inexorable trends emerge at the sectoral and regional level. Tensions can surface between the needs of individuals, families and communities, leading to guilt, recrimination, sadness and fierce expectations of loyalty. The drought has heightened these tensions and the challenge facing family farms and rural communities by strengthening the need for or reasons for individuals and individual families to focus on their own wellbeing.

In many cases, of course, the wellbeing of individuals and families is intimately in line with that of their communities. As seen in the way it has escaped many of the negative effects of rural decline, Birchip is a case in point. What factors specifically makes it exceptional is a matter for further research. Whatever the specific reasons for its relative success (and this is not to deny that it also faces some serious issues), what it illustrates is the existence of positive cases, both at the community level and business level. As discussed in the next section, work is needed to make the most of such examples and potential role models, and to help their influence to spread. BCG’s initiative in commissioning this social research is evidence of the kind of forward thinking that has helped to make it, and Birchip, successful. It is now up to the organisation, and business and government more generally, to respond to this research in order to help strengthen and maintain the viability of Australia’s farming families and rural communities.

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Part Two – September 2007

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3

September 2007

3.1

Overview This section reports on the interviews conducted in September 2007. By providing a snapshot of the situation in September 2007, it builds on the understanding we developed in Part One about the issues farming families are facing in a period of great uncertainty and diminished capacity. Like the first round of interviews, it explores immediate and longer-term pressures upon farming families and their decision making around the present and future.

An assessment of cropping in the region by the Victorian Department of Primary Industries at the time concluded that: ‘Crops range from very good to un-harvestable with significant variability not just between regions but also within farms. It’s disappointing the early season potential won’t be realised. Overall harvest will be well below average’ (DPI 2007: 1).

The interview findings presented in this section attest to the disappointment felt by farming families. Based on 20 interviews and a total of 43 interviewees, the findings also represent both the variability among farming families and the overall sense of shared difficulties. In exploring the circumstances, decisions and mindset of the interviewees, it refers to differences between those in the younger and older age groups as appropriate.

With the imminent return of drought and the ongoing legacy of previous years of drought, the Australian and Victorian governments released new drought assistance packages in October 2007. It is important to note that these changes were not in place at the time of this round of interviews and do not form part of the changing context farming families were facing at the time.

Eight key findings emerged from the interview data: After a period of hope, stress was rising again in September Following a difificult period of waiting, spirits rose with the Autumn break.

Many farming families are now more vulnerable financially than ever.

The threat of furhter drought is having a significant impact The threat of further losses is causing great anxiety.

Most people’s hopes for a redeeming year have been crushed.

Some people are losing faith in nature and farming Disbelief, despair and depression are widespread.

People are becoming frustrated with agriculture.

There is growing concern about the challenges facing the industry.

Defiant optimism is present and encouraged.

Risk has been approached in a wide variety of ways this season Risk-taking and risk-averse stratgies to production have been used by different farmers.

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The cautious approach being encouraged by drought challenges the dominant professional ideal in farming.

Decisions around enterprise mix are complicated by assessments of risk.

Efforts to adopt on-farm drought proofing measures are limited by a lack of capital.

Forward selling has badly impacted some farming families.

Many farming families are looking to increase their off-farm income Many view alternative income as key to “drought proofing”.

The time and capital being committed to farming is decreasing.

Farming families of all ages are trying to protect themselves with off-farm investments.

People are questioning their plans for the future Professional and personal plans are being postponed and compromised.

Virtually all families are questioning the value and possiblity of staying in farming.

Some people are restricted from leaving by financial and family reasons.

Even those deeply committed to farming are questioning its value to them.

The rural community is fatigued and fragmenting Many people are concerned about how others are faring.

Issues of rural decline are ongoing and problematic.

Fractures are appearing within the farming community.

Assistance has been utilised and is needed Families have benefited from various types of financial assistance Calls were made for further information and improvements to the financial assistance system.

Overall, the interviews suggest that the six months between February and September involved an exhausting series of highs and lows for farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region and beyond. This round of interviews capture a period when the growing likelihood of further drought was threatening to derail the renewed efforts and plans of many farming families. They highlight how farming families’ attempts to recover from previous drought conditions required them to cope with additional calls on their reserves as they prepared for production again. It also highlights how they needed to cope with the unavoidable lag period that exists between them committing further reserves and receiving the subsequent financial rewards that will help them recover. This process of recommitting and waiting places farming families’ in a vulnerable position long after drought has seemingly disappeared. It also leaves them exposed if drought appears as a possibility again, as in September it seemed to be doing.

Irrespective of how seasonal conditions developed from September on, the interviews suggested that the threat of further drought had already inflicted a serious toll on the farming community. Due to this and the low levels of financial, emotional and social reserves farming families were already operating on prior to the recent dry conditions, the next six months will once again form a momentous period. The pressure on decision making already present in February 2007 will continue to mount towards February 2008. Although at the time no major BCG & RMCG

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decisions about the future have been made by the farming families interviewed in September, the signs suggest that the interviews we conduct as the summer draws to a close next year will reveal that, unfortunately, some critical breaking points have been reached.

3.2

Key Findings

3.2.1

After a period of hope, stress was rising again in September Following a difficult period of waiting, spirits rose with the Autumn break To contextualise their current situations, interviewees were asked to reflect back on the period since February, when the last interviews were conducted. Consistent among their responses was the feeling that the six month period has involved a roller coaster of conditions and emotions. Consistent with Report One, interviewees generally reflected that when this ride began in February, they were at a dark, low spot – ‘flat’ and ‘miserable’. As one stated: ‘It was probably the darkest period that it has been since I’ve been back from school.

The drought was horrific, the heat was unbelievable. You don’t know whether it’s going to rain again…We were wondering if we’d have to go through it all again…’.

For some, this difficult period extended far beyond February. One couple discussed the difficulties they had until May: X: ‘We couldn’t get money from the bank because they were snowed under with applications, so that was a real worry. We bought sheep feed and weren’t able to pay for it, but luckily the blokes didn’t harass us. And we had trouble with fuel… We had no money from January to May’.

Y: ‘We were living on family payments that we got for the children. I usually like to let that accumulate for camps or shoes or whatever, but I was using that money to pay phone bills and everything like that. I accessed money from the CWA and the Salvation Army just so we could keep the phone and keep the power and things like that. We couldn’t pay school fees… but then they paid my school fees so I was really grateful for that’.

X: ‘You want to be able to provide the basics for your family and we couldn’t… You sort of feel like begging for money. It was really hard. You had to confront businesses that you couldn’t pay. Not being able to pay school fees was really hard because you feel like you’re not looking after your kids… You just feel awful not being able to provide for your children’.

Y: ‘The loan and the subsidy - it all came through in about May. We were sort of wondering how we were going to put in a crop, but it all came together after a lot of anguish and a lot of waiting… So now as long as we get more rain we’ll be right…’.

Waiting and wondering is a key theme among all the interviews. In February, people were focused on the future, as they waited cautiously – hopefully - for the season to begin.

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‘I think every February you’re full of hope, no matter how bad things have been in the past. And you’re full of fear - in about equal proportions… This February was worse because we had behind us so many bad years’.

‘Waiting was difficult. Waiting for the business to start coming through… Waiting for the dry to end… And we were looking forward. The drought year was finished so we were looking forward to the next year… You look at the bad year you’ve had and what it has left you with, and you plan what you’re going to do… We were probably as positive as you can be for that time’.

People were trying to put the difficulties of the past season(s) behind them and rally the enthusiasm to tackle the next one. The rains that came for many in late April – creating the best autumn break in a decade - gave a much-appreciated boost to this campaign. As described further below, many people were full of optimism.

Bolstered by a strong break and the promise of more rain to come, all of the farming families interviewed made the decision to continue with production this year. They were assisted in this decision by the widespread optimism that affected their communities as the season started promisingly and grain prices rose to dizzying levels. Just as they had shared the pain of the previous season, they shared the joy of the new season’s potential. Interviewees commented on the lift in spirit that went through the community, the ‘spark it put in our step’.

Many farming families are now more vulnerable financially than ever Yet, the decision to continue farming was a decision to take on more risk in the short term.

As discussed in the previous report, acting to produce a product in response to or expectation of rain incurs an immediate and significant financial cost. Many families needed to extend themselves financially to put crops in, using savings, liquefying assets or, most commonly, taking on more debt. The older couple below discussed how they have had to use their superannuation: X: ‘We couldn’t buy our super [superphosphate] the last few years. We’ve been buying it and paying for it the following year. But we couldn’t do that this year because of the failed crops last year… So we sold some shares to buy it’.

Y: ‘We sold nearly half our shares. That was always going to be our superannuation…

So if we have a decent harvest that same money is going back into the super fund.

We’ve really got to do that no matter how hard it is… But, then, if we do get a bit of spare money, some of my equipment is so old that I’m going to have to pour money into that… So that’s a bit of a worry too’.

Others discussed the debt they have taken on, some for the first time: ‘Over the last six years we have been reducing our debt all the time. But this last year we had to borrow that all back… You sort of think “Bloody hell!”’

‘We originally budgeted on reducing our overdraft by August to back under half of what it was – and now it’s nearly double what it was!... It doesn’t make it very easy’.

‘Until this year we haven’t really had a problem with the money side of things. But we’ve got a debt now’.

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‘We haven’t had an overdraft until this year… That doesn’t sit well with us… We thought that we were getting ahead, you know, and all of a sudden it’s all gone.

Everything that we’d worked for - not just over the last twelve months, but for the last ten years - it just seems to have disappeared overnight’.

These comments illustrate how for most farming families the cost of continuing has been to place oneself in a position of heightened financial vulnerability. When comparing their position in September 2007 to February 2007, many interviewees mentioned the growing financial pressure they now feel: ‘Financially we’re probably feeling it worse now that when you spoke to us last, because we haven’t had any income in that time and we won’t have any income until probably December/January. We’re just getting deeper into debt as every day goes by. If we have a good year this year we’re still not going to recover in one year from a drought. It’ll take a few years to recover.’

‘Certainly there were financial pressures [in February] but probably at that stage financial pressures weren’t as bad as they are right now. We didn’t have a great harvest in ‘06 but we had some harvest and the prices were good and the bank account was in the black. When you get bank statements in the black you don’t worry so much… Now, at this point of the year, it’s well and truly in overdraft. We’ve spent money on fertilizer, chemical, fuel and basically getting the crop in. Now when the bank statement arrives, we’re not so quick to open it’.

‘Last year we had the drought and we had no money coming in - but we did have pool payments from the year before and so there was money coming in every quarter from the previous harvest… If we don’t get any harvest this year, and that is looking increasingly likely, we’ll have no money coming in from last harvest and we’ll have losses from grain trading and we’ll have to start selling stuff to carry on’.

‘We’ve really gone back to a drought situation. The hardest part of this year is still going to be October/November. That’s when we’re still not going to have any cash flow – unless we pull FMDs [Farm Management Deposits] out. We’ve tried not to use FMDs this year because we need to roll them into superannuation’.

Although the difficulty of cash flow is the same in any season for those involved in cropping, this year it poses a more serious challenge because of the lower resource base virtually all started the year with. As described in the previous report and sections below, these eroded resources are not only financial and physical, but emotional and social.

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3.2.2

The threat of further drought is having a significant impact The threat of further losses is causing great anxiety The interviews in September 2007 provide a snapshot of a system under threat. At the time it was likely but not definite that drought-like conditions had returned. After the season’s ‘brilliant start’, more than six weeks had passed without significant rain and crops were beginning to show signs of distress. Interviewees varied in their assessment of whether the season could - or would - be ‘saved’ by subsequent rain.

Irrespective of the actual losses that some families had already experienced at the time of interview due to the lack of rain (discussed further below), it is important to appreciate that the threat of potential losses posed by the dry conditions had, in itself, a significant impact on all involved. Psychologists have documented how threatened loss as well as actual loss is a serious cause of stress (eg. Gleitman 1995). Part of this is to do with the uncertainty involved. ‘Uncertainty’, as one interviewee said, ‘is harder to deal with than the truth’.

Uncertainty allows the imagination to go into overdrive and tires the mind with myriad possibilities. It prevents natural problem solvers from going into their preferred mode of coping and puts a brake on planning, activity and resolution. It instead holds people in ‘waiting’ mode while fuelling their anxiety about the future. As some interviewees said: ‘The hardest thing is waiting… There’s not much else you can do… You can’t do anything…’.

‘I feel like we’re only marking time, we’re just waiting’.

‘I just wish we could skip this month and just see how things turn out’.

Anxiety about the future is acute among many farming families in the region because of the past poor seasons they have come through. The nightmare of drought is still lurking in their minds while its effects continue to shape their everyday existence. In September, the question was starting to arise as to whether the conditions they were experiencing spelled a return to drought. People were asking themselves whether the dry weeks they had just had were a hiccup in an otherwise good season, or whether it was the relatively wet period between April and August that was instead the aberration. Questioned on whether they thought they were in drought, some interviewees revealed that they were again beginning to worry this was the case: ‘If you drive around, I would say “No”, looking at the crops. But deep in the back of my mind I would say “Yes”, because we’re obviously far from a guaranteed harvest…’.

‘Well, once you miss out on a couple of rains… you wonder if you’re going to get any more’.

‘You start to wonder what would happen if we had another bad year’.

‘I think in February there was always hope that the next year has to be a better one.

Whereas with the last month having no rain, people are starting to lose that element of hope’.

‘If this year is a total wipe out… because we have none in reserve from last year, that’s when it all hits home…’.

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‘I don’t know… Things were wonderful a few weeks ago and now it’s just hanging on a knife’s edge’.

‘All I know is that our position financially, yet again, is on a knife edge’.

‘The stress has built definitely in the last month. Up until a few weeks ago, I was super positive and things were ticking along really well. But that element of doubt is beginning to creep into my mind now… You know there are these beautiful crops that are just one good rain away from being a really good year, but we’re just not home yet. You just have that shadow of a doubt there that it could all fall in a hole again.

We had really good crops last year until the AFL Grand Final and then it all fell in a hole then. … We’re just on a knife edge waiting’.

‘There was that little moment, that little moment a couple of months ago when the Mallee looked like paradise… I did feel so much better for two months. I felt I knew what I used to be like. Just back to being me again. …. And then there was a great big period of anxiety and all the rain sort of trickled away. And now we’re here… paying a lot of interest… and psychologically worse off… It's like being half a person, it just takes the spirit out of you’.

A discussion between a married couple further illustrates this rising concern: X: ’Up to a month ago we were pretty happy with ourselves and now things are getting a little nervous again’.

Y: ‘I think it’s worse than a little nervous!’

X: ‘With another good rain things will brighten up again. But until then things are a bit nervous… If we had have been done with it a month ago we’d be bouncing around now saying it is all good, but we’re starting to worry again… We’ve still got a chance, so while you’ve got a chance you can hope that things will be alright… It’s when the last plant falls over that it will be interesting’.

Most people’s hopes for a redeeming year have been crushed Threatened loss is not only a serious cause of stress because of the uncertainty that threat involves, but because of what may be lost. It is especially stressful when the potential loss is momentous, such as when the loss would be of something of special importance or when one’s resource base is at a vulnerably low level. Both of these circumstances match the situation in September for many farming families.

What was being threatened was, among other things, the potential loss of the promise – dreamt of for years and dangled before the community this year by the early rain and high prices - of an income that would rescue families from the downward spiral many feel they have been, and are, trapped in. Encouraged by the season’s early promise, many people had pegged their hopes on this being the season that it was all going to come together and get them back on track. As some interviewees described: ‘I find it really tough to think we could have had a really good year and paid off a lot more money’.

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‘If you had of come and done this interview a month ago you would have got a whole lot of different answers. We were positive, we’d bought a new header, just locked in 700 tonne of barley for what we thought was a good price… Now we’re over $100 behind on it. Every day it goes on it’s just heartbreaking… I was hoping this year was going to be the bumper one that would get us out of debt.’

‘This was a one in 100 year opportunity to have both good prices and good yields at the same time. And it still could happen, but every day that goes by the potential is dropping off and the possibilities of high prices and high yields are becoming slimmer everyday’.

‘This year the grain prices are through the roof and we should be overjoyed about that. And if we could just get some good rain we would have such a good year and the local economy would be so buoyant. It should be the best year we’ve ever had on a farm: financially rewarding and getting everyone out of debt. But it hinges on whether we get another two or three inches or rain or not’.

People differed in their assessments of how much damage had been already done to the season. The farmer below, for example, was relatively optimistic, boosted by his good fortune the year before: ‘We had a fair harvest last year so we’re not in the same category as a lot of people.

Even this year things are looking pretty good still. If we have as good a year as last year we’ll be satisfied, but I’m still hoping it will be a bit better’.

The overall feeling, however, was that, irrespective of how the season turned out, the season was failing to do what it was supposed to do, which was to redeem farming families from the poor fortunes that most have suffered. Although at the time the season may have still turned out to be an average year financially for some families (given the good prices), many seemed to feel this hope was small compensation for the amount of pain they have been through in recent years. People were hoping for more than another year of “survival”; they were hoping for a year of genuine “recovery”. That it was becoming apparent that this was not going to be the case – that many families were going to have to try to merely “cope” for another year – was bitterly disappointing for them. As some explained: ‘If it doesn’t rain again this year I think it’s going to hurt more than ever because of the fact the prices are up there and we know what we could have had and we didn’t get it.

I think that will really knock people around if we don’t get a reasonable harvest.’

‘After this year starting out so positive and then to be kicked in the guts makes it twice as hard as it would have been, had you prepared for it in the past six months’.

‘I think the hard bit is a lot of people thought this year was going to be the best year out and they’ve taken a massive fall, not necessarily because they’ve put a lot of inputs in, but emotionally’.

The exchange between the married couple below further illustrates that some people are indeed feeling crushed at the thought that the golden opportunity of the season has slipped through their fingers.

X: ‘Well this years dead’.

Y: ‘It's not dead, lots of things can happen…’.

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X: ‘Yes, but the real possibility of the wonderful year is dead’.

Y: ‘No, there's a lot of salvage… It's important to salvage what you can’.

X: ‘Yeah but the vision or the utopian idea of it being a good year - that’s gone’.

In this exchange it is the female that is feeling more pessimistic about the season. This is consistent with the overall findings that found that 35% of females seemed pessimistic relative to 22% of males, and that 35% of females expressed feelings of optimism relative to 61% of males. Some interviewees did not express strong sentiments either way.

For some interviewees at the time, even though they did not know whether or how far the season was going to move them “backwards” financially, the realisation that it was not going to “move them forward”, as it had seemed to originally promise to do, was enough to give them the feeling of “going backwards” or “downhill” anyway.

‘The last five or six weeks have gone from brilliant crops to going backwards’.

‘Up until a month and a half ago I would say we were sitting on cloud nine. In the last six weeks it’s going downhill fast. The stress is well and truly set in now.’

‘You look back two months ago and everything was looking really good: the prices were going to be good; and the yields were going to be good... In the past week or so it’s all going backwards again…’.

The word ‘again’ points to how interviewees remain sensitised to the pain of drought despite brief relief from it earlier this year. People are reacting strongly to the threat of further drought because of their intimate knowledge of what difficulties further drought would entail and their waning belief in their ability to cope with them. Many interviewees are emotionally exhausted. As one remarked: ‘The drought is still too fresh in your mind, you know. If things do turn sour again, how do you get through another one?’

As discussed above, given the toll of previous drought years, many farming families are operating on low levels of reserves. To even participate in this season, many have had to lay themselves on the line financially and emotionally. They have little buffer to absorb the impact of another bad year. As one farmer put it, ‘there are a number of people on their last chance this season’. For it to have got to this point is deeply devastating for many farming families, not just those who personally face financial crisis. We now turn and look in more detail at the psychological toll the threat of further drought is having.

3.2.3

Some people are losing faith in nature and farming Disbelief, despair and depression are widespread Having to deal repeatedly with the issue of drought is beginning to grind down some individuals’ faith in the world as they know it. Irrespective of any particular future impact of drought on them personally, many people are being negatively affected by the emerging fact of further drought itself, by the possibility or reality that things could actually turn so bad. This depressed outlook is spreading as some people’s fears that further drought may occur

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(discussed above) are morphing into a bleak acceptance that it is occurring. The following quotes illustrate this resignation: ‘We've given up hope that it's going to rain. It's not going to rain’.

‘If it hasn’t rained for three months, why would it rain cats and dogs in the next two weeks? It’s over’.

‘I've been through a lot in the winter… I went through all that anger you know – hope, anger, depression. But now I feel as though I'm getting through it… I feel better than I did a month ago. But that improvement is more a resignation and the fact of knowing that it's all over… Knowing is better than worrying…’

Parallel to feelings of resignation are feelings of disbelief, disappointment and despair.

People demonstrated feelings of shock and anger that drought is being inflicted on the farming community once again, and feelings of hurt and confusion at the injustice of it all. As some interviewees stated: ‘There’s a whole culture that’s going through the bush of, sort of, just, desperation, you know?’.

‘It’s tragic. It really is tragic what is happening’.

‘I remember years ago listening to stories about Queensland - how they’d had eight years of really bad times. And I remember they asked me what I thought and I said “Well I would hate to be those people who have had eight bad years, and I don’t want that to happen to me”. And now, I know that that is what has happened to me… Now I’m in that position that I said I really dreaded being in…I can’t believe it’.

Combined with hurt and confusion are also feelings of guilt. As well as being vulnerable to larger forces like the weather and the market, farming is obviously characterised by active human agency: the ability to skilfully negotiate and exploit larger forces to produce a desired end. With such power comes a sense of responsibility. And when such power fails to achieve the desired end, it can also bring a sense of guilt. Thus, although drought-induced failure in farming is at best only ever partially a human creation, those who experience such failure can feel a failure themselves. As one young farmer commented: ‘You feel like you’re letting everybody down. You’ve got your parents and your kids to look after and you’ve got to keep your wife happy’.

As seen in other quotes below, children’s wellbeing is a key concern and source of guilt for farming parents. Employees are also a source of concern and guilt. A number of interviewees commented on the sense of responsibility they have as employers and the sadness and guilt they feel at the possibility they may not be able to provide for their employees.

‘We also put a man on this year but I don’t know how much longer we can keep him for… Sooner or later we’re probably going to have to tell him to go’.

‘We also have people who work for us, so it’s hard… We don’t want to have to let them go’.

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Overall, memories of the last drought period and the difficulties of its ongoing consequences are now creeping back into the foreground as the landscape dries out. Shadows cast out by the mid-year rain are rushing back in to darken people’s outlooks. Interviewees talked of depression, demotivation and those around them who ‘went under’ last time or who they fear may ‘go under’ ‘this time round’.

‘It’s driven my old man into a corner… I don’t know how he’ll cope’.

‘I’ve been feeling low… I try to hide my negative impulses…. But X said to me the other day: “I haven't seen you for weeks. Where have you been?”… I guess I've been less social than I have been in the past’.

‘With the drought you think in the negative all the time’.

‘I've got an office full of stuff and I just can't get motivated to get in and do it….

Without doubt, without doubt I have been feeling quite demotivated’.

‘Two doors up a man did it - he shot himself in the shearing shed. There is a lot of it around… A work mate did it... Life is not easy I can tell you that…’.

‘I went to the doctor for high blood pressure… I talked to him for a bit and he said that he thought I needed anti-depression tablets… He kept asking me how my husband was and things like that… and he wrote out a prescription and said I’d be back on track… I went to the chemist and he said it was a mild dose and they weren’t addictive. But I told him that I didn’t need them. He said, “Don’t worry, there are about 130 people in this community that are on them”… That concerns me because that’s a hell of a percentage’.

People are becoming frustrated with agriculture As the above quotes indicate, one of the effects of drought is that it is altering people’s outlook on the world, throwing into doubt their previously optimistic beliefs that good will be rewarded and things will turn out well. People revealed many feelings of pessimism and caution about the future, some of which have lingered since the drought last season. As some commented:

‘You know, you just can’t be too positive because it can just get shattered’ ‘Even though we had a fantastic start, I can remember sitting around the table and everybody was talking so gleefully about the harvest and stuff and I said “We haven't got it – we haven't got it yet…” because I was still worried… you just never know.’

The feeling that agriculture or the seasons it relies upon cannot be “trusted” and allow farming families to relax and be happy is feeding a growing cynicism about the whole exercise. Part of the dismay at the lost opportunity of the current season is that it looked - for the first time in a long time - to be avoiding one of the core frustrations with agriculture, which is the antagonism that typically exists between good yields and good prices. As interviewees explained: BCG & RMCG

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‘Of course, next year we might have the yields, but we won’t have the price’.

‘Whenever the prices are good, we can never get good yields… It’s always the way.

That’s why until the money is actually in the bank we wait and see how much we smile… It’s part and parcel of farming’.

‘If everything had have run in our favour this year rainfall wise and the way the yields were looking, we probably would have made $400,000 over budget… But now we’re that far behind and the opportunity’s going to pass us by. And then next year something else will go wrong…’.

The feeling that “something always goes wrong with farming” seems to be increasingly shared by many farming families. As found in the last report, frustration with the weather is sensitising people to other painful characteristics of the current agricultural industry, such as the rising cost of inputs and land and the related debt trap that many feel they are in. As one young farmer explained: ‘We’d like to be able to set up and grow… but we’ve got no spare cash… I guess most people our age would be trying to grow. And then if you can’t grow - well, you can understand why people get upset about it… I think especially when you can see other industries where people are growing and this industry isn’t. If you are solely in this industry, you’re not growing, which makes it tough… When you can see people who are working as hard as you are and they’re moving forward and you’re not, you sort of think, “Why are we still doing this if we’re not moving forward?”… It makes you more disappointed.’

Two young farmer’s wives similarly commented about farming: ‘You put in all this work, but you can’t see that you’re ever going forward. If you work in any other industry or if you work for a wage you put in your effort and you get rewarded. Whereas in farming you spend years and years of putting in all this effort and all you’re doing is getting a bigger debt. And that’s tough’.

‘I feel for X [her husband] because they put so much work into putting their crops in and in the end it just doesn’t work out… It is very hard’.

Young couples are perhaps especially exposed to galling comparisons with other industries and career paths. With social groups that perhaps extend beyond the farming community to a greater degree than those of older farming couples, and generally more opportunities and years to explore other options, some young farming families seem to be increasingly finding their decision to farm a challenging one to justify to themselves. A discussion between a young couple illustrates how some are weighing up the costs and benefits of farming and the rural lifestyle: X: ‘We’ve been left behind by our friends a little bit income-wise’.

Y: ‘We’re getting left behind a little bit because a lot of our friends are living in Melbourne and they’re living in a house worth $1 million and they’ve got jobs that pay $150,000 a year. We can’t seem to make that sort of money…’

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X: ‘You get a bit envious. At the same time you know there are qualities that you get up here that you don’t get down there. Your children’s upbringing and things like that.’

Y: ‘Like they have to get up and go to work at 7am and take the kids to crèche and that’s not necessarily a good thing… But then they come home with $300,000 income between the husband and wife’.

X: ‘And actually a crèche would be lovely. There’s no crèche here, or a 3 year old kinder, I’d love a 3 year old kinder’.

As seen in Report One and discussed further below in Sections 2.6 and 2.7, features of farming and rural life combine to shape the decisions of farming families. Furthermore, aspects of both are unsettling some families’ decision to farm. As discussed further below, part of this is a growing cynicism about the potential for agriculture to deliver to families the goals they want to achieve, including an equal standing in the world with their non-farming friends.

Another frustration with agriculture is its dependency on nature: a world that in drought conditions seems especially uncontrollable and unreliable. As interviewees commented: ‘Financially we haven’t felt the effects yet, but it’s annoying. It’s annoying that it won’t rain and it’s annoying that it’s just so tough’.

‘What annoys me is when it doesn’t rain. You can be ready, but then the seasons turn around’.

‘We’ve lost a bit of faith in at all. I still consider myself a positive person but I’ve lost a fair bit of faith in the seasons and the weather… It’s disbelief at this stage - that we can get to this stage of the year and be on the edge again. To think that it has all come down to the next rainfall event again… I can’t believe it’.

‘I think I’m getting to a point where I’m losing motivation and all that sort of thing… I’m not a quitter but on the other hand you might eventually have to say that the weather has beaten you…’.

‘If this season doesn’t finish off, then it’s becoming more and more unreliable. And how much more can you take?’.

‘I haven't learnt to hate the land. I haven't learnt to hate nature… But you can't… If the land can't provide me with the where-with-all, I'm going to have to go and find it somewhere else’.

‘You feel like it’s letting you down. You’ve tried hard and it’s letting you down.’

This last quote communicates the sense that nature is not playing fair; that no matter how hard and cleverly farmers try, they cannot rely on being rewarded justly for it. Just as the drought is sensitising people to the frustrations of agricultural trends such as declining terms of trade, it is sensitising people to the frustrations of agriculture’s vulnerability to a seemingly contrary natural world, albeit one that may be being impacted or weakened by human interference.

The disjuncture that is created between endeavour and achievement contradicts one of the fundamental beliefs in western society referred to above: that genuine effort will be BCG & RMCG

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rewarded. A farmer pointed to this belief with an anecdote about another setting in which this belief is espoused: school.

‘Our daughter who is doing Year 12 was asked to do a talk on the drought. She likened it to spending all your time working on your VCE knowing that you’re going to fail. She said that’s what a drought is. It’s a great analogy’.

The analogy underlines how fear of failure is becoming in some cases a pessimistic expectation of failure. It points in part to how, by disrupting the relationship between hard work and success with a large dose of unpredictability, drought is increasing people’s sensitivity to nature’s unreliability or own vulnerability, heightening their feelings of insecurity, unsettling their worldviews and eroding their contentment in agriculture.

The rapidity with which the current season has unravelled seems to underline how tenuous farming families’ weather-based security is. The quotes below point to interviewees’ focus on the pace with which the good season has discontinued: ‘The pastures are folding up incredibly quickly’.

‘We have just come out of the drought, and history tells us that it won’t repeat itself.

All the signs were looking like things were going to be good, so I was extremely positive... It’s crazy how things have turned around so quickly’.

‘This year has been one in which you could not believe actually… You know, 100mls of rainfall to the 2nd of June in the growing season and then this sudden “Stop”. I mean, there's been no place in history where it's happened before where you’ve got such a deep start and such a sudden dry finish’.

‘You’re always looking forward to the year to come. Already now you’re looking forward to next year. Had you come around for instance six weeks ago doing this, things would be looking pretty good. If you come around here now, things are going backwards quickly’.

‘It has been a bit of a roller-coaster this year. It’s really been only the last three or four weeks where we’ve slipped back into the position we were in this time last year’.

In contrast to the excruciating wait for the season to ‘reveal’ itself (described above), and the protracted character of drought, the suddenness with which the season seems to have gone from potentially wonderful to potentially disastrous is contributing to people’s sense of alarm.

The traditional guide as to what to expect – history – is proving unreliable, leaving people with a heightened sense of uncertainty about what the future holds and how they are going to manage.

Exacerbating concern about the future is climate change. Whether understood as humaninduced or not, climate change threatens to further strain the relationship between farming and nature by intensifying uncertainty and inflaming extreme conditions. Although some interviewees are climate sceptics, some are troubled by worries about climate change in the longer term, just as they are troubled by worries about drought in the short term: ‘There’s just a nagging thing in the back of my mind about climate change…’. ‘[The dry climate] feels long term to me. I mean I'd like to think that next year it will suddenly turn around and this has just been an aberration, which is what X [her BCG & RMCG

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husband] is still hoping. But it feels like climate change. I think there's no doubt it's at least largely climate change’.

Acceptance of climate change leaves open the question of what climate to expect. It’s mere possibility throws into doubt what is “normal”. With it, it throws into doubt what “rules of thumb” can be relied upon to help one manage.

One rule of thumb or belief that is helping some people cope is an acceptance of our human inability to control weather or future climate. As one farmer remarked: ‘I suppose I’ve been through enough seasons to know that there are ups and downs and I sort of accept what’s happening. I can’t change the weather so I just go with the flow a bit. Years ago I’d let it get me down, but what will be will be’.

Acceptance of the uncertainty of the seasons paradoxically helps people cope by reducing an element of uncertainty - by resolving in their minds an issue that may otherwise remain a point of conjecture and effort. Just as we saw above an interviewee reflect on feeling better since resigning himself to the ‘fact’ that the current season is ‘over’, resigning oneself to a problem can be easier than fighting against it. This ‘appraisal-focused’ mode of coping involves altering how we think about a problem in order to be able to deal better with it (Nelson and Sutton 1990). It stands in contrast to the problem-solving and emotion-centred coping strategies mentioned in Report One. It is typically called into play when problemsolving is not possible.

The need for appraisal-focused coping signals the type and scale of issues that farming families are dealing with in amongst a myriad of more immediate and personal problems for which they have responsibility. These various issues coalesce in the question of drought recovery, which is a concept that calls for both a favourable change in weather and a human ability to subsequently respond. In talking about drought recovery, interviewees emphasised their ongoing and unavoidable reliance on weather. In particular, they underlined their need for a long enough period of farming-friendly seasonal conditions for them to manage themselves back into a robust position.

‘We don’t just need one year [of rain] - it’s got to then be normal years thereafter. If you turn around and have another drought in two years time, it’s really going to hurt because you’ll still be recovering from the last one. It’s because we’ve had this drought on top of many more before that… We’ve had this drought on top of lean times before that so that hasn’t helped the cause. The lead up to this drought has been terrible… Even our normal years have got to the stage where they aren’t good years any more’.

‘The trouble is the further you go, the deeper you get. You have a recovery phase but you don’t really recover. You can’t get ahead. You just get back to where you were until it all starts again. That’s the way it has been like for the past 10-15 years. You think back and wonder if you could have managed things better in the past. You think back to what you had with your house, cars, tractors and stuff… But, you know, I haven’t been extravagant and I’m still struggling’.

‘I think in many ways if we actually had a couple of good years we are in a better position [than if we didn’t have the drought] because we are smarter farmers than what we used to be. We are getting better at managing. So I think in many ways we will recover well from it. But, having said that, to truly recover in a financial sense BCG & RMCG

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we’re going to have to have a real run of good years to build ourselves back up again’.

‘So far there hasn’t been a recovery period at all. That’s what has really debilitated people more than anything’.

‘Everybody back this way lost serious money last year and that set them back a long way. A bloke we know said just about all his neighbours have gone back at least $300,000. After the ’82 drought, dad borrowed $10,000 and the first thing we did after we got the money was pay that back. That’s just not going to happen now. It’s going to take years’.

The severity and length of drought and its effects requires a corresponding intensity and prolongment of recovery processes. These processes consist of both human effort and favourable weather. They continue long after the weather changes for the better, but continue to rely on non-drought conditions, as the interviewees above are well aware.

There is growing concern about the challenges facing the industry In response to the antagonism that seems to be in play between farming and the weather, some commentators are speaking out in favour of Mother Nature. Adding to the problems facing farming families, this criticism is making some interviewees feel the need to justify agriculture’s existence in Australia and in particular their area. As one said: ‘Someone said to me the other day - I was quite angry - they said “Of course the Mallee’s marginal country anyway isn’t it?” And it really isn’t… The Mallee - the Mallee has made heaps of money… But this person suggested to us that the Mallee should just go back to timber... She said that’s obviously how it should be. Well, maybe… but it's not because the Mallee itself is marginal. It's not marginal’.

Combined with anger at this lack of support for local agriculture is concern that it does point to the magnitude of the political, social and environmental challenges the industry faces.

Among these challenges is the question of government policy. As discussed in Report One and further in Section 2.8 below, some interviewees are concerned about the short and long term commitment of the government to agriculture. To some, the future direction of agriculture and particularly drought policy is as worryingly uncertain and frustratingly uncontrollable as the weather.

‘If there’s one thing that’s come out of this drought is that the government needs to take a good look at if they want farming or if they don’t want farming in Australia.

Most people can get through one drought, though things like last year are tough. But what happens now for the people who aren’t going to get anything this year? The banks will just say that the time is up’.

There are many signs of growing disquiet among those in the farming community about the serious challenges facing the industry. In keeping with the findings in Report One, it seems the pre-existing stressors of the uncertainty surrounding government support and climate change continue to exert a presence. The result is that individuals’ immediate pressures are increasingly accompanied by doubts about the industry they are in. As a young farmer’s wife admitted: BCG & RMCG

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‘I would say I’m probably fairly negative about it… X [her husband] puts his heart and soul into it and doesn’t get any rewards out of it. I mean, it’s not like you can then go and invest your money in something else because there is no money coming out of it.’

Or as a farmer commented: ‘What [the drought experience] has done to me - it has probably put a lot of doubt in my mind about what this caper is really about … It does scare you a bit what the future holds for agriculture’.

Defiant optimism is present and encouraged Despite the challenges facing agriculture in the short and perhaps long term, some interviewees remain defiantly optimistic about the potential of the current season and the future of agriculture in general, placing confidence in the weather, their ability and/or the potential of science to solve problems.

‘I’m optimistic as far as the year goes. We vary rarely have two droughts in a row. We might have a downturn, but we won’t have two droughts in a row’.

‘I’m still quite optimistic that although it’s not going to be a huge one, financially it still could be pretty good’. ‘[The drought] is a challenge – just another challenge to try to get over and I think science will help us through’.

More commonly, individuals’ signalled confidence in their and agriculture’s ability to succeed if the season cooperates, reflecting the acceptance of having no control over weather mentioned above.

‘We’re doing everything right - we’re just not getting the rain’.

‘I’m still quite excited - as long as the rain keeps coming’.

‘I’m positive about the long term, it’s just a matter of whether we can stay in it for the short term until things turn around… If you come back in February, you might hear some sorry stories. But on the other side, if the rain comes and things turn around with high grain prices, you mightn’t find too many people because they’d all be on holidays!’.

Whether one is optimistic or not is in itself a growing issue. Some utterances of or about optimism represent people’s belief in the need for and appropriateness of having a positive outlook.

‘We just try to remain positive. The game we play is to wait and see all the time’.

‘We’ve got to keep each other emotionally buoyant. Emotion is probably more important than anything else. Once you emotionally go down the hole, then you’re struggling in every aspect’.

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‘I think we’re in reasonable shape, but you don’t know how long you can go on staying optimistic’.

‘You have to have a certain amount of optimism. If you don’t have a sense of optimism about farming in general then you’re probably in a pretty bad place’.

‘You make your plans for good seasons’.

‘You always think you’re going to grow a good crop. You have to’.

This effortful optimism is fuelled in part by a sense that it is inappropriate, indeed rude, to be anything other than positive. Reflecting comments in the last report, one interviewee complained about the media in this regard: ‘You listen to the country hour on the ABC and it is just misery. The woman on there just seems to play on it. She’s shocking really’.

Whether you and those around you have the “right”, “helpful” mental outlook is becoming a point of contention as the need to cope with poor conditions drags on. In particular, the common expectation that you and others will do your best to be optimistic can be challenging for those involved, especially when such efforts begin to waver, as the quotes above suggest is currently happening.

In keeping with this, a number of interviewees were apologetic that they were not able to offer a more optimistic perspective, or at pains to point out that they had only just stopped being more optimistic.

‘If it stays like this for another fortnight, everyday we’re just losing more… I’m sorry, it’s just a bad day for you to come really… I’m usually quite positive, but today I’m not.’

‘I wish you had have been here a month ago because my answers would have been so much different.’

‘Even up until the last couple of days I’ve been confident that September will be wet.

But now if it doesn’t bloody hurry up it will be too late and too much damage will be done…’.

‘We’ve had optimism up until this last week or so probably. But it’s all getting quite scary again because the forecast for the weeks ahead aren’t very good either…’

Embarrassment at a lack of optimism is embarrassment at not conforming to the ideal of the successful, confident farmer figure dominant in Australian agriculture. This masculine symbol is entrepreneurial, undaunted by set backs, able to negotiate all obstacles. He boldly takes risks and reaps the resultant rewards. As we now discuss, issues of risk and drought have been occupying the minds of interviewees since February as they have had to make tough production decisions. In many cases, pessimism displayed at the time of interview is in contrast to the optimism felt at the time of planting.

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3.2.4

Risk has been approached in a wide variety of ways this season Risk-taking and risk-averse strategies to production have been used by different farmers Many farming families approached production this year with more awareness of the business risks involved because of the low level of reserves they were operating from. The ways in which they perceived and responded to this risk are various. Section 3.4 looks at the decisions interviewees made earlier in the season around production, “drought proofing” and forward selling.

Farms in the Wimmera Southern Mallee predominantly involve cropping and, to a varying degree, sheep. At the start of this season, the major production decisions facing farming families in the region were: •

how much of the farm to crop;

•

what crops to put in;

•

what amount of inputs to use on the crops; and, if applicable,

•

how many sheep to run.

Farming families’ different responses to these questions point to their differing circumstances, approaches to farming, and perceptions of and attitudes to risk. In keeping with the hope – mentioned above - that this season would make up for prior poor ones, some interviewees (approximately 18%) went “all out” this year to maximise the potential gain. They cropped most if not all of their farms and/or used higher risk but profitable crops and large amounts of input. The following quotes illustrate this approach, as well as some of the regret that is starting to creep in, given the subsequent downturn in season: ‘Our strategy this year was to try and make up for the last few years… Anything that was in crop last year was re-sown and every acre has been sown. There was a prospect of good grain prices, and we put two barley crops in at the last minute because grain prices were predicted to be good and rain was supposed to be good.

In hindsight we should have left them out and fallowed them for next year. We grew canola as an opportunity crop because we got a good, early start and we had a rain on Anzac Day and it was sown in the last week of April which was perfect timing.

With an inch of rain it will still be a fantastic crop…’.

‘The prospect of grain prices being so high was one factor behind sowing the whole farm. And we already had some wheat locked in. The weather forecasting – all the so-called experts were saying that El Nino was finished and La Nina was kicking in.

Plus we had moisture - we had ten inches of rain in the first six months of the year so by the time of planting the crop we’d had more than half our annual rainfall’.

‘We had a good start so we went ahead with canola and things like that, which is starting to look like a bad decision. Generally we leave a couple of empty paddocks, but we thought this year might be a catch up year so we thought we’d put more acres in. We’ll find out if that goes any good or not…’.

‘I put most of the farm into crop to try to maximise income in as many spots as I could’.

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‘Unfortunately we’ve thrown all the inputs at it, even though I’ve tried to hold back…

I’ve still thrown everything I’ve got at the crop. And now it still shuts down...’.

‘We did put in a lot of crop this year. We hung our hopes on actually getting a decent income… So there is some fear…’.

‘The challenge is I suppose that we spent a lot more money this year trying to chase a good year. So what do you do now?.... We just got further in debt…’.

More commonly, interviewees (approximately 55%) responded to the prior run of drought years by becoming more cautious with their production decisions this year: ‘We didn’t sow as much crop. We decided to cut back and cut our risk, so we cut back probably 500 acres’.

‘In our mix of our crops, we’ve gone for the ones that have been less risk’.

‘We’ve practiced a bit of low input farming this year with fertilizers and chemicals’.

‘We tried not to spend too much on spray, tried to keep it within budget and not overspend on that’.

‘I cut fertilizer right back from a budget of around $60,000 to $16,000. That was the main change’.

‘We used less fertilizer: that bill was cut in half. And we just stuck to the basics, which are wheat and barley and beans’.

In keeping with the regret expressed by some interviewees about their decision to take a relatively high risk approach, one of the “positives” of the current season for those who have taken – often through financial necessity - a more cautious approach is that their decision means they have reduced their losses.

‘The biggest thing we did [differently this season] was cut back on inputs for financial reasons. For a while it looked like we were going to need all the inputs that we didn’t put in. But actually we’ve done well because the crops aren’t going to be anywhere near as good as they looked like they would be a month ago. So we’ve kept our costs down which is probably handy’.

‘We did just our normal herbicide spraying. We didn’t use any urea. We looked at the economics of top dressing and decided against it, which now in particular I’m glad we did.’.

The cautious approach being encouraged by drought challenges the dominant professional ideal in farming It is important to appreciate that the move to more ‘conservative’ farming practices is not in keeping with the dominant ideal of an impressive farmer. As discussed above and seen in the following comment by a farmer, the ideal figure is one who aims for high potential returns and acts on opportunities to claim them in a swift and decisive manner:

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‘You have to have the ability to really capitalize on these years when the prices are high. You have to hit the ground running when you come out of a drought. Some people might continue on and miss opportunities, so you’ve got to keep your eyes open for opportunities all the time and grab them’.

There is an unresolved tension between this model of success and the emerging idea that an uncertain and potentially dryer climate calls for a more cautious approach. As one older farmer explained: ‘There are blokes out here this year who have sown a few peas and sown canola, based on how the season opened up. Twenty years ago I would have done the same thing. But I’ve just backed off. I’ve sown no peas: I’m all cereals and I’m doing a bit of hay. I’m just not prepared to take the risks that I would have done twenty years ago.

That’s financially induced I suppose - you don’t take any more risks than you need to because canola is a risky crop, peas are a risky crop and expensive to grow. So stuff it, you know - just take a step back and be conservative. I hate it because I like to be out there doing the stuff, but if it’s going to cost you, there’s no point’.

The idea of ‘take a step back and be more conservative’ is supported by growing concern with risk and its management. Numerous interviewees indicated they are more aware than ever of the risks involved in their business activities.

‘We do plan far more than we used to about risk...’.

‘We think about risk management all the time now, especially having a young farm with nothing much to fall back on’.

Like the farmer above, many are also acting on this by becoming more conservative in approach, thanks in large part to the risks introduced by drought.

‘I reckon this year I’m far more conservative than I was because of the droughts.

That’s probably part of your knowledge bank… you know it can go pear shaped’.

‘I’ve reduced my reliance on borrowings and probably become more conservative in my planning’.

Altering the way one farms involves altering one’s professional self-identity. The interviews suggest that through the accumulated weight of individual production decisions, some farmers are repositioning how they see themselves as farmers. The predominant model of successful farming - based on a relatively high input/high risk approach that can reap large rewards – is being increasingly called into question. As some interviewees commented: ‘Every season is different. You always say you learn lessons from each year, but often those lessons don’t apply to the next year, so you just take away what you can… I would say we were probably a bit more cautious and conservative and that is probably the way we’ll farm forever now. The last five to ten years have probably made us more like that’.

Such a change in approach and identity is not easy or necessarily welcome. Some, like the older farmer above, resent it, and others, such as the farmer below, resist it: BCG & RMCG

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‘You shouldn’t be in this game if you can’t be optimistic because every year you gamble so much money on a positive outcome. You’ve always got to plant and you’ve got to think like it’s going to be a normal year. There are people around here that are starting to take short cuts and it’s going to hurt them in the long run’.

This quote illustrates the highly subjective nature of risk and the different time frames that can be taken in assessing it. What some see as conservative in the short term is seen as others as risky in the longer term. Thus, a growing awareness of risk does not spell a simple turn away from high input farming. But it does introduce a degree of ambiguity into the question of what the ideal approach to take is.

Decisions around enterprise mix are complicated by assessments of risk Key to production decisions for mixed or potentially-mixed farmers is establishing the desired balance between crops versus livestock. Many interviewees illustrated how the two types of enterprises compete for their attention, time and financial input. Most who did so commented in favour of sheep: ‘We’re lucky we've got sheep this year. You know, we’ll make some money… I'm not sure but we’ll go close to breaking even’.

‘With lambs you’re not going to make the same amount of money as a good wheat crop, but at least it hasn’t had the cost along the way’.

‘You can’t budget on income from crops… There is just too much risk… With sheep you’ve still got your lambs and it’s more stable. You’re not getting the highs and the lows of cropping… Everything in cropping has gone up too, like fuel and fertilizer… To me cropping is all about inputs. You have to have better machinery, more fertilizer, have your GM seed that you have to pay for. With sheep it’s more about good management’.

‘Cropping: it’s really only gambling. No different to putting $100,000 on a horse’.

‘Honestly, if grain prices stayed above $300 a ton, I would just unload all our sheep and live a less physical type of lifestyle. But unfortunately it would be a lot more risky’.

‘The sheep are a risk management tool’.

Given the collapse of crop yields that was occurring at the time, this lean towards sheep is unsurprising. As one farmer commented: ‘The sheep got the benefits this year. We’re shearing this beautiful wool. We've got lambs that are fat, we've got great lamb percentage. We've still got enough feed…

That’s the huge difference between this year and last year, as far as the actual years are concerned.’

But the preference of interviewees above for sheep over crops is about more than the fortunes of this particular season. Although the troubles occurring with cropping at the time would have reinforced pre-existing preferences for sheep, it seems the choice between the enterprise types is being shaped at a more profound level by assessments of which option is lower risk.

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Although the question of crops versus livestock represents heightening concern with how best to deal with the risk of uncertain and possibly drought-like conditions, the answer to the question of which enterprise type to favour is not clear-cut. As many interviewees pointed out in this and the last round of interviews, livestock are far from a sure bet during drought.

Although they generally require less financial input and can enable some continuity of income, they also represent a large amount of work and risk. The relatively high level and ceaselessness of physical labour that good stock management demands is exacerbated during drought by water and/or feed carting. Responsibility for stock can also involve a higher level of emotional labour, especially during drought as conditions for stock become difficult: ‘Livestock do really take it out of you in a drought because you’re responsible… It’s like having a kid, but you’ve got 10,000 of them… There’s that whole business of “Will I get the sheep through? Am I going to have to pay another whole lot of money to buy grain at $300?”. Whereas with the crops… well, you sort of come to terms with losing the crops. Even this year, when I felt so confident on the 1st of August, you do come to terms with losing them. But the sheep, you know, it kills you…’

Fear of having hundreds or thousands of hungry mouths to feed in drought conditions is therefore another factor affecting the production decisions interviewees have made and continue to make. As the farmer below describes, prices then also come into it: ‘We’ve got 800 ewes and lambs on at the moment, which doesn’t bear thinking about.

The hay that we thought we were going to cut has got sheep on it now... We’ve got some lovely new young ewes and they’re vaccinated, but if this carries on and with the current grain prices, there is no way known we can carry our sheep on… But I honestly don’t know what you would do, because you couldn’t afford to sell because you know when you unload the sheep you’re going to get stuff all for it… I’ve got a daughter who has a job in Mt Isa and if I could unload all the sheep I could go and make $1000 a week doing something up there and just come back when it rains…

But I don’t know if I’ll be able to sell them’.

Overall, the decisions arising as the possibility of drought emerges again are complex and difficult. They involve bringing together incommensurate factors like animal welfare, prices, and personal wellbeing, and weighing up short term and long term goals. The need to invest in drought proofing to cope with future drought – and, indeed, the coming months - adds a further layer of complexity to these decisions. We now look at the approach different farming families have taken to this issue.

Efforts to adopt on-farm drought proofing measures are limited by a lack of capital Given that costs are a key component of the risks that farming families are increasingly focusing upon, their decision making is coloured by awareness of the costs each option involves. As one interviewee commented: ‘We’re very aware that every decision we make costs us and aware of potential returns and probability of returns’.

The growing possibility of drought means that assessments of the costs of any particular production path also need to include the “drought proofing measures” that seem to be BCG & RMCG

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increasingly needed for that enterprise, such as storage bins for grain, or tanks, troughs and stored feed for livestock. Many interviewees described how they are trying to adopt such measures. Some explained their approach as: ‘More sheep and more hay and hopefully get into a position where we’ve got a fair bit of grain sitting aside’.

‘Storing a lot of grain if we can. That’s probably a risk management strategy, knowing you’ve got a silo full of feed or grain. We’ve cut a bit more hay the past few years and that gives us a fodder reserve’.

Part of the dilemma facing many farming families, however, is that, thanks to prior droughts, they cannot currently afford to invest in these measures. One farmer explained he is making progress in this area but has a long way to go: ‘Storage is not a problem. I can put some in the ground and do lots of things… We’ve actually progressed a bit actually… Considering last year was drought and this year is about to be, that’s not bad. But…there’s a long way to go’.

As another put it, in financial terms the issue is: ‘How can you drought proof without rain?’

Difficulties in affording drought proofing measures due to previous and emerging drought conditions throw into question the viability of different production options. Combined with issues about drought proofing a family’s business as opposed to farm, discussed in Section 2.4.4 below, the additional requirements that drought proofing represents further complicate the decisions many farming families are facing.

Efforts to adopt other on-farm risk management strategies such as diversification are also being stymied in some cases by a drought-induced lack of available capital. As one young couple explained: ‘We haven’t had any spare money to make any financial decisions to change the direction of the farm. The only financial decision has been to put the money back into the farm, which is no different’.

This quote illustrates how, in addition to the low input approach that some farming families are taking in response to uncertainty, another version of “conservatism” is also at work: a nochange version of conservatism. Like many examples of the recent shift to a low resource approach, taking a “no change” approach is also financially-induced in many cases. But, while the low input approach lowers financial risk (at least in the short term), the no-change approach may increase it. For, an inability to change direction represents an inability to adapt to new conditions. While at some levels lowering inputs may suffice as a suitable adaptation, other changes that demand the input of new capital (and expertise and energy), such as drought proofing measures or diversification, may be required to manage in the future. To the extent that past drought conditions are limiting many farming families ability to adapt in this way, this situation leaves them vulnerable to further such conditions; conditions that at the time of interview seemed to be emerging.

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Forward selling has badly impacted some farming families Forward selling is a relatively new phenomenon that is variously perceived as a source of decreased or increased risk. Hailed by some as a way of managing the fluctuations of the market and avoided by others as a risky and difficult gamble, hedging grain prices has played a large part in the current difficulties facing a significant number of farming families.

One interviewee estimated that ‘close to 50% of farmers around here would have some sort of hedging‘.

Hedging is an issue this season (2007) because it seems many forays into it are turning out to be over-optimistic on yield and under-optimistic on price. The result is that not only are those involved threatened with the problem of poor harvests, but they have committed to selling certain amounts of grain at prices which at the time of interview were well below the market. Some explained their decision and situation: ‘We’ve dabbled in futures trading in the past and this year we decided - because the way things were looking and the prices the way they were - we’d have a real go. But the market just kept rising… And it all comes back to that rain… Initial estimates were 30% of our crop marketed but you wind those yields back and now we’ve got 50% hedged… We’re realizing the loss that we’ve made…’.

‘When we were hedging our crop, we had confidence. Four weeks ago I locked in barley – that’s how confident I was in the season. Who would have thought the season would pull up like it is and cause all this grief?’

‘There were prospects of good grain prices and we started hedging our crop, which turned out to be a huge mistake… Now we’re looking like we might have a double whammy – we’ve lost money on hedging and we’ve got the risk of not growing any crop. It’s rapidly turning into a critical situation’.

‘We’ve all gone and hedged too much… We thought the price was good, but the losses are getting out of control.’

‘A lot of people have forward sold… So they’re watching themselves double lose in a way, which is hard as well’.

‘We’ve lost money because of this grain trading… The ones who have been unsuccessful are basically having a double whammy. We’ve had a drought, we’ve had losses on grain trading and we’re potentially looking at another drought. It’s like having three droughts in a row.’

Various reasons were suggested for why so many farming families have been badly impacted by forward selling this year. One suggested people were relatively forced into forward selling by the Wheat Board situation: ‘Possibly one of the things that has caused it is the Wheat Board debacle. Normally the Wheat Board do it all for us… But now they’re not doing it and everybody got told that you’ve got to start managing price yourself. And things have gone pear-shaped and we’ve all been caught’.

Another blamed the marketing advice they subsequently received:

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‘The marketing firms have a lot to answer for… Now people will just not go near them because every person I speak to says that if there’s one lesson they’ve learnt is that next time they’re not going to book up any grain, they’ll just put their money into silos’.

But perhaps the strongest incentive to forward sell was a level of desperation stemming from the losses of last year; a determination to try and gain back some control over one’s future and to compensate for previous financial disappointments. As one farmer explained: ‘The way grain prices were, I basically said that I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity - this is the year that could write last year right off. So we went hard on our inputs and went hard on our forward sale… and got ourselves in a bit of trouble’.

As seen in other sections, previous years’ droughts have created a desire to make up for lost opportunities among farming families. We have seen in this section that some acted on this desire to “catch up” by trying to maximise yield through a high input/large scale approach and/or by trying to maximise price through forward selling. Both strategies involved calculations of risk. As one farmer who took both strategies explained ‘that’s just our risk management policy’. It is impossible to know and perhaps unfair to ask whether such risk calculations were affected by drought-induced desperation or over-reaction to rain. In any case, the unfortunate financial difficulties such strategies look, in hindsight, to have created for those involved are likely to further focus farming families on “safer” sources of income, as we now discuss.

3.2.5

Many farming families are looking to increase their off-farm income Many view alternative income as key to “drought proofing” Farming families’ efforts to reduce risk are largely motivated by a desire to protect their financial wellbeing. Such wellbeing is determined by the families’ entire financial situation, not simply the financial circumstances of the farm. Demonstrating this whole-of-business or whole-of-family perspective, numerous interviewees discussed the growing importance they are placing on off-farm income in an effort to improve their financial security.

In keeping with this, some interviewees argued that the surest route to “drought proofing” is to bolster one’s income against the possible financial impact of drought by reducing its reliance on that which drought most affects: the farm. As some stated: ‘The problem is, you can’t drought proof a farm to the point where you can always grow a crop… so you need alternatives’.

‘Drought proofing is an alternative income’.

‘You can’t drought proof your farm, but you can have money off-farm…. You can take money off-farm from profits and invest it somewhere else… so if the farm loses a lot of money… I mean, it doesn’t seem to make sense to take that money and put it in a sinking ship… But the thing is, if you’re going to drought proof your farm by having offfarm assets then you’re drought proofing your total business, you’re not drought proofing your farm. That’s subsidizing your farm… In any case, you can’t do much

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about that if you don’t make money. You’ve got to have the farm running well before you can do that.’

‘I don’t really like the word “drought proof” because every farm experiences a drought.

You can set yourself up to cope with drought but I don’t know whether you ever “drought-proof” yourself. If we have a drought, it doesn’t matter if we’ve got $1 million dollars in the bank - at the end of the drought we’re going to spend some of that $1 million and we’re going to be worse off than we were at the start… So we’re not drought proof. We might still have money in the bank at the end of it, but we’re not drought proof… You can set your business up better to cope with drought and that’s it’.

The time and capital being committed to farming is decreasing One source of alternative income is off-farm employment. Although it is a more limited option for older couples, in keeping with national trends numerous interviewees referred to this an increasingly important source of funds for their family. As one said: ‘My contracting has kept us going… Without that I’d be very disheartened I think’.

Others discussed how they will need to rely on off-farm employment in the future if the current season fails. Heading off to the mines for a period was touted by a few. It is crucial to note that such options come at significant costs to the individual and family as competition for time and energy is created. For example, a young couple with three children under five and a pig shed to manage explained that, as in previous drought years, the husband would need to seek casual work up north if their financial situation deteriorates further: X: ‘If we have a bad year, it will put a bit more pressure on. Things will be pretty ugly.

I pick up a bit of casual work now and again where I can. It puts food on the table even though it doesn’t pay the bills. This time last year I had two months away’.

Y: ‘If it doesn’t rain, X will go away again and work and I’ll stay on the farm with the kids and pigs… It is difficult… It is very difficult’.

Another mother talked of her family’s increasing reliance on her salary and the difficulties of being away from her three young children: ‘I’ve gone back to work because of the situation… I love work in many ways, but I do feel more stress being at work and being away from the children’.

A young farmer described the difficulty of combining his shearing work with running a farm with his ageing father: ‘It’s hard when I’m shearing to work at home because I work through the weekends and at night… It makes it harder for Dad’.

Another, albeit impermanent, method of seeking off-farm income is the selling of assets.

While some farming families have sold off-farm assets to finance their current farm production, others are looking at the opposite flow of finance. Selling farm assets – namely land - to fund seemingly more secure and profitable off-farm investments or necessary BCG & RMCG

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family expenses was mentioned by approximately a quarter of interviewees as an option they have used or are considering. Some interviewees explained this as risk management: ‘Potentially selling a block or two is risk management… selling land and buying a house in the city, that’s a risk management tool’.

Given the capital-rich, cash-poor situation many farming families are in, others explained it as a need to liquidate rather than transfer assets. In this case, selling farm assets is an option of last resort.

‘I don’t see any other way of recovering other than selling off some assets. I’ve got to repay those borrowings. There is no way with what I’ve got that I could earn enough to pay off that debt. I would have to get $1000 a ton and that’s just not going to happen. As I said before: you recover, you have income, you’ve got to pay income tax, you’ve got to pay interest, you’ve got to pay principle… The industry is not providing enough to do that’.

‘We can always sell something… If the worst comes to the worse, we can sell some land…’.

‘I’ve been wondering how I can afford to send the two blokes [his sons] to university.

I’ll have to start selling off the farm… It’s disappointing because we’ve been established here since 1949… But that’s probably going to happen… It’s been hurried up by the drought…’.

A serious caveat with selling assets is being able to find someone willing to buy at a price you can agree on. As the last farmer quoted above continued: ‘The problem is I’ve been trying to sell a block of land for two years and it hasn’t sold… I thought I might put two blocks up and make it a bit of a parcel, but then I lose the house my sister lives in…’.

Another similarly reflected: ‘I used to think that if we want to go, there will always be someone there to buy the farm. And it came to me that there were an awful lot of people that are going to have to walk away or are just fed up with it. And it hit me that, if we decided to go, who was going to buy the farm? It’s not a simple thing that the neighbours will buy it because everyone seems to be struggling’.

An alternative source of income from land is leasing it out, which for many is a less radical and easier step than selling and is something a number of interviewees (approximately 15%) indicated they have done or are looking into.

Farming families of all ages are trying to protect themselves with off-farm investments Perhaps the most desirable form of off-farm income is that derived from a profitable investment portfolio, whether in the form of (non-farm) property, investment funds such as Farm Management Deposits, or shares. Numerous interviewees emphasised the value of such a portfolio to their financial wellbeing. As one farmer commented: BCG & RMCG

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‘If we didn’t have financial investment in things outside the farm then we would have gone under in previous years… If you’ve got some financial investment in things other than the farm, you’ve got a chance to recover’.

Traditionally, investment portfolios have been viewed primarily as superannuation for older farming couples. Increasingly, however, they are being seen as a form of insurance needed by all those involved in farming, irrespective of their stage of life. Approximately 35% of couples under 50 mentioned this as a strategy they are pursuing, compared to 20% of those over 50. As two young interviewees remarked: ‘If we were to have a good year, we won’t reinvest everything back into the farm anymore. We will be looking more at off-farm investments… a safety net’.

‘It has been very beneficial for X [her husband] and I in this early stage of our farming lives to go through all this because it makes us realize how important preparing for retirement is. We’ve seen people who are in their 60s and 70s now – whether they be neighbours or further away – who had planned to retire at this stage, but haven’t been able to. Seeing that has been a really good lesson for us. We can see the need to build our investments’.

Indicative of agriculture’s emerging image as unreliable, farming families of all ages are looking to underwrite their involvement in the industry with “more reliable” streams of income. That such streams of income include playing the share market – which relative to most jobs would be considered a risky approach to supporting oneself – highlights the relative level of risk that agriculture is perceived to involve.

The shift from farm to off-farm assets within farming families represents a further challenge to farming success. Whether in terms of funds or the time and energy individuals put into work, a competition is emerging within farming households between farming and its alternatives. While many farming families find themselves unable to earn enough farm income to invest either off-farm or on-farm, in other households it seems money and effort that would have gone into the farm is being increasingly redirected towards structures and activities aimed at complementing or subsidizing farming income. There are signs that the capital worth of some farms is being actively or passively eroded as assets are sold or improvements to farms - such as drought proofing measures, the purchase or maintenance of plant, and progress towards economies of scale - are delayed in favour of off-farm alternatives. The potential result is that the strength of farm businesses is being reduced at a time when their external challenges seem to be escalating.

3.2.6

People are questioning their plans for the future Professional and personal plans are being postponed and compromised The growing focus on off-farm income represents one of the ways in which drought and the threat of it are altering farming families’ plans for the future. Some of these alterations are in people’s goals and how they are planning on achieving them, and some are in the timing of what they are hoping to do.

In terms of the latter, approximately 67% of interviewees commented on the retarding effect drought is having on their personal and professional progress:

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‘We had wonderful plans but they’ve all sort of gone on the backburner again’.

‘It has slowed us right down with what we wanted to do.’

‘The plans we have, we are now putting on hold because, you know, the drought…’.

The sorts of plans and goals people are delaying or choosing between include expansion, upgrading or maintaining plant, diversification and drought proofing measures, succession, moving or renovating house, holidays, retirement and building financial investments. Leaving farming is also an option on people’s minds, as discussed further below. Approximately twothirds of those who reported that their plans have been delayed are under 50, reflecting perhaps the greater number of plans such interviewees have or the longer time frames they have to execute them. Slightly more older interviewees (20% compared to 15%) reported that they were going to have to change rather than delay their plans.

Plans involving spending are being especially held back both by the financial impacts of the drought last season and by the uncertainty created by the threat of drought this season: ‘You look at our current position and… we should spend nearly $200,000 on vehicles this year. That’s just on utes and cars. That’s a lot of money. And up until before ’05 we also had a plan to put another $100,000 worth on the end of the house. Now of course we’re 12 or 18 months away from even looking at that.’

‘Five years ago was our last decent holiday that we’ve been on. It would be lovely, when we’ve got the money, to pack up and go away. But after the last few years, we don’t have it’.

‘The uncertainty of the weather patterns, the dry pattern we’re in - it’s just not encouraging to make full on, flat out decisions to go ahead… For the past couple of years, I’ve had equipment loans and not the finance to service them… One young bloke here has just bought a header out of WA and he’s thinking of cancelling it because the season has fallen away so badly. But he needs it because he’s just taken on extra lease land. And it’s all done on finance so they’re under pressure already…’.

‘It would be fabulous if we could have something… That would be our lifetime dream: to have some money put away so we can enjoy ourselves later on. But we’re just not sure when it’s going to happen’.

Some plans, such as children’s education, cannot be postponed. Their continuation instead necessitates compromising on other plans and/or seeking additional income. We saw in Section 2.1 how one father is trying to sell land to fund his sons’ university education. Other families are similarly faced with pressing educational expenses, some of which require compromise on behalf of the children involved: ‘[The farm situation] becomes a family issue. We’ve got a daughter at college and that’s a costly thing. But do you pull her out of college or do you let her go and finish?

You couldn’t pull her out at end of Year 11 and not let her do Year 12 at college. We made the commitment to give her a chance because unlike her father she’s quite smart…. But it’s hard and it’s hard on the kids’.

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‘Our youngest is going to boarding school.... But if we have a tough year that will be one of the first things to go. He’ll have to stay here… But I just wonder why a child’s education has to suffer in a drought’.

A young farmer’s wife also expressed concern about the impact of farming in drought on her children: ‘It is very hard… I feel for the kids because there has been a lot that they have had to miss out on because we didn’t have the money ‘.

It is these sorts of issues that underline why decisions within farming households must always be understood within their family context as much as business context. They also underline the possibility that if drought and its lingering effects begin to elicit too great a toll on the family, they may lead to not just a bump in the road for the farming family, but an actual detour, as we now discuss.

Virtually all families are questioning the value and possibility of staying in farming The impact of drought on families’ financial status and their associated opportunities is perhaps the number one trigger for them to reconsider the possibility, rationality and desirability of staying in agriculture. Individuals’ concerns about their situation and growing frustration with agriculture mean that all interviewees are well aware of the at least theoretical option of exiting the industry. In some cases, people are seriously questioning for the first time whether they want to or will be able to stay. As one couple said: X: ‘I can’t believe we’re even thinking about it because we’re usually very positive. But this year has just given me that element of thought in the back of my mind thinking, “What’s the point?”. Even though the crops are still looking good, it is just so hard these days’.

Y: ‘It’s just so stressful! Every year we seem to be going through the same stresses and you think that you’re not enjoying it, so why not go and do something else?... I mean, I don’t want to go and live in the city or anything like that, but sometimes you just like to have a bit of a guarantee of your income every year’.

X: ‘And you have to be comfortable to make the decision to get out while you’ve got something. You don’t want to run your equity down to nothing because there would be nothing worse… So, I love it here, but you’ve got to throw these questions up, because as soon as you start getting pride involved that’s when you hang on until you’ve got nothing left’.

Although the specific questions people are asking themselves about staying in farming depend on their particular circumstances such as age and debt level, the mood of questioning is widespread, as the following quotes indicate: ‘Everybody is in the same predicament as us: How much more can we borrow before it’s unsustainable to pay it back? Why are we here if it doesn’t rain?’

‘At what point are we going to make a decision to say we’ve had enough of this?

Where’s our trigger point?... Because you can only take it for so long and the bank will only give you so much money’.

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‘There’s just the feeling of “Are we doing the right thing? Are we wasting our time beating our heads against a brick wall?”’.

‘Our youngest has got five years to go at school, and after that, who knows?... I just think there is so much more that we could be doing with X’s [her husband’s] ability and skills rather than beat our head against a brick wall here. It has been a long hard slog from starting from not much’.

‘If we decided to stay, it would be a question of whether we made the right decision. I mean, is it always going to be like this here?... X [her husband] and I have only been back here for 10 years and pretty much all those years have been not good’.

‘So, X [his friend] said: “Why am I here? I mean it's all going down hill and if I keep doing this I’ll just go broke…”. Not that he’s going broke by any means. But you know what it’s sort of like when you’re young and when you keep sort of increasing your debt - which we have done ourselves, another half million… You sort of say “I've got to stop this”. Sometimes you’ve got to make hard decisions. So, we don’t like them leaving, but I understand it… ‘ ‘Everything is hinging on this season and if it doesn’t rain again then everyone will just feel like throwing it in. You can’t just keep doing something that doesn’t work. If you’re not selling any produce then you have to ask yourself whether you should close the doors. If you’ve got a farm and you’re not growing anything then you’re not sustainable… You can’t just keep borrowing from the banks and the banks just can’t keep giving it to you… If we don’t get a crop I’ll have to go and find a job, or send X [his wife] to work, one or the other. But someone’s got to look after three kids, so I’ll have to go and find a job in the mines or something – that’s where everyone else is…

But, I don’t know, maybe we’ll just sell.’

‘If this year turns out as bad as it potentially could in X [town] then I might get a push from the bank. Why wouldn’t they? But I don’t want to be in that position’.

Farming families are grappling with the issue of whether to stay or go with varying degrees of freedom and with a varying breadth of options before them. While some are motivated by a need to escape and compensate for - perhaps temporarily - the particular financial circumstances of their farm, others are motivated by an uneasiness about agriculture in general; an uneasiness that has grown since February and seems to have contributed to more families questioning their future in the industry.

As emphasised in the previous report, an important element of the context in which families are making their decisions is what those around them are doing. The quotes above give the impression that not only is a large number of families talking about possibly leaving, but a significant proportion is likely to actually do so. Whether true or not, such an impression can itself be influential, playing a catalytic role in individual families’ decisions to go. Such an influence is more than a crowd effect; it reflects the very real connections that exist between members of the rural community.

Some people are restricted from leaving by financial and family reasons For some people who may otherwise decide they would like to leave, the opportunity to do so is blocked in some way. As seen in Report One, some older individuals’ retirement from BCG & RMCG

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farming is being delayed by their need to still earn enough savings to retire on, including a profitable sale of their farm. As two interviewees in the September interviews commented: ‘We wanted a good year because if you’re going to retire you don’t want to retire on a drought’.

‘We know people who want to retire. X’s parents and Y’s parents, for example, they all want to retire at Horsham. But they can't do it because they’re still putting money in the farm and haven't got the equity. So all their retirement plans are all put on hold’.

It is not only retirement out of farming careers that is being delayed. A farmer’s wife talked about how her own retirement is being delayed as the family farm accumulates debt: ‘I am starting to feel as if one part of my life should be finishing and that is my career.

I should be able to look forward to the change that I saw as being a logical progression… But it's not going to happen, not at the moment’.

Others’ ability to leave farming is being stalled, often unintentionally, by members of their family. One young couple discussed the pressure they feel to stay and look after the husbands’ parents: ‘To change what we’re doing would take a massive change. It affects the whole family, it doesn’t just affect us… There are a lot of influences in there so you can’t just change and do something else. It would still affect X’s parents because they’re still part of the farm… It’s an added pressure. You like to look after your parents because they looked after you’.

Others are in business partnerships with siblings who would be unable to buy the other out or survive on the remaining portion of the farm if one was to sell up. As a woman commented to her husband about his such situation: ‘At this stage, unless things change, we’ve got no chance of sorting that out’.

Children are also among the family members who prevent others leaving farming. We saw in a quote above that one couple is waiting for their youngest child to finish their last five years of schooling before thinking of doing something different. Other parents are waiting to hand over the farm to their children, or to be in an adequately robust position to do so.

‘We’ll stay here until X [his son] can take over… The timing is bad. Instead of putting a bit of money into setting up somewhere to get out and take it easy we’ve got to worry about surviving and paying the debt off… The problem will be being able to retire and having something for X to take over. It would be easy for us to bail out now, but that leaves him with nothing… And you can’t do that when he’s given his life up to hang around and stay’.

‘If there were just X [his wife] and I, we would have had a quiet year. But because we’ve got a son home and another one wanting to come home we’ve got to try and get ourselves back on top of the financial problem so we can move on from that and give them a start in farming’.

‘X’s parents are still involved in the farm as well, so we’ve actually been sorting out a succession plan. X’s parents instigated it. X’s dad is 70 soon and he was wanting to look at future things… We’re probably the ones at the moment who are putting the BCG & RMCG

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brakes on and wondering whether we want to jump out of the frying pan and into another fire… We’re just trying to weigh it all up’.

Perhaps the most common family barrier to the family departing farming is one spouse’s commitment to it. A number of female interviewees indicated that they are far more interested in leaving farming than their “born and bred farmer” husbands. The wife of a farmer who last year suffered serious depression and at the time of interview was experiencing severe stress following his large hedging losses explained her situation: ‘[Even if this year fails] we still won’t get off. X [her husband] would have to have every last cent spent before he got off the farm. I’m not as emotionally involved as him so I sort of think of it as something that’s not making money at the moment. I’m not saying I’d rather be gone, but do you stay on a ship until it sinks to the bottom of the ocean or do you get out when you see it starting to go down?... X has been born and bred here and it would break his heart to have to leave, so you just keep battling through it. But I hate having to see him making decisions in a panicked state in case it turns out to be the wrong decision and I don’t want to see him go downhill stresswise or in any other way… I’d hate to see if he went down because he’s the breadwinner and everything else’.

Another similarly discussed the tension between personally wanting to leave and being married to someone who doesn’t’: ‘People talk about selling out and I know lots and lots of families saying: “As soon as we get money for our farms, we’re going to sell”. Now, I envy them in a way because they see that as an option. But I can't with X because he doesn’t see it as an option…

He's obsessive, it's in his blood or something…’.

Even those deeply committed to farming are questioning its value to them Some farmer interviewees demonstrated a deep, habitual connection to their farm and the farming profession. Yet, it seems even such a connection is not preventing them from observing what is going on around them and questioning whether “logically” they should think about getting out. As a couple of farmers commented: ‘The hardest thing for me is that I always wanted to be a farmer and farming is my life.

The hardest thing is that this farm has been in my family for 120 years. But I don’t see any sense in staying here’.

‘We’re 5th generation, so that means a fair bit. But I probably would have made different decisions along the way if that link in the chain wasn’t as long’.

Associated with a deep connection to one’s professional identity is an inability to envisage what else one might happily do. As some older farmers reflected: ‘I’m probably a bit stubborn because I probably should go… But I’m comfortable here with what I’ve established and what I’m doing. Probably my heart is ruining my head in that respect… But what do you do to occupy yourself?... X [his peer] has suffered BCG & RMCG

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with depression and the uncertainty of how it is and he’s sold up… It takes a lot of guts to sell up and I’d love to, but I’m just not prepared to yet’.

‘I’m thinking about pulling out. But then I think, what do I do? You talk about displaced farmers always finding something somewhere, but… I mean, if I was 40 again, maybe…’.

‘I’m predicting that a lot of people will leave farming over this… I wouldn’t… The only thing I could do is lease the farm and get a job somewhere else. But what would an old fart like me would do?’.

Although the issue of how one would fill life after farming is especially pertinent for older farmers - for whom finding new employment or something to occupy them can be more of a challenge – younger farmers also expressed a sense of confined professional identity and options. As one said: ‘It’s all I know, so that’s what I do…’. Like others, however, this farmer has also been prompted by drought to reflect on what he does and does not enjoy about farming. As he and his wife discussed: X: ‘I mean I still enjoy watching things grow and things like that. But when you have to bring it down to making money out of it, then sometimes you don’t enjoy it. The business part of it is not much fun’.

Y: ‘If it wasn’t your livelihood then it would be enjoyable. When it’s your livelihood and when you have nothing to live on and you have to keep going back to the bank then it’s not enjoyable’.

X: ‘It makes it tough’.

Many of those who have the voluntary option of leaving farming will reject it for emotional and other reasons. Yet, as the couple above illustrates, even those who reject the idea are engaging with it to a degree as they are prompted by the current conditions and others’ actions to reflect on what is most important to, and possible for, their family. As some interviewees, all of whom are relatively young, remarked about their decision to date to stay in farming: ‘I guess [this farm] is where we want to be... I was born on a farm and I can’t imagine any other life… So I would like to be here. But if that’s not the case, as long as the family is together, that’s the important thing. We can’t change what’s happening and we have to accept what it is happening’.

‘I love ag, I love what I do, I love the business. I love the fact that my children can go to the farm and work with me and learn all sorts of things about working hard and working for money. I love it, I do love it.’

‘We think agriculture is our thing; we just have to work out how we go about it…

We’ve got a young family, so we’re putting time into family issues. But we’re also realizing that our family is going to cost more money, so we’re having to look at the farm having to produce more’.

‘At the stage of life we’re at [mid 30s], we can see a future in agriculture still. We’re probably making longer term plans as well - looking at what we’ll be doing in five or ten years time on the farm and the way we’ll be farming and thinking about a future there… But we have to be in the right place mentally.’

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‘We’re still wanting to stay in agriculture, I think. This year we have looked at whether we should be thinking of moving to another area and we’ve done a bit of investigative work. That happened probably since February. We are looking at perhaps moving to a higher rainfall area and doing similar to what we’re doing now but on a lower acreage and doing it a little bit better to produce the same from less area’.

It is likely that these families and many others will continue with their original plan of farming.

Nevertheless, past drought and the threat of its continuation are requiring them to monitor their decision, weigh up the costs and benefits, and adapt their methods. Some, like the couple above and another considering moving to Western Australia, are looking to relocate to other farming areas in an effort to escape the worst drought conditions. Others are looking at ways of ensuring their farm and wider business is profitable enough for their families’ changing financial needs. All are well aware of the challenges and hard work ahead on the path they have chosen to date.

3.2.7

The rural community is fatigued and fragmenting Many people are concerned about how others are faring One of the consequences of the community, governmental and media responses to the difficulties of last season (including research responses such as the ‘Critical Breaking Point?’ report) is that members of the rural community have a better understanding of what other members are going through. While knowledge of the exact circumstances of specific others usually remains poor – representing many families’ natural desire for privacy – there seems to be greater awareness among farming families of the range of problems facing farming and other rural families in general.

Flowing from this awareness is concern for those who are facing such problems. As one interviewee commented about reading the first CBP report: ‘I realised what different positions other people are in… I noted some of the depressive comments and realised how hard it is for some people out there’.

Some of the ‘different positions’ this interviewee refers to are created by the age brackets or stages of career people are in. As in the last report, numerous interviewees expressed concern for those younger or older than themselves. As one older farmer said: ‘I worry about the younger ones like the 30-40 year olds that are probably at the peak of their farming age… These young blokes are building up their leasing country and trying to get ahead and it’s just not happening for them… There is just a lack of confidence going forward, with the years being like they are…’.

Parents similarly expressed concern about the particular issues their son and those in his age bracket face: ‘Our son is 21 and he’s on the farm as well but all his friends have gone to the mines.

So there are no young blokes left. It makes it very hard for them socially because there is quite literally no one around’.

While a younger farmer reflected on the difficulties the older generation of farmers are facing:

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‘I don’t know how someone who is 60 or 65 must be thinking at the moment. They’re probably thinking they’re going to spend the last five years of their farming life paying off the debt that the drought year has created for them. It must be very hard. You’d have to be thinking that you’d be better off selling out’.

A couple of interviewees commented that they felt buoyed by reading in the previous report about others’ concern for their age group. Knowing that others care about the wellbeing of you and your peers, or you and your family, gives you a feeling of support vital for good mental health. This feeling of support is perhaps even more effective when those who care also share your situation. We saw in Report One how reassured many people are by the knowledge that they are not alone in facing problems to do with drought and rural society.

For, just as we may experience a sense of relief when we accept that a problem such as “weather” is beyond human control, we may experience a sense of relief when we learn that a problem we face is common to many. Both reappraisals shift the focus off our individual abilities and alleviate feelings of failure. Reflecting on how difficult it is to discuss the drought and its effects with wealthy Melbourne friends, an interviewee explained, for example: ‘As we were driving home [from Melbourne to their Mallee home], I said to X [her husband], “I’d rather be home because everybody’s in the same boat. At least everybody feels bad”... I mean, just in one day here two women said to me in town – one woman said to me, “Well Y [her name], we’ll just have to be here for each other”.

And the other woman said something very similar. And they’re people like, you know, I know only very slightly. But there is definitely, there is definitely a sense of sharing the pain, sharing the agony’.

Others made similar comments about the comfort they get from knowing they are not alone in facing drought and its attendant problems: ‘The fact that everybody else is in the same boat as us makes you think we’re in it together. And if people come unstuck and need to talk, you’re there for them.’

‘People are all in the same boat and we’re sharing ideas and comforting each other.’

The downside of ‘everybody’ being in the same boat is the magnitude of the problem it implies. In the current situation, interviewees comments suggest that the stress caused by the threat of further drought is not just widespread but acute. A long time resident of a small town in the Mallee remarked, for example: ‘I'm really worried about the community… The morale of the community - the panic and the disbelief - is something I haven't experienced in my life’.

The distress or depression of others can itself be upsetting, feeding and spreading the problem by creating a source of worry and a difficult environment in which to live. Comments by a married couple illustrate the kind of feedback loop that can be created when stress causes some people to withdraw from social life: X: ‘There’s not a very good feeling in town at this point in time. There was a lot of optimism – probably three months ago it had a whole new lease on life. But certainly now it’s not as good’.

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Y: ‘It’s probably gone up and down. With the early break everyone was very excited and everyone was doing things. There were new cars in town and new machinery and people out and about at things… We went into the pub for tea around the end of the tennis season one Saturday night and I remember the pub was pretty full… But then we went a couple of weeks ago on a Friday night for tea and it was dead. Friday night is usually a pretty good night in the pub, but there would have maybe been five farmers and three or four town folk there and that would have been it… I think people just aren’t going out again. They’ve just gotten back into that stressed mentality that on a Friday night we’ll stay home and save our money… So it’s hardly worth going’.

This couple’s familiarity with how people think and behave under stress indicates that stress in the community is nothing novel. The previous drought periods have ensured that.

Furthermore, as we saw in the first report and discuss in the following section, the main way drought’s effects are being expressed in the community is through the exacerbation of long term problems. As one interviewee put it” ‘Even though the drought is a big issue, for us there are so many other issues about living in a rural area that it’s just one little bump in the road’.

Issues of rural decline are ongoing and problematic The demographic trends and loss of services reported in the previous report continue to be a serious issue for farming families and the rural communities they are part of. Although the early break led to a revitalisation of spending and community spirit, this boost has not been enough to stem the declining viability of many rural businesses, which, like farms, are still reeling from the economic impact of past drought years and may not have been in the position to exploit the change in locals’ spending habits following rain. As one interviewee summed it up: ‘Look, I think we've got the basis of a great community… But, really, we just have to get some money in there… We need to circulate some money. We just need to have some good seasons - a big boom, a big boom’.

The difficult feedback loop between lack of patronage and lack of facilities or products seems to be still in play. Interviewees reported that over the last six months businesses in their local towns have continued to struggle or close: ‘How’s our community faring? Well, not very well. They’ve shut the shop and they’ve shut the post office’.

‘The take away shop closed. And the mechanic is talking about shutting shop and going up to the mines’.

‘Some things aren’t on the shelf here, the commodities are not there… People go to Horsham and probably do a month’s shopping.’

As local businesses close or lose their usefulness or appeal to potential customers, the number of people using the town decreases further as the centre loses its drawing power relative to alternative, competing towns. Another interviewee explained:

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‘Even if people are living here, if you can’t get everything you need, you’ll go to another town and you’ll buy a lot more in the other town because you’re there. I think that happens a lot… There’s less people in our town then there was… I don’t think that that’s just happened over six months; I’d say that’s happened over the years… I think the town is just getting smaller’.

Some types of businesses or services have particular drawing power, providing flow-on effects to other businesses in the town. The vital role of doctors was emphasised by a number of interviewees, who explained that not only does the existence of a doctor in town support associated businesses such as hospitals, pharmacies and residential homes, but it attracts residents to the area, supporting the town as a whole. One woman discussed this from the point of view of someone employed in the local pharmacy: ‘Without a doctor this town would be dead… We wouldn’t be able to run the hospital as a hospital without a doctor. Then people would get their script filled out of town so they wouldn’t come to us [at the pharmacy where she works], and then they’d probably buy their groceries while they’re out of town as well. So a doctor is a key person in the local community. If he sees 30 people a day here, that’s 30 people driving out of town five days a week if there were no doctor’.

A town’s dependency on a single role in the community like a local doctor makes it vulnerable. In turn, it makes it difficult for residents or potential residents to plan confidently for the future. An older interviewee discussed the issue from the perspective of someone who hopes to retire with his wife to a local retirement home in the future and who is concerned about the wellbeing of his elderly mother and mother-in-law: ‘I just wonder, in another five years who’s going to want to do it, who’s got the capacity to do it… Unless you’ve got local people really fighting for your essential services, I can see us ending up having to go to the doctor in Swan Hill or Horsham.

While you’re well that’s fine, but as you get older – X’s [his wife’s] mother is 87 and my mum is 84 – I just wonder whether the old people’s homes are going to be operational when it comes to be our turn. I think when you’ve got choice you can cope, but when you don’t have choice that’s when it gets hard’.

Another interviewee looking to hopefully retire in the next few years indicated that the presence – or in her case, absence – of a doctor in their local town was affecting her and her husband’s decision about where to retire to: ‘The medical thing does worry me a bit, that we don’t have a doctor here…’.

A local football club is another feature mentioned by a number of interviewees as vital to a town’s well being. As well as the economic role a football club plays in drawing people to a town, like other sports clubs a football club also plays a vital social role. As a form of entertainment more than exercise for most people, football particularly acts to bring people together in a relaxed setting to unwind and talk . As two male interviewees reflected: ‘If you didn’t have the football club it would be a bit sad to see what the town would be doing… You get to chat to people and that’s a really important resource’.

‘The fact that we had a footy club this year was a huge relief because it looked like folding, and that would have been a huge detriment to the town… If the footy club had

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have failed it would have been a huge blow… The footy club is good because you’ve always got someone to talk to’.

As with doctors, in the current climate of rural decline recognition of the importance the local football club plays in one’s life and the life of the town comes with fear that this resource will be lost. As the interviewee above continued and another stated: ‘Now there will be the worry of the footy team next year I suppose… Realistically, I don’t know how long it can continue…’.

‘The football club is really battling, but that’s the same in all small towns’.

An additional challenge for football clubs and those who value them is the seasonal nature of the game. As the interviewee above explained further: ‘Once footy is finished you lose a lot of the contacts that you sit down and watch the footy with’.

It is notable that, with the football season ended in September, the lack of football over the coming months is a further challenge for those facing a disappointing harvest and a long hot summer.

As suggested by discussions in the sections above about the rising financial stress being experienced by farming families, such families are once again pulling back on their spending as the potential for further financial difficulties emerges with the dry conditions. Many are also pulling back on their involvement in the community in other ways. Interviewees noted how the previous six weeks had seen a decline in the number of people around: ‘X [town] is getting quieter. You notice that the number of cars going up and down the street is definitely quieting down… There are people that we haven’t seen for ages.

‘There are less people going into town and staying at things and there are less people going to the pub’.

Besides socialising, this involvement includes participation in community groups and organisations, which is another long term issue facing rural towns. As one interviewee noted: ‘…there are less people to carry on the football club, the church, the scout group. I was president of the X [town] Hospital Committee and I know how difficult it is to keep things going. You never get all the problems solved and people just get tired of that after a while’.

Interviewees attested to this feeling of tiredness. While one young couple described how they have recently chosen to get more involved in their local organisations ‘because it directly affects us… and we don’t want to see things go backwards’, others talked of feeling less able or motivated to be involved as they focus on the serious issues before them personally. As one woman reflected, she and her husband are rationalising what they are involved in: ‘Like all small towns, a few people do lots of things basically. Of course, if you don’t put in, you don’t get out for your family. And also you don’t get the satisfaction of rural life if you don’t put in… We know this but we have been making lots of decisions BCG & RMCG

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recently about where we are putting our time and energy and what we are putting it into’.

Another summed up what seems to be the approach of many: ‘We try to support the local community whenever we can, but sometimes it’s just not practical… You need to consider your family as well’.

Overall, the threat of further drought is exacerbating ongoing issues of rural town viability as people are being forced to conserve their financial and personal reserves. Although there was a brief period of respite for some businesses, it may have not been long enough to revitalise some businesses, or local organisations that rely on people’s time and energy more than money. And although people’s drought-induced withdrawal from local life may not be permanent or even widespread, it begs the question of whether the businesses and organisations – which they would no doubt like to return to when future good conditions give them the chance - will have been able to survive the intervening period without their support, particularly as that period extends into the next year.

There is also the floating question of what effect the prolongment of drought will have on the populations of rural areas. An interviewee in a previous section predicted a ‘mass exodus’ of farming families, and as we have seen many other interviewees are thinking seriously about whether to go. Involved in their decision will be their assessments of the status and future viability of their local community. As one woman reflected in thinking about where her and her husband might move to: ‘I’ve got to be honest in saying there are times I could easily not live here because a lot of people have gone and it’s getting harder and harder to keep the community together… It’s very disheartening to see this town decline. It was thriving in our younger days – we had a hospital, doctors, train station, four garages, four banks, car agents, a picture show. You didn’t have to go out of town… But now there’s hardly anything’.

Rural decline is pushing members of the community to consider what the future holds for them and their family, as well as the community. No one wants to be the last one standing where the community once was, especially if such a position has been earned by sacrificing other opportunities. As a farmer remarked in discussing his families’ future plans: ‘We’ve often wondered what’s going to happen in ten years time. Are we going to be the ones left behind closing the doors on things like schools and footy clubs?’.

We now explore further how drought is heightening the tension between individual and group loyalties or priorities. As we will discuss, resultant fractures are beginning to appear between members of the rural community.

Fractures are appearing within the farming community At the time of interview, the latest dry conditions were too recent and their consequences too uncertain for any social assistance measures to have gotten underway. While normal social activities such as the Wycheproof Cup and Barley Banquet were on the calendar, it does not seem like there were extra-ordinary community spirit events being held to specifically combat the negative social effects of the threat of further drought. The interviews instead BCG & RMCG

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captured a moment when the community, still feeling raw from previous hard years, was in shock at the recent turn in the weather. They also captured the community at a time when people felt under pressure to be comprehending what was happening to them, and around them, and why, and were thus grasping for answers and perhaps people to blame. This section reports on some of the differences between people that interviewees mentioned in communicating their emerging understanding of the type and magnitude of the problems that they and the farming community are facing.

It was mentioned above that as a consequence of the relatively long term nature of drought over past years and responses to it, members of the rural community seem to be developing a better understanding of what other members are going through. While the upside of this is greater empathy and compassion within the community, the downside is that knowing more about other people’s situations can lead to judgement and jealousy. In seeking to better understand other people, we naturally compare their situations to that which we know best, which is our own situation. A farmer who felt relatively well off demonstrated this process of comparison as he reflected on reading the first CBP report: ‘I realized also that there are some people that are even better off… One person commented that it was the first time in his life that he’s had an overdraft. I wish we were in that position!’.

As we learn about others, we simultaneously develop our understanding of ourselves and our relative position in the world. Indeed, such self-knowledge is often the prime motivation for seeking information about others, especially when we are unsure as to what is happening to us. Report One described a hunger among many in the farming community to know what is happening to their peers in order to help them understand and ‘benchmark’ their own situation. As it also discussed, this form of social surveillance is accompanied not only by caring surveillance of each other, but by observations of a more judgemental character.

One of the notable changes between the February and September interviews is that stronger divisions seem to have emerged between members of the rural community. These divisions seem to reflect in part a divergence of people’s circumstances as, among many other things, the downward spiral from few reserves to more problems entwines those who were from the outset facing the most severe financial and personal challenges. Although the problems the farming community faces are generally widespread and pervasive, the effects that they are having are distributed less evenly.

Acting in parallel with diverging circumstances is growing awareness and interpretations of the differences. For some, this is emerging through comparisons with their friends, as seen in the comments previously about friends in Melbourne. As one young mother reflected on differences between her and her local friends: ‘Before the kinder meetings we go to the bakery and get lunch. Well, I did that twice and then I looked at the price that it was going to cost me and decided I’d take my lunch from then on. My girlfriends are happy to buy it from the bakery, where I probably look at it as money to buy a loaf of bread to feed the whole family… I think they probably look at me and think I’m pretty scummy because I won’t spend the money… But it doesn’t worry me because I know what our situation is like and I know that it is money we can’t spend’.

This interviewee and her husband are becoming well aware of how their situation, or attitude to it, seems to differ from many of their peers: BCG & RMCG

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X: ‘Around this area there are a lot of young families so we are lucky that we have plenty of support and people to turn to… They seem to be luckier than us though’.

Y: ‘They seem to be able to spend more money than us!’

X: ‘My dream would be to have a new car and all our friends have new cars and they can buy a lot more stuff. I wonder sometimes what we’re doing wrong because we’re still paying off land and that sort of stuff... Maybe on the other hand we are very tight with our money and we don’t spend it unless we have to’.

Y: ‘Instead of adding another $30,000 to the mortgage and driving a flash car…’.

The above conversation highlights people’s interest in other people’s approaches to money.

With finances top-of-mind due to the threat of further drought, the questions of whether others share the same financial problems as oneself and how they are dealing with them is a topic of particular interest at present. As seen in the conversation above, and in Report One in relation to financial assistance, divisions are forming between those who take different approaches to spending and debt. While many people are probably affected by the same feelings of self doubt about what they are ‘doing wrong’ as the woman above, they are also likely to be forming in their minds, as the couple above is, the justification for their approach.

In doing so, they are mentally distancing themselves from those who take a different tact.

The main argument over financial matters is between those who have taken on large debt and those who have chosen or managed to avoid it. Inflamed by the government’s financial assistance system (at least in its pre-October form) - which uses debt as a sign of legitimate need and throws all farmers’ financial management under the withering glare of national media - those who have been caught by debt problems are also the target of criticism from those within their sector. As a couple of interviewees commented: ‘We know a few people whose bank managers come and visit them and keep giving them more money without making them accountable for the money that they’re getting. I think they’re just setting them up for a lifetime of failure’ ‘Maybe the truth of the fact is people shouldn’t be borrowing inordinate amounts of money and only paying back interest, getting in a position where they can only make their money back by selling their land’.

Another demonstrated the anger that the financial assistance system has engendered among many who have taken a debt-averse approach to their financial management: ‘Because we were careful and we had money put away we were penalized because of that. It more or less says that you should go and spend your money. Some people spent the assistance on a holiday, some on a new car, some renovated their kitchen… I think you’ve got to be accountable for what you get. Even when banks lend money to these people, they’re lending them more money all the time but they’re not saying that you shouldn’t have the new this or the new that’.

Anger at the financial assistance system – documented in detail in the previous report – seems to be increasingly spilling over into anger at ‘these people’ that necessitate and benefit from the system. Fuelling this disquiet is a fear that the agricultural industry’s need for such an assistance package is bringing it into disrepute. While most members of the industry would appreciate financial assistance if it were universally available, what is galling for those that miss out is that the system’s use of financial criteria presents the view that BCG & RMCG

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unavoidable drought conditions are not the problem as much as individuals’ financial management. In other words, by focusing upon those who have made particular financial decisions – namely to take on debt - the system implies that farmer error as well as natural disaster are involved. Given the amount of public criticism the assistance system has attracted, those farmers who have brought this attention upon the industry are then resented by the rest.

But those who are carrying high levels of debt are often equally resentful of those who are not. While many suffering under debt are open about the fact that they wish things were different - as seen in comments in previous sections – some are also defensive of the position they are in, pointing to their stage of life, desire to succeed or family situation as a legitimate cause. As one younger farmer put it: ‘There are some pretty tough comments against some of us that have gone out and had a go. I guess the question is, those farmers who have made those comments, how sustainable are they going to be in ten years time? Each business is at a different stage. I’m taking my business through a growth phase and others have gone through that and are in a consolidating stage and they’re fortunate that they’re going through a drought at the moment when they’ve consolidated. Probably if they had gone through a drought when they were in a growth stage they probably would have needed that extra help too. The whole point of it is interest rate subsidies, and for those of us going through a growth stage it has been very good’.

Other interviewees in difficult financial situations downplayed the idea that those who are financially better off – and seemingly in need of less financial assistance - have reached that position through merit alone: ‘The ones that are doing alright are ones that have been set up with off-farm income or they’ve bought a whole heap of land that has been cheap or they’ve had a fair kick start’.

‘A lot of the farmers that are X’s [her husband] age have been set up really well by previous generations... They can take a few droughts. Financially they have got that much money stashed behind them that not much has changed… They’ve got money stashed away in all sorts of places. That’s life, there’s not much we can do about it’.

These arguments represent another example of appraisal-focused coping, as individuals present their debt problem as at least partly beyond their control. The implication is that it is unfair to criticise those who are suffering through no fault of their own.

Others downplayed the focus upon their individual decisions and abilities by normalising or even idealising the acquisition of debt.

‘We’d always be in overdraft at this time of the year – it’s the way you’re encouraged to do things these days’.

‘You just keep borrowing money if they let you because that’s what you’re expected to do’.

‘We use an overdraft all the time, but I suppose that’s pretty normal’.

‘We’re pretty experienced at taking on debt now… Not very hard to do… It’s not really very complicated… you borrow as much as you need to make the best of what you’ve got. If it’s good for the farm, you do it’.

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Comments about being expected or encouraged to take on debt bring us back to the issue of what model of ideal farmer is being promoted in the industry. As discussed in Section 2.4.2, there is a growing tension between the ideal of a high-risk/high-rewards approach to farming and a more conservative approach. While the former has been and continues to be dominant - associated as it is with the figure of the large, successful farmer - the recent fall of many of its adherents on the hurdle of unexpected drought has boosted support for the alternative model. As one farmer argued: ‘If you can forget about all this high flying machinery and having the best of whatever is out there, there is still plenty of money in farming and it’s still a lifestyle. The ones that have created a noose around their neck have 10,000 acres more than what they should be cropping and they have no home life and no social life… Agronomists and financial advisors try to tell you the best way to spend your money and it’s not even theirs. People get sucked in and they’re the ones that are saying that it is still going to rain “because it’s got to”. It only “has to” if you are over-extended…’

Another interviewee criticised the expansionist idea of reinvesting all farm income back into the farm to try to grow it: ‘There’s an awful lot of financial ignorance around. They don’t invest off-farm when they have the opportunity to balance the tougher situations. I’m not sure how you go about improving it, because I think that information is out there.’

How people manage their money – and the appropriateness of their decisions – is largely interpreted through their visible spending patterns. This was seen in comments above about new kitchens and holidays, and is evident in the comment below: ‘I look in the grocery shops at what the young ones buy and I shudder… You know, you can spray your garden with things you’ve already got in your cupboard, and there are other alternatives that cost very little. Bicarb soda and vinegar and things like that are cheaper and they work equally as well… I do shudder at what the young ones buy, like bottles and bottles of Coke… How they can afford it, I don’t know’.

Aware of the potentially judgemental social surveillance they are under, many people try to keep signs of their financial situation to themselves, including those who do not want to appear better off than others. As some interviewees said: ‘I don’t say much about it, but I know damn well that I’m miles better off than anybody who has a horrendous debt. If you’re not in debt and you get a tough time you can handle it. If you’re loaded up with debt, you’re looking at years down the track before you can get out’.

‘We are fortunate that we are in a lot better position than other people and we know that’.

‘I’m opposed to having a smart car because it isolates you and your family. If you drive around in a really smart car and other people don’t have a really smart car it creates resentment’.

Despite such efforts to avoid creating resentment, it seems that it is growing among some groups of the farming community as stress levels once again rise. Complaints with or jealousy of other groups, such as those with more rain, more water rights or small business BCG & RMCG

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assistance,also emerged in interviews. Overall it seems that, as one interviewee observed, tension is affecting people’s personalities and outlooks: ‘I’ve seen personalities change and I think a bit of it is due to the hard life. People do get a bit harder to get on with. There’s more tension and I think it’s coming out in personalities’.

These changes in personality are adding to the accumulating issues farming families need to deal with, and are in turn feeding the stress that underpins many issues. What the above quote also suggests, though, is that people understand that differences of opinion between members of the community are being exacerbated by the difficult conditions they share. As another interviewee put it: ‘Everybody is facing their own challenges about what is the best thing to do. Every situation is different and you don’t really know from the outside what is happening’.

Growing coolness between people may also be arising as people unconsciously try to psychologically protect themselves from the pain of physical separation from others when either party leaves. The discussion above suggests that drought is exacerbating the longstanding issue of rural depopulation. Those left are getting used to losing those around them to job and life opportunities elsewhere. As we have seen, many are also getting used to considering whether they themselves will physically leave. Either way, it is likely some people are becoming hardened to the once avoided subject of leaving farming, and that this hardening may be leading to a cooling of relations with others. In other words, social fracturing may be preceding and succeeding the physical fragmentation of rural communities.

3.2.8

Assistance has been utilised and is needed Families have benefited from various types of assistance In recognition of the hardship many farming families have been going through and continue to experience, a range of financial and social assistance measures have been put in place by government and other organizations. While this was relatively new and somewhat overwhelming for many families in February 2007, these latest interviews revealed a far greater degree of familiarity and comfort with what is available, albeit with some confusion over which institution is providing what assistance. Government financial assistance, which was a point of great contention - and, for some, shame - in the first round of interviews is now discussed more freely and positively. Half the families interviewed indicated that they have received some such assistance and many of these expressed how useful it has been for their family: ‘It all helps. You’d always find the money if you had to and you don’t want your kids missing out, but they’re all valuable no matter how small they are’.

‘I’m very thankful for the interest rate subsidy that we got’.

‘We’ll get through to harvest – not comfortably – but without too much bother. Having got that interest rate subsidy is a bit of a load off. It gives us those extra funds to get through the next few months… You don’t sweat on it but things were pretty tight before this interest rate subsidy came through. Half of it has already been spent on

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outstanding bills… Having to build up accounts or pay them late because it’s just not happening financially is hard. The blokes that you owe money to are in the same situation so you feel for them as well’.

‘I didn’t even put that [the interest rate subsidy] in the budget but somehow my budget blew out by about that amount, so I must admit it was bloody good when it turned up because it gave me another two months of breathing space’.

‘We got an interest subsidy from Rural Finance which was good, and we got EC payments and health cards… The actual EC payments are about the same as what we would usually pay ourselves from the farm. So it’s not enough to do any work on but it’s enough to live on. It basically just stops us from having to increase our overdraft. It worked out to be the same as what we’d normally draw monthly from our expenses’.

Financial assistance does, nevertheless, remain a challenging topic. Three of the twenty families (15%) interviewed chose not to talk about their own experiences with it, five (25%) self-assessed themselves as ineligible and two (10%) stated their application for assistance was rejected. Moreover, many of the areas of dissatisfaction with the system that were flagged in the last report are still areas of frustration among those who received it. To begin with, the criteria used in the system continue to be an issue, as indicated in Section 2.7. The problem of the apparent penalisation of those who “do the right thing” and earn off-farm income was highlighted by a young farmer: ‘Our Centrelink benefit has been cut because we earn too much off farm. That then becomes a point, because if I sit here and drink coffee all day Centrelink will give me more, but that’s not my attitude…’.

The administration of the system also continues to be a sore point with some. One interviewee relayed his experience in detail: ‘All the rigmarole that you have to go through to get all the data… It was just horrendous… We nearly had a divorce over getting some of these forms done… We had to put in our application three times I reckon because they’d lost it or it didn’t turn up… I just wanted to be able to talk to the same person to see if they’d got my form.

But you can’t ring anyone in particular… Some of the things they’d accept by fax and some things they wouldn’t… We’d have a tax file number and be an Australian citizen and then they’d turn around and want our birth certificate! X’s [his wife’s] parents didn’t even have birth certificates, we had to apply for them, and in the mean time they’re sending us letters telling us to hurry up… It was crazy. You were sending stuff off in kilos not grams’.

A young mother trying to get assistance to see a counsellor for depression also noted how difficult the system is, with a long waiting period involved: ‘My biggest thing at the moment is that I’m hoping to go and see a counsellor later in the week. Trying to get the doctor to write a letter to the government to get me some assistance so they can pay for me to see this woman has been my biggest bugbear.

She’s an expensive woman and if I could get some money to help with that then that would be great. But I’m still waiting and I don’t know if the money will come or not’.

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Finally, a couple of interviewees frustrated by the same sorts of administrative challenges discussed above, noted how small the amount of interest rate subsidy they received in the end was: ‘We got a very minor interest rate subsidy. But to be honest it just covered our rates. It was nothing like I expected… We’re grateful for something, but with the scale for our business it was very minor… We got $14,000 and our interest bill is probably $100,000’.

‘We put in for some interest rate subsidy… But with all the paperwork and hassles for what we got back out of it you could work it out as an hourly rate and I may as well go and work some place else for the money we got… There’s about 50% of the interest rate available and I think we came back with about 1%. So we’re not even going to bother putting in for it this year. I may as well just go and do a week’s work somewhere’.

Overall, though, most comments about financial assistance in this round of interviews were less negative than last time. Although it still engenders significant anger among many who are ineligible or only partially eligible for it – tapping as it does into the larger issue of how people are to best manage their business, discussed above - the sense of outrage it motivated in February has died down significantly. It seems the system’s existence, complete with its apparent flaws, has been largely accepted as a fact of life, however grudgingly by some. Indeed, one interviewee emphasised how positive he thought the assistance is: ‘It’s great the government have stepped behind us. They want to keep as many farmers going as they can. You’ve got EC that’s come in, which is really good, you’ve got the diesel rebate and that’s really good too, you’ve got ways to manage tax.

There are a whole lot of things that are great for business now’.

Others supportive of the assistance emphasised that for them the main issue is how long it will be continued for. There is ongoing fear that the government will overlook the significant lag time between the end of drought conditions and the end of drought effects: ‘The assistance that has been offered to this point has been acceptable. But I don’t know how they’ll look at it next year because if you have a reasonable income they will just think that everything is fixed. But I don’t think that it is… If we have a good year we’ll be taxed on having a good year and we still won’t get out of the situation we were in before the drought. I think it will take a few good years to get back to where we were’.

‘I just wonder what we’re going to do when we’re not eligible for the Centrelink payments anymore and we’ve still got this massive big debt. That’s when I’d like the government to think that the boys in the bush aren’t over this yet and give us a bit of interest relief for something that we didn’t cause. The drought caused it and it left us with a huge debt and instead of paying the debt off we’ll be paying interest’.

The fear of losing government support is heightened by public and media criticism of agriculture’s need for it. As discussed in Section 2.3, some interviewees are getting tired of having to defend agriculture. While this is making some question agriculture, others are most frustrated at the public’s ignorance, as the following interviewee demonstrated:

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‘Nobody in a job situation would understand. How would they survive two years with no income? If you worked really hard for twelve months and your boss decides not to pay you and you keep working and just hope he pays you after another twelve months - that’s what it’s like’.

Financial assistance to individual businesses and families has been augmented by financial assistance to drought-affected communities by government and other organisations.

Pointing to their awareness of the growth of grant money in the community, a couple of interviewees also indicated a degree of bemusement with its abundance: ‘There has been a lot of assistance for the community and a lot of money thrown around the community. I think the community has probably gained out of that, we’re involved in a lot of things around the town and there was grant money being chucked around everywhere.’

‘We’re getting plenty of grants at the school; they feel pretty sorry for you’.

In terms of information, generally interviewees reported that they are satisfied with the amount and quality of information that is available. Many indicated that they utilise written material, such as fax bulletins from various organizations. As some said: ‘I read everything. I think that I'm not the sort of farmer that’s just cunning, I'm more a farmer that’s interested, I'm really interested, you know I love it. So I sort of gobble up information’.

‘You don’t read everything that comes in but you get good at looking for the bits that catch your eye’.

Others indicated that they are increasingly sourcing their information through a range of trusted advisors such as consultants, agronomists, weather forecasters and bank managers.

One noted: ‘We often look for the quickest way to get the information we need… We have a good agronomist and he’s very good at sorting stuff for us’.

What outside experts provide is often more than information; it is a sounding board for people to work through their problems, akin in many ways to counselling role. As one interviewee noted about talking to his bank manager: ‘I felt so much better since I had the banker out… We sat down and we just talked and he gave me reassurance and he gave me a feeling of, you know, all’s not lost. So we talked it over… That was important - that I feel comfortable that there's going to be no surprises… You know, you don’t want someone to suddenly say “You need another block of land” or whatever… When people have plans and have people to talk to and consider things - it does help them through a crisis… We all have fears that come to us and we sort of need to say “Look I'm just afraid what happens if, x, y and z?”. And a banker could say to you “Well I don’t care if you have 10 bad years, I’ll always look after you”… Or they can say “Well, maybe you should get out”. Whatever – whatever logic… I think the advice for all of us is that sometimes you need to talk about it to someone… Whatever it is, talk about it and try to work through the emotions’.

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Others, however, demonstrated a wariness of outside experts and emphasised that they make their own decisions: ‘We make our own decision pretty much; we don’t have to deal with anybody. There is an agronomy bloke we use a bit, but he’s tied up with a chemical company which I’m a bit wary of’.

Few interviewees mentioned social assistance measures such as concerts. This suggests that, compared to February when it was a common topic of discussion, such measures are no longer so prominent in the community or in people’s minds. One interviewee commented directly on this, illustrating again the kind of ambivalence that many people demonstrated towards social assistance and community education measures in the February interviews: ‘There were a lot of drought “dos” and things on but they seem to have fizzled a bit. It was sort of like the issue of the moment. Everywhere you went there was someone from Centrelink handing out brochures’.

It is notable that the cynicism (mixed with gratitude) seen in the above comments is not demonstrated by those who commented on their first hand experience of financial or emotional counselling.

‘The rural counsellor stepped in when we were having family trouble and he was fantastic’.

‘When I was going through a rough time in March and April, I was spending a lot of time at home because I was dealing with it myself and didn’t want to share it with anybody. Now [after seeing a counsellor] I can talk about it, but then I was just dealing with it myself’.

It seems that it is this kind of one-on-one contact that people respond best to. We have seen that large programs or events such as business financial assistance, public education campaigns or community concerts seem to engender, at least in some, a degree of cynicism and frustration. In contrast, the chance to talk one-on-one about one’s problems with a caring and helpful person seems to allay people’s fears that the form of assistance is irrelevant, wasteful or superficially “fashionable” and short term. Some scepticism does remain about the value of talking to a stranger, underlining the importance many people place on whether others share their experiences, discussed above in Section 2.7. Many interviewees emphasised the importance of having good (non-judgemental) friends and peers to talk to. As one farmer said: ‘I’ve always prided myself on not relying on other people to cope, but sometimes just chatting to fellas in the same situation is good’.

But given the tensions that are arising within the community as individuals and families work through their own problems and make decisions perhaps seen as illogical or disloyal to their local community, the value of an outside perspective can be enhanced. The positive counselling experiences relayed in the interviews suggest that such a form of assistance should be strongly supported in the future.

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Calls were made for further information and improvements to the financial assistance system Interviewees were asked what further assistance they feel they need or would like to see.

Various information needs, systemic changes to existing assistance programs and some tax breaks were suggested.

Information about weather and in particular seasonal forecasting was the primary information gap identified. Interest in the topic area reflects how farmers are seeking to reduce some of the uncertainty about the future, and are focusing on an aspect of their environment that has proven devastatingly influential. Concern about climate change is also generating a hunger for climate information. The other area noted as lacking in accurate information is also characterised by uncertainty: grain futures. That these were the two areas identified suggests that one of the main reasons farming families seek information and expert advice is to help them minimise the uncertainty in their decisions.

The enduring frustrations with the financial assistance criteria came out in calls for their systemic improvement. As discussed above and in Report One, the two main complaints with the existing system is that it utilises financial criteria at all and that the financial criteria in place penalise those who have made the effort to save. As the following said: ‘I just think the drought assistance should be made available to all farming families not just the ones that have good accountants. What happened to us is because we had wheat in the wheat board pools they didn’t consider us to be in a drought because we had money from the wheat board pools. People who can manage their finances a bit better get penalized because they’re trying to manage their affairs. If some people are eligible for it everyone should be.’

‘They end up putting that many criteria on it that a lot of people won’t be able to meet it anyway. If you have gone and tried to make the most of profitable years and have off farm assets and set everything up as well as you can then you end up not being able to get any subsidies. They expect you to sell your off farm assets before you access any funding. You’re not going to do that because if you’ve got any brothers and sisters you’re taking their assets and they’re not really part of the farm.’

On the topic of financial assistance, a number of interviewees suggested that the main way they could be assisted would be tax breaks. This was highlighted as a way for the government to demonstrate that they understand that a decent harvest does not spell automatic drought recovery for farming families; that it will take more than one year for many of them to get back on their feet. As two interviewees stated: ‘The government will see it [our income this year] as just dollars, and tax us accordingly. I don’t think they need to give us handouts but give us tax breaks and acknowledge that we’re still suffering’.

‘We need some sort of tax break, as opposed to earning all this money one year and getting taxed on it... If you have a good year and you want to take a fair bit of your debt off you end up paying a lot of tax’.

These sentiments about tax point to another of the frustrations of agriculture, which is its stop-start cash flow. They also point to what we have seen is one of the central concerns BCG & RMCG

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about drought, which is that farming families will continue to feel its effects long after the rain begins again.

3.3

Conclusions The six months between February and September were an exhausting series of highs and lows for farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee region and beyond. Complex problems have continued, abated, restarted and appeared anew as weather conditions have improved and deteriorated. The “drought recovery” farming families were beginning to experience, emotionally if not financially, seems to have been aborted far too prematurely for any lasting positive effect. Instead it seems to have inflicted the injury of lost hope and opportunity.

Rather than tracking drought recovery as originally expected, the interviews reported in this section map the growing anxiety and despair that is affecting farming families living with the threat of further drought. While just a small snapshot in a rapidly changing and diverse context, thanks to the generosity and honesty of the interviewees, these interviews are an invaluable insight into the poorly understood yet crucial topic of drought as lived experience.

The interviews capture a period when the growing likelihood of further drought was threatening to derail the renewed efforts and plans of many farming families. They highlight how farming families’ attempts to recover from previous drought conditions require them to cope with additional calls on their reserves as they prepare for production again. It also highlights how they need to cope with the unavoidable lag period that exists between them committing further reserves and receiving the subsequent financial rewards that will help them recover. This process of recommitting and waiting places farming families’ in a vulnerable position long after drought has seemingly disappeared. It also leaves them exposed if it appears as a possibility again, as in September it seemed to be doing. Families are particularly vulnerable if: other factors, such as markets, are simultaneously working against them; and they have optimistically committed a large proportion of their remaining financial and emotional reserves to trying to maximise the recovery potential of the current year. A significant number of families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee seem to be experiencing the pain of this situation.

That bad luck is involved in the circumstances unfolding for farming families cannot be denied. So much of agriculture remains beyond human control, at least at the individual level. As families’ efforts to farm well are repeatedly thwarted by external conditions, frustration and disappointment with their chosen career and lifestyle is rising. Questions about the rationality, desirability and possibility of staying in agriculture are playing on the minds of virtually all involved. Simultaneously, families of all ages are looking to decrease their reliance on it by increasing the time and resources dedicated to other off-farm areas.

Faced with such competition, the farm itself is likely to be weakened, starved of necessary improvements and drought-buffering measures. As such, its inability to provide families with the security they want and need is exacerbated and its appeal as a long term option is further reduced.

2007 was to play a critical role in farming families’ ability and willingness to continue farming and has prompted far-reaching questions about the future. This, combined with the severity of the shock and disappointment that the apparent collapse of the season has entailed, given the hopes that had been pinned to it, has resulted in many farming families seeming to

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have reached their emotional and financial limits. Indeed, the current intersection of past drought, further drought, hedging disasters and rural decline is seriously challenging some individualsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; whole outlook on life. This observed darkening of their previously optimistic views suggests another avenue through which drought is likely to have a long lasting and profound effect.

Drought, or the threat of it, is also challenging the appeal and appropriateness of the dominant agricultural ideal of the risk-taking entrepreneurial farmer. As the stakes are raised and farmers seek to understand the options, weigh up the risks and justify their decisions, the division between relatively high and relatively low risk approaches to farming and business management is being reinforced. Judgement is also being passed by those on either side of the divide. The strengthening of such differences reflects the diverging circumstances of those in the debt cycle and those outside it, of those expanding and those winding down. It also reflects the social fractures that are forming within the farming community as a result of the stress it is under.

Irrespective of how seasonal conditions developed from September on, the interviews interpreted in this section suggest that the threat of further drought had already inflicted a serious toll on the farming community. Due to this and the low levels of financial, emotional and social reserves farming families were already operating on prior to the recent dry conditions, the next six months will once again form a momentous period. The pressure on decision making already present in February 2007 will continue to mount towards February 2008. Although to date no major decisions about the future have been made by the farming families interviewed in September, the signs suggest that the interviews we conduct as the summer draws to a close in 2008 will reveal that, unfortunately, some critical breaking points have been reached.

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Part Two – February 2008

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4

February 2008

4.1

Overview This section reports on the interviews conducted in February 2008. It builds on the understanding developed in Part One and the September report for Part Two about the issues farming families were facing in a period of great uncertainty and diminished capacity.

Like the first and second rounds of interviews, it explores immediate and longer-term pressures upon farming families and their decision making around the present and future.

Based on interviews with the same twenty families interviewed in September 2007, the findings represent the variability among farming families and their shared difficulties. They refer to differences between those in the younger and older age groups as appropriate.

Seven key findings emerged from the interview data: Last season had a neutral effect on most families’ financial situations •

Overall, last season did not greatly worsen or improve farming families’ finances

•

Families remain focused on financial pressures

The coming year instils a wide range of emotions in people •

Individuals offered various reasons for feeling optimistic about the coming season

•

Some interviewees are suffering ongoing stress and health issues

•

Many feel hesitant, fearful, sceptical and demotivated about the coming year

•

Some are struggling to make sense of last season

There is growing anger about input costs and farmers’ relationship with agribusiness •

Recent jumps in the cost of inputs are a major concern

•

Some farmers are questioning their relationships with others in the agricultural industry

Most farming families are trying to take a more risk-averse approach

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Many are approaching the coming season more conservatively than normal

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Most farmers are adapting their production practices

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A freeze on capital expenditure is common

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Many farmers have been put off using futures and forward contracts

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Off-farm income remains a priority

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The question of whether to leave farming is less prominent but of ongoing relevance for some •

Most families feel more positive about staying on their farm than they did in September

•

Leaving farming remains a consideration for some young families

•

Drought is affecting the timing of retirements and departures from the industry

Most people are positive but concerned about their communities •

People value the support their communities offer

•

Concern about population decline is widespread

•

Balancing the needs of one’s community and family remains a challenge for some

Financial assistance is accepted and welcomed by some but not all •

More families are open and happy about receiving financial assistance

•

Some still feel uncomfortable about financial assistance.

In sum, just as February to September 2007 in the Wimmera Southern Mallee was characterised by the low of drought punctuated by the brief-lived high of the early break, the pattern of the subsequent six months was not dissimilar. The stress in September of the early break’s collapse was alleviated in later months by better than expected harvests and buoyant prices. Although for some, this improvement has been stable and places them in a relatively strong position, for others, it was only relative to their worst fears in September and was a temporary reprieve from the continuing and in some cases worsening pressures of drought. The result is that as farming families gear up for another year, most are doing so with a heightened sense of caution as they try to accommodate the risk of climate unpredictability that they were so harshly schooled in last season. They are also trying to adapt to the growing financial risks associated with using inputs and marketing their own produce, which, thanks to the unpredictability of the market, are a further serious source of complexity and stress.

Given that drought and other long-term pressures are ongoing issues for the farming families involved in this research, many of the findings from this round of interviews reiterate those of February and September 2007. The differences between farming families’ financial situations remain. While some are now better or worse off than this time last year, the mix of large and small incomes from last harvest combined with the large or conservative costs involved in different strategies seems to have resulted in a general pattern of marginal change that reinforces the influence of pre-existing financial reserves as the determining factor of financial wellbeing. That is, while last year represented a slight recovery period for some farming families, for most families recovery remains a hope and goal.

Hope itself also varies across the farming population. The discrepancy seen in September last year between the optimistic and despairing perspectives of individuals has been reinforced in this latest round of interviews. While for some, the financial ‘escape’ allowed by BCG & RMCG

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better-than-expected yields and high prices towards the end of last year has been the strongest influence on their outlook, for others the general collapse of the season and the continuation of drought has been the determining factor. Worries associated with the latter have been particularly compounded recently by the rising costs of inputs as families again face the challenge of cash flow and risk associated with gearing up for another season.

Although most families’ situations have only improved marginally since September, if at all, most families have also retreated from being on the brink of leaving. While a few young families have decided or are still seriously considering leaving in the short to medium term, and for those near retirement age such a decision remains pertinent, most have decided to ‘knuckle down’ again, buoyed in some cases by the hope a new year offers. However, the level of concern about the future that interviewees’ voiced, and the way drought is obstructing some people’s ability to leave, suggests that some families’ decision to stay may be a year-by-year proposition, mentally as well as financially.

The interconnection of individuals, families and communities and their decisions again emerged as a strong theme in these interviews. It is obvious how important local communities are to many farming families and the value of the support such communities offer, particularly in times of drought. We have also seen, though, how at a more micro-level the needs of these different spheres can be in tension as the already difficult task of prioritising one’s limited time, energy and other resources between farm, family and community, and in a significant number of cases, between farm and off-farm employment, including unpaid childcare, is exacerbated by drought. Just as some are having to let their soil fertility or machinery quality decline in the short term in order to survive the acute pressure they are currently under, so too are some having to step back from supporting and contributing to their community in order to cope with their individual situations.

The resultant issue of divided loyalties is emerging too within the agricultural industry as different players try to balance individual gain with the sense of team identity that is created by agriculture’s difference to other sectors. Some farmers feel a sense of anger, hurt and injustice at what they see as their exploitation by non-farming players in the agricultural industry. Such a situation is illustrative of the complex social as well as financial character of decisions farmers increasingly face in managing their farm businesses.

4.2

Findings

4.2.1

Last season had a neutral effect on most families’ financial situations Overall, last season did not greatly worsen or improve farming families’ finances With a harvest that was generally worse than that hoped for in April, but better than that feared in September, last season turned out to have, on balance, a relatively neutral effect on farming families’ financial situations. About 45% reported a slight improvement, about 35% reported a slight worsening, and about 20% reported no change. Among the interviewees in the latter category, two explained: ‘Well, [our situation] hasn’t got any worse anyway... I think everyone was struggling a fair bit last year and the fact that the harvest turned out not too bad gave everyone a bit more spirit. When I say not too bad – it could have been a lot worse. We could have got nothing like last year’.

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‘Our situation is no better than it was and no worse than it was. We got through the year without having to dig into our resources and hopefully we’ll be able to do the same this year’.

High grain prices and significant losses on forward and futures contracts for some added to the mix of positive and negative factors and the enormous highs and lows of 2007. The general outcome is a mixture of relief for the way complete disaster was averted combined with some lingering disappointment about the failure of a potentially bumper season. Many interviewees commented on their sense of relief: ‘We got out of it a little better than what it looked like when you were here last, when it was looking like it was going to be a complete failure. We still have losses on our contracts and losses on our futures, but fortunately prices were good’.

‘It was a relief not to go further backwards. Even though we’ve got a fair way to go yet…’. ‘[Last September] things were going downhill and we didn’t know how the season was going to go but at least now – it wasn’t a great season - but we know how it has gone… You just want the season to be over and it is over now, so there is a bit of relief…’.

‘I suppose we’re relieved a bit… There is an element of relief because I didn’t know which way it was going to go. We feel that we’re fortunate that we’ve had the year we’ve had I suppose. In saying that, the drought did make some pretty big impact and it’s going to take a while to come back from that’.

‘We expected nothing and got something in the end’.

‘The gate has been opened and we’ve been let out of jail I reckon’.

Others also expressed the sense of loss they still feel at the collapse of what they had hoped would be “the season” to get them “back on track”.

‘We’ve got money, but [the harvest] wasn’t the boomer we were hoping for. Back in August, we were hoping for a boomer’.

‘The disappointment of last season is a challenge. It started off so well and then petered out’.

‘There is frustration and this sense of loss…’.

Although overall the season had a neutral effect, for some the season spelt a slight improvement to their financial situation, allowing them to ‘catch up’ a bit on previous poor seasons: ‘What’s happened still hasn’t made up for the year before, but we’ve caught up a bit’.

‘We’re lucky that we’ve had a bit of a catch up. We’ve eased the pressure and now we start again… If we had another disaster it would be a different story, of course, but it has eased the pressure’.

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‘In some ways we’re probably as well off as we have been for some time because of the harvest that we had... We’re comfortable with where we are.’

‘We’re not a whole lot in front, but we’re probably a bit stronger than we were. Things aren’t quite as tight’.

‘We’re cruising. Financially we were fine last year… It didn’t affect us like it did other people. It has been tough but it hasn’t been dire. Other people have certainly struggled a lot more’.

‘It [our financial position] would be more settled and more manageable now… The price of the grain helped make the position a bit sounder than it was last year’.

‘A big change is we’ve got black letters on the cheque account. We haven’t had that for a while!… We’re the strongest we’ve been for 3 or 4 years’.

‘This year we won’t be in the black all year because we’ll run back into overdraft, but we’re going to be able to meet our commitments this year, whereas last year we weren’t able to. We’ll be able to pay for all our inputs – chemicals and fertilizers – up front this season, whereas last season we deferred it and paid it all in January. So in effect we’re paying last season’s and this season’s together… We’ve been able to catch up and pay for two seasons’ ‘At least this year we’ll be able to make payments on things and pay things back.

We’re not spending any money except on inputs. The machinery loan will be paid back, the property loans will be paid back and we’ll probably make our interest commitments on some others. We’ll be biting into it instead of having to borrow’.

Some others, however, felt that last season slightly pushed them further behind: ‘It [our financial situation] would be weaker than twelve months ago… We pretty much just covered our costs’.

‘Because we had to borrow money and stuff, we’re way back’.

‘We’re probably not back to where we were twelve months ago, though we’re still better than we thought we would be in September’.

‘Harvest didn’t go very well at all. We did actually have a harvest, but nothing brilliant by any standards. We got enough that we could put away a little bit to sell later on, which is what we usually try to do - try to sell some to get us through later in the year but no where near as much as we would have got in previous years or as we would have wanted to… We were finished [our harvest] by the first week of December, which was really strange, really sad. Usually we’d only be starting then’.

Families remain focused on financial pressures Even among those who feel their financial pressure was somewhat alleviated by last season, there remains a strong focus on the need to ‘tread carefully’ and to face the ongoing financial issues created by previous years of drought. Many are concerned that even if the BCG & RMCG

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last season did not actively move them backwards, by not moving them forward to an adequate degree, they are in danger of “slipping further behind” financially.

For example, many interviewees voiced concern about the debt levels they are still carrying, with their attendant interest burden: ‘We’ve got a heck of a debt’.

‘Our debt is enormous. I’ve never had it anywhere near as much as it is at the moment’.

‘We’ve increased our overdraft another $50,000 to give us some more strength up our sleeve and just to go through this year’.

‘By the end of this year we’ll still be catching up. We’ve paid back the overdraft and loans that we took, but we’ll probably have to bite into that again before the years out.

By the end of this year I reckon we’ll have to go back there again, although not to the amount we went last year. We’ve just got to tread carefully for the next twelve months and hopefully the next one is a reasonable one and then by the end of next year we’ll probably be back to where we were before the drought.’

As discussed further below, others are concerned about their ability to meet the rising cost of inputs: ‘The financial pressure is still the same. Whilst we had a half reasonable harvest with good returns, the costs have doubled so the pressure is still there’.

‘Sometimes you say you’re going to invest in the future, where this year [by using minimal fertiliser] we’re just investing in next year’s crop basically’.

‘Our bank account is definitely a lot lower than what it was… The bank account is lower but the cost of things has gone up hugely… We’ve got enough money that if we’re really careful we’ll get through, but if we don’t have a harvest at the end of this year then we’ll be in serious trouble. It’s not just the fact of surviving, it’s the fact of paying all the loans we have and all the interest off them. That’s why X is away working, so he can make money to pay the interest off the loans that we’ve got so at least we can stay above water with those sorts of things. I think we should have enough if we’re really careful, but it’s going to be tight by the end of the year’.

Some are also concerned about the lists of capital improvement requirements that are accumulating for their farms: ‘There’s a sense now that along with the drought the farm has to be going backwards because the machinery is getting older, it’s getting more out of date, so not only do you have the debt to pay off but you have to catch up. This is all assuming that it does rain again’.

‘You can’t stand still. If you have five bad years your header is five years older, your tractor is five years older and your ute is five years older. All of a sudden if you don’t get out of that in ten years you’re in big trouble because everything is too old... For a lot of people, there is a lot of catching up to do’.

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‘We’ve probably hung off replacing equipment and things that need upgrading so that makes you wonder’.

‘We probably haven’t bought machinery that we should have bought’.

In summary, 2007 seems to have resulted in mixed emotions dominated by feelings of relief, combined with an ongoing focus on the financial challenges ahead.

4.2.2

The coming year instils a wide range of emotions in people Individuals offered various reasons for feeling optimistic about the coming season The highs and lows of last season have impacted the farming community in diverse ways.

While, at the time of interview, approximately half of the interviewees seemed to be still smarting from the pain inflicted by last season and previous drought years (discussed below), the other half seemed almost euphoric about the coming year. Those who were most optimistic were those who viewed the coming season as a new beginning, holding the potential and even likelihood of being more favourable than recent seasons. Some interviewees commented that they felt the general mood in their farming community was more positive: ‘I think generally around here people are a whole lot happier’.

‘Things have changed dramatically. It’s more positive I think. Who knows what next year will bring? But you just go along instead of having that gutted feeling that there is no future and feel like you’re letting people down. It’s more positive’.

The optimism about the future expressed by interviewees was based on seven factors. First, there was a continuation of the kind of ‘defiant optimism’ discussed in the previous section, where optimism emerges as a feature of determination. In February, that determination was to forget about last season and ‘get on’ with the current one. As one farmer stated: ‘We’ve come to terms with it and we’re moving on... It is history and you’ve just got to get on with it’.

In keeping with the relationship between defiant optimism and the dominant professional ideal in agriculture discussed in the previous section, this determination to ‘get on’ with the next season was described by some farmers as a basic requirement of farming.

‘We’re gearing up for a normal season, we’ve got our fertilizers in the shed ready to go and we’re just treating it as normal. Cautiously normal… I think you probably have to do that every year, whether you’ve just had a good year or not. It’s just the nature of farming’.

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Second, optimism was also expressed as a feature of relief, as a logical outcome of pleasure and pride in having survived the difficulties of last season: ‘I think everybody is feeling a bit buoyant after surviving last year. If you can survive last year you can survive anything! That’s almost the attitude I think. We’ve been through the worst of it. It can only get better from here on’.

‘We’re optimistic. After what you have been through, you don’t think there is going to be another drought, you think it’s going to be good this year!’

‘I’m feeling positive, certainly better than this time last year. Just having that relief of clearing last year helps a huge amount mentally. I lost it there for a few days last year…’.

Third, some have been buoyed by the slight hope afforded by last season. After having a relatively good harvest, some interviewees stated, for example: ‘I think we’ve been very optimistic and have been the whole way through. I think we are even more so now that we’ve had a good harvest and there has been more rain around’.

‘You feel as though you can achieve something now, whereas before you doubted yourself and everything you were doing’.

‘I like it again at the moment. Not love, but I like it… Now I cope well every day… It’s nice to be in control of your life again, and have those dreams and goals come back’.

Fourth, optimism emerged out of an apparent annual cycling of emotions, with hope for the coming season discussed as a natural feature of the time of year.

‘It is always good this time of year, you get a bit of rain, you scrunch up a bit of soil and you start thinking about what might be and forget about the bad years a bit… I would say that every February I feel pretty much the same way - there is always a sense of optimism’.

‘I think when February comes around people get more optimistic again and knuckle down for the year ahead’.

‘You’re always positive at this time of year because you never know what the year’s going to bring and you always hope’.

‘It’s all the same. It’s another year with the same expectations and the same hopes’ ‘At this time of year, you haven’t had to front the season and it could still be a great season. It’s not like July where the season might be gone and you’ve got to face up to it. It’s a good time at the moment for us’.

‘At this time of the year I’m always positive. You close off last year at the 31st of December and you move in and you start planning and people are positive’.

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As with last season, some are especially hoping that this year will be a redeeming year for them, the one that allows them to turn things around: ‘Most people are still hopeful that this will be “the year” and I’m hearing more positive things’.

Fifth, a degree of optimism was expressed by those who have assessed the situation they are in and concluded that their level of personal responsibility for their current difficulties is low. That is, reflecting the reappraisal approach to dealing with stress discussed in the previous report, some farming families feel able to face the current season as optimistically as normal based on their belief that they are not to blame for the difficulties of last season: ‘I don’t think we did anything wrong last year. It just didn’t rain’.

‘Even though…that dry period knocked everything down with yields and stuff, you can see that you can still grow things and it’s not really your fault’.

‘We’ve just come to the decision that you can’t do anything about it so you just get on with it’.

Sixth, some interviewees underpinned their optimism about the future with analysis of the specific situation currently facing farming. For these respondents, not only is the coming season a new beginning, but coming seasons represent a ‘new era’ in agriculture. As some explained, they feel the profitability of cropping is increasing, based largely on their reading of the positive price signals for grain: ‘I feel incredibly confident about future prices and demand for our product. In fact our crops are on just the start of a boom. I firmly believe we’re just about on boom times.

We get to the stage where we’re going to have starvation in the world because there’ll be such a shortage of food’.

‘I’m pretty excited about it [the future of agriculture in the area]… If we can just have an average run of seasons and this high grain price hangs around for a few years, which I think it will, we could see a whole new era of farming in Mallee.’

‘To be perfectly honest, I think, if we can get this weather thing sorted out, then agriculture has a pretty bright future for the next four or five years. There is a worldwide grain shortage so I can’t see wheat prices dropping below $250 a ton for the next five years and perhaps even $300 could be the floor. With higher grain prices there is going to be less livestock around so livestock prices should stay strong. I think agriculture has got a fairly positive future at the moment’.

For one farmer, this sense of a new positive era was also related to his particular circumstances as he nears retirement and gears up for a “last push”: ‘There is talk that there is rain up in Queensland and when they’re getting lots of rain it always comes down here and what have you. There are high grain prices and high wool prices, etc, etc. All our kids have left home this year… I feel like this is my opportunity to really knuckle down and get things done here. I reckon I’ve got BCG & RMCG

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probably 10 years to go and I want to give it a red hot go and see if we can make an inroad into this debt’.

Another interviewee commented that he thought quite a few older farmers may be gearing up for a similar last push, choosing to stay in the industry in the short term to make money while the situation – based on grain prices – was ‘so good’: ‘Some of the ones that are still here might only be staying for the short term and they might think that they’ll just stay while it’s so good. They might get out after a couple of years or something. There might be a few thinking along those lines. I heard someone say the other night… “Why would I be going now?” This could be the best time we’ve had in the industry since the ‘70s’.

Finally, some people expressed a feeling of optimism that they will be OK regardless of what happens in farming. Many related this to the effects of a relatively recent holiday and the broader perspective it had afforded them.

‘We had two weeks holiday and that’s always good. You need that perspective to realize that this isn’t everything…’ ‘[The holiday] may have not been beneficial financially, but mentally and socially it has been’.

Pointing in some cases to a sense of enhanced financial security, others discussed future holiday plans. As one young couple remarked: ‘We’re going to Adelaide for a couple of weeks with the kids… We’ve bought a little camper trailer so off we go… If you don’t do that sort of thing you wonder why you’re farming. You’ve got to take advantage of years when you have a bit of spare cash.’

Holiday plans not only indicate enhanced financial security, but how some are adjusting their attitude to the financial pressure of the drought, taking a longer term view of how best to cope as the drought continues. One farming family discussed how, regardless of a poor season last year, they have decided to release the brake they had previously imposed on their personal spending because they are sick of living in “crisis” mode.

‘X [his wife] is going overseas for a holiday and previously I would have said we couldn’t afford it, but if one of the kids came home and said they needed to go overseas and borrow $3,000 we’d probably find it. We would find the money for them, but not for ourselves, so we just thought, “Bugger it”, and she’s going… I think our attitude has changed too. Twelve months ago we faced a drought and we pulled our belts in and all that of thing, whereas this year about half way through the year and particularly that time through October we thought: “Why are we beating ourselves over the head with a sledgehammer?”. Your friends and people that you know outside farming are sailing along and the stock market is going gangbusters and here we are pulling our belts in another notch! We just thought “bugger it” and did a bit of retail therapy! This was in September. Then we had our neighbours over who were all doom and gloom and we told them that we were getting the builder in next month to start some extensions - we’re finally moving the toilet inside. You just think: “bugger it, why not?”’.

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This family illustrates how, rather than continuing to delay their plans, some families have decided to push on with them regardless, despite what they acknowledge is the apparent irrationality of doing so. As discussed further below, such a decision represents a new way of coping as much as any predictions about new conditions emerging. That is, stepping out of crisis mode is motivated as much by the expectation that drought will continue long term as by any optimism that the crisis has actually abated.

Overall, optimism about the coming season and seasons was expressed by a range of interviewees for a range of reasons. As we now discuss, however, many others feel less able to dissociate the future from the stresses of the recent past.

Some interviewees are suffering ongoing stress and health issues Not only have farming families’ financial and physical reserves been tapped over recent years of drought, but so too have their emotional and mental reserves. For a significant number of interviewees, it seems their capacity for optimism in the future has been drained by an accumulative sense of exhaustion and disappointment.

Numerous interviewees described how stressful they found last year, some using hindsight to reflect that they or others had not been coping well. Even if they described the stress as something that had substantially passed by the time of interview, the descriptions underline the toll that the anxiety of last season created: ‘Last year… it was really tough and I hated it… Looking back now, I think I got very low, especially from about February onwards. I wasn’t feeling well and ached and things like that. I ended up with high blood pressure’.

‘It was a fairly stressful season because we were one hot day off not having a crop.

That was fairly wearing on everyone. We’d seen it the year before with the crop all dying in one day and that was very much in the forefront of everyone’s mind - that we could lose the crop in one day. So that was fairly stressful’.

‘We’ve been through some dreadful times back in September, October and November. We were at each other’s throats. The kids used to step in and tell us to stop arguing’. ‘[A neighbour] was telling me that they went for a week without speaking to anyone and they just felt rotten and I thought that is probably happening all over… I think a lot of that went on and I think people bear the scars of that with pressure on relationships and questioning why you’re doing it and the isolation... What worries me is that these people who normally would cope can eventually buckle when all this pressure is put on them… You’re talking about people who are the strength of the community’.

‘I’m not a big drinker, but I think there are a lot of blokes around that are terrible drinkers… One bloke owes $500,000 and he was saying he reckoned he’d clear it up at harvest time, but he just drinks and drinks’.

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For many interviewees, the stress of last season and preceding years remains. A number commented on how tired they feel as a result of ongoing overwork, while others gave indications of depression: ‘I know I’m probably a lot more tired than I was this time last year because I’m doing that much more than I was [with on-farm and off-farm work]. It does wear you down. I think it wears down your spirit and stuff like that. You’ve got to pick yourself up and keep going. It’s not worthwhile dwelling on it either because it’s not going to make it rain if I worry about it’.

‘I get aches and pains and things that I never used to have… I don’t sleep well. In fact, I sleep terribly’.

‘I don’t want to go into town as much as I used to… Sometimes you just don’t feel like talking very much’.

‘I think in some ways perhaps I am crumbling’.

These problems of stress and tiredness are made worse by ongoing financial restrictions on people’s lifestyles. As a young woman who lives 20 minutes from town commented: ‘The stress of the money is the worst thing I think. I don’t really have a life at the moment: my life is the farm. I don’t go to town unless I really have to because of the cost of fuel and I don’t drive round and visit friends because that’s more cost’.

As mentioned in the section above, some families are releasing the brake on their spending to a degree. A farmer discussed how, regardless of a poor season last year, he feels the need to start taking this approach in order to help his wife cope with the ongoing stress: ‘We’ve just taken a whack out of the share portfolio… I’ve just decided to keep taking money out of it to maintain a certain living standard because I think that’s the key aspect of our stability this year: to maintain a psychology. I’m prepared to say, “Why press yourself too hard to repay things when it’s not a dress rehearsal?”… I’m very conscious of the fact that X [his wife] is very fragile and you could sort of psychologically blow her to bits… You feel sort of responsible’.

Not all families have the option of lifting restrictions on their standard of living. A significant number mentioned that they have not been able to afford a proper holiday in the last year. A mother of three children under ten with a husband earning off-farm income inter-state described the situation facing her and her children: ‘We haven’t been on a decent holiday for six years… I mean, I took the kids away for three days to the Grampians this year. But it was just me and the kids, so it wasn’t really great. X [her husband] was away working. It was the end of the holidays and the kids hadn’t been anywhere and I just thought we had to go somewhere, so we went to the Grampians… At least they could go back to school and say they went somewhere. And I had to get away. I was at the stage where I couldn’t stand this house anymore’.

An inability to get away from the farm and to rest is obviously likely to worsen pre-existing levels of stress and tiredness. Even those who enjoyed the reprieve of a holiday, though, BCG & RMCG

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were not necessarily relieved of such feelings. As one woman commented about returning from holiday to do the farm book work: ‘I just didn’t want to come back from the holidays and face the bookwork again. It seems to be a bit overwhelming lately… But that’s farming… And I guess that just comes from having a holiday. I guess also because we’re still not out of drought’.

Overall, many interviewees indicated that their emotional reserves are low and in need of replenishment, regardless of the “escape” offered by the strong prices last season or the holiday breaks some of them had. As a result, their outlooks on the coming year are coloured not only by factors such as weather predictions and market forecasts, but by a growing sense of exhaustion and trepidation.

Many feel hesitant, fearful, sceptical and demotivated about the coming year Drought continues to feel current and threatening for many interviewees. In contrast to the optimism felt by the interviewees in Section 2.2 above, others’ feelings about the coming year are dominated by hesitation, fear, scepticism and demotivation.

Based on their experience of last year, some individuals were hesitant about whether conditions would improve this year.

‘I’m tentative. We sort of scraped through again and the signs are good for next year, but based on the last five, you can’t be too confident. I’m not confident that it’s going to be a good season. I hope like hell it will be, but I’m not confident… It’s hard to be really confident when you’ve been through five years of no rain. You just wonder what’s in store next.’

‘I think it is still a bit nerve racking because you don’t know what the future holds with the drought. It’s lovely that the prices are high and everything else, but because of drought…if it doesn’t rain, we’re not going to be part of it. If we become part of that drought cycle and can’t grow the grain, then the prices won’t matter because we won’t be able to grow the stuff’. ‘[Last season] has made people nervous... It was looking so good and we just didn’t get that rain to finish off and it makes you nervous’.

‘We feel apprehensive about how long the drought is going to go on… it’s not over yet’.

‘It’s good, but the potential is still there to go back into it. There is no way known we’re out of this cycle’.

As the references to nerves and apprehension indicate, this hesitation is borne in large part out of fear. Although last season generally finished off better than many farming families feared it would when interviewed in September, the slight improvement that occurred has not been enough for some of them to put the season’s earlier collapse out of their mind. The way last season failed has introduced a new possibility into people’s minds, adding to their mental inventory of things that could go wrong. Indeed, the risk literature suggests that BCG & RMCG

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because the events of last season are relatively recent and fresh in people’s minds, their estimation of how likely a reoccurrence of such a situation is is likely to be heightened.

Fear about the coming year is not only a product of people’s estimations of the probability of things going wrong, but a product of the expected severity of the consequences that they foresee arising from another poor season. That is, farming families’ strong concern about the risk of further drought is influenced by the magnitude of its possible effects on them as much as by the likelihood of its occurrence. Underlining the ongoing financial pressure that they and others feel, some interviewees explained: ‘When you’re in a very weak financial situation you certainly don’t go into seasons with much confidence. You know you could be in real bother if you have another hiccup’.

‘I think if this year is hard, it’s going to be a whole lot tougher again’.

‘I think this year will be a test too. If this is a tough year, it will probably see a lot go.’

‘A lot of people would have cleared out if we didn’t get anything [last season]… This coming one will be the test, that’s the worry’.

Associated with ongoing financial pressure is ongoing emotional pressure. Just as one induces fear, so too does the other. One farmers’ wife described vividly the fear she feels of being emotionally tested again the way she was last year: ‘If I believed in God I would just be praying. That’s how it is… I find it very difficult to think about this coming year without feeling just absolute panic... It’s the anxiety of wondering if we’re going to get a break, and if we do get a break is it just going to be like last year [and fail]?… The anticipation of feeling like I felt last year for another year is just awful’.

While the interviewee above feels panic at the thought of what the coming year might hold, others feel de-energised and increasingly cynical. As tiredness takes its toll, scepticism about farming is growing among some farming families, as illustrated by the following exchange: Interviewer: How would you describe your mental outlook?

X: It changes all the time.

Y: Depends whether I’m tired.

X: We’re both pretty worn out.

Interviewer: You think the stress of last season has worn you out?

X: The last few seasons.

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Y: You get very sceptical… I feel some of farming is positive. When you see other people still positive about it or new people coming into it who are positive about it… but I’m getting a bit sick of bad seasons. That’s not something you can change either.

I just get a bit sceptical about it’.

Some interviewees particularly expressed scepticism towards predictions about weather conditions in the coming year, especially positive ones. As the interviewee [Y] above continued, for example: ‘I don’t believe weather forecasts and stuff like that. If it’s raining, then I’ll believe it’s raining’.

Another woman also explained: ‘People will say to me, “This year’s going to be a good year”, and I’m like, “Don’t tell me anymore”. Because people have said for so many years that this year’s going to be a good year and it hasn’t happened…. Don’t tell me if it’s going to be a good year or a bad year because I really don’t want to know. I’m past believing that this year is going to be a good year. I’m over predictions.’

Others expressed scepticism about getting rewarded for their efforts. As a farmer described: ‘I’d like to have more to look forward to. We can do the crop choices and the chemicals and we’ve got all those skills, but if you don’t get rain you can’t do anything.

That’s the most disheartening thing about all the work you put in: you don’t get a reward for your effort. If it doesn’t rain, nothing happens’.

A lack of guaranteed reward is one of the factors underpinning the demotivation some are feeling about farming. One young farmer described how difficult he has found it recently to feel motivated to work hard: ‘Sometimes motivation is hard because you feel like why should you do something just to get another kick?… Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning… It gets hard to see the point in working hard sometimes…You just have to get back to the enjoyment of the job – and there is a lot of enjoyment in the job – but sometimes it is hard to see it because you get so many kicks’.

Some are struggling to make sense of last season Adding to the demotivation some feel is confusion about how to interpret and allocate responsibility for what happened last season. The young farmer above discussed how last season has added to his growing sense of confusion and concern about the future of farming: ‘Back in the mid 90s… it wasn’t a matter of making money or losing money, it was: “how much money are we going to make?” So when you did something you were excited about what you were trying to do because it was going to work. So working all night or doing all that sort of stuff, you enjoyed it because you were going to get a reward for your efforts. If you did that extra bit you got paid the extra amount. It was easier to do it then… That’s the thing I can’t understand: it was just so easy to make money… You could get rye grass all through your crop and you were still making BCG & RMCG

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money. Until you get past it and look back on it you don’t realise it… Now I find it hard. And I feel after last season that, after we had such a good start then it turned off, I feel even more confused or concerned. You know that the same thing could happen again…’.

This third generation farmer talked in the September interviews about feeling let down by the Mallee and nature in general. Similar sentiments were expressed in the latest interviews by others trying to interpret what has been happening. One woman emphasised that the disappointment she feels about the ongoing drought conditions is not a reflection of farming families being ‘soft’, but of a loss of something she and others once believed to be reliable: ‘We’ve never had it soft. We’ve never had it soft. Living in the Mallee you’re never going to have it soft; there is always the wonder about how the season is going to be.

But in the past the bad years have been balanced by the good years and the moderate years and we had confidence that in the end it would all balance out… X [her husband] used to say, “Good old Mallee, it really doesn’t let you down in the end”. But it has. It definitely has. So we certainly can’t say that anymore. For us personally, it has let us down year after year after year really… Everything that seems potentially bad, now I think is going to happen.’

One of the main things that seems potentially bad to many farming families, and which represents a changing relationship to nature, is the possibility that the drought in some way reflects longer term climate change. While some remain convinced that conditions “have to” improve, others are increasingly sceptical about how relevant past experiences of cyclical good and bad conditions are to today’s situation. More interviewees than ever expressed concern about climate change: ‘History may not be where we can turn to to understand the changes that are happening. That’s where I’m full of fear and full of angst and just sick of it’.

‘To a point, trends and patterns are well and good but we’re chartering history really aren’t we? It doesn’t mean it won’t turn around, but it doesn’t mean it will. This could be it’.

‘I’m optimistic on certain things and not optimistic on certain things. Climate change keeps getting rammed down your throat. It’s impossible to be optimistic about climate change. How bad it is, I don’t know… I’m optimistic about the prices, but not optimistic about climate change.’

‘Optimism in our productive capacity has certainly been challenged by climate change’.

‘If we continue to have less than 10 inches of rainfall every year, then the future of farming is in trouble’ ‘Climate change is what worries me about agriculture. I don’t know if it’s going to be quite as easy to grow as it has been in the last century.’

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While the stress caused by climate change stems in large part from a sense of having limited agency to stop it, the feeling that one is in some way to blame for one’s difficulties is equally a source of stress. As seen in Section 2.2 above, in trying to understand last season and what is happening to them, some individuals have been trying to critically evaluate their own role in creating their current difficulties. While we saw above that some have drawn strength from their conclusion that they are not responsible, others are nagged by feelings of self-doubt. As some interviewees stated: ‘I have to say, I’ve looked at my farming methods really critically and thought where I could have done better. You know, can I really say it was the drought or was it some decisions that I made, like having too many sheep or whatever?’

‘Sometimes you start to doubt whether you’re any good at what you do… Although you can’t judge if you’re any good at what you do if it doesn’t bloody rain’.

‘It’s hard when my girlfriends get a new car or a new this or that and I just wonder what we’re doing wrong... You do wonder sometimes what you’re doing wrong, but I guess we’re all struggling’.

One young farmer was particularly critical of his ability to make what he idealises as rational, timely and confident decisions: ‘To make the right decisions I think you have to remove yourself emotionally somehow. To stop making stupid decisions or take advantage of situations… I’ve found it very hard. You know you should be doing things but you don’t feel confident to do it. You do it anyway because eventually you’ve got to do it… A week later and you get up the courage to do that job…’.

This farmer’s refection exemplifies the way many individuals have been prompted to try to make sense of what happened last season and what is happening to farming and the climate longer term. Although there is great diversity in the conclusions people are reaching about their own role relative to that of weather, there is an emerging consensus that a serious contributing factor to the difficulties farmers are facing is increasingly the cost of agricultural inputs, as we now discuss.

4.2.3

There is growing anger about input costs and farmers’ relationship with agribusiness Recent jumps in the cost of inputs are a major concern Raising the stakes on the coming season is the escalating cost of fertiliser, chemicals and fuel. Dampening the positive effect of high product prices, the current and predicted price of inputs is threatening to severely curtail some farming families’ profitability over the coming year, increasing the pressure upon them to have a good harvest. As some of the many who referred to this challenge reported: ‘Fertiliser and fuel have gone up and chemicals are ridiculous’.

‘The biggest challenge is the cost of fuel, cost of fertilizer … The challenge is to keep your costs down’.

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‘They’re saying that grain prices will stay high for a couple of years yet, but that won’t help anything with the costs the way they are’.

‘We bought our fertilizer early, but we didn’t buy any chemical and the price of chemical is just unbelievable at the moment. It has more than doubled, so that does put a shadow over the viability of the crop… You’ve got to look at the risk factors of spending so much money on a crop’.

Not only is the amount of money required to buy inputs an issue, but so too is the timing of when to spend it. As discussed in the previous report, the need to “gear up” for the next season frequently puts financial strain on farming families because of the inevitable time lag between preparing for a season and being (it is hoped) financially rewarded for it. Cash flow difficulties are being exacerbated by the recent and ongoing rises in the costs of inputs because not only is more finance being demanded of farming families but, in an effort to avoid future peaks in price, some of them have purchased inputs while still waiting for payment from last season or still paying off pre-existing expenses. As a farmer explained: ‘The biggest decision for us was whether we buy chemical at the old price and pay for it six months in advance or buy it later…. All those things were decisions we had to make when there was no cash flow at harvest. We’ve got cash flow now, but it wasn’t there when we bought it. We had to go into overdraft to buy all our fertilizer and chemical’.

Farmers are questioning their relationships with some others in the agricultural industry The ‘ridiculous’ prices being asked of farmers for inputs is causing many to question their relationship with the sellers of such inputs, and with some other players in agriculture more generally. Given the difficult times they have been through and that many continue to experience, many interviewees are disillusioned about what they see as their exploitation by large agribusiness companies, adding to the sense of scepticism discussed above. As some explained: ‘The way companies have treated you last year and the start of this year makes you very sceptical about some companies… They’re just whacking a profit on it… All that sort of stuff makes you think they’re all against you. People you thought were farming with you or were a farmer’s company - they’re not, they’re just out to get everything out of you they can. If you’re in a spot, they’ll take advantage of it’.

‘Everybody has got a heap of money, but it’s not going to buy them anything because of costs. In the meantime, everyone else associated with it thinks farmers have got heaps of money and everything will go up again’.

‘The trouble is, when the prices are so good, everyone comes in for their bite of the cherry… It’s ridiculous how much the price of everything is going up’.

Fertiliser companies were particularly the focus of interviewees’ bitterness. As two commented: ‘The fertilizer side has created a lot of headaches. You develop a bit of resentment because you feel there is a lot of profit taking being done by major companies and BCG & RMCG

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we’re on the receiving end of it. I know it’s a supply and demand thing, but I also resent being charged double the price for fertilizer. It came into the country and was being sold at $500 a ton and now the same fertilizer is being charged at over $1000 a ton. It doesn’t sit real well because these companies send their rep’s out and they’re working for you and that sort of thing, then on the flipside they’re taking huge profits because the opportunity is there’. ‘(Sarcastically) I’m pleased to see the fertiliser companies have taken advantage of it [high grain prices]… I just think it’s rubbish. You can’t tell me it would double in price in one year… No matter what they say they just can’t justify that amount of price rise’.

Fertiliser prices have been especially thrown into the spotlight because of the current ACCC investigations into the recent increases. The government’s involvement in the situation was, in turn, also the subject of ire for some interviewees. One commented that: ‘I can’t believe the government hasn’t done anything about the price hike’.

Farmers’ concern about the character of their relationships with fertiliser and chemical companies is symptomatic of or has heightened their growing concern about the character of their relationship with some other players in the agricultural arena. A sheep farmer expressed disgust at the meat companies he believed kept the prices down last autumn when many farmers needed to sell lambs: ‘They kept the price low when they knew people were desperate to sell… They knew people had no harvest yet and were relying on this lamb money to get them through, so it was rotten of them to keep the prices down’.

Another relayed anger about being “done over” by a large hay purchaser: ‘We cut four paddocks for cereal hay and we had them forward sold with Murray Goulburn, but then they pulled out on us and left us high and dry. It was very frustrating and disappointing because we missed all the opportunity to sell our hay…

Murray Goulburn have a lot to answer for in that regard and they just got away from that scot-free and I think it stinks. We had barley contracts with ABB which we weren’t able to fill and we had to take the wash out on them… But it seems like what’s good enough for the goose is not good enough for the gander. With the hay contracts they just decided that it didn’t suit them and they walked away and that was it… We needed that like a hole in the head’.

Also reflecting a belief in a double standard at work, others expressed a lack of trust in the genuineness of some agricultural advisors’ concern for farmers. As seen in Report Two, although farmers’ reliance on advisors is generally increasing as the complexity of farming grows, some remain sceptical towards them. It seems this scepticism may be growing, fuelled perhaps by the riskiness – at least in hindsight - of the decisions advisors have encouraged farmers to take. As two farmers commented: ‘They [accountants] are the worst people you could ever deal with because they have no respect for paying bills and they don’t care how much debt you have… They’ve never run anything that they’ve actually owned, so they don’t worry about it’.

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‘The chaps that are advising people to do that [take out forward contracts] aren’t taking any risk at all’.

The comment above about forward contracts points to the recent changes in crop marketing that require farmers to negotiate another circle of relationships. Interviewees commented on how having to manage their own sales adds to the complexity and risk they need to manage: ‘We’ve always had the Wheat Board or the Barley Board or something else to fall back on, but all of a sudden we have to look at where we’re going to trade and who we’re going to trade with and what prices we’re going to set’.

‘Now because it’s all deregulated you’ve got to decide: do we sell it this week? Do we sell it next week?… All this too-ing and fro-ing, and the price goes up and down like it did in the forties for no real reason’.

As discussed further below, some farmers are sceptical about the companies involved in offering futures and forwards contracts, especially following the negative experiences many had with such contracts last season. As one commented: ‘Ultimately, there is only going to be one winner… You’re the fool that hasn’t got the product that you sold, and the buyer is the one that is always going to be the winner’.

Overall, it seems there is a growing sense of competition within the agricultural industry itself. In previous interviews it was the relationship between agriculture and other industries (and the related relationship between rural people and city people) that emerged as a concern for farming families as - in trying to better understand the circumstances they faced - they strove to determine who did and did not share their situation. Agribusiness was generally spoken of favourably and empathetically, with concern being voiced about how local agribusiness companies were faring and how they deserved as much financial assistance as farmers. However, recent events and difficulties, in which some agribusinesses have been the source of angst for farmers, suggest that a growing number of farming families are now focusing in on the differences between farming and non-farming members of the agricultural industry. The dividing line between the two groups is emerging as an indicator of who farming families can identify with and trust, leaving many feeling more isolated than they previously were. In particular, the long-standing issue of terms of trade is rising in prominence as it is becoming more personalised. Farming families’ disappointment that yet further obstacles to their financial viability have emerged is heightened by the fact that those placing these obstacles in their way are people they previously thought to were “members of the agricultural team”, “on their side” in agriculture’s struggle against drought and urban bias.

Among the relationships with sellers and buyers that are increasingly involved in running a farm business are those with other farmers. Farmers have always dealt with other farmers as purchasers or vendors of various assets or services. Yet, farmers’ growing sensitivity to the character of their relationships with non-farmers in agriculture described above, combined with diversification into products wanted by other farmers such as hay and straw, seems to be encouraging some interviewees to also reflect on their relationship with and

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obligation to “one of their own” at a time when their own needs are also acute. As an interviewee remarked about his new experience of selling hay to dairy farmers: ‘I know some dairy farmers are quite well off, but some are struggling too, so you’ve got to be fair to both sides. We’re all in the same game: we’re all farmers. But, then, you do have to look after yourself as well’ Reflecting the tension described in the last report (and again below) that can exist between one’s own needs and the needs of one’s local community, the comment above underlines the dual sense of alone-ness and comradeship that seems to be growing among farmers as they collectively identify themselves in opposition to non-farming players in agriculture and also seek to strengthen their individual positions. This web of relationships, loyalties and needs adds significantly to the complexity of the decision-making environment farming families are facing.

4.2.4

Most farming families are trying to take a more risk-averse approach Many are approaching the coming season more conservatively than normal The continuation of the drought has encouraged most farming families to take a more conservative approach to farming this year. Last season’s collapse powerfully reinstated drought as an ongoing and serious threat in their minds. The potential consequences of drought have also increased for most families as their financial and/or emotional reserves have been further eroded or only marginally replenished by the events of the last year.

Although, as discussed above, about half of the interviewees feel optimistic about the coming year, about 80% of farming families reported that they are going to adopt a more conservative approach to production and marketing in some way, following their experiences in recent years. As encapsulated in the following observation by an interviewee, this move represents an openness to change: ‘Farmers are pretty amazing, they stick at the one thing and don’t change their mind much, but when it gets tough, people do things that are fairly out of the ordinary’.

The following comments point to the kind of adjustment that is taking place: ‘It’ll be a new mindset now… People will be more conservative.’

‘We’re probably a bit more conservative in case it happens again’.

‘After every drought you’re more conservative. You’re far more conservative because you don’t want to go back there. That’s part of life I guess. It has made me far more conservative for this next crop.’ ‘[Our approach will] be fairly conservative… If we have a fantastic opening break in March… it will just mean we’ll do it easier and hopefully we’ll get better yielding crop and that sort of thing’.

‘Hopefully we’re just a little more wary than we once were’.

‘We know it’s the climate we live in, so you treat every year as though it might be a drought and you have to be ready for it no matter what it is’.

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‘You’re not regimented like you used to be. I think basically in the last ten years the weather has made people change their ideas on farming and what they do on the farm… Especially after last year, thinking that we’d had such a good start and thinking that this was the one. But you’ve never really got it until the money is in the bank. I think that the year before having a drought and last year looking good then falling over at the last minute, we’ve seen it all and hopefully learned from it.’

‘A lot of people budget for a good year and that’s all well and good if it’s going to rain, but what if it doesn’t? It’s a bit like if you only crop half: if it’s a bumper year you’re not going to make as much, but you will still make money, whereas if it is a dry year you will also make money. So you budget to be as safe as possible and forget about chasing the carrot’.

It is important to note that not all farmers are taking a more conservative approach. As seen also in Section 2.2, some farmers feel that such a move is a temptation that should be resisted, particularly given the potential for a redeeming year that high commodity prices seem to be creating. Their attitude is not to be intimidated or put off by recent poor seasons, but to treat the upcoming season as normal or even a potential boomer. That is, their approach is conservative in the sense of ‘no change’.

‘I really don’t think that the drought has dictated anything to us or made us do anything different or made us think any different. I wouldn’t say it hasn’t affected us, but, you know, you’ve got to be in it to win it’.

‘My lifetime has been agriculture and I’m positive about it. People say it’s climate change and everything else, but we have to live with climate change… I’ve never not sown… You go about farming and you don’t hesitate, you do the actions. X [his wife] disagrees with me sometimes when I go and get $4000 more of chemical or 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, but it’s got to be done’.

‘We bought some stock since harvest, but the way the grain prices are I think we’ll sell it all back again… We weren’t planning on sowing all the crop again, we were trying to get into more of a rotation, but you’ve got to try to make hay while the sun shines. If grain prices are going to be good this year, then you have to try to capitalize on the prospect of an average season with terrific grain prices. It could be the best year we’ve ever had.’

Although the above indicates that there are notable examples of farmers who are maintaining their normal, generally high-input approach to farming, as discussed earlier most are adapting what they are doing as a result of the drought, altering, for example, their enterprise mix, how much crop they sow and how much input they use. We now look at the specific production choices such interviewees reported they are making to gain a better idea of how these farmers are adapting to ongoing drought.

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Most farmers are adapting their production practices Whether the changes are forced or voluntary, temporary or permanent, most farmers are adapting some of their production practices to compensate for their current financial position and/or to allow for the financial pressure that would be inflicted by further drought. Virtually all are striving to reduce their costs and thus the financial risk that production this season represents for them. Some of the areas in which changes were reported are: enterprise mix and stocking rates; crop type; fertiliser use and type; chemical use; cutting for hay; and use of contractors.

As described in Report Two, most of the farmers interviewed are at least potentially mixed farmers and treat the balance of crops and livestock on their property as a risk management tool, albeit with varying interpretations of whether crops or livestock constitute the better bet in drought conditions. Some farmers again discussed enterprise mix and stocking rates in February 2008 as a major consideration in their plan for the year. Most were opting to increase their proportion of stock, given the higher risks they perceive to be involved in cropping, particularly given rising costs. As some said: ‘Our main [change] will be that [we will have] probably around 1000 ewes. That will be our focus and the crops will be bonuses, which is different… It’s because we can’t take the risk with cropping all the time and the costs are just rising and rising’.

‘We’ve grown our sheep numbers to prevent a drought’.

‘The blokes who don’t have sheep are missing out on thousands of dollars’.

“We’ll do less cropping… Sheep have money at the moment’. “[We’re] reducing the cropping acreage and having more cattle and just seeing that through” ‘We’ve nearly had a 20% increase in the beef herd [since harvest]… With the price of fertilizer and chemical…if you locked in the expenses for the next crop and it’s a dry year, it’s going to be fairly difficult. We’ve always split the business with the livestock and they generate a fair amount of income and that money is guaranteed. Our expenses on the livestock side of the business have barely increased and we’ll have a much better income out of them this year than cropping’.

‘We’ve made a conscious decision to put more energy and a bit more money into the stock side… The stock can’t produce the same return as a crop. In an average year your cropping side is going to be way ahead, but in a below average year your stock…because there is no cost involved…The sheep and the cattle have carried us through quite a few dry years now.’

While motivated by the same desired reduction in risk, other farmers had concluded that they should reduce the proportion of stock in their mix: ‘We sold our ewes… because we could see things going wrong. They were sold three weeks off a lambing to the meatworks. I was terribly disappointed but we would have had nearly 1000 lambs [to look after]’.

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For some who have decided to destock, the issue of water security was the determining factor, given that stock have a continuous need for water and that the Wimmera Mallee pipeline is yet to be completed: ‘We’re still waiting for a secure water supply and perhaps then we’ll get into some stock again. Until that happens we’ll continue cropping. We’ll always crop, but we may run more sheep. We thought about even feed-lotting cattle with all this hay, but water is the big issue there. Until the [Wimmera Mallee] pipe comes we probably won’t do that’.

‘Nothing has changed in terms of the farm, other than we’re not running any stock…

We always have been prime lamb breeders… But we have no stock on now. It is the first time in 120 years that we haven’t had stock on the place and that’s mostly because of water’.

For others reliant on grain for feed, it was the high price of grain that has forced them to destock. As a young farmer commented: ‘We’ve de-stocked a lot of our pigs. We’ve still got pigs, but we’ve de-stocked a lot and we’re continuing to de-stock. With the price of grain the way it is at the moment, we’re really not coming out very well with our pigs’.

Some grains demand higher prices than others, but also come with higher costs and risks. A notable number of farmers discussed how they are going to forego the temptation of higher returns on higher risk crops like legumes and canola in favour of the more guaranteed income offered by wheat and barley.

‘Well our plan is not to sow legumes ever again and not to sow canola again. It’s because of the expenses involved in growing both crops. To get a good return you’ve got to plough it in now when the money is short. The whole aim is to sow the less expensive crops to grow and you may get a lesser return but you don’t lose as much.

We’re coming into a year where we’re going to need finances to carry us through so the plan is to sow wheat and barley. It’s nice to grow canola and get a nice big $500 or $600 a ton for it and be in front, but you still have to grow the tons. We got a thunderstorm with heavy rain after the crop was windrowed last year and we lost 50% of our grain on the ground’.

‘We didn’t want to risk putting in stuff that was going to be too expensive to spray, like canola and legumes and stuff like that… If you’re trying to recover from two years of no income, you’ve got to be as reliable as you can’.

‘The whole idea is to sow the less expensive crops to grow and you may get lesser return but you don’t lose as much’.

‘My approach is the best crop doesn’t make you the most money’.

One of the things that make some crops more expensive to grow than others is how much fertiliser they demand. The amount of fertiliser that needs to be applied to any crop is, however, not clear-cut. Given the escalating cost of normal fertiliser, many farmers indicated BCG & RMCG

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they are going to decrease the amount they use this year, either because they are questioning the amount they previously, habitually used, or because they feel they need to adopt such an approach in the short-term for financial reasons.

‘I think probably the last ten years has taught us to manage our inputs… To pour the fertilizer in and grow the best crop in the district isn’t necessarily going to make you the most money. So you look at every cost along the way and we’ve learned a lot over the past few years’.

‘We’re probably looking more carefully at inputs because I know last year a lot of people put a lot of extra ground into cropping because they were trying to recoup their costs a bit. I think this year people are probably a bit more cautious because you can end up having huge input bills. So I think we’re probably questioning that side of it’.

‘We’re just going to soil test a lot of the paddocks and see if they need it. If the prices are going to stay up… One of the things we decided was not to risk by taking short cuts, but not to overstep it either, if that makes sense… We can always apply later – that’s the lesson that I’ve learned. Especially with nitrogen and also lesser risk crops’.

‘I think people are looking at that situation more now, finding out whether they need to put that much superphosphate on or whether they can cut back somewhere’.

‘I’ve decided not to put fertiliser on a lot of our country this year which is the first time I’ve ever not put fertiliser on… So we’re really mining a bit of our country for a couple of years’.

Instead of or as well as questioning the amount of fertiliser they use, some farmers are questioning the type of fertiliser they use. Some, for example, are looking at cheaper conventional alternatives to superphosphate: ‘I’ve been looking at tanks for liquid fertiliser and liquid nitrogen… Liquid nitrogen is going to be cheaper than fertiliser. I’m just looking for opportunities I suppose’.

‘I’m just planning out what I’m thinking of doing at this stage with my cropping program. It’s not going to change much at all, it will still be much the same as what I have done in other years. It’s just with the superphosphate I might not use the dearer ones that I was’.

Others are looking beyond conventional fertilisers altogether to “natural” alternatives: ‘We’ll have a go at the organic stuff this year I reckon’.

‘We’ve done a bit of biological farming anyway to build the soils up and just with the cost of fertiliser we’re thinking about doing a bit more of that’.

‘Last year we bought a super…which was triple strength… Now I’ve gone back to the health stuff again, so instead of costing us about $60,000 it will only cost us about $22,000’.

While the amount and type of pesticides and other crop chemicals that farmers use seems to be less open to question than for fertiliser, some farmers are also making adaptations in BCG & RMCG

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this area to reduce costs. Besides altering crop type to reduce the need for spraying, some farmers are using fallowing rather than direct drilling to reduce their chemical bills, while others have altered how they spray or how much they use: ‘With chemicals the way they are, there is no way we can direct drill at the moment.

We’ll stick with the fallowing for now’.

‘It’s been a real thing for X [her husband] whether he sprays the paddock or digs it up, because what costs more?’.

‘Things have changed a lot in terms of farming now. We’re all out at night spraying conserving every drop that falls, whereas we never even used to worry about summer rain’.

‘X [her son] doesn’t use as much spray as that book tells you to use. He cuts it back’.

A further way to reduce chemical use is to grow a crop for hay rather than grain, as the former accommodates a much larger proportion of weeds. Following their crops’ failure to produce adequate grain last season, many farmers cut them for hay as a measure of last resort. For some, it was the first time they had done so. While interviewees reported that it wasn’t successful for all who tried it because they were under-prepared for the need to cart and store it, it opened other farmers’ eyes to a potential new revenue stream.

‘One thing we learned last year was that you can cut the poorer crops for hay and there is an opportunity to make a few dollars out of it... Actually that was a turning point too mentally because we were all stressing about how the year was going to be like, and as soon as we started cutting hay and doing something positive we could keep our mind off how bad things were. Not the fact that we were making money doing the hay, but just that we were doing something other than waiting for rain.’

‘Before I put in crop fertilizer or broad leaf spray or grass weed spray, I’ll sit down and look at the economics of cutting for hay. I wouldn’t have even thought of that five or six years ago, but the last few years has taught us that there is certainly a return to be made there… You just become a bit more conscious of what everything you do costs you and I think we’re coming more successful by managing all our inputs’.

‘We haven’t done it [grow hay] for a while, but it’s going to be our policy from now on’.

Finally, a few farmers discussed their use of contractors as an area they have altered in order to reduce costs, some reducing their use and others increasing it. One in the latter camp linked it to his production of hay: ‘We got a contractor in to do nearly all the [hay] carting and we’ve never done that before and that freed up a lot of labour… And his bill was less than one load of fuel’.

Not only does the use of contractors for cropping activities free up labour, it avoids the need for expensive equipment. As now discussed, many farmers are trying to reduce costs by reducing their capital expenditure.

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A freeze on capital expenditure is common One of the more temporary and involuntary measures farming families are taking to adapt to the financial pressure of ongoing drought conditions is a freeze on further capital investment.

Although some made purchases on the back of last season’s harvest and others made purchases at last season’s early break, the decision to not update agricultural plant at this point in time seems to be relatively widespread, underlying or complementing some of the practice changes discussed above such as a move away from chemical intensive crops.

‘Last year we were starting to get a bit confident and thought it would be a good year to do that sort of stuff [buy new plant} but it [a good season] didn’t happen. So we won’t be doing that again’.

‘There are a lot of things I would like to update: I’d like a new set of press wheels; I wouldn’t mind putting a light bar on the boom spray… but I won’t worry too much about that… We’re not spending any money except on inputs’.

‘Until I get a good year, I’m not going to commit myself to these sorts of investments [new machinery]’.

One farmer commented that he thought this reticence to make large capital investments would be a relatively long-term change because of people’s nervousness about spending: ‘People who have run short of money are not going to rush out and spend it when they get it next time. It’s going to take a long time to change now’.

Nevertheless, as some interviewees pointed out, one of the consequences of the drought and the clearing sales it has induced is the availability of some cheap second hand equipment. Some - with the ability to do so - have taken the view that investing in such equipment at this point will save them money in the long run. Two farmers discussed how they have recently made new purchases in order to reduce their reliance on contractors: ‘I got a header in tip-top condition for $20,000…which means I am paying $5012 a year for a header rather than spending it on contractors’.

‘We’ve bought a tractor and we’re doing all the cropping ourselves now [rather than contracting it out] and more of it… Our overdraft has grown to accommodate that…

The upside is if we have a good season and the prices stay strong we can come back, whereas before there wasn’t much light at the end of the tunnel’.

The quote above points to the other motivation driving the purchase of new equipment, which is the potential to gain high returns through a relatively high risk approach. While the discussion above in Section 2.5.1 makes clear the popularity of a more conservative approach to farming among the interviewees, it is important to reiterate that not all have adopted such an attitude. As one farmer commented, the main lesson he learnt from last year is to act decisively at the first sign of an early break: ‘The biggest lesson was probably early sowing. That’s something that we’ve tended to do anyway but it really did show up. There was a huge difference in yields between what was sown early and what was sown late. It was probably underlining what we perhaps already felt.’

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The tension between taking a cautious approach and “chasing the carrot” - as a farmer above put it – is a continuation of what was found in the September interviews. As now discussed, it was evident in the February 2008 interviews not only in terms of production practices, but farmers’ attitudes to marketing.

Many farmers have been put off using forward and futures contracts Given the way grain prices rose throughout the year last year, virtually all of the 45% of farmers who reported locking into forward and futures contracts in 2007 also reported that they had lost money in the process. As one said: ‘We’ve lost $40,000 or $50,000 of profit straight off the top of our hay harvest… When we were doing money on the grain contracts, that was a really stressful time. A fortnight before we washed out it was terrible’.

Many more observed what happened to those who were caught with unfavourable contracts.

As two such observers remarked: ‘Those who didn’t contract their grain aren’t going too badly, but those who did are kicking themselves’.

‘We didn’t do any futures trading last year and everyone we know that did futures trading got burnt badly. That was the easiest money we got by doing nothing’.

As a result of the poor performance of forward and futures trades, many of those involved, as well as many of their peers who observed what happened, now feel more cautious about such marketing strategies. Some of those involved talked about what an impact this experience or a similar one in previous years had on them: ‘We don’t forward sell grain. We got caught doing that a few years ago and just got out by the skin of our teeth’.

‘We still have losses on out contracts and losses on our futures but fortunately prices were good… We haven’t locked in any forward sales [this year]… We could lock in some for this harvest at $380 a ton and normally you would think, ‘Why wouldn’t you lock some in?’. Well, it’s because we got our fingers burned so badly last year’.

Despite being ‘burnt’ by past attempts and feeling more cautious about “going hard”, many of those who have used such a marketing approach remain torn about abandoning it. As the farmer above continued: ‘We haven’t locked in any forward sales, so that’s something different… And we haven’t had anything to do with futures; that has changed. This time last year we had grain already hedged even though we hadn’t even planted it… So that’s one thing that has changed. We haven’t locked ourselves into anything that we might regret later on… But it hasn’t put us off going hard again… Even though we got our fingers burnt last year you’ve got to press on and recognize that $380 a ton is a good price… We want to get as much out of it as we can while the price is around $400 a ton’.

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While those who have not used forward or futures contracts seem less likely than ever to begin to do so, those who have used them seem more interested in refining how they manage them than avoiding them altogether: ‘I think swaps are still a very good tool for us, but we did have some forward contracts as well… and we probably won’t do that again’.

X: ‘We’re going to be a little bit more conservative until we know we can sure up production. Last year made me follow the market more than ever before. It was all I can think about at times, it was unbelievable what was happening. So I think we’re going to be more aware of what’s going on and not go quite as hard’.

Y: ‘It was always our strategy [to hedge] because you can’t just leave it all until the end. We were always going to have some sort of hedging in place, but we’re just going to be more aware of it and follow it a bit more… I know some people had guidance last year that they don’t want again. In saying that, we probably didn’t have the guidance that we needed, even though I’m experienced in that area. We still needed some outside advice so we might get that this year’.

The issue is whether using forward and futures contracts constitutes a reduction or inflation of risk for farmers. As much as efforts to reduce costs through altering production practices involve uncertainty and risk as short-term and long-term requirements interact, efforts to increase revenue through controlling prices seem to involve a higher level of uncertainty and risk again. Discussing such ‘proactive’ marketing approaches, one farmer highlighted the difficulty farmers face in determining the best risk management strategy: ‘The risk management is a big issue. That’s the really big issue… You’ve got this conflict about trying to be proactive about running your business, but the risks attached to it are huge. That’s what a lot of people found out: they lost their harvest before they even had it. How much should you do these sorts of things? That’s one of the biggest challenges’.

Overall, farming families not only face the challenge of determining how risk averse they want and need to be, but also how they can best enact their desired approach. There is no clear-cut answer to what high and low risk approaches in farming look like. Does taking on proportionately more stock decrease one’s risk in drought? Does saving costs by using less fertiliser reduce one’s financial risk and, if so, over what time scale? Does locking in a seemingly good price for one’s harvest protect or threaten one’s investment in it, given the uncertainty that surrounds weather and yield? These are some of the questions farming families are increasingly confronted with as the ongoing drought heightens the importance of risk management for them.

Off-farm income remains a priority As found in Report Two, a further way many farming families are aiming to reduce the risk of drought’s financial impact is by building up their total financial security with off-farm investments and employment. Although most also reported that they currently do not have adequate farm or off-farm income to be able to implement the first of these strategies, it is significant that investing off-farm rather than on-farm remains a common goal.

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‘There are a lot of people who have off farm investments out there and it has probably saved them… If we have some good years and we’ve got money to invest off farm, then I’d be reducing debt. I guess the key priority to reduce debt and consolidate a little and then get yourself into a position where you’ll be able to invest off farm’.

‘If you’ve got $20,000 or $30,000 to put into that you might be better off putting it into off farm or the stock market or education or something’.

‘I think maybe if we do have some reasonable years we might invest off farm to cover those years where it might be a bit tougher.

‘We haven’t been in the position to make off farm investments, but I think perhaps investing off farm into something else might be a drought management strategy down the track’.

Less an ideal and more a necessity is investing time and energy in off-farm work. Most families use some kind of off-farm employment to supplement their farm income, with most partners and 35% of those who are actively farming in paid off-farm work. Many of these expressed gratitude for the enhanced financial capacity and stability it offers them. One couple run a chemical distribution company on the side, taking advantage of others’ growing frustration with large agribusiness companies. As they commented: ‘The cash coming in makes a heck of a difference to the overdraft’.

Others are also involved in agricultural industry-related businesses, such as contracting and financial management consulting. Reflecting the growing complexity farming families have to deal with on the financial management front, the woman involved in the latter observed that: ‘People would rather outsource it [financial advice] than learn it themselves, so I’ve taken that on’.

Working off-farm requires sacrificing at least some of the time and energy that would otherwise be spent on the farm. As it is usually added on to rather than substituted for farm work, it also comes at the cost of other priorities such as family and home. As one woman said of her son: ‘X has been lucky enough to get a bit of work out at the carrot farm… That’s why my lawns look like this’.

A young mother highlighted the cost to her and her family of her husband needing to work off-farm as well as on: ‘He [her husband] has gone to Adelaide for 15 days… He’s just driving the truck and loading and unloading the chooks… It’s hard… I just don’t have enough time to do the house because I’m always at the pig shed or I’ve got to spend time with the kids… It’ll be nice when he’s home… But it just means when he comes home and he has to do everything in two or three days that he would usually do in a week, just to catch up’.

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The quote above highlights another area that clashes with both farm work and paid off-farm work: childcare. Although unpaid, such work adds to the family’s income to the extent that it avoids the need to pay for such a service. Combined with a lack of commercial childcare, looking after young children at home is another task many young rural couples must manage, as some families discussed in interview. In one family with three young children and a fourth on the way, the husband looks after the children while the wife does part-time off-farm work. He commented on how challenging he finds the combination, remarking that: ‘It can get pretty full on looking after the farm and the children. It works so much better when she is at home’.

For some young families, off-farm work for the wife remains an aspiration. Two discussed how, with the men already juggling on-farm and off-farm work themselves, the option of him also managing childcare while their wife does paid work is closed to them. In addition, they indicated that any ability the woman has to do paid work in addition to looking after the children would need to be funnelled into their farms, given their husbands are already working off-farm. As one couple in which the husband travels away to cart hay explained: X: ‘The worst thing is that with the hay carting, with only a single trailer, it’s a lot of extra work that I hadn’t planned on and I still have to do 90% of the farm work as well’.

Y: ‘The plan was that I’d be able to help him do stuff, but while the kids are little you just can’t do that. You can’t just strap them in a tractor all day; that’s no upbringing for a kid. So he’s pretty much got it all to himself’.

Another woman who is already managing her and her husbands’ farm in addition to three young children while he drives a chicken truck (discussed above), and who feels unable to leave the farm regularly because of the cost of fuel, described how much she would appreciate having even one day a week of off-farm work to get away from the farm and generate some extra and independent income.

‘Our money always goes back into the business, that’s the way that X’s [her husband’s] family has worked. That is something that I find really hard because I don’t have my own money to spend. I spend the farm’s money and you sort of think twice. If I had my own money and I was able to go out and work… I would love to do even just one day a week. But X’s not around to look after [the kids] and it’s just not an option. But then I could spend it and feel happy about spending it. If you’re spending the farm’s money you think twice about it… It would be great just to have a day off with other adults and I’d have money to get little things for the kids… But once [the kids] are old enough, I’ll be on the header or the truck or something, I imagine, so…’.

As mentioned in the previous reports, the tension between spending money on the farm versus on the family or home more generally was commonly mentioned by interviewees.

The quote above indicates how off-farm employment, particularly that done by women, is often viewed less as a way of improving the financial security of the farm business, and more as a way of improving the financial security of the family or individuals within it BCG & RMCG

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independent of the farm. Like the use of off-farm investments, this focus on the financial security of the family separate to that of the farm represents another way in which farming families are trying to manage the risk increasingly believed to be associated with farming.

Not all families are able to adopt such an “insurance policy”, given the multiple demands on them, including the increasing levels of attention and money that farms themselves seem to be demanding as the drought continues. Nevertheless, as discussed in Report Two, building one’s farm-independent security is emerging as a key feature of “drought proofing” efforts among an increasingly risk-averse farming community.

As with the on-farm production and marketing decisions discussed above, however, the distribution of risk across different options is not clear-cut. Placing one’s farm in competition with off-farm demands heightens as well as alleviates risk for the family involved to the extent that it weakens the farm business. As we now discuss, the ultimate expression of such a weakening, and of a risk-averse approach to farming, may be the abandonment of the farm altogether.

4.2.5

The question of whether to leave farming is less prominent but of ongoing relevance for some Most families feel more positive about staying on their farm than they did in September In September 2007, virtually all families were questioning whether they should continue in farming or at least on their present farms (Report Two). In February 2008, all remained on their farm and most seemed relatively content with their decision. Although tempered by comments about their reservations about farm life - reflecting the process of questioning they have been through and perhaps periodically re-enter - interviewees offered up observations about what they enjoy about farming and living on a farm.

Some farmers discussed farming as their job of choice. As two remarked: ‘Being sixth generation and farming in the same area as my forefathers is great. Also the freedom of just being your own boss and working for yourself and for your family to try and achieve goals is great. I love it. I just wish it would rain!’.

‘This is what I’m educated in and what I enjoy doing. To make a jump to something else, it would have to be a pretty good thing to make a jump to’.

For some interviewees, it is the physical environment of farm life that they are drawn to, notably its spaciousness. As two commented: ‘I just like living where it’s quiet… I just don’t like close proximity’.

‘I love the solitude. I enjoy my own company and I don’t class myself as isolated out here’.

When asked about what they like about being where they are, an older couple explained: X: ‘That’s a tricky one! Sometimes I wonder why we live here because it’s flat, it’s not outback. But we’re lucky we have the river and the sky is magnificent. I suppose if you

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lived in town you’d get sick of people being so close. Your personal space grows being out here’.

Y: ‘I suppose it’s what we’ve made it and we’ve done everything to make this comfortable for ourselves and what we like. It’s probably not the most profitable property around, but it’s done pretty well for us… It’s lovely to see all the trees we’ve put in and all our land care improvements’.

Most younger women referred to lifestyle and especially the benefits of farm life for children as the best thing about living on a farm. Although not obvious for those young families in which overwork and isolation seem to be dominating family life (mentioned above), farm life offers some families the chance to have more time together: ‘Just being together as a family is good. So many families in the city have the mum and dad go off to work and then after school the kids go to crèche and whatever and they’re travelling for an hour each day. We’re having that contact all the time’.

‘It really is the best place to bring up your family and everything like that. We’re together every day working and that’s really good. I enjoy being out on the farm.

Yesterday I was in the shearing shed with X [her husband] and I like it. The last two years I didn’t really like getting in the ute and having a look [because things were so dry], but now I’m starting to change again, so who knows how I’ll feel next year!... I’m probably just a bit sick of the isolation’.

‘It’s a good lifestyle for the children, they get out and about and get in the back of utes and all sorts of things. I think for the children’s sake it is really nice. It’s probably a safer environment too. Not safe in terms of machinery, but you can walk down the street pretty sure you’re going to make it home at the end, whereas in the city who knows? So it’s a nice safe lifestyle and they can go out with dad during the day and dad pops in for coffees, which doesn’t happen in the city. That’s what I think is probably the best part about being on the farm.’

As discussed in the previous reports and further below, how growing up on a farm affects children is a major consideration for farming parents. While those above feel on balance that such an upbringing is positive, others are less sure. The enhanced contact with immediate family that farming offers can be balanced by greater social isolation from others. By creating overwork and stress, drought can also reduce the benefits of the former while exacerbating the occurrence of the latter. We now look at the pros and cons some young farming families are working through as they consider whether to stay on their farms.

Leaving farming remains a consideration for some young families Although most young families have decided at least for now to remain on their farms, one has decided to leave and about a third are still considering the possibility. When asked about their plans for the future, one of the farmers in the latter category described his and his wife’s ongoing openness to the possibility of leaving:

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X: ‘Well you’d consider any option… You might consider selling the farm. You might consider getting another job and putting another man on the farm. You’d consider anything’.

Interviewer: And have you considered leaving the farm?

X: ‘Yeah we’ve considered leaving the farm… You’ve got to always readdress your situation and what you think you could do... I probably always think of it’.

Another similarly discussed leaving as an ongoing option for him and his wife, although not one they were considering seriously at the time: ‘We have been toying with the idea of moving. We kind of worked though that a fair way and it didn’t happen… We were seriously thinking about it but things didn’t fall into place… But we haven’t put that completely out of our minds’.

Others reflected on the possibility of leaving as something they have thought about but rejected for now. One farmer pointed to overwork and a lack of family time as an issue: ‘It was really tough [last year] and I hated it… We were wondering whether we were doing the right thing… It is a good lifestyle, but we seem to be busy all the time. I remember dad used to play golf one or two days a week and we used to go water skiing on Sundays and things have changed. Now we work on Sundays. When we’re busy, we’re busy, and when we’re not supposed to be busy, we’re busy anyway. But we’ll stick at it and hopefully things will improve’.

The persistence the farmer above demonstrates was mentioned also by another young couple who are also hoping things will improve. As seen in the previous section, this couple perceives close family ties – in this case with an older generation as well as their young children - as one of the main perceived benefits of farm life: X: ‘It’s crossed our mind for sure… We really looked at it closely and thought if things get much worse we won’t have much choice… But the persistence thing has kept us here. In the southern Mallee things aren’t going to stay bad forever. You may have a run of fifteen years being bad but it’s not going to stay bad forever. So you always work for the good times’.

Y: ‘You can’t make those decisions quickly… There’s a lot to consider before you decide to move on… When you actually are considering a change like that you start to appreciate what you have got. You can take it for granted and it takes something like that to realise that if we did move on we wouldn’t have the support of family and all that goes with it. Plus X’s [her husbands’] heart and soul is in the farm so it would be a hard day if he ever had to leave the farm’.

The quotes above underline the extended time frame on which the decision about whether to stay or go tends to be made, given the magnitude of the family, employment, home, education and lifestyle changes often involved. Combined with the long term character of drought and its creeping impacts (Report One), and the long term character of other pressures facing farmers such as terms of trade, it can be difficult for farming families to move from a feeling of discontentment with farming to actually deciding whether to leave. A BCG & RMCG

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couple that have reached a firm decision and have decided to sell after the next harvest described the complexity and difficulty of their decision: X: ‘We’ve been thinking about going for a couple of years… I still think there’s a little bit of future left in farming, but really not a great lot. The costs are getting too outlandish. They will come back, but they won’t come back to what they used to be’.

Y: ‘We were going before harvest and I got cold feet because I just thought: “what if we go and X [her husband] really doesn’t like it and really wants to come back farming?”. Because you can’t go back. This is a door that once you go through it, you can’t go back…’.

X: ‘The thing is, you’ve got to really be switched on to a lot of things in farming today.

It’s difficult: you’ve got to be up to date and you’ve got to start economizing and work everything out. I used to do that to a point, but since family came along and I’ve had to cart hay, I’ve been leaving that alone a little bit and I’ve got myself behind the eight ball now. It’s just going to take too much to get going again. Then you still have the hassle that you don’t want to change and you want to keep going like you used to’.

Y: ‘It’s been going on for a couple of years, with the kids and X working off-farm and everything... So although it’s sad, it’s sort of nice to finally know what we’re going to do. This house has really been a bugbear and if we can’t get a truck and a shed then there’s no point fixing up the house. It’s just nice to know that I only have to be here for another maybe twelve months and then I can say goodbye to the house’.

X: ‘Farming has certainly changed in the last few years. Fallowing is still the only way at the moment and only cropping half is still the only viable option to you, but along with that you’ve still got to pay for fertilizer and you’ve still got to pay for fuel and you’ve still got to buy groceries and drive so far to get things… You might turn over a lot of money but it requires a lot of money to stay here. If you do something else you might not turn over as much money, but everything is a lot simpler and you haven’t got 15 things breaking down all in a row… Once you sort of evaluate everything else around you, I end up having limited time that I can spend on the farm and then you’ve got limited avenues for the kids growing up. You’ve got to look at what you do for schooling and their social life too. You’ve got to look at all that; you can’t just palm them off on a school bus and hope that everything works out. When you combine all that with everything on the farm, it’s a little bit ridiculous... Anyway, we’re getting out’.

Y: ‘If the block doesn’t sell then we’ll look at something else… It’ll be hard to sell because people don’t have the money... We only need to have a drought this coming year and we won’t even be able to walk away from the land let alone try and sell it’.

X: ‘I don’t see myself having any problem getting a job. I may be limited to what I may be able to do, but as far as any manual sort of work, surely I’ll be reasonably right.

Especially when you see some people now that have jobs. It’s just that I don’t have any pieces of paper or anything and sometimes that goes ahead of ability’.

This case study also highlights the interconnections between generations that drought can throw into stark relief. Continuing his discussion of his and his wife’s decision to leave, the above farmer mentioned that his parents, with whom he currently farms and who are BCG & RMCG

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resistant to him and his wife going, are likely to be forced to leave once they are on their own. Talking about his father, he commented: ‘I don’t know whether he thinks we’re going to change our mind again. He’s probably still got his head in the sand a little bit… I don’t think he’ll have the ability to [stay farming]’.

The issue of succession was then revealed as a further factor influencing the couple’s decision to leave. As the forty year old farmer continued, reflecting his disenchantment with farming illustrated above: ‘When you start looking at, it I’m already half way through [his farming career] and I haven’t even got a go yet. Who knows, I might not be any good, so I may as well get out before I make a failure of it’.

While the issue of the lack of succession this farmer refers to is clearly independent of drought, we see how drought likely worsens the situation. The farmer’s pessimistic prediction that he might fail at running the farm alone is based in the difficulty he is already having – outlined above - “staying in front of the eight ball” in the increasingly costly and complex world of farming, on top of off-farm work.

Overall, this interview extract provides insight into the various calculations of risk farming families – and especially young farming families - need to make in considering the pros and cons of farming and farm life. It illustrates how for some families, farming is becoming too high risk or costly a proposition. It points to the diffuse ways in which drought may be influencing their farm experiences and decisions: increasing the complexity and risk of production; creating a financial need for off-farm employment that then competes with farm demands; and further reducing the avenues for children growing up by accelerating processes of rural decline. While none of these factors are created by drought alone, it is likely that they have been exacerbated by it.

Drought is affecting the timing of retirements and departures from the industry Farming families’ concerns about drought and their reactions to it range across short, medium and long-term time scales. In the short term, some families are taking drought season by season, monitoring their ability and willingness to stay on their farm according to how well they survive each production cycle. In keeping with this, the day to day difficulties created in part by drought such as overwork are triggering some families, like the one above, to decide to leave relatively immediately. Others are factoring drought into their longer term view of agriculture and climate change. Drought is not in the foreground for such families, who do not view their involvement in farming to season by season proposition, but it remains very much in the background and could theoretically trigger a decision by them to leave at any time. Examples of this kind of thinking were given in Section 2.3.3 above.

Drought is also affecting some families’ decision making in the medium term. Comments suggest that for some families drought is not a trigger to leave immediately, but a motivator for them to leave in the next two-five years. This view seems particularly pertinent to those at or near retirement age, for whom leaving is an inevitable and voluntary act, but one in which the exact timing is open to question. Drought in this situation can have an accelerating or retarding effect on the decision.

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One farmer in his fifties illustrates how drought can accelerate decisions to retire out of the industry. In contrast to the optimistic view described in Section 2.2 that the industry is about to offer farmers the chance to make large amounts of money, this farmer discussed how the difficulties created by drought and other factors mean that he feels the longer he stays in the industry the more motivation and money he is losing. Combined with his need to fund his children through university and his own post-farming life, he is consequently now looking at selling and leasing his land earlier than he otherwise would have: ‘You can keep going and get further in debt until the bank takes it off you anyway, or you can get to the stage where you sell some land, get rid of the bank, and put the surplus in another asset like a house... It’s difficult, but you’ve got to be realistic… The things is, while I’ve got kids at university and I haven’t got much money in superannuation, I’ve got to have income... So I’m thinking I’ll sell some land and lease the rest of it… But the problem is I’m not ready yet to retire, I’d just be bored stupid, so I’m not sure what I will do... It’s hard getting off the land’.

The problem of inadequate superannuation among those near retirement age is a common one, as seen in the previous reports. Most interviewees in this situation discussed leaving as something drought is making more difficult by delaying their financial ability to do so. The first and foremost way it does this is by draining post-farming funds. As one interviewee commented: ‘We’re getting close to retirement age and it would be nice to have no debt at all right now so we could start thinking about retirement. But with the drought it has been hard to save’.

Another reflected on the difficulty his parents are having accruing sufficient superannuation, and how this is retarding the succession of the farm: ‘We’ve got some serious work to do [on succession]… It has been affected by the drought to a certain degree. We’ve always been wanting to put more into Dad’s super and the past couple of years we haven’t. We’re continually putting some stuff in, but they want to put more in and we just can’t, so it has been affected’.

The couple below pointed to a similar issue, compounded in this case by the fact that that the husband’s father is increasingly impatient to leave: X: ‘Now they [his parents] are getting to the stage where they just want out altogether I think, which creates issues in itself because we’re going to have to look at labour and that sort of thing… He [his dad] is getting older and finding it a bit more tiring I think. And probably just the pressure of the past few years. I think he just threw his hands up in the air four or five years ago’.

Y: ‘He’s been waiting for a big year to get out and it hasn’t happened… I think he doesn’t want to abandon the ship completely while things aren’t good. He just wants a good year and a good amount of money in the bank so he can walk away knowing the farm is in good condition’.

X: ‘I think he has a sense of responsibility and doesn’t want to leave us in the lurch.

He was actually encouraging us to go… He is very discouraged by the whole industry because they didn’t have the same issues; they always had a pretty consistent BCG & RMCG

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industry before, so he’s really discouraged. So from that perspective, he’s a great help to us, but when he’s so discouraged that doesn’t help either because it kind of gets you down’.

The above exchange highlights a second retirement issue facing those older couples with children who want to come home to the farm, which is that they not only want to earn enough to retire on, they want to keep investing in the farm to make it a more secure option for their children. As seen in Report One, some older parents in this situation feel a growing sense of fatigue and demotivation countered by a commitment to helping their children with the farm. The couple below, for example, are trying to get their farm to a point that it is profitable enough for their son to come home and for them to retire; a goal that has been impeded by the drought: X: ‘B [his son] is still keen but he’s been practically full time shearing since June. If we could just say that we could afford for him to come back on the farm now that would be great, but it’s just not working like that… And finance is going to be a big knocker, because it’s fine to say we’ll just walk out, but what are we going to live on?

You need money to live on. And the boy is going to have to survive… I know sometimes I think to myself that he won’t have a hope, but I thought that of myself… I was basically self-taught and we survived…’.

Y: ‘The other thing is he has just got engaged to his girlfriend… The extra problem there is whether C [the son’s fiancé] wants to be a farmer’s wife and we don’t know that. So we’re not sure what the future’s holding there’.

X: ‘He’s still keen to come back to the farm but it would be good to say, “Ok, come home now”… For now we’ve just got to forget that I’m 63 and pretend that I’m 21 the third time over’.

Y: ‘I think if B had not wanted to be a farmer we may have bailed out when things got hard a few years ago. We always said that we didn’t want to get into so much debt that we’d leave here with nothing. But because B was there we have tried to hang on’.

X: ‘B really wants to be a farmer. He feels like I used to feel’.

Some fear that the drought is also impeding their goal of preparing the farm for the return of the next generation by changing their children’s mind about entering the industry. As one farmer commented: ‘After years like this it probably puts a worse view on farming and another nail in the coffin from our sons’ point of view. We won’t have to worry about leaving the farm to them because they won’t want it’.

While simplifying parents’ decision making about retiring, having children decide not to come home can be disappointing, especially if it is based on the children’s rejection of farming rather than their overwhelming desire to do something else. But, even if children do not want to actively farm, they can exert a braking influence on their parents’ decision to leave farming through their strong attachment to the farm as home. As one couple reflected:

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X: ‘[The farm] is our home. I think our children share that with us. When we talked about moving or looking at other opportunities they said “No!”, because this is their home’.

Y: ‘I used to be like that too, but I think as you get older you get over that. I have no particular attachment to this place. I could leave next week if I wanted to or had to’.

A third way in which the drought is delaying some couples’ retirement plans is by depressing the property market and hampering their ability to sell at their desired price. As one commented: ‘I think the drought has made it look less enticing for people to move to the country or this part of the world.’

Some interviewees reflected that they think others are waiting for prices to recover so they can sell up: ‘A lot of people would leave if they could sell at their price’.

‘People say that they can’t sell at the moment because no one will want to buy it, but when we have a good year they will sell. That’s the sort of psychology going through.’

For those who want to leave in the short to medium term, being unable to find a suitable buyer can be a serious obstacle. We saw above that the young couple who have decided to leave are concerned that if they have a drought this year ‘we won’t even be able to walk away from the land let alone try and sell it’, while the farmer above who feels he needs to sell and lease his land to fund his children’s university education commented that he has had a block for sale for two years with no success. Thus, even for these people for whom drought is triggering their desire to leave the industry relatively immediately, it is also serving to hinder their fulfilment of this goal. Likewise, for those looking to retire from farming in the medium term, drought is not only confirming their desire to go, but is reducing their financial ability to do so.

Having one’s retirement from farming or farm life delayed can be upsetting. We saw above some of the demotivation and fatigue that can set in. This not only affects those who are still farming, but their partners who are forced to remain on the farm. One woman expressed the anger and disappointment she feels that her and her husbands’ retirement plans and her own escape from farm life to the city has been delayed by the poor conditions of the last decade: ‘My expectations of what was going to happen to my life are not what’s happening to it.... To get to the crucial point of my life where I thought I was going to be letting it all hang out a bit and then all of a sudden it has gone like this [gestures downwards] instead of going like that [gestures upwards]. I feel it is really unfair… But there is no one to blame, so you can’t focus on anybody. It can’t be directed anywhere… I just feel a diffuse sense of anger and frustration and a sense of unfairness that it’s happening and it’s happening right now when I want it to be different.’

This woman continued that she is envious of those around her that are leaving. As her and her husband discussed, reflecting the fact that they have a son who wants to come home: BCG & RMCG

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X: ‘I think if people have gotten to the stage where they really want to go, I understand entirely. I’m envious, in fact, that they can want to go. X [her husband] can’t do that, he can’t want to go, and I’m bound to him…’

Y: ‘We’d never sell out… I’m in for the long haul… What Z [his son] does is his own decision, but for me I love the life, it still interests me, and I believe there’s a huge future for us’.

X: ‘You may just not have a wife’.

As mentioned in the previous reports, it seems quite a number of women are keen to leave farming but are kept by their commitment to their husband. A young woman whose husband is combining on-farm and off-farm work described how she feels: ‘I could pack up and leave tomorrow quite easily, quite easily. If someone gave me an out, I could go… There’s so much stress. I would love X [her husband] to have a 9 to 5 job… I feel for him because he puts so much work into the farm and works really hard and gets no benefits… I sometimes hit a low and think it’s really tough, but I think I’m so used to it now because we’ve had so many bad years. But sometimes I think it would be nice to just pack up and go. I don’t think I cope as well as I’d like to sometimes… The stress of the money is the worst thing I think… And it would be nice if we were somewhere where we could walk to visit friends or do that sort of thing… I know my girlfriend is the same as me: she’d pack up and leave tomorrow if she could.

But they’re not going either’.

As another commented: ‘I think it’s a case with a lot of women that they want to move, but our roots are here.

X [her husband] likes it here so we’ll stay here.’

Overall, drought is increasing the desire of some people to leave farming. At the same time, it is hampering many families’ ability to do so, whether they are near retirement age or not.

How each farming family is being affected by the ongoing drought conditions depends on their particular set of circumstances and relationships. As emphasised in the previous reports, key to these circumstances and relationships and people’s consequent decisions about the future is the status of their local community. We now turn to look at this community dimension.

4.2.6

Most are positive but concerned about their communities People value the support their communities offer Interviewees were asked about what they like best about living where they do. In addition to the farming-specific answers described in Section 2.6.1, some referred to positive elements of their local community. In addition to safety, the main characteristic they highlighted was the “sense of community” that exists in their local town, which was discussed as an

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important source of support and identity. As people commented about the various towns they feel they belong to: ‘There is no doubt that the community element of X [town] life is very strong and people love whatever it is. It’s an intangible, but they love it’.

‘It’s safe and there’s a good community’.

‘It is a strong little community really. If anything happens there is people around.... I think there are still a lot of families around that seem to hold the community together.’

Concern about population decline is widespread The last quote above about there ‘still’ being families around to hold the community together points to people’s underlying concern about population decline in their local area.

Contributing to this widespread worry is the experience of having those around them leave.

Many interviewees observed or speculated about other families around them leaving farming and their community. In doing so, they pointed to some of the ways they are affected by such events themselves, such as the shrinkage of their support network, their increased sense of social isolation and the increased vulnerability of their community. As some commented: ‘People are leaving all the time. We just lost another young family and their parents have gone. Another family has gone from out here that are my age [50s]. Farms are getting bigger so therefore there will be less people around. It’s a lot more important now to have a local support network’.

‘We’ve lost three young families just lately. There was a clearance sale today but I didn’t go. That was for a couple and their three young children. Another couple that live 5kms away have three young children and they’re moving away. Simply because they’ve accepted the fact that they were in a partnership and there wasn’t enough work for two families so someone had to go. In this case I think it was the younger brother… Another young couple with a child were managing a property and I think they had a bit of a tough time of it and ended up having a falling out… He and his wife would have been terrific for the community. So there’s three young families and there just seems to be more and more empty houses around the place’.

‘We lost 3 neighbours this year… They were three neighbours I talked to a lot. So that’s sad in lots of ways. Probably they were the three neighbours that I conversed with regularly... You look around and you think: “Shit! All the neighbours have gone”…

It is the effect the drought has had on two of those blokes. They basically couldn’t handle the stress. One had four kids and they’ve gone out of the area... The third guy retired because he has just changed the way he wants to spend the rest of his life and that’s fair enough… We’re probably more isolated now just because we’ve lost three of our neighbours and ones that we liked and talked to a lot and related to. When you lose them you become more isolated in lots of ways’.

‘Met one today who sold his farm… a young bloke… I bought his tractor last year and he bought another one, so I don’t think he was planning to leave last year’.

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‘I think that X [a neighbour] likes farming, but he’s just had enough of it here and they’re just gradually going backwards, so they’re off. He just says, “What’s the future?”… It adds to people’s sense of despair. If these stalwarts of the community are going - and their parents were here and their parents before that - if they’re going, things are crook. That’s the sort of rolling stone thing going on’.

The quotes above point to the role of drought in triggering some families to leave farming and their local communities, as discussed in Section 2.6.2. How drought is affecting those around them is a serious preoccupation for many in small rural communities. As found in the previous reports, many interviewees expressed interest and concern about how well others are coping with the drought, demonstrating what was termed in Report One ‘caring social surveillance’. As some observed: ‘Our immediate neighbours had a really ordinary year… so I’d say they’d be feeling it pretty hard… We are concerned about them and so are other people’.

‘We were fairly fortunate around here because we did actually get some crop… But I just think all of this is a big drain on small communities…’.

‘I watch people in the supermarket and the specials disappear incredibly quickly. And the butcher says that people don’t buy the good meat… He said, “sometimes I wonder what people eat”. So I think people certainly are tightening their belts, but if you meet them on the street they’re no different.’

Beyond harvests and spending patterns, one of the most obvious indications of how people are coping with the drought is whether they decide to leave. It is this that has the greatest impact on others. Strong interest in families’ decisions about leaving is fuelled not only by concern about the individuals’ involved, but by concern for the wellbeing of the communities being left behind. Some interviewees indicated grave concern about their communities: ‘X [town] is slowly spiralling out to the other districts’.

‘X [town] has done its lifespan now, I reckon’.

‘Long term as far as the community goes, I can’t see – if we get two more years like this - I can’t see that the community will be able to sustain itself’.

Besides size, interviewees also discussed related issues like inadequate services, as found in previous reports. One highlighted how rural communities tend to operate as what the literature calls ‘professional nurseries’: training grounds for young professionals who do their requisite period gaining clinical experience and then tend to leave. As he commented: ‘I think there are a lot of inadequacies out here like education, medical and welfare.

Invariably when we get someone good they get headhunted and away they go… We just lost our chiropractor in X and if you get a good dentist or something they’re there for a year and they’re gone. It’s just annoying’.

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Others pointed to the loss of social and sporting organisations going on in their communities, reiterating their importance to local communities described in Reports One and Two. One interviewee talked specifically about the local football team, underlining how its survival is (like some farms) ‘a year to year proposition’ and has been particularly weakened this year by the poor harvest last season.

‘I think the biggest problem with a small town like X [town] is that the town itself has relied over the years on sporting teams and those sorts of things. It looks like they won’t even get a football team on the ground this year. There’s talk about that because the clearing of the bunkers has always earned them money to help get a football side. But, no wheat, no bunkers, no money, no team… It’s a year to year proposition the footy thing. The cricket team has combined with Y [town], there’s no tennis - so footy and netball is basically it. Without a footy team the town will just bloody die. That’s the life blood’.

The specific relationship between harvest and football provides a neat illustration of one of the ways farming and local communities are interlinked. In particular, it highlights how the effect of drought on farming flows though to the broader rural community. As discussed in previous reports, the status of local communities, in turn, influences farming by contributing to whether farming families want to stay in the area. An older farmers’ wife who wants to leave farming and her local community pointed to the influence of the latter on her decision: ‘I compare it with the years we grew up. X [town] was a thriving community and it was absolutely fantastic to live here, you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. You had entertainment, you had people, it was thriving, it was great. Now it’s a struggle. If we were living in the days that we did in the ’50s, I’d be very contented and very happy here. That’s where the difference is as far as I’m concerned. I just want a bit more culture, a bit more fun and that sort of thing’.

The two-way relationship between farming families and their local communities means that what benefits one benefits the other. In addition to this positive feedback, however, lie certain tensions between the needs of communities and families/individuals, as we now discuss.

Balancing the needs of one’s community and family remains a challenge for some One of the main reasons population decline weakens rural communities is not only because it means there are less people to support services and organisations with their patronage, but there are less people to run them in the first place. In the absence of the commercial or professional alternatives found in city centres, many organisations in small rural communities are run on a voluntary basis. Indeed, a culture of volunteerism is one of the things that contributes to the sense of community that is valued about living in such areas.

Yet, finding enough people to be on committees and “do things” is increasingly a challenge: ‘The town is getting smaller and the pool of people that are willing to do things is shrinking. That is one thing that I worry about - is where that is going to be in another 10 or 12 years.’

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‘Committees are folding up because we can’t get the support and there are only a handful of people who want to take on positions… Those are the things that are depressing’.

‘There are families that have three or four kids at the school now, but when that lot goes through the school is probably going to close. The school is a bit of a focal point because parents have things in common when the kids are going to the same school.

It’s at the stage now where every parent is on school council, whereas there used to be elections. There is just barely enough to go around. It’s just the cycle of country communities becoming smaller’.

Significantly, it is not only the falling head count that is contributing to the lack of volunteers in small rural communities. As discussed in Report Two, there are also signs that some of those who remain are becoming less interested in supporting their local community. There seem to be two inter-related reasons for this. First is that, as found in Report Two, the continuing difficulties and stress of the drought seem to be forcing or encouraging a small proportion of families and individuals to focus on their own needs over those of their local community. For some, this situation is something they recognise as a thing of the past.

Some of the interviewees for whom last season marked an improvement reflected that they had become more insular for a period last year as they focused on making decisions about their future: ‘I reckon for a time in the year we were more focused on our own situation. That was probably around August. But I don’t think we probably are now… It probably is dependent on the drought a bit because we had to make some decisions, so you had to spend some time making decisions.’

Other interviewees, for whom the pressures of previous years do not seem to have abated, the feeling of being unable or unwilling to contribute to their community if it requires a sacrifice of them is also ongoing. A young couple observed that they have been prompted by the drought to wonder about the amount of work their involvement in the community demands: X: ‘I think we have a sense of loyalty, but there is also resentment because we have a lot of city friends and it would be nice not to have to put in so much energy to get something back from the community’.

Y: ‘It’d be nice if we wanted to play tennis to just go and pay our money and play rather than having to put in hours of work! Not worry about who’s going to clean the toilets or pull the weeds from the courts!’

X: ‘Maybe the drought makes you think a bit more about that because you think: “Well, we’re not making that much money here anyway, why are we spending our lives putting into this community that doesn’t really have a future because everybody just wants to get out?”... X is a very strong community, but there is just less people to do the jobs and probably less optimism about the future of the town because things are being lost’.

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We saw in Section 2.5.5 above the tension that exists - as in all families managing the worklife balance - between the needs of farm and family. These combined farm and family needs can then stand in contrast to those of the community, particularly when the former are heightened by the effects of drought. When asked about his involvement in the community, one farmer commented, for example: ‘Because of the drought there is so much more work on. With cropping the work just stops, but with the stock business, the work doubles. You’re feeding and carting water and fencing dams and those sort of things. So for me, when I come home I just want to have a sleep… I just find my job fairly physically and mentally demanding’ Having children to look after increases the family demands that parents have to juggle as they divide their time and energy between competing priorities, as do issues like failing health and elderly relatives to care for. Stage of life is therefore an important determinant of how much time people have to devote to their farm and local community. Added to this are then the effects of the drought. Just as drought can increase the amount of attention and energy the farm demands of individuals, it can increase the amount that other family members require. A father of three, who is finding farming increasingly challenging, reflected on the need to focus on his children: ‘I used to be really involved in town affairs but in the last ten years I’ve pulled back from that and concentrated on my own kids. It’s all I can handle at the moment on top of the farm’.

One of this farmers’ children is suffering from depression. As discussed in the previous reports, one of the results of feeling depressed can be a desire to withdraw from social interaction with others. We saw in Section 2.3.1 how some have been and continue to voluntarily isolate themselves from their community as they deal with the drought-induced stresses they are under. Such isolation is a further example of how one’s personal needs and those of the community can compete.

A result of having less engagement with the local community is a growing lack of knowledge about how other community members are faring. As one woman answered when asked about her local community: ‘I don’t know [how the community is]. I’m too busy worrying about us’.

By weakening relationships, having less contact with other community members is also likely to increase people’s natural propensity to keep their own situation to themselves, decreasing further how much community members understand about others’ situations. As found in the previous reports, privacy is still an issue for some people: ‘I don’t know how others are… It has always been a big thing that you don’t talk about how bad you are off or the fact that you’ve got a healthcare card or those things’.

‘I don’t really know how people are; no-one says, I just know there are a lot of people hurting. On face value, not a lot looks different, but I know it is’.

A cause and effect of weakened relationships between community members is falling support for local businesses. As discussed in the previous reports, whether someone shops BCG & RMCG

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locally is considered by some to be a quintessential sign of their loyalty to the community. As one interviewee put it: ‘Too many people are going out of town shopping, and our little businesses are struggling… People think they can get cheaper things in Horsham and Warracknabeal but when you look at the specials in X [town] they’re very competitive. They also forget the cost of the fuel has to be added to the expenses… We support X to the hilt, but there are not enough people doing it. So soon our stores will have to close down. I know they’re struggling’.

As indicated in the above, the challenge for farming families is the relative total cost of products in their local town versus larger centres. Whether the cost differential is real or not, there is a perception that shopping locally or further afield is a case of community loyalty versus financial pragmatism. But there are also other forces involved. Convenience is also a factor as the transfer of some shops and services to the larger centres draws people to them and away from the ones that remain in their local towns. As one woman commented: ‘You find that you have to go to Horsham for other things on a more regular basis so you just naturally do everything else there as well’.

In addition, it seems some increasingly look to the larger centres to provide them with an escape. Suggesting that in times of stress people are as likely to look for social engagement as social isolation, albeit perhaps social engagement of a different kind to normal, the interviewee above who commented on supporting her local town continued: ‘The thing is, we’ve been told – particularly by the women – that [the reason some now shop in Horsham and Warracknabeal is] it’s a day out, they just want to get out and away from all of this. While they’re over there they have lunch and go shopping and it’s an outing for them’.

The second reason the proportion of people volunteering for their community may be dropping is because of the change in the constitution of the community. Shopping in a more distant town may not be starkly different to shopping in one’s local centre if one increasingly does not know those who live in it. As in the previous interviews, numerous interviewees commented on how their local townscape is changing with the arrival of new, generally less well off residents. Replacing the traditional residents who have left, these new residents were consistently described in interview in terms that make clear they are seen as an ‘undesirable’ addition to the community.

‘The community has diminished because the town is full of bloody blow ins… They’re all on government benefits’.

‘Some people that do come you’re obviously very disappointed in. We’ve got people across the road that have been involved with drugs and all sorts of awful things are going on over there’.

‘There have been some druggies arrive and I think the town is frightened of them’.

‘Some people have moved into the town for the cheaper housing and accommodation and the population is sort of changing because they’re not necessarily contributing.

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townspeople. The people that are coming to replace them generally aren’t the type of people who can replace the ones that have just left’.

To the extent that the new residents referred to above do not contribute to the voluntary work on which small rural communities rely, their substitution for ‘hardworking townspeople’ will reduce the amount of such work that is done. It is also possible that, to the extent that the turnover in population alienates the remaining original residents, this latter group may become less motivated to contribute, further reducing the community work base.

Whether new or different residents feel unwilling or unwelcome to contribute to established town activities is an open question. On the one hand, there are signs that new residents are made to feel welcome. One interviewee emphasised that she has made good friends with a family that has recently moved into their area: ‘There are friends that I’ve made who just moved to X in the last six months that have done a lot of travelling and are just interesting people… I find these people a breath of fresh air because there is no small town gossip and they’ve got interesting things to say. So you do get some lovely people, but they’re few and far between’.

Another directly tackled the idea that country towns are insular: ‘There is no divide between the wealthiest person in the community and the poorest person. X [town] is small enough that you can’t afford to have differences like you do in Melbourne. I think country people are perceived as being insular and not open to new people coming into town, but I think it is probably the opposite. We can’t afford to knock everyone back so you’ve got to accept everyone!… You see people who are 80 years old talking to 15 year olds like they’re best mates and you don’t get that at other places. I think country towns have a lot of support and acceptance to offer to people who come in.’

On the other hand, another interviewee who has married into a local area described how she continues to feel unwelcome because, she feels, she and her farmer husband are not of the right ‘standard’: ‘I don’t really know [how the community is going]. I don’t really spend much time in X. I’ve never really felt like I’ve fitted in. I think there are two standards in X: the high standard and the low standard. And I think we’ve always been on the low standard and I’ve never really felt like I’ve fitted in… They do have a good network with footy club and netball club and things... So they probably look after themselves if you’re in those clubs and those groups… I think you get good support if you’re in the right group… I just feel like we’ve never been really good enough. You have to be of a certain standard and we’re not good enough… I think it’s so sad that people judge people by the way they look…and that’s how I feel it is in X. People judge you because you don’t look right or you don’t dress right… Sometimes I go into the supermarket and I’m really tired and the kids are running and I’m just ignoring it and I’m just over it… I’ve suffered depression and I was going through a really bad patch and I had a lady who was judging me even though I know she had also suffered from depression. I thought that she should know what it’s like and people forget what it’s like when you’ve got kids this age and you’re not getting any sleep and stuff like that.

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I’m on medication now and I’ve dealt with it and I’m fine but sometimes people judge and they have no idea’.

This interviewee and her husband are among those who are facing the greatest financial difficulties among the interviewee sample. Although only a single case study, their social situation suggests that there is a degree of class division within their town, as there may be in others. It suggests that it may be this socio-economic difference, more than the newness of residents, that is at the root of the tension between existing and ‘undesirable’ newcomers.

As discussed in Report Two, it seems some newcomers also bring a different, diminished sense of what it is to belong to a community. Because of the strong value farming families and other traditional small town residents place on community – discussed above - this difference represents a threat to what they know and love and, to the degree that the community relies on voluntary contributions, to the existence of “the sense of community” itself. It points to the challenge that those who live in rural areas face in holding their communities together in terms of culture as well as numbers while remaining open to a range of existing and new residents.

4.2.7

Financial assistance is accepted and welcomed by some but not all More families are open and happy about receiving financial assistance Reports One and Two discussed at length the contentious and stressful nature of the government’s financial assistance system for many farming families. As a relatively new initiative in February 2007, the topic was particularly top of mind at the time. In the February 2008 interviews, the concept of financial assistance emerged as far less controversial, with many farming families having worked through their own difficulties in learning about, accessing and accepting some form of payment, and one family newly eligible because of the changes introduced in October 2007. Most interviewee comments about such assistance were focused on their personal experience of it rather than the system at large and described how useful the assistance has been in helping them cope with the ongoing drought conditions: ‘We’ve actually got the full drought assistance… Without that we would have been in trouble’.

‘We’re getting the drought assistance through Centrelink – the exceptional circumstances… It’s very helpful. It helps pay the food bills and stuff like that’.

‘We got the interest rate subsidy again last year and that has been magic. If those things hadn’t been there we would have been gone a couple of years ago’.

‘I was more than happy with the interest rate subsidy and honestly if that wasn’t in place – and I’m assuming I’ll get it again this year – if that wasn’t in place, I’d be worried because that would make a lot of difference to us. It saved us about $43,000 last year and I’m hoping it’ll be that this year.’

‘It does make a difference in keeping people in the industry because you need something to get you through the suffering. If you didn’t have that you’d probably sell a paddock instead and you’d be less viable. We could survive without it but, as X [her husband] said, it’d probably add other pressures’.

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‘We had the interest subsidy for three years and it has certainly made it easier for us.

I doubt whether we’ll get it this time but we certainly have appreciated what we have got out of it’.

‘The interest subsidy last year was a big help to us… Really, I think it gave people the confidence to know they could borrow the money and they knew as soon as they had a crop they’d pay the money back. So that enabled people to operate for the year… I think it has helped people enormously’.

For some interviewees, their acceptance of government financial assistance represents a change in mindset from being uncomfortable with such assistance to having justified to themselves that such help is legitimate. As some commented: ‘When we first started we weren’t used to taking money from the government, but, ten or eleven years on, it’s like: “If you can’t beat them, join them”. I think it’s because most people are in the same boat and it’s a fact that if you live in this area, you can’t beat drought… It’s good that the government saw the need to help and did.’

‘We were in two minds about it in the first place… We didn’t apply for a long time, but in the end we decided to… We weren’t going to do it because we didn’t feel like we really needed it because we’ve always gotten by… But we have gotten a rates subsidy and it has been a big help with our rates’.

In February 2007, financial assistance from community groups was even more contentious than that from the government for some interviewees. Although mentioned by only one couple in February 2008, discussion of it was - as for government assistance - about how grateful they are for it: X: ‘Through the CWA [Country Women’s Association] we got some money for fuel and we got some for groceries, provided that we bought it at the local supermarket, which we did… They paid our SEC bill and the fuel and they gave us this $1000 check, so they gave us over $2000!’

Y: ‘That was good and I made that last pretty well. Also, a church down in Melbourne gave us a couple of lots of food’.

X: ‘If you take all of that away I don’t think we’d have any money… But there’s always somebody worse off out there’.

Social assistance – as in entertainment- or information-based events – was also little mentioned by the interviewees in February 2008, suggesting that few such events were being held around the time. However, one couple did refer to a recent such event in their local area and expressed gratitude for the financial support from the government it represents. As one remarked:

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Full marks to the government for when they’ve given money for this, that and the other. We had a thing on in Z [town] a couple of months ago and they gave us $300 for that and that was good’.

Overall, the dominant reaction to various types of drought-related financial assistance was one of gratitude, suggesting that the need for financial assistance within the farming community has become more widely accepted over the last six to twelve months.

Nevertheless, such assistance still generates uncomfortable feelings for some farming families, as we now discuss.

Some still feel uncomfortable about financial assistance Some of those receiving assistance revealed feelings of guilt associated with accepting such help. As one woman commented: ‘I feel guilty spending money when I’m being given this subsidy’.

An older farmer was particularly grateful for the help he received from a Rural Financial Counsellor to access the financial assistance and similarly expressed feelings of guilt: ‘He was fantastic, he’ll be my friend for life. With the hours and the work he put in here, I feel so guilty that I didn’t pay him anything.’

Feelings of guilt reflect the reciprocality that characterises our normal social and economic interactions. The absence of reciprocality from the relationship of assistance can make the “transaction” feel incomplete and one-sided, burdening the recipients of such assistance with feelings of inadequacy. An interviewee suggested that some recipients’ self-esteem has been affected in this way: ‘The problem has been with the whole welfare mentality of the drought payments and I don’t know if that’s beneficial to people. I know some people do need support, but I just think the way it has been done has brought on a bit of a welfare mentality, which has affected some people’s self-esteem’.

Another reflected from a personal perspective how difficult she finds it to be the object of people’s ‘grace’: ‘You do realize that this sort of sense of everybody being kind to us is a horrible feeling. They mean well… but it’s awful being the object of sort of the whole country’s grace’.

Besides grace, charity or pity - which can imply a recipients’ (inferior) condition is intrinsic and needs to be simply accepted - assistance can be motivated by a desire to improve the recipient. Like many outside observers, some interviewees reflected this view by expressing various criticisms of those that need assistance. One accompanied her in principle acceptance of financial assistance with the caveat that people should be encouraged to be as self-reliant as possible: BCG & RMCG

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‘I think it is very generous… Not overly generous, but I wouldn’t like to see it increased. I think it would discourage people from trying their hardest and trying to get back on their feet again. It might make it very easy for people to sit back and live off the government’.

The self-help philosophy that this quote promotes was reiterated by two other interviewees who offered more individualised criticism of assistance recipients, arguing that they need to be more responsible. The first focused on the issue of money management: ‘Some of those farmers [who receive assistance] haven’t changed their ways. I don’t how you get around that, but I just think that a lot of those ones aren’t going to survive on the farm anyway. I wonder if money was spent on making people accountable or limiting their personal spending would work. I think you would find with a lot of those people, their personal spending is big. I’d hate to see what some of them would spend.’

The other emphasised the need for farmers to take a more responsible approach to climate and risk, reflecting the difference in opinion on this topic that was discussed in Section 2.5 above: ‘When they can make the decision to buy a $300,000 tractor then you’d think they should be able to think about having enough money for a year or two if it doesn’t rain.

They haven’t got their head screwed on. For a drought to cripple people that much that they’re looking out for handouts, then it’s sort of their fault. You can put it in the back of your mind that it [the weather] might turn around, but it could go on for a couple of years yet… You can’t just say: “It’s got to be a good year”’.

Overall, the above reflects that although most farming families seem to be more accustomed to living and working in an environment characterised by financial assistance than they were a year ago, and are grateful for how it has helped them, the whole concept of such assistance continues to generate mixed feelings. In a culture seemingly dominated by a strong belief in self-reliance, ‘handouts’ continue to generate a lack of (self-) respect among recipients and observers alike, reflecting one of the reasons the newcomers (who are often on government support) discussed in Section 2.7.3 above have trouble fitting in. The result is that, as one interviewee commented: ‘There have been a lot of people upset with others for getting it’.

Part of the complaint with financial assistance is that the money could be spent in other ways. Pointing to the ongoing issues of rural decline facing small rural communities and the close relationship between farming and non-farming wellbeing, some interviewees called for more general investment in rural areas. In particular, one farmer commented: ‘Assistance is OK to a point, but the government can’t do everything for you…

Bringing industry to rural Victoria would be of more benefit than providing handouts’.

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4.3

Conclusions February to September 2007 in the Wimmera Southern Mallee was characterised by the low of drought punctuated by the brief-lived high of the early break. The pattern of the subsequent six months was not dissimilar, as the stress in September of the early break’s collapse was alleviated in later months by better than expected harvests and buoyant prices.

Although for some this improvement has been stable and places them in a relatively strong position, for others it was only relative to their worst fears in September and was a temporary reprieve from the continuing and in some cases worsening pressures of drought.

The result is that as farming families gear up for another year, most are doing so with a heightened sense of caution as they try to accommodate the risk of climate unpredictability that they were so harshly schooled in last season. They are also trying to adapt to the growing financial risks associated with using inputs and marketing their own produce, which, thanks to the unpredictability of the market, are a further serious source of complexity and stress.

Given that drought and other long-term pressures are ongoing issues for the farming families involved in this research, many of the findings from this round of interviews reiterate those of February and September 2007. The differences between farming families’ financial situations remain. While these have possibly been exaggerated by the events of the last six months, they are more likely to have been altered in complex ways as rewards in yield and profit varied according to the precise climatic conditions experienced, the different approaches taken to production including the amount spent, and the different approaches taken to marketing, influencing the prices ultimately obtained. Overall, while some are now better or worse off than this time last year, the mix of large and small incomes from last harvest combined with the large or conservative costs involved in different strategies seems to have resulted in a general pattern of marginal change that reinforces the influence of preexisting financial reserves as the determining factor of financial wellbeing. That is, while last year represented a slight recovery period for some farming families, for most families recovery remains a hope and goal.

Hope itself also varies across the farming population. The discrepancy seen in September last year between the optimistic and despairing perspectives of individuals has been reinforced in this latest round of interviews. While for some, the financial ‘escape’ allowed by better-than-expected yields and high prices towards the end of last year has been the strongest influence on their outlook, for others the general collapse of the season and the continuation of drought has been the determining factor. Worries associated with the latter have been particularly compounded recently by the rising costs of inputs as families again face the challenge of cash flow and risk associated with gearing up for another season.

Such a conflation of issues illustrates how the drain that drought places on families’ financial and emotional reserves heightens their sensitivity to pre-existing issues in agriculture like terms of trade, and vice versa.

Such a conflation of issues also highlights farming families’ enormous resilience. Although most families’ situations have only improved marginally since September, if at all, most families have also retreated from being on the brink of leaving. While a few young families have decided or are still seriously considering leaving in the short to medium term, and for those near retirement age such a decision remains pertinent, most have decided to ‘knuckle down’ again, buoyed in some cases by the hope a new year offers. However, the level of concern about the future that interviewees’ voiced, and the way drought is obstructing some people’s ability to leave, suggests that some families’ decision to stay may be a year-by-year proposition, mentally as well as financially. For, firstly, it may be that the complex

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combination of positive and negative factors they have experienced over the last six to twelve months has simply not provided a clear direction for them, and so while most remain in farming, many effectively remain in a kind of ‘wait and see’ mode. Secondly, any future improvement in conditions may allow some people to leave just as it will allow others’ to stay.

The interconnection of individuals, families and communities again emerged as a strong theme in these interviews. As seen in the previous reports, in many ways their needs are in sync and it is an ongoing fact that the revitalisation of small rural centres remains one of the most effective ways to help farming families, just as assistance to farming families contributes to the wellbeing of their rural communities. We have seen how important local communities are to many farming families and the value of the support such communities offer, particularly in times of drought. We have also seen, though, how at a more micro-level the needs of these different spheres can be in tension. For, one of the effects of drought is how it exacerbates the already difficult task of prioritising one’s limited time, energy and money between farm, family and community, and in a significant number of cases, between farm and off-farm employment, including unpaid childcare. The involuntary, pressing nature of some demands, such as paid work or unavoidable family needs, mean that other areas – characterised as important but less urgent - may be neglected. How urgent different demands are for different families varies. For some, the farm is the central focus while, for others, such as the young family in the sample who are definitely leaving, the farm has suffered as generating cash flow through off-farm work and caring for young children has had to take priority. One of the results is that, just as some are having to let their soil fertility or machinery quality decline in the short term in order to survive the acute pressure they are currently under, so too are some having to step back from supporting and contributing to their community in order to cope with their individual situations.

The resultant issue of divided loyalties is emerging too within the agricultural industry as different players try to balance individual gain with the sense of team identity that is created by agriculture’s difference to other sectors. While the previous reports provided signs that at a personal and local level relationships between some agribusinesses and farmers have grown stronger as a result of the drought as they empathise with each others’ situations, the latest interviews suggest that the relative reprieve offered by last season has been also marred by what some farmers see as their exploitation by non-farming players in the agricultural industry. The sense of anger, hurt and injustice this is causing is contributing to some people’s disillusionment with farming. It is also illustrative of the complex social as well as financial character of decisions farmers increasingly face in managing their farm businesses.

Overall, the February 2008 interviews presented in this report represent the continuation of the main trends identified in the interviews of the previous year. For, just as drought continues, so too do the effects and pressures it has created. And just as it is characterised by its extended character, so too do most farming families persevere. What this means in the context of the whole twelve month study is discussed further below.

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Discussions, Conclusions and Recommendations for the 12 months

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5

Discussion and Conclusions

5.1

Introduction The above three reports provide a rich picture of the complex and challenging situation that farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee have been facing over the last twelve months as they cope with the aftermath and continuation of drought-like conditions. Thanks to the generosity and honesty of the interviewees, the skills and hard work of the local interviewers, and the foresight of BCG and the investors, these interviews provide unique insights into the circumstances, decisions and thoughts of a diverse group of individuals across an extended and difficult period. In doing so, they further our understanding of drought in general and the multiple challenges facing farming families. This section summarises the main principles, issues and trends that emerge from the research. Some brief reflections on the method are then offered before some conclusions and recommendations are presented.

5.2

Principles: what have we learnt about drought?

As common and devastating as drought is, very little social research has been conducted into it. Very little is known about how it actually acts on people, including those in rural areas and on farms where the impact is particularly acute. For this reason, it is important to consider what this research suggests about how drought is experienced.

The first thing this research has highlighted is that it is not possible to identify “the effect of drought” on an individual or family. Rather, we have seen that drought acts as a diffuse pressure on many areas at once, squeezing people in direct and indirect ways and exacerbating existing pressures as much as creating new problems. Farming families are especially vulnerable to the impacts of drought because not only are they affected indirectly via its effect on their community and sector, but they are affected directly by a lack of water for their household, garden and farm. How severely a farm is affected by drought depends on multiple things: its water supply relative to its water needs; its physical sensitivity to water shortage; and, most importantly, its financial sensitivity to the result of such a shortage, which is influenced, in turn, by the other challenges it is facing. How severely a farming family is affected then depends not only on the latter, but on their emotional and mental robustness at the time, as well as the type and degree of additional problems drought creates for them, such as its effect on their work lives or local community. Via its financial effect and people’s concern about uncertainty and risk, drought alters the direction and timing of people’s decisions and plans. As we have seen, it accelerates some processes while delaying others, stalling some decision-making by throwing rules of thumb and assumptions about the future into question.

The insidious, monotonous character of drought also stalls decision-making. In contrast to the sudden on/off nature of other disasters such as fire and flood, drought does not readily “trigger” responses at a particular point in time. Because it is characterised in large part by its longevity, and such longevity can only be ascertained in hindsight, it is not a clear and obvious situation that one can plan one’s response to. Rather, long-term drought of the type being experienced in the Wimmera Southern Mallee creeps up on people, slowly ratcheting up the pressure they are under by continuously eroding their personal, physical and financial reserves and gradually worsening, or worsening the impact on them, of other burdens.

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Drought’s effect can then linger long after it has passed climatically, as people are left with the problems of depletion created during its existence and the anxiety of wondering whether each subsequent delay in rain signals the beginning of another drought.

At a community level, the effects of drought are complex. On the one hand, drought is indiscriminate, a problem common to those living within the large areas on which it is officially identified. On the other hand, differences in rain patterns, water demand and vulnerability to its impacts mean experiences of drought vary markedly at a micro-scale, differing between areas, farms and paddocks, and communities, families and individuals.

Heightened by the selective character of the government financial assistance system established to help some farming families during drought, discrepancies between people’s experience of drought can cause social anxiety, particularly for those who feel worse off than others. As people struggle to make sense of what is happening to them, knowing that others are experiencing the same or worse difficulties can reassure them by reducing their sense of individual responsibility and thus self-recrimination. For this reason, as we have seen, community-wide drought initiatives can be an important source of support by symbolising the shared character of the problem. They can also bring people together in an unprecedented manner, revealing a rare positive effect of drought. Such an experience is not common to all communities or individuals, however. Drought can also negatively affect local communities as people withdraw to focus on their own problems or prioritise their own needs in other ways. The resultant changes to the community mean that all members of a community are affected by drought regardless of how it impacts them directly.

5.3

Issues: what are the main issues farming families are facing?

Drought wears away at farming families’ reserves, deepening the indentations of pre-existing problems in their lives. Although focused on drought, the present study therefore also sheds light on many of the issues farming families in the Wimmera Southern Mallee are facing.

In terms of farming, the initial issues of water shortage created by drought are weakening farms by seeping through to many other areas. A reduction in financial reserves means the annual cash flow challenge created by seasonal start up costs is becoming more acute for many families, pushing them to take on (more) debt, sell assets or eat into savings. Such short term financial needs mean some farmers are unable to adopt recommended droughtproofing measures such as storage tanks and are having to forego long-term maintenance measures, such as sustaining soil fertility and updating plant. The resultant reductions in the robustness of their farms is compounded by the concern a growing number have about the reliability of farming as a source of livelihood, which is prompting farming families of all ages to try to “insure” themselves against further financial impacts by committing more money, time and energy to off-farm interests.

Financial necessity, heightened wariness of the financial risks involved, and interest in how best to manage drought conditions is also prompting a large number of farmers to question their previous production practices. Input costs are rising, both in absolute terms and relative to some farmers’ shrinking incomes. As people’s reserves diminish, their sensitivity to risk increases because the severity of any given impact increases for them. Combined with the uncertainty that surrounds weather, yield and product prices, these higher stakes are making decision making more stressful for some farming families and encouraging many to take a more conservative approach. As those who are optimistically and in some cases defiantly sticking with a high input/high risk approach realise, however, taking a lower risk approach

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reduces one’s ability to bounce back quickly if the drought does end and high product prices are maintained. Strong differences in opinion exist between farmers as to which is the most suitable approach under current conditions of ongoing drought combined with high prices and, by introducing a degree of social surveillance, these differences add to the stressfulness of the decisions involved.

To minimise the squeeze of falling terms of trade, some farmers are actively managing their input costs by intervening in the market at strategic times, based on predictions of future fluxes in price. Some are doing the same for product prices, using futures and forward contracts. Such a marketing approach calls on a relatively new area of knowledge and skills for many farmers; an area that joins other components of business and financial management, use of climate forecasting and drought-appropriate production practices as areas some farmers currently feel poorly equipped in. This marketing work also requires an adjustment of farmers’ relationships with suppliers and buyers as they more actively engage with these other players in the agricultural industry. Farmers’ relationships with the sellers of inputs have been tested lately as jumps in the cost of fertiliser and chemicals have revealed what many farmers feel is these non-farming partners’ willingness to exploit them. The resultant sense of betrayal has left some farmers feeling more isolated and disillusioned with the agricultural industry at a time when many also feel the public image of the sector as a whole has been damaged by the vulnerabilities drought has exposed.

The above indicates how the complexity of farming is increasing in many directions at once.

Decisions for farming families are also being made more complex and difficult by community and work-life balance issues. Just as decisions about the farm increasingly require farmers to make calls on the future in terms of production, marketing and investment, so too do decisions about the farming families’ plans as they are forced to make calls on the current and future status of their communities. Some families are increasingly questioning the quality of life their farm and rural living situation provides and will continue to provide in the future. Representing a pull on their loyalties, they are considering the decline of their local communities and whether these communities will be able to adequately meet their future needs for education, social interaction and medical support, among other things. At the same time, some families’ ability to help maintain their communities is diminished by their need to attend to work and family needs made more pressing in part by drought. These needs are themselves in tension, particularly for those juggling off-farm and childcare work as well as farm work. The upshot is that, combined with processes of depopulation and repopulation that are being accelerated in part by the drought, the robustness of some rural communities is weakening at a time when some farming families are increasingly questioning their community’s appeal.

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5.4

Trends: what are farming families choosing to do?

The principles and issues discussed above draw on the patterns that have emerged from the data over the last twelve months. More specifically, though, what does this research suggest about how farming families are responding to the drought and other challenges laid out above? Eleven main trends are apparent: 1. Virtually all farming families are eating into their physical, financial and personal/emotional reserves to cope with the drought and will continue to need to do so if drought continues; 2. For most farming families, the effects of drought will remain with them for years after the drought ends; 3. The majority of farming families are persevering and have not been pushed to leave farming, although most have had to alter their personal and professional plans and most have engaged the question of whether to leave and will continue to re-engage it over coming years; 4. There are strong differences between the circumstances and outlooks of farming families and these differences appear to be widening in some ways; 5. Regardless of how severely a farming familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s financial situation has been affected by the drought, they have been and will continue to be affected by drought indirectly as it exacerbates other issues, affects those around them, and throws a veil of uncertainty over the future; 6. Farming familiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; awareness of and sensitivity to the risks involved in farming has escalated and many are adopting what could be a permanently more conservative approach to production, marketing and income protection; 7. The default position for a minority of farmers is optimism and the proportion of people who share this outlook swells at the start of each year when the potential of the new season is still unknown; 8. Some peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s outlook on farming, climate and the world in general has been fundamentally darkened by their experience over the last few years and they now suffer from high levels of anxiety irrespective of weather conditions; 9. People remain committed to their sector and communities, but struggle with multiple demands upon them and are being forced to focus on their own needs to cope with the effects of the drought; 10. The vast majority of small rural communities are facing serious issues of declining active populations and services and this is negatively affecting the wellbeing and resolve of the farming families that help make up those communities; and 11. Financial assistance is now welcomed and accepted by most but will continue to aggravate negative responses among some for the way that it conflicts with their belief in self-help.

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Given these trends, what seems likely to happen over the next twelve or more months? in keeping with the way farming families need to increasingly make calls on the future as they determine their strategy for the coming season, let us also make some informed guesses on what could happen.

If the drought breaks this coming season and farmers receive the rainfall they need, they will be rewarded for the risks they are going to take on production this season, whether those risks are moderate or large. Attenuated by the production approach the farmer has taken and the product prices they receive (with fewer locking into contracts following last year), average rainfall and yields could lead to marginal or well above average profits. What this means for individual farming families, then, depends on their financial and family situation and subsequent seasons. A good season this year could spell the beginning of a recovery period. It is critical to realise, though, that for most farming families this period will need to extend for a number of years or more if they are to return to their pre-drought position.

Neglected or depleted areas such as debt repayments, vehicle maintenance and superannuation will ensure there is a steady stream of demands on their revitalised income for many years to come. Some may find the short term measures they took during drought have trapped them in an untenable position regardless of subsequent improvements in conditions. Such farming families may sell up as the continuing nature of their struggles despite the alleviation of drought saps the last of their motivation. Others are likely to find their problems gradually reduced but, as suggested by interviewees in Report Three, may celebrate this fact by also deciding to sell up. Communities will benefit from the general surge in spirit and influx of money that a good year would bring, but will suffer from the loss of farming families that may also result and are likely to continue to face issues of decline in the longer term.

If a good season this year is simply a short-lived reprieve from drought, most farming families are likely to persevere initially while monitoring more intently than ever whether they want, and are able to, stay. The sense of caution, questioning and in some cases anxiety that has spread throughout many farming families is likely to continue regardless of how the seasons unfold and particularly if they begin poorly. For the minority who are already feeling relatively financially stable thanks to last season or being minimally affected by the drought throughout, a good season this year could be enough to allow them to recover fully.

If drought continues this season, the farming community is likely to be seriously demoralised. There will be a number of forced and voluntary exits, while some of those left will be increasingly keen to do so and yet increasingly unable to do so on their terms.

Whether happily, reluctantly or ambivalently, however, most farming families will persevere as the hope of better future conditions, powerful connections with farming and/or droughtinduced inertia hold them to their farms. Communities in this situation would be hit with the double whammy of the loss of some farming families and heightened pressure on those who remain.

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5.5

The interview experience At the end of the February 2008 interviews, interviewees were asked to reflect on the experience of being part of the research over the previous twelve months. Their responses – detailed in Appendix 3 - underline some of the observations made in the reports and shed light on the value of reflection and talking to others.

Among the 95% of interviewees who were strongly positive about the experience, the main reasons for their enthusiasm were that the research allowed them to: Learn about others (through reading the reports, which they were sent); Learn about themselves (through reflection at an individual or family level); Be heard (have their experience and opinions heard); and Contribute to action on the issues (by participating in a process that they hope will subsequently improve the situation for farming families).

The value placed on learning about others reiterates the desire interviewees expressed more generally to understand what is happening around them. As discussed in Report One in particular, many farming families feel ignorant about how others in their community are coping with the drought and its attendant pressures and this ignorance is a barrier to them making sense of what is happening to themselves. They therefore found reading about others’ experiences in the reports improved their understanding of the context they are in.

Besides finding access to the reports a route to better self-understanding, some interviewees also indicated that they found the process of talking and listening in the interviews helped them to make sense of their own situations. While the reports only represent a fraction of the detail discussed in each family’s interviews, for the family members involved, their own interviews provided a valued opportunity to reflect at length on their own situation. For some, this was prompted by being asked to think about things they otherwise had not reflected on, such as how things had changed over the last six months and even how they were feeling. For others, the main value was in hearing what other family members said and stimulating conversation among themselves.

The other two main things interviewees’ reported they got out of the interview experience – being heard and contributing to action - highlight the feeling, expressed in Report One, that farming families are largely unknown and ignored by the urban population and that what representations the latter do receive of farming families are unhelpfully distorted. To be able to represent the complexity of their lives and challenges to others was thus of value to some interviewees, particularly given the need many feel for serious action on some of the underlying issues they are facing.

Interviewers were also asked to reflect on how they found the interview experience. As detailed in Appendix 3, these responses highlight the challenges but also the benefits local interviewers experienced in conducting the interviews. Combined with the high quality of the interview data produced, these responses suggest that this project’s unique approach of using trained local interviewers achieved its goal of not only enabling valuable research to BCG

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be conducted but of building capacity in the local community. As such, this project paves the way for the approach to be used elsewhere.

5.6

Conclusions Overall, this research highlights how drought is exacerbating the already complex issues facing farming families today. By adding another layer of unpredictability and eroding their physical, financial and social/personal reserves, drought is heightening the uncertainty and risk many farming families are dealing with. This research highlights the commonalities and the diversity between farming families as they cope with this situation and different life stages, and documents both the anxiety and resilience different individuals, families and communities are exhibiting. It brings to the fore the importance of the wider rural community for farming families and the impact of challenges in this arena on farming familiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; decisionmaking. It details the dangerous positive feedback cycles that can emerge between issues as well as the rapid rises in optimism that can result from small improvements in conditions.

In sum, this unique, extended snapshot of a community under stress provides insights for and about others experiencing drought and attendant pressures; insights that it is hoped will lead to an improvement in their situations.

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6

Recommendations While the primary role of this report is to stimulate reflection and discussion among the wide range of audiences it is applicable to, it is also pertinent for it to consider how farming families may best be assisted. To this end, four recommendations were made at the end of Part One of the research. Given the continuation of the drought, these recommendations still stand at the completion of Part Two of the research. To complement these points, some further recommendations are also provided.

6.1

Recommendations from Part One of the research That more support is provided immediately to abate the accumulating effects of drought. Overall, there is an urgent need for a broad suite of efforts that addresses the immediate, long term, social and financial effects of drought and which takes into account differences between people (including stage of life and gender), appropriateness for rural culture, and people’s desire for leadership and political certainty. As part of this, and as recommended by interviewees, work is needed to eliminate or reduce the divisive character of the eligibility criteria used in the current financial assistance system and to extend such assistance to those whose vulnerability to future pressures is growing daily. As similarly suggested, the rural financial counselling system should be expanded and training in business management skills should be made more available.

That information and skills training to aid farming families’ decision making is extended effectively to them. Farming families are hungry for information and skills to help them break out of ‘pause mode’ and make the serious and difficult decisions that confront them. Information about the state of the sectors, regions and communities that people live and work in should be provided in recognition of the fact that the social identity and context of such families means that their decision making is influenced by how they are positioned relative to others and the decisions that others are making. Inter-disciplinary information to help farming families anticipate and plan for the environmental, economic, political, social and cultural conditions they are likely to face in the future is also needed. How to use such information is an important area for extension, and training in business management should be made more widely available. In conjunction with this, discussion groups, one-on-one support, and dialogue about positive case studies and non-financial benchmarks of value should be developed and promoted. This could be combined with a mentoring scheme and with the provision of assessments of farmers’ skill sets, career advice, and an employment service.

That effort is redoubled to address the process of rural decline in small towns. Rural communities could be helped to conduct a risk assessment of the threats they face and how these could be controlled. Based on the Birchip model, the existing or potential “keystone” organization(s) or service(s) of each town, such as a medical, educational, agri-business or sporting facility, could also be identified and supported in order to provide a core for community employment and interaction. Coordination and collaboration between neighbouring small towns and the development of regional rather than town-based identities and loyalties could be encouraged. Work is also needed in many centres to address the cultural clash between the traditional and new populations and make the most of the inmigration at the community level.

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That further research is conducted into: the ongoing effects of drought, people’s coping strategies, and the timescales of their decision making; the aftermath of drought, the recovery process, and the vulnerabilities and improvements that emerge from the drought experience; the differences in resilience that seem to exist between some rural communities and a prioritisation of threats they face; the critical success factors of rural businesses and communities that are thriving despite the difficult environment they are in and clues into how to reverse the negative feedback spiral of agricultural and rural decline; the experiences and needs of women and the younger generation on farms, including those who do and do not actively farm; the perceptions of those who have left farming for various alternatives and what skills they have called on most; ‘new car syndrome’ and the existence and effects of social surveillance in rural communities; and the experiences and perceptions of new entrants to small towns, including ex-farm retirees and those on government support.

6.2

Additional recommendations from Part Two of the research That this report is made available to farming families in general and used to stimulate reflection about their own situations Interviewees’ positive responses about the opportunity to read about other farming families’ experiences point to the value other farming families may also gain from such an opportunity. While specific to the Wimmera Mallee region and to a particular period in time, this report touches on issues and perspectives that are likely to resound with those in other drought affected areas, while any differences would also be informative. Given the dearth of in-depth social research on farming families’ experiences with drought and other challenges, this report could and should be used to stimulate reflection among other relevant populations, as well as further research into the issues it reveals. Farming families around Australia are facing the same sort of complex decisions as those documented in this report, as a growing number of complicated components demand to be reconciled with multiple sources of uncertainty and intangible social factors. Other research into complex decisionmaking (McGuckian and Rickards, in press) suggests that the process can be greatly assisted be providing opportunities for those involved to “tell their story” and work out, as they do, what is most important to them. While initiating such a process of reflection can feel awkward, conversation can be kick started by using a “trigger” such as this report.

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That farming families are assisted in managing risk and multiple priorities Risk is a serious concern for many farming families as they are required to manage it in a growing number of areas. Yet, understanding the risks involved in different decisions is highly complex and difficult. Such a process could be greatly assisted by information about the options. Technical information about the performance of different enterprise mixes, crop types, input levels, and labour saving devices, for example, could help to inform the complicated production decisions farmers face, as could seasonal forecasting and other climate related information. Marketing is another area for research, development and extension as farmers are increasingly called upon to make sophisticated and strategic decisions about their sales and purchases. So too is financial management for farming families seeking to balance the need to “insure” themselves against poor farm performance and yet also needing to invest in the farm to ensure its viability. How to balance these and other competing demands such as farm and off-farm work are important areas for research, development and extension. Many of these issues also require one on one work with farming families and the Rural Financial Counsellor service should be strongly supported to this end.

That government and others commit to halting rural decline in small communities One of the most serious underlying issues still facing farming families is the ongoing decline on many of their local communities. Thus, although covered by the fourth recommendation above, it is worth reiterating the need for serious attention to be given to this issue. While the voluntary contributions of community members is and will remain central to the success of rural communities, larger scale contributions are needed to sheer up the essential social and economic infrastructure in such places. A state and federal government commitment to maintain small rural communities would economically and psychologically underpin such communities’ own efforts. Without such a long-term commitment, uncertainty and exhaustion threaten to weaken the community members’ own efforts. Radical regional development programs are needed to bolster the economies of small communities with additional industries and high quality education and medical services. Special initiatives that tackle some of the widespread social and health issues affecting many farming families, such as local health checks, holiday programs and support of local sporting organisations, also need support.

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Alston, M. and Kent, J. (2005) Impacts of Drought on Educational Access for Rural and Remote Young People. A report for DEST. Centre for Rural Social Research, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.

Alston, M. (2006) ‘’I’d like to just walk out of here’: Australian women’s experience of drought’, Sociologia Ruralis, 46: 154-70.

Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K. (2000) Reflexive Methodology: new vistas for qualitative research. Sage, London.

Anderson, D. (2005) ‘Drought, risk and rural endurance: ways of thinking the Australian climate’. History and the meaning of things seminar series, Museum of Victoria, May 11, 2005, Melbourne.

Arkle, P. (2006) ‘Taking national drought policy forward’, Farm Policy Journal 3: 1-11.

Barr, N., Karunaratne, K. and Wilkinson, R. (2005) Australia’s farmers: past, present and future. Land and Water Australia, Canberra.

Botterill, L. and Fisher, M. (eds) (2003) Beyond Drought: people, policy and perspectives.

CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.

Botterill, L. and Wilhite, D. (eds) (2005) From Disaster Response to Risk Management: Australia’s drought policy. Springer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Bryant, L. (2007) ‘The Social Impacts to the Riverland’, In: The Economic and Social Impacts of Key Industries on the Riverland, Riverland Socio-Economic Impact Report Steering Committee in conjunction with the University of South Australia, April 2007 Budge, T. (2006) ‘Sponge cities and small towns: a new economic partnership’, In: M. Rogers and D. Jones (eds) The Changing Nature of Australia’s Country Towns, Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities, La Trobe University, Bendigo. Victorian Universities Regional Research Network Press, Ballarat.

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Appendix 1: Interview Questions February 2007 Basic interviewee information 1. Relationship between the interviewees 2. Age, gender and occupation of each interviewee 3. Family structure and location 4. No. years in agriculture; No. years on the current property 5. No. employees on the farm; Size of farm (ha); Enterprise type The questions 1.

So tell me about how things are going in this area.

2. When did the drought start? When you talk about the drought, what period of time do you think of?

3. How do you think people in this area are being affected by the drought?

4. What changes have you seen?

5. What worries you most about the changes?

6.

What does the drought mean for your lives here?

7. What is it like to be living and working here in a drought?

8.

How has the drought affected you each individually? As a group? How would you say each of you is coping?

9. Has your health been affected?

10. What do you do differently as a result of the drought? How have your activities changed, on the farm and more generally?

11. Has the drought changed how you think about what you do? In what way?

12. What about how you feel about what you do?

13. What are the biggest challenges you face at the moment? As farmers? As a family?

14. How are these challenges similar to and different from what others are facing?

15. Have you experienced other droughts? If so, in what ways was your experience of these drought(s) similar to and different from the current situation? Is there anything about the current drought that makes it more or less difficult for you?

16. In what way are the challenges that you’re currently facing similar to and different from the challenges you were facing before the drought?

17. What decisions do you feel you are facing at the moment? What decisions has the drought raised for you?

18. How are you working through those decisions? What factors are you taking into account?

19. What options do you see for yourselves for the future?

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20. What control do you feel you have over your future?

21. What is the main thing you want to improve about your situation right now and in the longer term?

22. What are the biggest obstacles in your way?

23. How could you be helped to improve your situation?

24. How well equipped do you feel to make the decisions you need to make? How well equipped do you feel to act on those decisions? Do you feel you have enough energy?

Resources? Knowledge?

25. What kind of help do you feel is available to you and from whom?

26. Have you taken this help? If so, what difference has it made and how? If you have not taken this help, why is that?

27. Is the right help available? Is there something that needs to change about the help that is available?

28. Are there some problems that you feel no-one can help you with? If so, what are these problems?

29. How connected do you feel to other people in the rural community?

30. How connected do you feel to people in your local community? In what ways are you involved in the community here? Is there much of a community present?

31. To what degree does your connection with your local community provide you with a sense of support?

32. What would you say are your main strengths as individuals? As a family? As a business?

33. What do you like most about farming? Why do you do it?

34. How did you come to be here? – In farming? In this region? On this farm?

35. What are your hopes or goals for the future – both professionally and personally? What are you aiming for?

36. Why do you think that is? What has shaped your hopes and goals?

37. Have your hopes and goals changed over time? If so, how?

38. How confident are you feeling in your ability to achieve your goals?

39. How do you feel about being farmers/ part of a farming family in Australia today?

40. How have things changed since you or your family have been in farming? How do you feel about those changes?

41. What role do you think groups like BCG play in this region? What role do you think they could or should play?

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September 2007 Introduction 1. Thank interviewees for participating. Explain the purpose of the follow up interviews Basic interviewee information 2. Relationship between the family members present?

3. Age of interviewees?

Questions 4. Have you had a chance to read the report on the first interviews? What are your thoughts about it?

5. Thinking back to when the first interviews were conducted, how would you describe your situation at the time?

6. What do you remember as the most difficult aspect?

7. How would you describe the mindset you were in 6 months ago?

8. What has happened since then - what has changed around you?

9. How do you think your local community is faring at the moment? What changes have you seen over the last 6 months?

10. How has this meant for your own situation? What new issues or challenges have emerged for you?

11. What about your situation has remained constant over this time period?

12. Has your mental outlook changed over the last 6 months? In what way? What affects it most?

13. Does it feel like you are still in drought? If yes, in what way? If no, why not?

14. Would you say you are recovering or have recovered from drought? If not, are things remaining the same or getting worse?

15. What will it take for you and your farm to recover from the drought?

16. What do you think makes the difference between whether a farming family is able to cope with and recover from drought or not?

17. What stage of your career and family life would you say you are at?

18. How do you think this influences the type and intensity of the pressures you are under?

19. How closely do you identify with others at a similar stage of life or career?

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20. How are you feeling now about being in agriculture?

21. How are each of you feeling about staying on this farm?

22. Have you made a firm decision about whether to stay or go? If so, what decision have you made?

23. What has influenced your decision?

24. What is the most difficult thing about making this decision?

25. What sort of information have you found you needed? Financial, technical, personal?

26. Have you been able to find this information? If so, where from? Who or what has helped?

27. What other types of support or assistance have each of you received over the last 6 months?

28. How has this helped each of you? What aspects have worked well and not so well? Who has delivered this assistance?

29. What special drought support or assistance do each of you need now or think you may need in the future? Is this available?

30. What services and infrastructure do you really value having access to in your local community?

31. How secure do you feel these are in this local area?

32. How does this affect how you feel about living here? Does it influence your decision to stay or go?

33. How connected do you feel to your local community?

34. Has this changed over the last 6 months?

35. We keep hearing about “drought proofing” farms. How possible do you think it is to drought proof a farm?

36. What have you done or are you planning on doing in terms of drought proofing?

37. What are the main challenges you face in putting these plans in place?

38. “Risk management” is also a term we keep hearing directed at farming families. What does this term mean to you?

39. What are the main risks you perceive to your farm?

40. How are you tackling these risks?

41. One of the approaches to risk management we hear about is diversifying into different enterprises. How appealing is this approach to you?

42. What production decisions have you made this season? What approach have you taken with your crops, for example?

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43. What financial decisions have you made? Have you taken on more debt, for example?

44. How have you made these decisions?

45. Is this different to how you have previously made decisions? How has this last drought influenced your thinking?

46. What information have you found you needed with these decisions? Have you needed information about any particular topics?

47. Have you been able to find this information? If so, where from? Who or what has helped and in what way?

Looking to future 48. What are your hopes and plans for the next 6 months?

49. What are your concerns?

50. What would be the best case scenario for each of you?

51. What is needed for this to occur?

Thank you very much for your time and honesty.

These interviews will be transcribed in a confidential manner. The results will be analysed and used to inform BCG decisions. We look forwards to talking to you again next February. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you again.

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February 2008 Introduction 1.

Thank interviewees for participating. Explain the purpose of the follow up interviews.

2.

Confirm name and age of interviewees and relationship between those present

Decisions over the last 6 months 3.

Since I saw you last youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve obviously been through harvest and had to make a lot of decisions. To start with, how did your harvest go?

4.

(If applicable) And how are your stock? How have you managed them over the last 6 months?

5.

Have you had to make any changes to your business as a result of the drought?

6.

How are you feeling about these decisions now?

Changes since then 7.

What about your situation now is the same as it was 6 months ago? 12 months ago?

8.

How has your situation changed over that time? What new issues or challenges have emerged?

9.

What are the main things you are focused on at the moment? Are these different to your focus in a normal February?

10. How would you describe your current financial situation? Is it stronger or weaker than 6 months ago?

12 months ago?

Mental outlook 11. How would you describe your current mental outlook? How has the stress of last seasonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collapse affected you?

12. Have you taken a holiday over this last summer?

13. How are you feeling now about being in agriculture?

Approach to farming 14. How would you describe your approach to farming? What do you think is needed for success in farming?

15. Has the drought affected this? What have you learnt from the drought? Will you and your family do anything differently this year?

Plans for the future 16. What are your plans for the farm for the next 6-12 months? Will you have to sell any assets to gear up for production this year?

17. More generally, what options are you considering for the future? What are your hopes and plans?

18. How have these changed over the last 6-12 months?

19. Is succession an issue your family is facing? If so, have these plans been altered by the drought?

20. Have you been thinking about whether to stay on the farm? If so, what have you decided and why?

21. How have you made your decision? Has it taken a lot of time?

22. What is the most difficult thing about making the decision to stay or go?

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Assistance 23. Since September, the government has altered its drought support package. Have any of the changes affected you? Do you now receive financial assistance as a result of the changes?

24. How do you feel now about financial assistance in general?

25. Have you received any other forms of help or support over the last 6 months?

26. What would help you most at the moment? Is this available?

27. What do you think about the Exit Grants the government is providing? Has this influenced your decision about whether to stay or go?

Local community 28. How do you think your local community is faring at the moment?

29. What changes have you seen over the last 6 months?

30. What has this meant for your own situation?

31. In the last report it was suggested that while the drought is bringing people together in some ways, it is also creating differences in people’s circumstances and forcing people to focus on their own situations. To what extent does this ring true to you?

32. Has anyone you know decided in the last 6 months to leave?

33. How does it affect you when people decide to leave? How does it affect the community?

34. To what extent do you feel a sense of loyalty or commitment to your local community?

35. Has this changed over the last 6-12 months?

36. Why do you think people decide to stay in a community? What makes the difference?

37. What do you like best about living here?

Participation in the research 38. To finish, what has it been like to participate in this research?

39. Do you feel you have gained something from the process of being involved? From the findings?

40. Is there anything we should have done differently in the research?

Publicity about the research 41. How do you think we should promote and use the findings from this research?

42. Would you be interested in being available for media interviews? With newspapers, radio or TV? 43. ABC 4Corners is currently producing a program called ‘Can Agriculture Survive Climate Change?', using the Mallee region as case study, and it is going to mention this research. They are interested in talking to farming families like yourselves that have participated in the research. We have said we won’t give them the names of any participants, but would let you know that the opportunity is there to talk to them if you would like to. Would you like us to pass your name on?

Thank you very much for your time and openness over the last 12 months. We really appreciate it. These interviews will be transcribed confidentially. The results will be analysed and used to inform BCG decisions. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you again.

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Appendix 2: Summary table of drought financial assistance Source

Type

Eligibility

Further information

Victorian DPI

EC Interest Rate Subsidy

This subsidy applies to interest and costs on borrowings supplied by commercial institution, vendor or private arrangements. It is designed to provide carry-on finance, improvements in productivity for recovery purposes, or debt restructuring.

www.dpi.vic.gov.au/dpi/nrenf a.nsf/LinkView/50557DB7E3 5150F6CA25720A0022D06 96163175BD669CCD84A25 6DEA00120A0E

In assessing the eligibility of a farm enterprise for Exceptional Circumstances Interest Subsidy Support the following factors need to be satisfied: 1.

The producer must be located within an Exceptional Circumstances area.

2.

The enterprise is in financial difficulty due to exceptional circumstances. In considering this, Rural Finance shall take into account the total amount of interest payable per annum, the estimated farm surplus over the medium term, and the applicant's equity in the farm business in relation to the amount of current and future indebtedness, together with both farm and off-farm assets and income.

3.

Without support under these guidelines the farm would not have the capacity to achieve or maintain sustainable long-term profitability.

4.

The farming operation has been profitable in the past and has the potential to return to profitability in the future. In assessing the likelihood of long-term profitability of the enterprise the following factors shall be taken into account: i.

the expected future capacity of the farm to operate profitably (without Government support) as measured by its ability to meet its future financial commitments relating to:

farm operating costs

living cost of the farm family

servicing of the farm debts

future capital requirements for plant and improvements

investment requirements to return the farm to profitability;

ii.

the long-term economic trends which impact on the farm enterprise;

iii.

the demonstrated technical, financial and business management performance of the applicant;

iv. the provision of financial support for the farm enterprise by commercial lenders through the exceptional circumstance period and beyond.

Centrelink on behalf of DAFF

EC Relief Payments

5.

The farm is of commercial scale.

6.

The primary producer is primarily reliant on this activity for his/her livelihood. In this regard it is expected that the applicant has been a primary producer for at least two years and under normal circumstances contributes at least 75% of his/her labour to the farm enterprise and at least 50% of income is derived from farming.

7.

The applicant is able to demonstrate a need for financial assistance after allowing for family resources.

8.

The applicant has disposed of: all non-essential farm assets, and offfarm assets, such that the net value of off-farm assets is not in excess of $458,000 (excluding bona fide Superannuation and Life Assurance).

9.

Capital from livestock sales which is to be used for subsequent restocking will be ignored for assessment purposes however actual or budget amounts should be included in any application.

Those eligible are farmers in an EC area: over 18 years of age not receiving any other income support payments, and subject to the same income and assets tests applying to Newstart Allowance except that: −

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for the period 1 July 2005 until 30 June 2008 an amount of up to $10 000 may be disregarded from off-farm salary and wages and

www.centrelink.gov.au/intern et/internet.nsf/filestores/se09 0_0703/$file/se090_0703en. pdf You need to request an EC certificate from Centrelink by calling the Drought

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farming assets, including the farmer's superannuation and life insurance in the assets test; −

Assistance Hotline 13 2316.

proceeds from the forced disposal of livestock due to drought are excluded from the income test. Farmers will be required to deposit the proceeds from the forced sale in either a Farm Management Deposit or a deposit with a term of at least three months with a bank, building society, credit union or other institution that receives money on deposit.

Exceptional Circumstances Relief Payment is paid fortnightly at a rate equivalent to Newstart Allowance and, where applicable, Partner Allowance.

If a family receives the Assistance for Isolated Children Boarding Allowance, receiving EC Relief Payments may make them eligible for an Additional Boarding Allowance.

Leads to following assistance marked with* Centrelink on behalf of DAFF

Health Care Card*

Anyone over 16 years can get a Health Care Card if you are a low income earner or if you get one of a number of payments, including Exceptional Circumstances Relief Payment and Youth Allowance. If a dependent child receives a HCC, they are exempt from the Parental Income, Family Assets and Family Actual Means Test for Youth Allowance.

www.centrelink.gov.au/intern et/internet.nsf/payments/con c_cards_hcc.htm

If you were previously getting one of the payments continuously for more than 12 months, you can continue to receive a Health Care Card for six months after your payment is cancelled.

A Health Care Card entitles you to reduced cost medicines as well as a limited number of other concessions from state and local government authorities may include reductions in: health care costs including ambulance, dental care and eye care public transport costs water rates energy/electricity bills.

Victorian DPI

Municipal Rates & Charges Subsidy*

50% concession on the municipal rates and charges payable by farmers: currently assessed to be in Exceptional Circumstances (EC), and who are receiving Centrelink EC Relief Payments.

www.dpi.vic.gov.au/dpi/nrenf a.nsf/LinkView/05B0FF236F AD78B3CA25705000144E6 26163175BD669CCD84A25 6DEA00120A0E

The concession is 50% of the instalment amount or total amount due on municipal rate notices with no cap. The Department of Primary Industries oversees the delivery of the assistance by Councils and make payments to Councils to fund the concessions.

Victorian DPI

Water Rebate

Rural water users receiving less than 50% of their normal water allocation will be eligible for a rebate to meet the fixed water supply charges on farmers’ 2006/07 bills, up to the value of $5,000.

Eligible rural water users include: irrigators supplied by regulated systems who are receiving less than 50% of their normal entitlement as at 23 October 2006; regulated surface water diverters receiving less than 50% of their normal entitlement as at 23 October 2006; stock and domestic customers supplied by regulated systems that are operating at less than 50% of their normal allocation as at 23 October 2006; groundwater diverters within Water Supply Protection Areas who are receiving less than an amount equivalent to 50% of their normal entitlement as at 23 October 2006 and; unregulated surface water diverters likely to have access to less than 50% of their water (as assessed by water authorities on 1 December 2006).

Centrelink on behalf of DAFF

Professional Advice & Planning Grant

Farming enterprises: Located in an area that has been drought declared for more than 3 years** There can be only one grant per farm enterprise The person who is applying on behalf of the farming enterprise must:

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−

have been a farmer for 2 years prior to lodging this claim

−

contribute at least 75% of their labour to the farming enterprise,

www.centrelink.gov.au/intern et/internet.nsf/filestores/su61 3_0612/$file/su613_0612en _p.pdf. www.daff.gov.au/__data/ass ets/pdf_file/0003/149223/pro f-advice-planning-grants-

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and; −

180107.pdf

earn at least 50% of their income from the farming enterprise.

Off-farm net assets of all the members of the farm enterprise must not exceed $458,000. This figure is indexed annually (each July). There is no income test.

For maps of EC areas, see: www.ruralfinance.com.au/pa ges/Default.aspx?PageID=6 1&id=1

**In Victoria, as of 06/03/07, the EC areas that were declared for 3 years are: Central and East Gippsland; Central Victoria; Goulburn-LoddonCampaspe; Eastern Mallee; North-East Victoria; and Northern Victoria.

Note, this does not include the Mallee Northern Wimmera, South East Mallee or South Western Victoria areas of interest in this report.

Local providers on behalf of DAFF

Financial counselling

Regionally-based Rural Financial Counsellors can provide free, independent financial assessment for farming families. This can include help filling in forms to claim the above forms of assistance.

Dedicated website unable to be found

GWM Water

Tank Rebate

Customers of Grampians Wimmera Mallee Water (GWMWater) unable to receive their winter dam fill are eligible for rebates on the purchase of Domestic and Stock Water Tanks. Tanks must be installed by 31 December 2007 and rebate applications lodged with GWMWater by 31 January 2008.

Contact DPI on 136 186 or GWMWater on 1300 659 961.

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Appendix 3: Evaluation of the research process – feedback from interviewers and interviewees Feedback from interviewees Introduction At the end of the February 2008 interviews, interviewees were asked for feedback on how they have found the process of participating in the research over the previous twelve months.

All but one of the families interviewed (95% of the interviewees) were positive about the experience. One especially stressed couple instead demonstrated ambivalence and disinterest.

What interviewees gained from the experience Overview Among those who reported that they found the experience to be positive, the main reasons for their enthusiasm were that the research allowed them to: Learn about others (through accessing the report); Learn about themselves (through reflection at an individual or family level); Be heard (have their experience and opinions heard); and Contribute to action on the issues (by participating in a process that they hope will subsequently improve the situation for farming families).

The relative strength of these responses is shown in the table below. It is notable that learning about others emerged most frequently as the main outcome participants valued about their participation, underlining their interest in what other people are going through, especially in relation to issues they have ‘benchmarked’ themselves on by being part of the research.

Outcome of participation

% of respondents*

Learning about others

58

Learning about selves

43

Being heard

31

Contributing to action on the issues

21

* Note the sum is more than 100% because people often gave more than one answer

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Comments from interviewees on each of these outcomes is provided below.

Learning about others ‘Reading [the report] was very interesting as far as the comments people made. It gives you an indication of what’s happening out there… Sometimes it makes you feel more positive about where you are’.

‘To see in writing that people have actually said these things has probably made us feel lucky. We’re doing it tough, but probably not as tough as a lot of them’.

‘The beauty of it is that I think we are all pretty similar and I think that’s the reassuring part of it. We’re all sort of going through it together’.

‘Knowing that we’re surviving and there are other people in the same situation’.

‘You don’t know how hard people are swimming to stay afloat. It is very interesting to hear that people are doing it just as hard as the rest of us. That gives us some comfort’.

‘It’s a bit of a learning experience if you see something [in the report] that others are doing differently, because I might be able to use that or it might be something I can do’.

Learning about selves ‘The questions have made us think about things that you normally don’t sit down and think about…. You’ve been a free counsellor!’

‘You sort of become aware of things that you haven’t put into the think tank before’.

‘It has been good to think back because often the year goes by and you don’t think back on things’.

‘I know I’ve been in situations [in the interviews] where I’ve heard X answer questions and I haven’t realised that she felt that way about things because I haven’t asked her.

Sometimes there needs to be an opportunity for that to come out’.

‘It has been good listening to X’s answers because sometimes you don’t hear those questions answered by your husband… A couple of my friends actually wanted to be part of it as well and wish they had been rung up!’.

‘It has been good to hear some of X’s [her husbands] answers and they probably are what I thought he’d say but it’s nice to hear him say it. There are some things that you don’t really talk about.’

‘To hear X’s [her husband’s] point of view as well has been good’.

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X: It has helped us talk more about things I think.

Y: After you left we had things to talk about that we probably hadn’t thought of’.

Being heard ‘It’s always good to talk to other people about these things because we do talk a lot to each other about it’.

‘It’s been good… I think it should be presented to government as a package. This is what is happens to a community in a drought and this is what pressure they’re under.

People just don’t understand that’.

‘It’s probably good that people get to see what it’s really like. If you live in Melbourne you’ve got no idea, and if you get the right people it can be good because you can see the true story. You can get your farmers with plenty of money and they make it look easy… But it’s better if they pick people like us that don’t have that bit of extra money behind them’.

Contribution to action on the issues ‘I think the solutions are the thing. It’s maybe asking the impossible but what’s the answer to this? Is it just rain? Is it having structures in the community based on knowledge and social groups? To be able to come up with what the key factors are that will make this community grow agriculturally and socially and make people want to live here and be content – that’s the thing’.

‘I think [the research] should continue…[so] people can look back on this [period] and if there is a bit of this sort of stuff around then they can see what happened and how bad it was’.

‘It’s very good for the BCG and the information feeds back to the government, which is good for the EC because that is very important to us at this time’.

‘It’s important so people can be prepared for this long term drought phenomenon. We will certainly prepare better for it next time’.

‘The fact that it might lead to some changes is the thing’.

‘I think the bottom line is that people want to improve our communities and our situations, so if this helps…’.

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Feedback from interviewers Introduction Given the novel nature of using local interviewers for social research – for BCG and more generally – it was considered important to evaluate its relative success.

At the completion of all of the interviews, the four interviewers were telephoned by a third party to collect their feedback on the process. The results are presented below.

What interviewers gained from the experience All of the interviewers stated that meeting new people from similar backgrounds to themselves was a valuable part of participating in the project.

‘I’m a bit isolated where I am so it’s good to go out and meet people’.

‘It was good to speak to the farmers and meet new people’.

Some interviewers indicated that they gained valuable insights into farmers’ situations and decision making processes, which some have applied to either their own job situation.

‘It was insightful to see how farmers work and how they make their decisions… I have applied this knowledge to my actual career’.

‘It was a good experience because I am a farmer too, so I learnt a lot about the complexities of different farming families and how they farm’.

Two interviewers also stated that they had learnt skills in dealing with stressed people that they had applied outside of the research.

‘I learnt a lot…especially in terms of helping people who are going through a hard time’.

Active listening was another skill acquired by interviewers during the process.

‘Active listening skills were good…learning how to go into someone’s home and ask them personal questions [whilst showing empathy] was good’.

Interviewers’ reported strengths The majority of interviewers reported their strengths as their understanding of the rural and farming issues that interviewees were facing and a consequent ability to be able to develop rapport with and draw information out of them.

‘I let them feel comfortable’.

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‘I was able to make people feel at home and comfortable. People were open and honest with me’.

Interviewers’ reported challenges Interviewers’ challenges with the interviewing process were varied.

One stated that they felt dealing with emotional people was their major challenge: ‘When people seemed upset, it was hard to know how to get them to open up’.

Conversely, another stated that they found getting interviewees to focus on the topic to be difficult: ‘Cutting them short was very difficult’.

Another interviewer indicated that following the interview guide and capturing all the information was challenging: ‘You had to be on the ball! I was worried that I wasn’t getting them to answer all the questions’.

Finally, another interviewer reported a major challenge to be asking the interview questions without leading the interviewee: ‘Allowing the person to answer fully without influencing them was hard’.

Feedback on Training All interviewers indicated that they found the training and information prior to the interviews to be helpful and valuable.

‘The training day was common sense sort of stuff but it was a great reminder before we went into the interviews’.

‘The lead up information and the training day were really useful, it gave me a lot of good tips’. ‘[The trainer] was good. She gave us heaps of information on how to actively listen and how to approach the interview’.

Interest in further social research All interviewers indicated that as a result of their interviewing experience they would like to participate in future social research. Although most also stated that their opportunities for

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this are limited due to other commitments, one interviewer reported that they are now contemplating incorporating social research into their university studies if possible.

‘If I could work it in with my work I would’.

‘I’ve thought about doing a social research project for my university industry project this year’.

Summary of advantages and disadvantages Overall, the local interviewer approach has the following advantages, disadvantages and implications for the project.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Advantage

Implication

Disadvantage

Implication

Capacity building in social research among local interviewers

Social outcome for region

Multiple interviewers

Introduces potentially unrecognised variation into the data

Increased understanding of research issues among interviewers and BCG

Greater capacity to use social research to explore regional issues in the future

Interviewers’ lack of experience in interviewing

Potentially decreases quality of data

Increased connection between producers, BCG and local interviewers

Networks strengthened

Disconnection of interviewers from the rest of the research process (research design and analysis)

Potentially decreases quality of interviewing Reduces participatory benefits to interviewers and project

Employment that interviews represented for local interviewers

Social and economic outcome for local area

Credibility and rapport of interviewers with interviewees

Improved quality of data

Interviewers’ ability to ask and explain questions in terms of the local context

Improved quality of data

Interviewers’ feedback on the draft interview questions

Improved quality of data

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The first was Stehlik et al (2000) Representative of only a very few respondents, the following unusually positive farmer illustrates the diversity of responses: ‘‘We’re just a bit lucky with the way the rain falls... Well it’s a combination of technology and luck where the rain falls… It’s luck and good management that’s stood by us, I guess, in the last 10 years… I guess as the last decade’s progressed, we’ve got smarter and smarter how to utilise every millimetre of rain and turn it into money. How precious each millimetre of rain is and how we can, with conservation tillage - that’s been a real saviour. Our crop yields have been pretty good right through. Even last year we did pretty well and I guess our farming practices, we’ve put a lot of work not only into our stock, but ways of utilising each millimetre of rain and making plants get the most from it… We put a lot of time, effort, research and money into growing good pastures and good crops… I’m dollar-driven, for one thing, which I think you’ve got to be if you’re going to make it.

Learning - each day you learn something. Actually, you don’t try to make too many mistakes; you just can’t afford to make mistakes now. In the past we could learn from our mistakes, but now you’ve got to research things that well, and researching things and doing them well I guess interests all of us here… One of the most exciting things apart from stock is putting seed in moist soil and watching it grow to a crop and harvesting the rewards... It’s just producing, being primary producers, and putting the research and the inputs in… We love looking into things and really researching things to do it well, then putting it into practice. Then when it rains, it’s just exciting and if it doesn’t rain, it’s sad. But we don’t need to go to the casinos, do we? All the uncertainty I think is good… It doesn’t always work out the way you want it to, but that’s half the fun of it anyway… I guess we’ve always treated these challenging years as, should I say, exciting, in inverted commas. I’ll always learn from it and I’ll always come out of it wiser, and better farmers and better people for it… Certainly the main negative is loss of income…

But we’ve moved forward, we bought more land, bit more land, and certainly progressed, certainly haven’t gone backwards… Farming excites me… you just have to really love it’.

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