THE SOUTHERN
Part of the Farmer Group Rural Newspapers Covering Victoria Published since 1986
DECEMBER, 2014
8-9
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SUMMER FODDER
26
BUILT TO LAST: Ballarat’s Stephen Scobie and daughter Jaci exhibited their centuryold thresher and slightly younger Cliff and Bunting baler at the Lake Goldsmith steam rally near Ballarat last month. Out of the picture driving the thresher is a 1910 Clayton and Shuttleworth Fowler steam traction engine. Stephen’s grandfather, then based at Dean, near Creswick, bought the engine and thresher nearly 100 years ago. Stephen operates Scobie’s Service Centre and services all New Holland tractors in the region. More pictures pages 4-5
New conservation plan AUSTRALIAN Farm Institute executive director Mick Keogh has asked for an environmental management rethink that would give farmers the freedom to determine the conservation of native vegetation and threatened species on their farms. S REDUCE SE OU GREENH SION IS GAS EM
Writing in the Australian Farm Institute’s November newsletter, Mr Keogh said that despite 100 million hectares – or 20 per cent of Australian agricultural land – converted from agricultural to conservation use in the past 30 years, environmental “experts and conservation groups still claim that species are becoming
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extinct and the environment is suffering”. “If this is correct then to argue for continuation of these existing regulations in the expectation of a different outcome surely meets the definition of insanity,” he said. Current legislation to protect and foster biodiversity was also “heavy handed” and regulatory
arrangements were “cumbersome”. Mr Keogh has advocated a pragmatic approach to develop “bio-regional targets” for land that needs to be reserved to maintain farm land sustainability. “This would…determine the minimum proportion of land that each farmer owns which he
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would be required to prudently retain in a largely natural state,” he said. Farmers’ responsibilities under state soil conservation and pest and weed control legislation would be maintained but such a change would free them of restrictions imposed by native vegetation and threatened species legislation.
If this could be achieved then farmers would be able to determine which areas of their land could be set aside for conservation. Mr Keogh said that such a fresh approach would also deliver the flexibility to change these areas to optimise land management over time. Continued page 11
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