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In this section you will find detailed information, including national overviews and state and regional level assessments, from the 2000-2002 National Land and Water Resources Audit theme assessments.
Land Use Change - Australia
Australia
Introduction to agricultural land use change in Australia
Land is a major resource used by agriculture to provide products that service human needs and wants including: nutritious food such as meats, milk, eggs, grains, vegetables and fruit; fibres for clothing and furnishings; and industrial products like oils, leather, starches and building materials. The estimated total area of business establishments used for agriculture is about 464 million hectares, which represents around 60 per cent of the total land area of Australia (ABS 1997). This use of land supported 240 000 farmers and 397 000 employees in 1996 and contributed more than $27 billion to the gross domestic product, including $20 billion from export income.
The actions and practices undertaken in using the resources to produce these goods have impacts on the condition of land, vegetation and water resources, which is the focus for the National Land and Water Resources Audit (the Audit). Consequently, where land use and its practices are contributing to declining land condition, then the most obvious solution is to change land uses and practices to more appropriate ones. To do this effectively we should first understand what and where land uses are now, and if and where trends and directions in land use are changing. Then it may be possible to describe of desired scenarios for the future. We should expect that changing of land uses is a complex phenomenon that will differ greatly from place to place.
Because of this importance of agricultural land use to the national economy and the condition of the natural resource base, the emphasis in this project is on changes in the areas of more intensive agriculture and systems of land use. The project seeks to identify spatially within rainfed and irrigated regions the magnitude, scale and intensity of shifts in land use, productivity and enterprise diversification that have occurred over the past 20 years, and also generates medium term projections for future change.
Changes to the distribution and type of agriculture are discussed in the following areas:
History to and the major drivers of land use changes in Australia
Trends (1983 to 1997) in land use change, productivity and enterprise diversification across Australia
An outlook for agriculture to 2010 and 2020
Victorian and Western Australia case studies to investigate the links between land degradation and land use.
A summary of lessons learnt from undertaken the analysis of land use change, intensification and diversification.
Historical
Agriculture, which has reached its present land use after much trial and error, experimentation and testing, needs to be considered in the context of historical changes. Over the last century or so Australia has gone through phases of exploitation and expansion (Figure 1). Agricultural industries have adopted new technologies and methods and dealt with some major challenges such as soil erosion and pests. As a consequence there has been steady growth in the area of some land uses, particularly cropping. Productivity in terms of animal numbers has also increased steadily.
Intensification of land use - the greater use of inputs or a speeding up of processes - is a major response in Australia to the challenges of international markets and profitability. The changes entailed in intensification have not only transformed the nature of farm-based production, but it also altered the whole agro-food chain and the social composition of rural areas. The intensification of agricultural land use comes partly from using new technologies to adapt to these challenges, and partly from modifying the constraints of natural resource eg by irrigation, frost avoidance and fertiliser application.
The successes of Australian agriculture have depended on the degree to which a large overseas market existed for a product that could be produced using little labour but required large areas of land and that could be transported cheaply. The historical phases of agricultural development in Australia began with wool, then beef cattle followed by grains as enabling technologies became available, and now possibly milk products. Thus in Figure 1, the outputs of the three major industries were converted to a standard dry sheep equivalent (DSE). In this representation wool was the major product until about 1900. From then until 1975, cattle steadily became the larger component of total DSE. After 1975 the largest growth has been from the grain crops.
During the 15 year time frame from 1982-83 to 1996-97, the areas of intensive land use experienced widespread droughts (1982, 1994) with some areas experiencing rainfall deficiencies at other times, and floods in various parts, while the price of wool boomed during the 1980s and then crashed in 1989. In the wider sphere, the banking sector in Australia was deregulated in 1984, followed by a boom and crash on the stock market in 1987, interest rates soared during 1988-89, the USSR dissolved in 1989, a war over petrol in the Gulf States during 1991, followed by widespread economic growth before Asia suffered a financial crisis in 1997. In technologies, computers developed from a novelty to common place use on farms, in businesses and in the home; phones became mobile, herbicides facilitated conservation farming practices, remote sensing of landscapes allowed some monitoring of land condition. The major policies of The Decade of Landcare was initiated in 1989, the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development launched in 1992, and Agriculture Advancing Australia in 1997.
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Agricultural land use
Land use, particularly by broadscale agriculture, is largely determined by climatic factors, particularly rainfall amounts, timing and reliability, while at the local scale soil and landscape features are important. The areas of intensive land use are generally in the wetter temperate parts of Australia. They occur in a belt that runs down the east coast of Australia, around the south coast and halfway up the west coast. The inland border is not precisely defined but in the south and west parts is approximated by the 250 mm isohyet.
The total area of farms has declined since 1960 in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania (Table 1). However, with extensive releases of Crown land during the 1960s and 1970s, the area increased up to 1980 in Western Australia and Queensland, although it has declined since then in both States. Conversion of areas to conservation areas, infrastructure and urban development are likely to be major causes of this decline.
| State | 1960 | 1980 | 1997 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | 69.95 | 65.01 | 60.90 |
| Queensland | 150.58 | 157.72 | 151.07 |
| Victoria | 15.28 | 14.74 | 12.74 |
| South Australia | 62.95 | 62.79 | 56.22 |
| Western Australia | 99.07 | 114.92 | 112.48 |
| Tasmania | 2.64 | 2.23 | 1.92 |
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An introduction to land use and land use change in Australia
Trends for major industries over 140 years
A historical perspective on agricultural productivity
Drivers of land use change
The major driver for changes in agricultural land use appears to be market prices for potential products because of its large influence on profit. This shows up in responses at larger scales such as Statistical Division over a period of about 5 years.
Another important driver is productivity gains, underpinned by innovation. Some production factors, such as climate, constrain the responses in land use at regional scales and often show up Statistical Local Area (SLA) level over 10 years. New technologies open up opportunities to intensify or convert land uses, which highlights the need for continued investment through research and development. Threats to improved productivity, such as land and water degradation, often show up at smaller scales, and require more detailed information that was illustrated by case studies in Victoria and Western Australia.
Personal drivers, such as skills, lifestyle objectives, stewardship and orientation to change are factors that will modify responses to challenges but are not covered in this study. In effect, they might vary within a production unit and certainly vary considerably between units.
There are many external influences, which may show up at a range of scales and impact. Global policies such as greenhouse and World Trade Organisation (WTO) trading rules obviously work at a large scale, but peer pressure and the availability of specialist infrastructure are more local. These influences are often episodic and unpredictable.
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Major factors in land use change
Land use changes
While the condition of land and water resources is the cumulative consequence of many individual actions, these actions vary considerably in space and time and are both too numerous and too small to monitor and calculate at a State or continental scale. Therefore, it is more convenient and succinct to group them in larger categories such as industries and land uses with each encompassing many land use practices. Data from the annual Agricultural Census (AgStats) collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) provides information on many different agricultural products. To provide some meaningful indications of land use over the 20 years the data was aggregated to 5 larger categories that follow the Australian Land Use and Management Classification. They are: extensive grazing; sown pastures; broadacre crops; semi-intensive crops; and horticulture.
There is a high proportion of the total area of agricultural holdings that does not have a specific land use attributed to it in the Agricultural Census - the 'residual'. This means that many natural resource ecosystems have very sparse information about its land use. This residual area needs to be given more attention to determine actual land use and potential for diversification more accurately.
Changes in land use categories
Land use has changed during the 1982-83 to 1996-97 timeframe to different extents across the area of intensive agricultural land uses. As an example the changes in the broadacre crops category are demonstrated in Figure 2. This category includes all the annual crops such as wheat and other cereals, oilseeds, and pulses grown in both winter and summer, but excludes cotton, rice and sugar cane. There are changes in direction at different times in different places. There was a general increase after the drought in 1982-83 for several years and then declined during the late 1980s - and later in New South Wales. In Western Australia the area sown increased after 1989 to achieve a record area in 1997. In New South Wales and Queensland there was a dramatic impact of the 1994-95 drought.
The spatial distribution of these changes is shown in the map in Figure 3 of the differences that occurred between the beginning (3 years of 1983 to 1985) and the end (3 years of 1994, 1996 and 1997) of the time sequence. About half of the intensive land use region does not show any net change in the area of cropping undertaken - in most cases because there is minimal cropping undertaken there. Changes of less than 5% of total area were also common across the cropping belt. Significant increases (greater than 5 per cent) appeared to occur in the wider mallee lands from south-east Western Australia to north-west Victoria. By contrast, some areas show a significant reduction (more than 5 per cent) in the area under crop over the 15 years.
The area of extensive grazing land (estimated by the sum of native pasture and the 'residual') is the least intensive land use. It showed a gradual decline within the intensive land use regions within South Australia and Victoria, possibly in Queensland and considerable variation within New South Wales over the 15 years 1983-83 to 1996-97. Sown pasture (including lucerne), wherein land has been deliberately sown to pasture species usually to improve productivity, represents another state of intensification. The area of sown pasture has remained relatively constant in all States from 1970 except in Queensland, which continued to increase in area until 1994. A sharp decline in 1996 and the following years reflects the change in definition of the items collected in AgStats.
Sheep, which graze both extensive and sown pastures in the intensive land use regions, have generally increased in numbers in all states from 1983 until about 1990. The subsequent fall in numbers with each succeeding year until the mid 1990s is most probably due to the decline in wool prices since 1990 when the wool support price scheme was abolished. However other factors such as a wide spread drought in New South Wales and Queensland during the mid-1990s would also have had an influence. Beef cattle are the other major grazer of pastures and, in some contrast to sheep numbers, have generally increased in number over much of the timeframe.
The category of semi-intensive crops includes cotton, sugar cane, rice and potatoes. In general the area sown to the semi-intensive crops has increased over the time, with the trend particularly noticeable in Queensland and New South Wales over the period, perhaps with more variability in NSW. There appears very little area sown to these semi-intensive crops in the other states.
Horticultural crops here include all vegetables (except potatoes), fruit, nuts, vines, nurseries and turf. There is a trend for the area planted to these crops to increase over the time frame in all states.
About 45 per cent of the total 2.1 million hectares that was irrigated in 1996-97 was in New South Wales, 27 per cent in Victoria, nearly 20 per cent in Queensland, 5 per cent in South Australia, and less than 3 per cent in Western Australia and Tasmania. Most of the increases in areas irrigated appear to have occurred in New South Wales and Queensland.
The larger increases (more than 7 000 hectares) in irrigation were usually associated with major rivers such as the Murrumbidgee, Lachlan, McIntyre, Barwon, Macquarie, Burdekin and the Daly. Some decreases occurred in the regions of Gippsland, Mildura and Gannawarra in Victoria, of Singleton/Hawkesbury, Richmond, Copmanhurst and Lismore in NSW, and the Paroo in Queensland.
| Commodity group | 1983-84 | 1996-97 |
|---|---|---|
| Pastures | 871 | 935 |
| Cereals | 315 | 337 |
| Vegetables | 76 | 87 |
| Fruit | 97 | 151 |
| Other crops | 260 | 544 |
| Total | 1 625 | 2 056 |
Pastures still constitute the largest area that is irrigated (Table 2), concentrated in southern New South Wales and Victoria, where it is important for the dairy industry. The largest area, around 80 per cent, of irrigated cereals occurs in New South Wales, with a large proportion (between a third to a half) in rice. There is a general increase in the area of irrigated fruit and vegetables. Although these areas are comparatively small, they produce high value crops and sometimes more than one harvest per season. New South Wales has the largest irrigated area of 'Other crops', which consists of mostly of cotton but also sugar cane, soybeans and other commodities not classified under the major crop categories. The increases in this category have been sufficiently large to now constitute the second largest irrigation land use.
Broad changes in land use were summarised using an intensity index to capture movements between the land use categories. The intensity index was calculated for each year and SLA based on the proportions of the total agricultural area in each land use category in each region, and an intensity factor for each category based upon the average cost of production for 1991-1994 taken from the ABS Farm Financial Survey. The distribution in the map (Figure 4) shows that the greatest range in intensity (maximum - minimum value) occurs in a broad crescent that curves around inside the east coast, around the south coast, including Tasmania, to the southern part of the west coast of Australia. Further inland most areas show less change. Within the crescent the areas of greatest change surround large populations and often occur near irrigation. However, there are also pockets that seem to have a low change in intensity.
The intensification of land use is one of the responses to the challenges of the cost-price squeeze - a consequence of attempting to secure more economic yield from each hectare. Such intensification implies greater use of inputs, including land resources or as the speeding up some of the processes in agricultural and natural systems. While this leads to larger risks from residues of unused inputs, or a wider range of environmental costs or reduced resource quality, it also provides more income and financial capacity for addressing environmental issues.
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Pattern of land use in Australia
Changes in land use between 1982-83 and 1996-97
Diversity
Diversification is an important mechanism for managing risks in production, markets and income. Protection of biological diversity is a core objective of the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) and an identified task for government is to promote multiple and sequential land uses. In this project, three aspects of diversity were considered: diversity of agricultural plant species; diversity within broadacre cropping; and diversity within farms.
Diversification of plant species used in agricultural production contributes some biological resilience into agricultural systems, through the ability to withstand adverse climatic conditions and minimises the build up of diseases, pests and weed populations, and thus to the maintenance of the resource base. Most changes in agricultural plant diversity index, as estimated by a modified Shannon index, have occurred in the broadacre cropping belt of southern Australia. This is not surprising given that native pastures are only counted as a single species and sown pastures as possibly three species. Outside this zone increases occurred along the Queensland coast with sugar cane increases, along the tablelands and coast of New South Wales where the area of sown pastures increased, and in southern Victoria and Western Australia where native pasture increased. It would seem that decreases in diversity index is mostly a response to changes in cropping rotations and to areas of sown pastures partly a consequence of changes in questions in the Agricultural Census.
Diversity within broadacre cropping was shown by the contribution to total area broadacre crops by different biological families such as cereals, pulses (grain legumes) and oilseeds. As an example, the ratio of non-cereal crops (includes pulses and oilseeds) to total crop gives some indication of biological diversity. In 1997, the most diverse areas of winter cropping appeared in: the northern part of the Western Australian wheat belt, and reflect intensive use of lupins in crop rotations; in the Lower Southeastern region of South Australia and the Wimmera of Victoria with peas and canola.
The degree of diversity within farms (farm diversity) was measured by a diversity ratio derived from ABARE's Australian Agricultural and Grazing Industry Survey database of 20 years. There was great similarity in the patterns of both physical and financial diversity. The patterns were also generally similar to those shown at the SLA level for agricultural plant diversity and for broadacre crop diversity. Although there was considerable variation in both attributes from year to year, in each year the cropping belt stands out for its higher diversity in this method.
Overall, diversity appears to be increasing especially within the grain cropping regions. The effects of this diversification upon the condition of supporting natural resource base are not clear in this analysis.
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Changes in the diversity of land use
Productivity
Land can be valued for economic uses (such as agriculture, forestry, dwelling, transport and industry) and more social uses (such as nature conservation, recreation and aesthetic), while recently the value as provider of services (such as clean water, air, and greenhouse sinks) has emerged. Consequently productivity can be approached from a number of viewpoints. Of the range of different measures used to assess the productivity of agriculture through time the two included here are:
partial productivity measures for a single input that provide insights into the intensification of individual components such as yield when expressed as the volume of production for a given (single) unit of input (eg. a hectare of land, a mm of effective rainfall, a megalitre of irrigation water applied) but may also take into account some climatic factors, such as the Stress Index (STIN) model; and
total factor productivity (TFP) measures where a diverse range of inputs and/or outputs are involved. TFP measures the productivity of the whole enterprise.
Grain yields
Trends in wheat yields over the time frame were calculated using the Stress Index (STIN) model to remove the major effects of climate. When this is done (Figure 5) then generally strong positive yield trends were evident in the wheat belt of Western Australia weakening towards the inland and east. The largest increases of more than 60 kg/ha/year appeared in the northern part of the wheat belt around Geraldton. This area also showed high broadacre crop diversity. It is likely that the extra nitrogen contributed by the lupin crop and better disease and weed control from the rotations are having a beneficial effect on wheat yields. In South Australia and Victoria the yield increases were most marked towards the south. New South Wales showed strongest yield gains in pockets along the eastern border and in irrigation areas of the MIA. There were only a few, small areas showing strong gains in Queensland, mostly around the inner Darling Downs.
Yield increases in barley were similar to those of wheat, ie within one group (15 kg/ha/year) of yield change, in most of the wheat belt. Although at a slightly lower rate than wheat, there are some locations such as southern Victoria and southern Western Australia, where the rate was higher than for wheat. Oats and other cereals (rye and triticale) were combined in another analysis. The pattern was more similar to that of barley than wheat and the rates at a generally lower rate again.
The most widely grown summer grain is grain sorghum restricted to northern New South Wales and eastern Queensland. While yields have generally increased in all regions the rate of increase was much higher in northern New South Wales. In parts of Queensland there were extended droughts at the end of the timeframe, some regions face competition from other crops (such as cotton) or there is less incentive to apply fertilsers or rotate with other grain crops.
Variability of yields constrains farmers investment in productivity processes because of increased risk of poor returns to alternative crops such as pulses and to fertiliser applications. A map of the variability in yields of wheat show a close and direct correlation with that of the reliability in growing season rainfall, although there a some outliers due to other causes such as disease or waterlogging.
Water use efficiency - calculated as the ratio of actual yield to the potential yield (as estimated by the STIN model) - provides measure of how much water, both stored in soil and as rainfall, is used by the wheat crop. The remainder may run off, evaporate from the soil surface or drain into the subsoil groundwater and represents both an unused resource and a contributing risk to erosion and salinity. Higher water use efficiencies (greater than 70% of potential) occured in the Wimmera, Yorke Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula, and in shires in the drier eastern part of the Western Australian wheatbelt. Lower water use efficiencies (less than 50% of potential) seemed to occur in areas receiving summer rainfall ie northern New South Wales and Queensland.
Total Factor Productivity
Growth in total factor productivity (TFP) over the twenty years 1978-79 to 1997-98 using ABARE farm survey data shows geographical pattern of trends in growth (Figure 6). The map indicates that significant variation in productivity growth has occurred across Australia. In particular, it appears that the distribution of broadacre industries is a key factor contributing to the observed patterns. The largest productivity gains have occurred in the wheat-sheep zone where cropping activities are concentrated. For instance in the Central Wheat Belt and Greenough region of Western Australia productivity is high and related to high cropping diversity and yield increases in wheat. Some predominantly grazing areas also showed growth in TFP eg western Riverina and Murray Mallee north of the Murray River. Lower productivity gains appear to have occurred in the regions where livestock activities dominate the broadacre production mix. The areas of lowest growth are concentrated in the high rainfall zones where the combination of livestock focussed activities and small farm size may have contributed to the relatively lower productivity gains.
Total biological productivity
Changes in agricultural biological productivity (based on conversions to DSE using metabolisable energy estimates) between the early 1980s (represented by the average of 1983, 1984 and 1985) and the mid 1990s (represented by the average of 1995, 1996 and 1997) are given in Figure 7. Overall most SLAs showed an increase in agricultural productivity between these times. The increases appeared greatest for the cane-growing districts of coastal Queensland, and for the dairy districts of Victoria and Tasmania. Some areas appeared to show a decrease in productivity, particularly in the larger Darling Downs up to the Burnett in Queensland. The regional basis of this decline suggests that drought impacts during 1994 to 1996 are showing out. Other pockets occurred in northern NSW, and in two small parts of Victoria, which may be errors in the concordance of AgStats.
Overall productivity, measured as total factor productivity, yields and biological productivity appears to have increased steadily across most of the areas of intensive land use over the 1982-83 to 1996-97 timeframe. The rates of increase have varied between regions. Areas with consistently high productivity rates appear to be in the northern grain belt of Western Australia, the irrigated areas along the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers, the central grain belt of New South Wales, the coastal areas of Queensland where sugar areas have increased, and in the dairy areas of southern Victoria and north-western Tasmania. Areas of lower productivity growth include most of Queensland except the coastal areas, the high rainfall sheep and beef grazing areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania, and the more arid grazing and cropping regions of South Australia.
Over the last 20 years the land resources of Australia, with additional inputs, have continued to yield useful and desirable products of food and fibre. There is little indication from the evidence at the Statistical Local Area scale that land degradation is affecting productivity. However, it is likely that these effects that operate at local scales may be masked by the high levels of aggregation of farm data at the SLA level.
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Projections
Just as the present is the result of past actions so the future will develop as the result of actions from many individual decisions being made now. The people making those decisions will be influenced by perceived pressures and challenges. The development of projections and forecasts help refine those perceptions and expectations.
Projections and forecasts are assessments of the likely consequences of known causal factors but there are inherently unknowable parts of such projections. For instance, we can be quite confident that there will be at least two major droughts in Australia during the next 20 years, but not confident about when they will occur or where they will concentrate. Similarly with forecasts about floods and market downturns.
On present trends, many parts of agriculture will become increasingly integrated with the food industry with more use of contracts and vertical integration. These changes in the agro-food sector could be dramatic over the next twenty years if some anticipated changes in consumer tastes, in technologies and in the underlying competitive positions come to pass. Agriculture based on food is likely to suffer declining individual incomes in real terms. In response farmers will be leaving the industry, and reallocating resources to more profitable uses leading to fewer, larger farms.
A simple rule of thumb projection assumes that the next 20 years are going to be similar to the last 20 with, cattle and sheep numbers and crop areas fluctuating in response to climatic conditions and market prices within the present bounds. This is most likely for the gross pattern of land uses although there will be ongoing forces for change and some resisting inertia at the local and regional scale.
However, an extrapolation of a linear regression of the increase in total DSE with time (a rate of about 3 million DSE per year) to 2020 would give a total productive capacity of about 520 million DSE compared to a level of about 495 million DSE in 2000.
Projections about possible futures for world agriculture for times up to 2030 by international organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) and the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggest that food production could increase at about 0.7 per cent per annum. The major growth areas are expected in wheat, oilseeds, beef, poultry, and processed dairy products. Sheep meat is projected to decline slightly. The long-term trend for prices to decline is expected to continue. However, considerable uncertainties pertain to these projections with 3 projections indicate total cereal production by 2010 ranged between 151 and 195 million tonnes, nearly a 30 per cent difference.
Long term projections by ABARE were made for several scenarios of productivity change in Australian agriculture relative to that in the rest of the world. Assumed increases in total factor productivity, of approximately 1 percent per annum, which is quite large, led to sometimes large projected land use changes under these cases.
Regional differences occur in the degree of response of land use to changing relative returns to land. The differences are due to factors such as the production risk associated with different climatic and physical factors, and hence the premium that landholders require before they are likely to change land use varies between activities and regions. For example, in the western wheat-sheep zone, in south-west Western Australia, the proportion of land used for cropping and sheep production is very sensitive to changes in returns to land in cropping activities.
Increasing market demand and productivity imply continued intensification of agriculture, with implications for the natural resource base on which it is dependent. From a management perspective, sustainable agriculture is mostly about processes and practices. Improved management and strategic planning are likely to be required at farm, landscape, and industry scale. Given the inherent variability of the agricultural sector, such strategic planning needs to incorporate various scenarios and include contingency responses. Moreover, there is considerable inertia in the system and innovations take time to be taken up so that the impacts of decisions, particularly at larger scales, may not be observable for decades.
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Case Studies
Four regions - Loddon and Corangamite in Victoria, Blackwood Catchment and Chapman River Catchment in Western Australia - were used to investigate the utility of different information in describing the effects of land degradation on land use. Two of the regions - Loddon and Blackwood - suffer from dryland salinity problems; in addition the Loddon area also experiences irrigated and significant peri-urban growth. Soil acidification was an issue in the Chapman River Catchment.
Data aggregated at the Statistical Division (SD) level can show the effects of the major economic drivers on land use patterns. For example the two Victorian case studies demonstrated that changes in the value of wool, dairy products and of cereals for grain subsequently showed in changes in the area of land use of these categories. However, because of the amount of aggregation at this level, the interpretation of land use change from changes in value of agriculture production at the SD level is difficult. The Statistical Local Area level information also showed, at a smaller scale, the long term changes such as decline in wool, the long term changes with wheat, and increase in the major dairy industry. Influences on productivity, intensification and diversification were also noted.
For the Victorian case studies information was also available at a parish level, and this provided more information on the location of dairying and the switching between livestock and cropping land use. However, additional data did not always present a consistent picture. The groundtruthing of data using focus groups suggested there can be numerous drivers of land use change at work, that appear to push different sub-regions in different directions. Parish data did also indicate a consolidation of the dairy industry within the region, and the emergence of new and supporting industries eg feed grain production for the dairy industry.
For the Western Australian case studies information was available from the ABS census at small areas (10km x 10km pixels). This data appeared to be show up responses - likely to be to increasing acidity and salinity - in crop areas and yields that were not evident at the SLA aggregation level. There, producer perceptions of salinity, which presumably reflect the situation on the ground, were that an increasing proportion of their holdings was being affected by salinity. However this has not yet shown up, as might have been expected, in a reduced area used for higher value operations such as cropping although there was a reduced number of pixels with relatively high yields in the Blackwood Catchment and Chapman Catchment. Although wheat yields were increasing steadily in both Catchments some areas had low water use efficiencies for wheat production, which have worrying implications for salinisation trends and raises concerns about the sustainability of cropping in those regions.
The case studies indicate that there can be many local factors affecting, and being affected by, land use. Land use changes due to more complex environmental and social factors require a range of datasets that are appropriate to the scale of the relevant factors to assist interpretation and to derive consistent narratives. Such consistent narratives will be the basis of responsive actions.
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Victorian Corangamite case study
Western Australia Blackwood case study
Western Australian Greenough/Chapman catchment case study
Lessons learnt
Quality and consistency of data
A great strength of the AgStats data from ABS, as shown by these results, is the long run of data that enables tracking of changes and determining trends over time. However, changes to boundaries (particularly in Victoria) reduced the usefulness of this data to analyse local area trends in some cases eg pasture productivity in Victoria. Information technologies, such as GIS, can now enhance the ability to interpolate results and add another dimension to understanding. Therefore, being able to geo-locate the data would add considerable value to AgStats. The case studies showed, particularly in Western Australia, that geo-location of respondents would greatly enhance this capability to follow changes, determine trends and develop information for areas other than SLAs, such as such as catchments and landscapes.
The move by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to conduct an Agricultural Census only every five years and to use surveys of about 20 per cent of the population for the intervening four years increases the need for geo-location so that meaningful attribution can be made by interpolation. This will be most useful for the broadacre land uses, since the discrete nature of some intensive industries means that interpolation may not be appropriate.
Likewise changes to questions (eg for pastures) showed up as breaks in trends. For instance, the rationalisations of categories collected in the 1995 census reduced the value of this year in many analyses undertaken here. While recognising the need to allow change in response to challenges of the day (eg environmental accounting as well as economic accounts), it would enhance the value of the data for natural resource management if some more items were to be maintained as a standard. This might be possible if some categories that are normally aggregated from other items eg total cereals, total oilseeds and total pulses, could be collected as a single entity when the full set of items is not collected.
The accuracy of recording the items also appeared to be variable, with high confidence pertaining to animal numbers and crop areas. There is a large proportion of the total area of agricultural holdings that does not have a specific land use attributed to it in the Agricultural Census - the 'residual'. This means that many natural resource ecosystems have very sparse information about its land use. This residual area needs to be given more attention to determine actual land use and potential for diversification more accurately. Likewise the collection of information on farms were either not part included in the census, had income below the $5 000 cutoff, or gave incomplete responses needs some attention.
Land use and resource condition
The principal focus of environmental decision-making as it affects agriculture is on it use of, and impact on, natural resources. The emphasis here was on the on-farm resources such as soil (erosion, acidification), associated biota (feral pests, weeds, ecosystem functions) and supply of irrigation water. While there are wider off-farm impacts, such as its effects on biodiversity and as sources and sinks for greenhouse gases, they are not included in this report. Nor did this report consider the off-farm land uses (such as roads, railways, reserves, conservation areas, urban and industrial) and their practices and impacts.
An estimate of catchment condition prepared by another Audit project showed there were obvious similarities between the distribution of best to worst condition and productivity and intensification. Many areas of more intensively used land, particularly for broadacre cropping are showing out in the worst quartile of catchment conditions. Noteworthy are the wheat belt of Western Australia, the eastern Riverina, the Wimmera, the Central West of NSW, the Darling Downs, extending up into parts of the Central Highlands of Queensland.
All actions will have unintended consequences as well as those intended. Each form of land degradation - usually an unintended consequence of some agricultural operations - has its own timetable and scale of action. For the effective management of each form of land degradation, information is required at its appropriate scale to enable appropriate action. It is the aim of planning, modelling and monitoring to reduce these unintended consequences through being better able to respond appropriately.
There were indications that land users respond well to on-site problems. For instance, in Western Australia the small area data (shown at 10km x 10 km cells) showed that in the Chapman Catchment, where a high proportion of the crop is rotated each year with lupins - a crop that itself induces moderate acidification - there was evidence that lime applications had increased to counter soil acidification. Managers of agricultural land also respond to new challenges and adopt new technology. This was shown over the last century or so as Australia has gone through phases of exploitation and expansion, changed land uses and increased productivity.
Productivity increases imply some intensification of land use, which has implications for land degradation and will vary with local conditions. To continue to improve management for sustainable agriculture, it is likely that there will need to be integrated planning across several spheres - in government, with industry and on farm - in order to avoid an escalation of the unintended consequences of such intensification. Given the considerable inertia in the system for changes to occur, the many thousands of decisions and their consequent actions over time, these responses need ongoing support.
Further information
- Australian Agriculture Assessment 2001 (theme) report
- "Land use change, productivity and diversification" report
- "Land use change, productivity and diversification" by Bureau of Rural Sciences (PDF - 5.5 MB)
- "Land use change, productivity and diversification" by Bureau of Rural Sciences (PDF - 2.5 MB)
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