Bert Kelly, “Technique good, but the marketing …,”
The Bulletin, April 16, 1985, p. 102.

I have recently been on an interesting bus trip to some of the farming areas in southern Queensland — a trip to allow past Nuffield Farming scholars to see some of the cream of the farming south of Brisbane and on the Darling Downs. It also gave us the opportunity to publicise the Nuffield Farming Scholarship as we will be seeking applicants from Queensland later this year. There were more than 20 of us in the bus. The younger ones were too bright for comfort. I won my scholarship in 1951 but I would never have got past first base now. I was careful not to say much, knowing that it is better to keep one’s mouth shut and have people suspect you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

The most interesting thing I saw was a young farmer making a 24-hectare ring tank to store water to irrigate cotton. His land is worth about $2500 a hectare, yet he was spending his own money to cover 24 hectares with water to do his own irrigation. All he was getting from the government was access to cheap water when the nearby river was running strongly.

It irked me, as a South Australian, to realise that this water would eventually have reached the Darling, then the Murray and may even have got to Adelaide if he had not trapped it in his ring tank. I tried to be nasty about this but the farmer said that, if he did not use the water, it might very well be used to grow crops in our state which had to be subsidised. This hurt me.

I was glad to hear the young man pay tribute to Paul Kahl, who has given such wise and strong leadership to Australian cotton growers. It was Kahl, way back in the early 1960s, who gave evidence to the Tariff Board saying that he did not want the cotton bounty continued, saying that he stopped growing cotton in California because the government there was interfering with market forces and so making a mess of things and he hoped the Australian government would not do the same here. I guess he was thinking about Ord River cotton at the time. Anyhow, the Tariff Board accepted his plea and the government agreed and now the cotton growing industry is a glowing example of what happens when governments stop blanketing the market signals.

This experience with cotton is in stark contrast to the reliance of most Queensland farmers on government guidance. You see and feel this everywhere, with wheat, peanuts, sugar, dairy products and so on, all through the cropping scene. I wonder if the meat and wool people realise how lucky they are that so far they have escaped being helped by the government. I asked a dairy farmer if he was fearful that Victorian milk might undersell him in Brisbane. His reply was quick and certain: “Uncle Joh would never allow that to happen.” I tried to explain that the constitution says that trade between the state shall be absolutely free but he didn’t seem to think this applied to Queensland. The wheatgrowers are going a stage further; they are threatening to sell their wheat through their own wheat board if the Australian Wheat Board does not lift its game. You would think that the sorry outcome of some of their marketing experiences would have made them a bit diffident about claiming superiority for their way of doing things but it doesn’t seem to worry them.

Often, as we are travelling around, particularly on the fringes of the Downs, the locals would explain that the country through which we were passing was once farmed by small, struggling dairy farmers. It is now used for growing all kids of arable crops and, although the farmers are not rolling in money, they are certainly far better off than if they, or their forefathers, had been induced, by government intervention, to keep on milking cows. People should remember this when belting the daylights out of John Kerin and his dairy plan.

It is all too easy for politicians to make good fellows of themselves by telling farmers what they want to hear and so encourage them to continue to work like peasants in an industry for which there is no long-term future except in the home market. If we had not encouraged dairy farmers to produce more butter in 1962, they would not be in the mess they are now.

I was impressed by the quality of the soil conservation work, particularly the broad-based contour banks in the peanut country in the South Burnett district. They are able to sow all these banks; they even sow across them if the slope is less than 2 percent. This saves a lot of time and trouble working small lands with big machinery.

In short, the farming we saw was of the highest quality. I wish I could say the same about their marketing arrangements. They always seem to be teetering on the edge of agrarian socialism.