As the planet warms these farmers are adapting to an uncertain future
If the climate becomes drier, farmers in some parts of the Eyre Peninsula could find it harder to make a living. But they're already adapting to an uncertain future of climate change and dwindling townships.
ABC News: Evelyn Leckie
)Bruce Heddle stands in the middle of a paddock and squints against the bright sunshine.
Around his feet, planted in neat parallel furrows, bright green blades of wheat, each no longer than a pen, flutter in the wind.
"The seeds are planted in two precise rows with the fertiliser placed right in the middle, between them, very precisely," he says.
"And when it rains, the water is funnelled to the bottom of the furrow, where the seeds and fertiliser are."
Three steps to his left, the ground looks a bit different. This section of the paddock was tilled â€" that is, the soil churned, turned and levelled â€" before the wheat seeds were planted.
At the moment, the young plants in the tilled soil look just as vibrant and healthy as their counterparts in furrows, with no weeds in sight.
Whether that's still the case come harvest time towards the end of the year, only time will tell.
This is an experiment Bruce is running on his farm, just outside the town of Minnipa on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula.
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)It compares the current super-precise style of farming with an adaptation of the more old-fashioned approach of tilling the soil before seeding.
Tilling to control weeds has the benefit of using less herbicide, but also has a trade-off â€" disturbing the soil risks erosion, not to mention losing precious water to evaporation.
While Bruce's tilled-vs-no-till experiment is more to satisfy his own curiosity than anything else, a short drive down a dirt track takes us to another paddock, one that's part of a larger project across the Eyre Peninsula.
This paddock is rigged up to an array of probes and monitoring systems. A solar-powered transmitter beams soil moisture information straight to Bruce's smartphone.
Because out here, soil moisture is everything.
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)The Minnipa area is classified as a low-rainfall zone. It receives an average of less than 350 millimetres each year.
The soil's ruddy hue is an ever-present reminder that we're on the edge of the outback.
Yet the western region of the Eyre Peninsula manages to churn out around 10 per cent of the state's total wheat and barley production.
And how it will cope under a changing climate is, at least for now, up in the air.
Precious waterHalf an hour down the Eyre Highway, in the town of Wudinna, a massive granite statue â€" the "Big Farmer" â€" faces towering white silos on the other side of the bitumen.
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)The statue represents the good years as well as the bad, according to the plaque.
"On the female side, the seven missing grains from the wheat head symbols symbolises hungry years, hardship and battle for survival."
Hardship is right. Before European settlers could harvest crops from the cleared land, they needed to harvest water.
There were very few rivers around here.
Digging dams was a futile exercise. The soil simply did not hold water.
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)But 1.6-billion-year-old granite domes rising gently from the landscape would offer a source of sorts.
This is Kokatha country, and the circular pools that dot the top of these huge monoliths served as water sources for First Nations people for thousands of years.
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)In the early 1900s, settlers built low walls around a handful of domes to funnel run-off into underground tanks and natural granite bowls, like the basin at one end of Polda Rock, just north of Wudinna.
Around this time, the newly laid railway line bearing water tankers sealed with tar started bringing the precious liquid from down south â€" but this wasn't fail safe.
Your allotted tanker sprung a leak on its journey north? Too bad. You got what was left in it. And sometimes the water smelt and tasted so strongly of tar not even the horses would drink it.
These days, a concrete pipeline runs along the now-disused railway line to supply towns along the Eyre Highway.
And the Polda Rock reservoir still provides water to the town of Wudinna today, with a little help from a solar-powered pump, says Eleanor Scholz, mayor of the district.
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)Eleanor grew up in Minnipa and knows how hard life can be on these drier fringes of cropping country.
In dry years, relentless gusty winds whipped up topsoil and drove it across the land, turning the sky red.
"I always remember we had a huge dust storm as a little kid," she recalls.
"The sky went dark, and the older kids told us it was the end of the world â€" and we believed them."
She gestures to the fresh new growth surrounding Polda Rock. It's late June, and hard to imagine thick, soupy dust storms looming over the region just a month earlier.
"This year, we've had … really dry conditions and as the soil moisture goes, and as the wind starts blowing, the dust just blows again," Eleanor says.
"But … a good rain and everything, within a week or two, is turning green again."
Bust and boom"Good rain" is somewhat of an understatement. Mention the recent rains at the Minnipa pub, and locals effusively chime in and rattle off a bunch of statistics.
Minnipa's average June rainfall is 35 millimetres.
Last year, they barely got half that.
This year, the Bureau of Meteorology registered 72 mm for the month … and some farms were drenched with nearly twice that.
It's not over either.
Veils of rain continue to drift lazily across the horizon.
The fickle nature of rainfall year to year means farmers must trap as much as possible in the soil, even from the thunderstorms that roll in over summer, months before any seeds are planted.
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)They do this by leaving as much of the previous crop's residue, such as old, dead stems, on the surface, and kill summer weeds, which suck up and whisk away precious water stored below.
This means a brown paddock strewn with scraps of last year's crop is not necessarily a dry one â€" at least, not once you get below the surface.
But even with the best water-trapping measures, if there's no rain, there's no soil moisture.
Gareth Scholz has felt this pain.
(Just a note on the Scholzes: there are quite a few in the area, all related, if only distantly. That's because in 1914, two Scholz brothers moved to the area to farm. Each had six sons, and they all became farmers too.)
Gareth and his wife Roanne run 2,600 hectares of cropping and grazing land just north of Minnipa. He calls his first years of farming "a bit of a baptism of fire".
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)"When I first started going out and farming on my own, we had three of the worst droughts â€" some of the worst droughts my father had ever seen â€" in a row in 2006, 2007 and 2008," he says.
Those years, they were lucky to harvest the amount of seed they sowed.
But in 2009, the drought broke â€" in a big way. It was the best year in living memory and kicked off a golden run that lasted until 2016.
Rainfall-wise, 2016 to 2020 were on the drier side, but soil-moisture-retaining techniques meant crop yields were about average.
"Everyone has a go at the Bureau of Meteorology for getting the rainfall wrong, but you can't predict it," Gareth says.
"There's so many times where your neighbour will get twice as much rainfall as you.
"And that rain might be the one that comes at the right time."
The 'line of rainfall'Gareth's property straddles what's known as Goyder's Line â€" a boundary drawn back in 1865 by then-Surveyor-General George Goyder.
He was given the job of mapping the extent of the Great 1860s Drought, which devastated much of South Australia.
Some 50 years before the township of Minnipa was proclaimed, Goyder made his way on horseback across the state.
Guided by chats with graziers and the presence of hardy, scrubby, desert-dwelling plants like saltbush and mulga, Goyder traced his "line of rainfall" on the map.
Goyder's Line eventually became considered the border between safe cropping land to the south and riskier cropping land to the north.
And back in the day, farming on the wrong side of the line could potentially put a dampener on your social life, says CSIRO climate applications scientist Uday Nidumolu.
"There are stories of families not wanting their daughters to marry farmers north of Goyder's Line."
But as the decades wore on, it became clear that Goyder's Line was less a precise perimeter and more of a guide.
These days, in some areas, farmers successfully grow crops a good 100 kilometres north of the line.
In 2012, Dr Nidumolu and colleagues from the CSIRO and South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) found that if they drew a line based on the ratio of rainfall and evaporation, it more accurately reflected the real cropping boundary of South Australia.
In the same paper, they mapped how their line might shift under two projected climate models â€" one modelling a wetter future and the other, a drier one.
Should the conditions that feed into the drier model come to pass, their line might start to shuffle southwards, making it more difficult to grow profitable crops in the Upper Eyre Peninsula.
Dr Nidumolu says it's important to note that we don't know how far south this line may shift â€" or if it will shift at all.
"There's a range of things that can happen," he says.
"The future lies somewhere in between the extremes."
Because that's the thing about rainfall and climate change. While climate scientists are very confident that average temperatures will change â€" things will heat up â€" there is less confidence around changes to rainfall in the coming decade, according to Peter Hayman, a climate applications scientist at SARDI and study co-author.
"Climate science would bet an expensive bottle of wine that the next decade will be warmer, but probably a cheaper bottle of wine that it will be drier," Dr Hayman says.
Warming is a real concern, he adds, "especially as it increases the chance of hot days in spring when crops are vulnerable".
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found warming has already reached 1.4C in Australia.
These electorates have the highest climate risk. So why are they less likely to demand more action?You might expect electorates with a high climate risk to want more action on climate policy, but that's not always the case.
Read moreBut changes to rainfall patterns are most worrying â€" and most uncertain.
"A low level of drying in coming decades is something farmers can adapt to, but more severe drying, say greater than 15 per cent, will present a major challenge," Dr Hayman says.
Indeed, water security is important to three-quarters of full-time Eyre Peninsula farmers, according to the Rural landholder social benchmarking report 2020. This is despite only 43 per cent of those surveyed agreeing that climate change poses a risk to the region.
This finding echoes the Australia Talks National Survey 2021, which tells us people in rural areas are generally less likely than those elsewhere to think climate change is a serious problem that needs to be urgently addressed.
From farming crops to solar and windWell before the threat of climate change reared its head, farmers adapted to make the most of their land.
European settlers quickly realised farming techniques used in Britain simply wouldn't work on the Upper Eyre Peninsula, and adjusted their practices accordingly.
They diversified, too. Decades ago, most farms here only grew wheat.
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)Now, come September, rippling paddocks of wheat and barley are interspersed with blocks of golden canola flowers or low rows of shrubby lentils.
And still others â€" such as Tim Scholz, a farmer in the Wudinna area â€" are keen to use the land to produce something entirely different.
"We produce energy currently off of our land â€" we do it in the form of food," he says.
"It's human energy, human food, but it still takes the sun and the wind and the rain to produce that.
"And we have a lot of latent energy that falls on our land every day, and nothing happens with it."
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)That latent energy, Tim envisions, could be harvested by solar panels and wind farms, then be used to make green ammonia from water and air.
Ammonia â€" a gas made of a nitrogen atom bonded to three hydrogens â€" is a strategic choice for a couple of reasons.
First up, it can be cooled and compressed into a liquid, then shipped off around the world.
When it gets to its destination it can be separated into nitrogen gas and â€" crucially â€" hydrogen gas.
With the rise of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, and a prediction that hydrogen may comprise a quarter of the world's energy demands by 2050, the market for green hydrogen is strong â€" especially in Europe and Asia, Tim says.
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)Ammonia could also literally go back into the earth on which solar and wind farms stand, as zero-carbon fertiliser.
A focus on green ammonia and zero-carbon farming in a region where many farmers don't consider climate change to be a risk, Tim adds, isn't a matter of pitching ideologies against each other.
"It's really saying there are new economics happening here. And the world has decided, rightly or wrongly, that it wants a low-carbon future â€" and certainly needs to.
"The reality is, for the past 300 years, we've dug up a whole lot of carbon that was sequestered in an earlier time in history, and now we're putting it back in the atmosphere.
"So we must make some changes."
Bigger farms, smaller townsThe region's ability to continually adapt and improve has its downsides. In a way, it's become a victim of its own success.
Over the decades, farmers have switched to no-till farming, used machinery capable of seeding entire farms in a matter of days â€" not weeks â€" and planted fast-growing, more productive crop varietals.
As yields increased, so too have expectations, Bruce Heddle says.
"What was a good crop for my dad would be regarded as a pretty average one these days."
New technology allowing farms to be bigger than ever, paired with low interest rates, means farmers are only too happy to buy out and absorb their neighbours, if the offer is there.
This trend of ever-growing farms isn't going to stop either, Bruce says: "We're not going to turn this back. No, the genie's out of the bottle."
And as families sell up and move away, towns like Minnipa have been shrinking.
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)Gone are the days when multiple buses, chock full, would ferry students to and from the local school.
These days, fewer than 60 students attend the school, which spans primary and secondary year levels.
Younger people don't tend to stay in the area, and the population of Minnipa is ageing.
At the 2016 census, the median age of Minnipa residents was 51 years old. The state's median age is 40.
But perhaps Minnipa's dwindling population is best illustrated by the town's footy and netball clubs. This season they aligned with clubs from Elliston, a town 90 kilometres south as the crow flies.
While Bruce says he has only 10 or 11 crops left in him â€" his beard is more salt than pepper these days â€" Gareth Scholz, on the northern side of town, has at least a few dozen.
Gareth is optimistic that he and his family will make it work, whatever hand they're dealt.
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)"We're always working around the climate and we're constantly adapting to that if we can," he says.
"Even if the climate's remaining the same, if we can utilise our resources like water better, we can be more productive anyway."
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)He's one of many farmers to embrace technologies such as drones, and is keen to trial cattle ear tags or microchips, which could let him and Roanne keep their herds within "virtual fences" and monitor the animals' health.
And when he's ready to hang up his boots, would he like to see his kids take over?
"Oh, definitely," he says with a grin.
"I'd always like to get the next generation to come through and teach them.
"Yeah, I think there's a bright future in agriculture."
CreditsReporter and producer: Belinda Smith
Additional reporting: Evelyn Leckie
Photography and video: Lincoln Rothall, Evelyn Leckie
Additional images: State Library of South Australia, Getty Images
Editors: Genelle Weule and Joel Zander
ABC Science editor: Jonathan Webb
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