Our productivity crisis

An ag econs seminar in Perth last week compared Australia's farm productivity growth with that of Canada. This was part of a more specific talk comparing our grain supply chain with Canada's. Taken alone, this information probably constitutes a "crisis" for Australian farmers.

From 1981 to 2012, Australia's wheat yields have improved by 12 kg per hectare a year, compared to Canada's 33 kg figure. A large part of this may be due to climate change that has benefited Canada, but reduced Australian yields. Also, some of this improvement, at least for Canada, has come from improved wheat varieties, which has been delivering 0.7 per cent improvement a year ( Farm Weekly, September 29th, 2015) - which is probably what I think the Australian genetic improvement.

Another comparison I dug up, after seeing these figures, was from some economists (Nossal and Sheng, 2013), that compared "total factor productivity" for agriculture in Australia, Canada and the United States -

The warning from the seminar was that Australia needs to act to protect farming industries.
I would also add that our productivity has deteriorated in recent years - though not just because of climate change and poorer seasons.

Our solution will start with putting the problem on the table. We can no longer pretend that our research and development institutions are delivering the productivity we should expect. I believe this problem has arisen from "out-sourcing" of farm R&D to professionals, and we need to re-engage farmers in the process.

For starters, the best way for farmers to measure progress, is to take seasonal factors out of the judgement about what is a good crop, by using Water Use Efficiency calculations.

Another current gripe is the short term focus on profit - one year at a time. Because of this, we have neglected a major limitation on yield for most farms, in liming. I suspect most farms would have other opportunities to lift yield and productivity that would become immediately obvious from water use calculations.

However to go beyond what we already know, but are not doing, we will need to develop better crop monitoring than we have come to expect over recent decades.