Landcare has been a good nurse
John Bartle, Manager Farm Forestry Unit, Department of Conservation and Land Management
Landcare has been a good nurse.
The patients have been kept comfortable. A few ointments have been applied but no real improvement in the illness is apparent. The patients have been well attended by the nurses, and have been encouraged to form groups to discuss their illness. They have been kept busy with afternoon teas, carpet bowls and quoits. Many have responded to the encouragement to plan for the future, just in case the ointments work and the illness goes away, although, deep down, the patients suspect this really won’t happen.
The patients love the nurses and want them around, even if they have only ineffective ointments. In fact every patient would like to have their own personal nurse "hitting the ground" right beside their bed!
But even more, the patients would like to have their health back.
I present this little allegory in the hope that it might strike a chord.
The lesson from landcare over the last few years is that earnest nurses and superficial ointments will not solve serious illness. Lets get landcare out of palliative care and into fundamental cures. The expenditure on nurses would give much greater return if the nurses were working with outpatients on the road to recovery.
What is the cure for land degradation?
Land degradation has many facets. The two major ones are water use related (i.e. groundwater rise, salinity and waterlogging) and lack of protection for the land (i.e. wind erosion and shelter). These could potentially be cured if we had a range of economically attractive perennial crop and fodder species.
Once convinced of the economics of perennials, farmers and the landcare movement would quickly learn to use them to also treat land degradation.
The landcare movement in WA should adopt the development of commercial woody plant and tree crops as its primary objective. It should not await the ad hoc arrival of major new perennial plant options like tagasaste or bluegums. It should instigate and promote their development. Species for the wheatbelt should have the highest priority.
The slow rate of tree planting under the present palliative approach to landcare is extremely serious for three reasons:
We must divert a large proportion of the investment in landcare away from handouts and into the development of new perennial crops. This would have the following outcomes:
Rapid progress could be made in the development of new perennial crop plants and products with the existing levels of landcare funding, although more funds would hasten progress. However, it must be emphasised that to be successful in commercial development would require a ‘culture shift’. It would require real entrepreneurship locally and a sea change in Canberra. However, tagasaste, bluegums and, still in its infancy, oil mallee provide examples from which we can learn.
Note: This article was a presentation to the State Decade of Landcare Inquiry in 1996.
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