Water supplies tapped | Even flies are staying next to air conditioners, says a Northern Territory producer
SYDNEY (Reuters) — A searing heat wave is baking central and northern Australia, piling more misery on drought-hit cattle farmers.
Producers were forced to slaughter livestock last year as Australia sweltered through the hottest year on record.
Temperatures topped 40 C in large parts of Australia’s key agricultural regions for most of the last week of December, with the mercury topping 48 C in the west-central Queensland town of Birdsville.
The heat wave is moving east across Australia, prompting health warnings last week in some of the country’s biggest cities. Firefighters were already battling bushfires.
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However, it is in the outback that soaring temperatures have had the most devastating impact, especially on cattle farmers in Queensland, which accounts for 50 percent on the national herd.
“Water supplies are fast diminishing and whatever feed supplies that were left are cooking off to the point where there won’t be any left,” said Charles Burke, a beef farmer and chief executive of Agforce, a Queens-land cattle industry group.
“This drought is shaping to be an absolute disaster.”
Monsoon rain in Australia’s north failed last summer, and the continent endured its hottest year since records began in 1910, the Bureau of Meteorology said Jan. 3.
Average temperatures were 1.2 C higher than the long-term average of 21.8 C, breaking the previous record set in 2005.
“The new record high calendar year temperature averaged across Australia is remarkable because it occurred not in an El Nino year but a normal year,” said David Karoly, a climate scientist from the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences.
The El Nino weather pattern is a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean and usually brings hot, dry and often drought conditions to Australia.
In the remote town of Marree, 700 kilometres north of Adelaide in South Australia, one resident tested the folklore that eggs can be fried on the road during an outback heat wave.
“You hear stories of people frying an egg on a shovel, so we set up a shovel this morning out the front and sure enough we’ve got an egg there that’s slowly frying away,” publican Phil Turner told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Faced with such tough conditions, farmers are being forced to slaughter more cattle in the current 2013-14 season.
Australia’s cattle herd will fall to 25 million head during the 2013-14 season, the lowest since the 2009-10 season, because of increased slaughtering, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics and Sciences said.
“Even the flies are sticking close to the house … thanks to the air conditioner coming out the windows,” said Jo Fogarty from the Lucy Creek cattle station in the Northern Territory.
“(We are) leaving sprinklers on for the dogs and birds at the moment. We are quite lucky we have got a good supply of water at the homestead.”
Australia is the world’s third largest beef exporter, with sales during the 2013-14 season expected to reach $4.82 billion.
However, future exports could fall if Australian farmers continue to send cattle to slaughter because farmers will eventually rebuild stocks when conditions improve.
The soaring temperatures have also renewed focus on climate change policy in Australia under the new government.
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has said he accepts the reality of climate change, but he abolished the country’s Climate Change Commission in September and rejected any link that global warming was responsible for a series of bushfires across New South Wales state in October.
One of Abbott’s major policies is to overturn the previous government’s carbon tax, which was aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to tackle climate change.
“On the science perspective, which is the basis for taking action, you’re getting very, very mixed messages from this government,” said Will Steffen, an adjunct professor at the Australian National University.
“I think the first challenge needs to be absolutely clear and consistent messaging from this new government that they understand the science, they accept the science, they accept the risk and they accept the lead to take vigorous and decisive action in getting emissions down.”
- Australia’s national cattle herd stands at 28.5 million head.
- The beef industry accounts for 57 percent of all farms with agricultural activity.
- The value of Australian cattle and calf production (including live export) is about $7.4 billion Aus.
- 77,164 properties raise 13.6 million beef cows and heifers.
- Australia produces four percent of the world’s beef supply and is the third largest beef exporter.
