Australia's farming productivity rate is falling, despite the nation's farmers efficiency
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00:00Music
00:06I think optimism is what you need, for sure.
00:10There are few times in a year as hopeful as sowing.
00:13And if you are ready, then there's plenty of reason to be optimistic.
00:18It's exciting, there's opportunity to say that the year could be great.
00:23At Lilliput, near Rutherglen in Victoria's northeast,
00:28James Russell is planting wheat and canola.
00:31Australia wide, farming is on track for one of its highest value years.
00:35But this fifth generation farmer says the spoils won't come without risk.
00:41Where my grandfather was farming, sort of where I got a lot of my knowledge from,
00:46he often spoke about the costings of things way back then.
00:51Sort of that dollar to make two dollars.
00:54That was the margin, you know, you put a dollar in to make two.
00:58Whereas now, what we're seeing on a net profit scale,
01:02we're sort of seeing ten dollars to make eleven.
01:05The cost of inputs, such as seed, fertiliser, fuel, land and labour,
01:11mean farmers like James rely on being paid well for their outputs.
01:15In this case, crops.
01:17We are looking at around fourteen hundred dollars a hectare gross margin
01:24to actually produce a crop nowadays.
01:26If we don't receive those higher outputs,
01:28we've got a big bill to fit at the end of the year.
01:31It's the difference between what's going in and what's coming out of the farm business
01:35that shows why farm productivity really matters.
01:38So we look at productivity in two ways.
01:41We kind of look at it in the sense of, well, how much more output are you getting
01:44from a given set of inputs?
01:46Or are you getting more output from your already existing use?
01:50But in a sign that the National Farmers Federation says should be ringing alarm bells,
01:55Australia's farm productivity rate is barely growing at all.
01:59The annual rate in the 80s and 90s was 2.2%.
02:03Today, it's closer to half a percent.
02:06And that's kind of put us back in terms of our relative to international competitors,
02:12where they're getting stronger productivity growth.
02:14Now, the thing with that is that despite them getting stronger productivity growth,
02:18they're starting from a lower base than we are.
02:20Now, this is the simplest of my life,
02:24well, I'm looking for Ali Keefe and I will see the next minute,
02:26clicking a road in the스가st.