I would like to tell you a story, a parable if you like. It concerns a farmer, and let's call him Joe. This is part one.

Farmer Joe has been a farmer all his adult life. At first he worked the land with his father, and later he inherited the farm. This was the life he knew. The farm was central to his life. Apart from several years at university, this was where he grew up. It was where he learned the lessons of life from his father. This was where he brought his wife and where his children were born and were growing up. He even imagined being buried there one day, under the massive old eucalypt beside the machinery shed. He felt that farming was more than a job. It was something so integral to him that should he not be able to live and work on the farm, he felt an essential part of his being would simply die.

Joe, and his father before him had followed the ebb and flow of the markets, and at one time had raised stock for the beef market. At another time they had tried their hand at a few sidelines, raising Emu's and had even considered Alpacas, and in one wild flight of fancy had looked into raising Deer for the venison market. However, what Joe loved most of all was the smell of freshly turned soil. Some people called it the smell of gold, but for Joe it was the smell of life. At the end of days of ploughing his fields, there was a deep satisfaction to measure the furrows and gauge their evenness, and follow their lines across the rolling land. Later, he would often have to catch himself as he would murmur a grunt of pride and pleasure when the seed was sown, and seedlings planted, and he saw the rich green colour of young plants beginning to carpet his long hours of ploughing.

During his intense years at the Rural Training College he had put in many hours at grasping the science of farm management, animal husbandry, business management, soil chemistry and plant biology. He had worked hard at understanding the threats to fruitful farming - market fluctuations, pest attacks in the forms of mildew, plant diseases, insect attacks, animal diseases. Years afterward he still drew on that foundational time of learning. Of course he knew that his learning had never stopped, and the practical hands-on work had perhaps been the real school of learning, and though sometimes he felt he could have done without those years at the Rural Training College, deep down he realised how valuable they had been to training his mind to carefully and logically assess, evaluate and test the things he did on the farm in objective ways independently of the popular prevailing practices.

The farm had always provided a living for the family. It wasn't a gold mine, but with careful management Joe's family had been able to live modestly. It was hard work. Sometimes it was a grind. His hands were calloused and the farm soil and grease of his machinery was ingrained into his large hands. Joe was used to the hard work, and most times he didn't mind it. Lately though, the markets were less predictable than usual, the yields of his crops had been in decline for several years. Things were quite tight financially. The hours of work he had to put in, though no more than before, seemed to be longer for less result.

Because of this, he had begun to question various things about what he was doing, and the circumstances in which he found himself. He wondered about the methods he was using, and his ability to take advantage of flat market conditions. He even began questioning the science he was taught way back at college. There was no doubt that this was a good thing to do, and here was one of those times when he really appreciated the training he had been given at college on how to think and follow things through to reliable conclusions.

What was disturbing this evaluation process were some unsettling stories of farms in neighbouring shires and states where they were doing some really great things. As the stories went, these farms were expanding at unheard of rates, especially when things were in decline everywhere else. They were having to buy more land, enlarge their machinery budget many times over, employ administrators and full time book keepers just to cope with all the extra work they were generating in their expansion programs. No one was telling how they were able to do this, but the stories all seemed to have some substance to them, and it all seemed to come down to new farming methods. (to be continued) AE