Sustaining a nation
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 27: Food Chain
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
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We visited our relations in spring last year. They raise their living from the central western plains of New South Wales, near Forbes. This is not the kind of country where city folk buy hobby farms, or aspire to holiday homes. A day's drive from Sydney, it is not easy or pretty. It is working-farm country, straightforward and pragmatic, although the flat pastures and waving wheat have their own beauty in good times. These are not good times.
Lambs were fetching four dollars a kilogram at the Forbes saleyards in the week of our visit. That is how they are sold – not on the weight of the bleating animals, but on a calculation of what their carcasses will yield in meat once the hide is removed, the internal organs scooped out, the blood drained away and the head, feet and tail disposed of. Only we city slickers, leaning over the railings of the yard, smelling the manure, watching the animals roll their eyes and push in fear as the auctioneers shout, see a chasm between the cold calculation of ‘dressed weight' and the reality of living creatures.
The animals are not only animals. They are units of production. Their entire lives – the costs of rearing, feeding and transporting – are calculated in dollars, with the end point being dressed weight, on which the farmer is paid. According to Meat & Livestock Australia, the costs of production for an efficient lamb producer are around two dollars a kilogram, dressed weight. An inefficient producer might have costs as high as $3.34, leaving little room for profit and what the corporation calls the ‘lifestyle aspirations that your farm must support'.
After the dressed weight is calculated and the farmer paid, fat is trimmed. Bone is cut away. More blood is lost. Up to half the dressed weight disappears between sale of the living beast and dinner.
The owner of the farm we visited, Graeme McIntosh, has a saying: ‘You've got livestock, you've got dead stock.' There is little room for sentiment, yet they take such care. We heard about how Graeme and his partner, Yvonne, spent hours picking barley-grass seeds out of the eyes of their sheep. The animals have two eyelids, and the sharp seeds get caught in between. The pain can drive animals mad, or, in the cool language of farming publications, lead them to ‘lose condition'. To pick out the seeds, Yvonne had to hold the animals down, one by one, warm waxy wool against her work shirt, while Graeme took to them with tweezers.
In the yards near the back door of the farmhouse, Yvonne keeps an enclosure of baby lambs who have lost their mothers. She buys powdered milk in the supermarket, mixes it, and feeds it to the lambs morning and evening in old soft drink bottles topped with a baby's bottle teat. My children love to help with the feeding, although the hungry lambs butt so hard that it can be difficult to hang on to the bottle. Once, the children found an orphan lamb close to death and brought it back to the farmhouse. After a few days of Yvonne's care, it was clearly going to live, and the children named it Lucky. On our most recent visit, they asked what had become of it. Lucky had gone, of course. My husband suggested that next time a better name might be Chop, or Rolled Roast.
I have heard tales of how, many years ago, sheep on a farm near here had to be put down and buried in a mass pit in a time of drought, when they could be neither kept nor sold. The pointless mass killing could have broken hearts but after some hours, as each carcass hit the trench, the people doing the shooting broke into song. It was the song from Monty Python's Life of Brian: ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.'
When we visited the Forbes saleyards last year – when lambs were being sold for four dollars a kilogram, dressed weight – lamb forequarter chops in Woolworths and Coles cost around eleven dollars a kilo. In between was transport, slaughter, more transport, butchering, the packing into plastic trays and all that is involved in maintaining the bright lights and cold cabinets of the modern supermarket. The profits on any one piece of meat are not big. The two big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, make big money, but largely because of the volume of stuff they sell, rather than enormous mark-ups. The industry relies on volume.
IN PREVIOUS YEARS, I have visited the farm in summer, when the region is consumed in the business of the wheat harvest. Combine harvesters work through the night. Farmers survive with little sleep. Wheat dust covers everything. I have sat in a truck on its way to the silos, which stand silent for most of the year but at harvest time are so busy you have to watch yourself or be run over. Selling wheat is not as simple as it once was, when the grower took the Wheat Board pool price and left it at that. These days, farmers can sell for cash at the silo or take a fixed-grade contract, which can give a premium price but leaves them exposed if the grade or yield of the crop fails to live up to the contract.
There are other buyers at the silos as well: biscuit manufacturers and exporters offering their own prices for different grades of wheat. The truck drivers use mobile phones to keep in touch, and calculations are made on whether to go to one silo or another, factoring in the cost of fuel and driving time. The trucks pull in under the elevated office. Samples are taken from deep within their loads, and measured on the spot for moisture and protein. The higher the protein level, the higher the price. Wheat that contains too much moisture is rejected and must go back to the farm, perhaps to be stored for feed.
All this activity, all this hard work. All the fertiliser, the fuel and the rain. It seems extraordinary to me that at home I can buy a loaf of bread – baked, packed, wrapped and sliced for my convenience – for just $1.80.
There hasn't been a decent wheat crop in Forbes for some years. The Yarrabandai silo is silent and empty. On its side there is ironic graffiti: ‘The Hub of the Universe.' There is not a soul to be seen.
The lives of my farming relations are not about the Epicurean, nor about the personal relationships of farmers' markets, nor about any of the fads and fashions of food that haunt the city. My relatives are preoccupied with the hard and gritty business of the industrialised production of food, which remains the means by which most Australians are fed. They are proud of this.
In the city, we risk making a fetish of food. There is so much of it, and it is so cheap. There have never been so many cookbooks, celebrity chefs, unusual ingredients, or attention paid to gradations of taste in oils and nuts, breads and vinegars. There are parts of the city where, for hundreds of metres, every business is a café or a restaurant or a fast-food outlet. In living memory, we have moved from a situation in which most people were worried about not getting enough food, and in which the breadwinner was preoccupied with just that, to one in which most of us worry about how not to overeat.
Yet, while food has become so fancy and fussed over, the growing of it has become less important to our national economy and our national psyche. In the 1950s, agriculture – mostly food production – made up almost a third of the nation's gross domestic product. Today it is 3 per cent.
Growing food is about connections, but these days it is also about disconnections. The country and the city seem out of sympathy with each other. We visited the farm during the Sydney dust storm of September 2009. Graeme and Yvonne were scathing about the media coverage. In the farmhouse, dust storms are a weekly occurrence. Every nice thing in the house is in sealed plastic bags. The lounge-room chairs are permanently dressed in dust covers and still the fine red grit gets in everything. Reading about what happened in Sydney, Yvonne almost cracked a grin. ‘Those poor petals,' she said.
The farm is connected to the cities by roads, but more powerfully by money, and economics, and what is metaphorically described as a supply chain. Every link on the chain is a location of tension, of the playing out of competing interests.
A full text version of this article will become available during the course of this edition.