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Farming's future lies outside the gate

By Daniel Lewis, Regional Reporter
June 9, 2004

Weekend warriors - the tribe of smaller farmers who earn a lot of their income outside the farm gate - now outnumber their full-time counterparts, a new farm research organisation says.

Mick Keogh, executive director of the Australian Farm Institute, says the situation has arisen because farms with an output of less than $200,000 a year are generally no longer viable without off-farm income.

Despite the huge subsidies paid to farmers in Britain and the US, weekend warriors numerically dominate their agricultural sector now, too, as the number of full-time farmers rapidly declines.

Mr Keogh said the number of "commercial" farm enterprises in Australia had fallen by about 15 per cent over the past 12 years.

The debut edition of the institute's Farm Policy Journal has papers from Australia, Britain, Denmark, the United States and New Zealand. Mr Keogh said all "noted significant falls in the numbers of full-time professional farmers in their countries over the past few decades and a rise in the number of part-timers".

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"Increased global competition means that only the most efficient farmers remain viable, which usually means larger-scale production, farm consolidation and fewer farmers. The only alternative for small-scale farm businesses is to supplement farm income with off-farm work."

Mr Keogh says Australian agriculture is made up of three tribes.

"Hunter-gatherers" are big broadacre farmers with sufficient scale and capital to produce more than $200,000 of agricultural output a year.

"Control freaks" are farmers with smaller but more intensive farm operations such as pork, poultry, dairy and horticulture.

"Weekend warriors" are farmers with less than $100,000 a year of output who are "probably not commercially viable without a continuing injection of off-farm income, and who allocate an increasing proportion of their (or their partner's) working hours to off-farm employment".

Mr Keogh said the average farm in the "weekend warrior" category now got more than $30,000 of its income off-farm, with $22,000 of that coming from wages and salaries.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics show that farms in that category had an annual average rate of return of minus 2.6 per cent between 1991-92 and 2001-02, while the hunter-gather category had a return of 4 to 7.7 per cent.

Mr Keogh said the off-farm income trend was a positive one for small farmers because it meant the sector "isn't becoming a disaster every time there's a commodity price collapse or a drought".

Governments needed to take the change into account, however, in areas such as drought policy, where off-farm income has automatically disqualified many farming families from support.

Mr Keogh said another key trend was the pressure on farmers to provide "public-good environmental services" such as preserving biodiversity.

But while farmers in Europe and North America were being given public funds to change farm practices for the public good, their counterparts in Australia were being forced to change "almost entirely on command-and-control regulatory measures, which simply don't work for farmers or for the environment".