Thanks for your comments.

I don’t have any answers why sensible Australians are not more concerned by unsustainable farming practices. I have travelled quite a bit through the centre of Australia and one of my abiding memories was in far western Queensland. I was on a dirt track, eight hours drive from the nearest homestead, beautiful, barren landscape that only Australia can produce, with nothing in sight as far as the eye could see. Then, I noticed a small shape appear and advance. I watched it approach, assuming it was a car. It turned out it was a cow – grazing. Nothing summed up better the unsustainable nature of Australian dryland grazing practices. All that land for a single cow.

Partial cause of drought is the clearing of land. Most cleared land in Australia has been cleared for livestock grazing – e.g. about 96% of land clearing in Queensland before the ban was for livestock, 4% for everything else.

In Australia, livestock farming uses much more water than plant products. Per kilo of product, about 4.5 times the amount of water used for plant products – calculated from ABS and ABARE figures. For example, a litre of milk requires about 4000 litres of water to produce – domestic ‘virtual water’ usage is huge, making direct domestic water usage figures seem like a trickle. We need to start looking at how much water is used to produce what we consume.

Assuming greenhouse gases are part of the cause of the drought, livestock, particularly sheep and cows, are largely responsible. Methane is a very bad greenhouse gas, over 20 years, it is over 70 times as potent as CO2.
Livestock production accounts for at least 37% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years, calculated from the 2006 figures obtained from the Australian Greenhouse Emissions Information System (AGEIS). These calculations were submitted to the government for its recent Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, trying to get livestock emissions included.
For comparisson, plant farming produces about 2% of Australia’s emissions, for about 2.5 times more plant foods produced.

I’ve been completely stumped for a number of years: why aren’t supposedly sensible, rational, socially-concerned individuals, concerned about the very idea of farming livestock in Australia. With goodwill I ask for your ideas on this, if you can provide a sensible answer to this question, I’d be much obliged.

a m w h y c at y a h o o dot c o m dot a u (my email address, take out spaces and add usual punctuation )