Get big or get out

Broadacre farming and the efficiency ethos

Most broadacre farmers – farmers engaged in dryland farming requiring large tracts of land for grazing and cropping – their advisers, financiers and politicians argue for the need to maintain a program of increased productivity and efficiency. Farm efficiency and productivity, it is argued, will ensure that farmers and their families receive a reliable income stream from their investments in farming; while for local, state and federal governments, increased productivity and efficiency will reduce governments’ need to underwrite the livelihoods of farming families. The rationalisation of farming properties brought about under the aegis of such aims has seen families move out of farming, and for many this also means out of broadacre-farming regions as farms are amalgamated into larger entities – created variously by neighbouring farmers, outside investors and property speculators, and large corporate agribusinesses buying up their land. Quite differently from local farmers, most outside investors focus solely on financial gain, with little regard for community interests or stewardship of the local environment. The neoliberal focus on productivity for continuing family-farm viability contributes to the collateral damage of reduced populations in broadacre-farming regions, ushering in other changes that have grave social, economic and environmental consequences for farmers, other rural residents and the nation as a whole.