Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Tasmania’s agricultural future. (AIAST Conf Presentation Edited)
At the core of Tasmania’s ability to have a long term quality based agricultural future is the quality of our natural resources. Whether soils, water or the supporting natural systems, their quality is paramount to both our ability to produce and also to the marketability of that product.
Given the relatively small land mass we occupy, and divide that by a third and we are not talking about large slabs of land. But what we do have is highly productive while ever we continue to support that capacity and not run it down. And that is the catch.
All farmers and land managers are managers of natural resources. But they can generally only see their patch and maybe a bit beyond. The task for NRM organisations is to provide a much broader perspective to planning and day to day activities at a farm and regional level and everywhere in between. This perspective involves understanding the knowledge that exists at all those levels, including the knowledge that exists at a farm level from many generations of observation, and working to make sense of it at the landscape level.
Why bother? Because we are not ultimately dealing with individual farms when it comes to managing natural resources. What happens 5 farms up the valley has a direct impact on your farm over time. And so for the state to continue to maintain and improve its productive capacity, we need to be managing the big picture of our natural resources.
But it does not stop there. Just having the knowledge at an institutional level is no help to anyone and so NRM organisations along with others continue to have a key role in extending and helping apply that perspective.
One of the reasons the NRM regions have been actively supporting, investing in and developing property management planning is as a mechanism to do just this. We are able to collect information at a property level, add that to our knowledge at a catchment and regional level (and sometimes state level) and build a reasonable picture of where we are at with our natural resources and the issues which are arising that need to be thought about and acted on. That same mechanism allows us to provide a landscape perspective into planning at a farm level.
But not only does good natural resource management maintain productive capacity, it supports Tasmanian agricultures chief advantage, marketing our image. While the marketing itself is not a key NRM role, providing some of the underpinning sustainability management frameworks for the marketers to use is. Branding or image increasingly requires verification and demonstration of claims. And because NRM bodies are squarely in the space of supporting natural resource management, we are well placed to support some of the foundations that demonstrate our agricultural credentials.
We are, whether we like it or not, one of the more agriculturally reliant states in Australia. I think it is a good thing but it does mean the community at large needs to have an appreciation of this and a stronger connection to agriculture.
At a more domestic level, we need to bring a great understanding of sustainable agriculture to urban communities. Until consumers (and that includes industries which value add primary produce) better understand the impact they have on natural resources and the people managing them, the agricultural sector at large will find maintaining natural resource capital increasingly difficult.
And finally, for Tasmania to prosper, we do need to make good use of the resources we have and the irrigation development process is obviously seeking to do just this. And as with any development which dramatically changes industry, especially a natural resource based industry such as agriculture, there needs to be the constructive but sometimes annoying word of caution. When it comes to irrigation development there are plenty of those. We must continue to examine the sustainability, from source to use, to ensure we do not exceed the capacity of our natural resources. And from all indications this is occurring. We just cannot afford to stop keeping our eye on it.
John Ruskin famously said, “The bitterness of poor quality is forgotten long after the pleasure of low cost is forgotten”.
The role of NRM organisations in Tasmanian agriculture is to work in partnership with the sector to bring perspectives, activities and initiatives which support the long term sustainability of Agriculture in Tasmania so that in 50 or 100 years time we are not regretting the poor quality of our actions now.
