Australian farmers will have to get used to an even hotter climate

TWICE A WEEK Ambrose Doolan pays for a lorry to drive 1,000km to stock up on fodder. His cattle farm near the town of Coonabarabran, in northern New South Wales, turned to dust after the rains failed this winter; few farmers in the state have feed to spare. To keep his cows from starving, Mr Doolan relies on a potent blend of hay, molasses and cotton seed, trucked in from across the country. His animals chew through 30 tonnes of it every day, at vast cost. Mr Doolan has farmed through dry spells before. None, he says, was as severe as this.

The drought afflicts a huge area of eastern Australia, running from south-western Queensland into South Australia. Some spots have been short of rain for years, but a hot, dry winter has pushed the region into crisis. Almost all of New South Wales, a state responsible for a quarter of Australia’s agricultural output by value, is parched. Trees have died, crops have withered, animals have shrunk to skeletons. In Coonabarabran, where water is strictly rationed, some residents have moved their washing machines outside so that the run-off can hose their gardens.

Drought is a fact of life in Australia. The sun-beaten country has struggled through at least ten catastrophic ones since the mid-19th century. But they are now more frequent and severe. Scientists at the University of Melbourne, reconstructing rainfall patterns using tree rings, ice cores, sediment and corals, reckon that the big droughts of the past few decades were more acute than any in the past 400 years.

A “double whammy” of climate trends indicates that worse lies ahead, says Will Steffen, an American climate scientist. First, the Australian continent has warmed by about 1°C since 1910, making droughts more crippling when they occur. Second, rainfall is ever less reliable. The fronts that used to drop rain over Australia’s southerly breadbaskets have begun to stray southward, to the open ocean. Since the mid-1990s, deluges in south-eastern Australia have declined by around 15% in the crop-growing seasons of late autumn and early winter. Mr Steffen predicts a further drop of 15% by around 2030.

Many farmers have been forced to send their animals to slaughter. The cull may leave the number of livestock in Australia at a record low; wheat yields could be the feeblest in a decade. Those like Mr Doolan who keep their animals alive at great expense are gamblers. They bet that when the rains return and other farmers start rebuilding, the value of their herds will soar. Previous droughts have taken about a percentage point off Australia’s growth rate. And the strain is not just economic: the suicide rate in the outback has risen sharply during the latest drought.

State and federal governments have responded with billions of dollars in emergency funds for cheap loans, household allowances and mental-health services. In New South Wales farmers can claim subsidies of up to A$30,000 ($21,000) for transporting feed and livestock. Landholders are grateful but want more. “A tin of beans doesn’t feed the cows,” grumbles an old hand in Coonabarabran.

But some city folk argue that taxpayers should not have to subsidise farmers in tough years, given that profits in good times can be enormous. The government has not matched emergency handouts with a long-term plan to cope with global warming. On a recent rural tour, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, suggested that farmers do not “care one way or the other” whether climate change contributes to the problem. His right-of-centre government has ditched a policy that would have enshrined emissions targets in law, all but abandoning goals set under the UN’s Paris Agreement three years ago. Australia’s emissions have been rising.

The dry spell shows no sign of breaking. In Coonabarabran, Mr Doolan watches the skies. If rain comes before Christmas, he says, his investment will pay off. In future he may stockpile bumper crops in silos. “Drought is like the tide,” he muses. If he weathers one, there is sure to be another.