Further to my post where I explained how Australia’s poor soils are largely incapable of growing much more than meat, this article landed in my news feed…
Here’s a list of what Australian farmers produce:
- Each year, on average each Australian farmer feeds 600 people.
- Agriculture powers 1.6 million Australian jobs.
- Australian farmers manage 48 per cent of the nation’s landmass.
- Cattle, wheat and whole milk are our top three commodities by value.
- More than 99% of Australia’s agricultural businesses are Australian owned.
- Out of the $58.1 billion worth of food and fibre Australian farmers produced in 2015-16 77 per cent ($44.8 billion) was exported.
- 6.8 million hectares of agricultural land has been set aside by Australian farmers for conservation and protection purposes.
- Australian farmers are among the most self-sufficient in the world, with government support for Australian farms representing just 1% of farming income. In Norway it is 62%, Korea 49%, China 21%, European Union 19% and United States 9%.
Farm facts by commodity
- In total, Australian beef cattle farmers produce 2.5 million tonnes of beef and veal each year. Australians eat an average 26kg of beef per person, per year.
- Australians consume an average of 45.3kg of chicken meat per person, per year. This not only cements chicken’s position as Australian consumers’ favourite meat, but also makes Australia one of the largest consumers of chicken meat in the world!
- In a normal year, Australia’s cotton growers produce enough cotton to clothe 500 million people.
- Australia produces about 3 per cent of the world’s cotton but is the fifth largest exporter, behind the USA, India, Brazil, Uzbekistan.
- Australian dairy farmers produce 9,539 million litres of whole milk per year with the farmgate value of milk production being $4.3 billion.
- On average, each Australian eats 3.08kg of dried fruit per year. Total Australian dried fruit exports in 2015–16 totalled 5,000 tonnes and was valued at $19.4 million.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
ry long way away. I still thought at the time that renewables would ‘save us’, or at the very least that energy efficiency would be taken up on a massive scale. None of those things happened.
