Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Low Soil Productivity Impacts Ag Productivity
In Collapse, Jared Diamond points out that low average productivity of Australian soils has had major economic consequences for Australian agriculture, forestry and fisheries. The nutrients present in arable soils at the beginning of European style agriculture were quickly exhausted. In effect, Australia’s first farmers were inadvertently mining their soils for nutrients. Since then, nutrients have had to be added artificially in the form of fertilizer, increasing costs compared to more fertile soils overseas.
Low soil productivity means low growth rates and low average yields. Therefore a larger area of land has to be cultivated than in other countries to obtain similar yields. So fuel and maintenance costs for machinery also tend to be relatively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwester Australia, part of Australia’s so-call wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas. Wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients have to be added artificially as fertilizer. This makes the “wheat-belt” a gigantic flowerpot in which, just as in a real flowerpot, the sand provides nothing more than the stuff, the medium, that holds the plants.
As a result of the extra expenses due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents. So why do they persist?
Low soil productivity means low growth rates and low average yields. Therefore a larger area of land has to be cultivated than in other countries to obtain similar yields. So fuel and maintenance costs for machinery also tend to be relatively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwester Australia, part of Australia’s so-call wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas. Wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients have to be added artificially as fertilizer. This makes the “wheat-belt” a gigantic flowerpot in which, just as in a real flowerpot, the sand provides nothing more than the stuff, the medium, that holds the plants.
As a result of the extra expenses due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents. So why do they persist?
