Every Western Australian farmer knows that we suffer from a summer drought each year.

Our summers are hot and dry, with at best the odd thunderstorm to break up the dust.

Come winter, our droughts are broken when the southern fronts start to break through, usually in April, but historically, the big break is later in May and even some years in June.

Come Easter, farmers start looking to the sky to see if this year is going to be an early start to seeding and pasture growth or if the waiting game is going to commence in earnest.

Come ANZAC Day and most farmers will have given up waiting and started seeding dry.

If a farmer has been unlucky during the previous year being dry, they will have had a long dry summer with limited pasture and a poor harvest, as the rains did not come bringing the millimetres that they needed to have a good year.

On average, most of our farmers across the Wheatbelt and Great Southern have an historical winter growing rainfall of between 200mm and 400mm, more as you approach the coast, less as you go inland.

If the rains come at the right time, they can grow magnificent crops and bountiful pastures. Miss out, as parts of the northern Wheatbelt and patches of the Great Southern and South West did last year, then things quickly become grim.

2023/24 has been grim for many Western Australian farmers, coming off the two previous years of record rainfall, record crops, and record sheep and cattle prices.

But everything collapsed last year, and it’s gotten worse over summer as the only records being broken are the price of stock feed going up and the price of livestock going down.

Add to that, the water reserves in farmers’ dams are now running dangerously low and farmers are being forced to quit stock at rates that are competitive with the price of a bullet.  

As farmers look to the sky, wondering if it will be a back-to-back winter drought, they also look at dismay at the Federal government as it continues its push to end the live sheep trade.

What’s the trade got to do with the weather? For our farmers, the link is so obvious they remain dumbfounded that the Government has not joined the dots.

When the rains don’t come, the livestock go on the boat, preserving both the soil and the bank balance.

It’s how we operate in the West; it’s how we have managed the risk of drought for over 70 years since the Middle East shipping trade commenced.

With no large domestic market to take processed meat and a ravenous mining industry that consumes all our spare labour, there is no spare capacity in our abattoirs to take a deluge of livestock when the rains dry up.

But does the Federal government care or even understand?

It seems not, as they keep promising the impossible to build a processing system that replicates the Eastern states market.

But we are not the East; we are the West. We don’t get summer rains for year-round feed; we don’t have tens of thousands of farms stretching 3000km from Victoria in the south to Queensland in the north providing competition in the saleyard.

We don’t have half a million people getting off planes migrating wanting jobs; we don’t have 25 million consumers providing a large domestic market, or large amounts of airfreight capacity to take chilled product to foreign markets.

What we do have is a Federal government that has scared off our pressure relief valve, the Middle East buyers and the ships that we now desperately need to remove our excess stock before they are unsalable, and farmers are forced to destroy them.

Western Australian farmers can deal with drought, we have one every year, but it’s governments that ultimately control the market, the market for labour, the market for domestic supermarket competition, and most importantly the market for our exports.

The Federal government is failing farmers in the West on all three. Our only hope is it rains soon, but even then, where are the buyers?”