Unlike humans, sheep are not polled every five years to determine their population size and location. Instead, numbers are estimated each year, informed by processing rates, cross-border trade figures, live export trade figures, accepted lambing rates and so on. It’s not an exact science but it provides a relatively clear picture – and if we gave the picture a title, it would be called Peak Sheep.
The gradual build through the wheatbelt’s establishment was part of Australia ‘riding the sheep’s back’ to wool-based prosperity. The steep incline in the sixties is reminiscent of the face of Bluff Knoll and stamped the brand of ‘wheat and sheep’ on Australian farming. But it was during the heady days circa 1990, when there were three times as many ovine wandering the paddocks of WA as there are today, where Mount Sheep became capped in snow. For varying reasons, many farmers have gradually decided that sheep are not worth it, and the descent has been clear and consistent in the decades that have followed.
Just like sheep, there is no census as to the allocation of hectares to varying farmland purposes but there is an obvious correlation - sheep and a wheat crop in head are mutually exclusive after all. The estimate back in Peak Sheep is that only 5 million hectares were allocated for grain production every year. If you consider that the wheatbelt had been fully stretched to its current size by then, this year’s record grain harvest grown on 9 million hectares only occurred due to far fewer of the woolly buggers standing around occupying space.
Current satellite technology accessed by GIWA to estimate each year’s crop size is much more advanced in determining what is grown across what area each year than estimates of the past; and an extra million hectares was scoured by seeders last year compared to just 5 years ago. If we average a cereal yield of 3 tonnes per hectare in a good year, then no wonder we had a bin buster.
Besides vacant sheep territory, hectares have also moved to the cropping side of the ledger through wetter south-west country drying out and the ill-fated tax driven southern tree schemes literally being chopped and chipped and land turned back to broadacre. But environmental challenges such as salinity and diminishing rainfall patterns haven’t gone away, and the new threat of large, multinationals buying marginal land and turning it back to scrub for carbon offsets will also nibble away on the fringes.
Whether further sheep declines will occur from the looming live sheep trade ban is unknown, but the impact on additional hectares for grain will be less, as the existing sheep flock is working more within the cropping system than the other way around.
Peak Sheep has long passed and, at least from a hectare perspective, we may have just crested Mount Grain.
