Background Briefing

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

This program was originally broadcast on 6 July 2003.
Stu Higgins: G’day, I’m Stu Higgins. I’m a farmer and I grow irrigated cotton. For the last year I have been working with the listeners of Radio National on my farm on the Darling Downs in south-west Queensland.
Alicia Brown: You’re listening to Background Briefing on Radio National; I’m Alicia Brown, and I worked with Stu Higgins on the Grow Your Own Project on the weekday program, Bush Telegraph. Grow Your Own ran for 10 months and thousands of listeners took part. Over time, they came to face the same dilemmas, the same hard decisions, unpredictable events and financial realities as real life cotton farmers face all the time.

As consumers we have an embarrassment of choice; there might be 10 different T-shirts in the drawer, and in the fridge you could take your pick from skim, light, or calcium-enriched milk. And as consumers we want all this, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, to come fast and cheap. The farmer, in our case study the cotton farmer, has to meet that demand.

Today’s story started at a dinner party.

Stu Higgins: She leaned across the table and called me an environmental vandal. I just looked at her and said, ‘Nice jeans and T-shirt’. It happens all the time. At first when I tell people I’m a farmer, they comment on how hard it must be working on the land, and they’re always fascinated to know what time I wake up in the morning.

Then they normally ask me what I grow. And I tell them, ‘I’m a farmer who grows irrigated cotton, and I grow the clothes that you’re wearing right now.’ I’d been called an environmental vandal just once too often, and this time, it was different. This time I was talking to an ABC radio presenter and the conversation ended with a challenge.

Alicia Brown: The person who took up the challenge was Sarah Macdonald; she was presenting Bush Telegraph at the time. Stu said he’d give Radio National listeners a 5-acre paddock to farm, so they could plant a crop, they could make the necessary decisions, and grow cotton their way, either by phone or through our website. And so, Grown Your Own was born.

The Radio National listeners who took part began their farming adventure just as western Queensland experienced a long drought; that’s something every working farmer has to deal with. Stu Higgins became part of the Bush Telegraph team, and reported in regularly from the field.

Stu Higgins: I really would like to see a greater connection and a greater understanding of what rural people and what irrigators and farmers are trying to do, and what urban people or people who haven’t had the opportunity to have access to the rural environment, to have a go and to just appreciate some of the fluctuations. The other part of the challenge is, we all wear the clothes, and I just would like to create that connection between what people are wearing, and what I’m wearing, to how we grow it and the decisions I have to make, which aren’t always easy.

Alicia Brown: They’re not easy decisions. To grow cotton, one of Australia’s most controversial crops, you have to grapple with all the big issues: genetic modification, pesticides and water. Today we’ll take you through what happened, and exactly what it taught us.

Firstly, genetic modification. Cotton can be engineered to protect against the heliothis caterpillar. It’s almost halved the amount of chemicals used to control this pest. Without GM cotton, it can take up to 10 sprays to keep a crop going in a season.

And then there’s the big one: water, especially in a drought year. This season, 1.24-million-million litres was poured onto Australia’s cotton crop. That’s 2-1/2 Sydney Harbours. Using that water, pesticide and Genetically Modified cotton, the industry generates $1.5-billion a year. Don’t forget it also spits out 3-1/2 million bales of cotton that end up as T-shirts, baby clothes, tampons and banknotes.

Tractor sounds

Stu Higgins: These are all big issues for a farmer to be thinking about when he’s in the paddock. They play out on my farm every day. But they’re also big issues for the consumer to think about, they’re woven into the clothes they wear.

We’ve all got views on how these controversial issues should be handled, and that made growing a crop on national radio lively, to say the least.

Alicia Brown: Listeners could vote by phoning in or going online to our website. Whatever the majority voted for, Stu would carry out in the listeners’ paddock.

Stu Higgins: Well, as you can see, it’s flat, which is what we need for irrigation. I think it’s about 320-metres long. This paddock on the farm is quite close to the creek; that’s going to be another interesting challenge for the listeners and those wanting to be involved in the challenge. We’ve got to take those considerations into account. It’s near the road, so it’s extremely visible. All the neighbours and all the people in the district will be able to see how you’re going. I’ve purposely done it that way because it does have a big impact on the way you do things. My paddock will be watered from the same head ditch; it will be within a metre from your field, from the Grow Your Own field. I might be doing things a little bit differently, you can ask me any time what I’m up to, I’d be more than happy to let you know what I’m doing, and the reasons as to why I’m doing it.

My first little piece of advice, if I could be so bold, would be to say planning is essential.

Alicia Brown: The planning meant that before they’d even put a seed in the ground, Stu and the listeners had to work out what type of cotton they’d plant, GM or conventional. They had to work out how they’d control weeds and insects, how they’d water the crop in a drought, and to start with, how they’d fertilise the soil. Now the soil needs nutrients and these could be supplied organically, with cow manure from the local feedlot, or synthetically with chemical blends.

While Stu was at home greasing the tractor, listeners from across Australia were phoning in their suggestions.

Stu Higgins: We disagreed from the outset. The listeners opted to fertilise the Grow Your Own field with manure, and I went with the synthetic fertiliser. I used a urea blend, so I could control the nutrients the plants need. Whatever’s lacking in the soil was replaced in the right amounts.

Manure is the more ‘organic option’, and I’d like to be green and go manure. Unfortunately I can’t control what comes out of a cow and it takes a lot more than just one season to get the right balance of nutrients in the soil for an organic farming system.

I’d made a promise, and that was to do exactly what the listeners wanted. I ordered in 32 tonnes of manure and arranged for the spreading contractor to be ready to start work for when Sarah Macdonald and the Bush Telegraph team came up to visit the farm.

Sarah Macdonald: OK, well at the edge of the field is a giant pile of poo basically. This is our manure, Stu?

Stu Higgins: This is the manure. It came in two semi trailer loads, 16 tonnes each.

Sarah Macdonald: It smells good, it smells like good manure.

Stu Higgins: It does. It’s that living, organic smell I suppose, which is a nice smell.

Sarah Macdonald: And it’s much darker than the soil you’ve got in your fields.

Stu Higgins: Yes, it is darker, and it’s been screened, which is pretty important, so it’s quite fine. The biggest size might be, well looking there, roughly golf ball, and the smallest size, well a powder.

Sarah Macdonald: OK now, here’s your contractor who’s going to help us spread the manure. Is your name really Cox Cotton?

Cox Cotton: My name really is Cox Cotton, yes. It goes back many generations.

Sarah Macdonald: Now can we come with you?

Cox Cotton: Sure, away you go. Turning on the PTO shaft which runs the spinners on the back. Hang on to your hats, here we go.

Alicia Brown: The listeners who were deciding what Stu would do in the field on their behalf were a bit like backseat farmers. At first they didn’t really like the idea of growing cotton at all. Many said hemp would be a much better crop for all sorts of reasons, but cotton stayed.

Having accepted that they were growing cotton, listeners wanted to stay green, and overwhelmingly voted for manure. Stu did exactly as they wanted, but as it turned out, it was a bad choice. Manure simply doesn’t have enough nitrogen to replenish the soil and get the best yield.

At the Australian National University, David Dumaresq lectures in Human Ecology. He’s also an organic farmer himself. He says the outcome of the fertiliser challenge shows just how difficult it is to be purist about farming.

David Dumaresq: Listeners who were trying to do the farm management, were having to grapple with the actual nitty gritty of the farming practice, for which most of them were almost often profoundly ignorant. Lots of people were trying to do what they saw as more environmentally friendly farm management, without really knowing whether that was the case or not, whether it work and so on. And that illustrates the first level we have about trying to, if you like, farming more sustainable. What sort of changes can we make to farming practice; how can they be applied, and so on.

Alicia Brown: It also showed how hard it is to change a complex system like farming, quickly.

David Dumaresq: Agriculture, particularly farming, is embedded in wider systems. The greening of agriculture for instance, might be much more than just dealing with farm management systems. To think that we could just substitute one fertiliser input for a different one, is actually not the point. It probably wouldn’t have anything but maybe major yield loss. And nor do I think it would be particularly a sort of greening exercise of that farm management.

Alicia Brown: It takes a long time, years in fact, for a farmer to switch to organic methods. And during that time, he doesn’t bring in any income. It can take 10 years to build the soil up with enough natural nutrients to be productive; you can’t market your produce as organic until you get certification, and that takes three years.

There’s not a single organic cotton grower in Australia. Some have tried, and there are a few bales of organic cotton sitting in a warehouse in Brisbane, left over from an attempt in Warren, five years ago. No-one wants to pay what it cost to produce them. Organic farming can’t get the yields to keep up with consumer demand. It can’t pay the farmer for the years without income, and for the farmer it changes everything.

Stu Higgins: Asking a farmer to switch from conventional farming to organic farming, or from cotton to simply growing hemp, for me is the equivalent of asking a concert pianist to master the double bass. It’s all music, but using totally different instruments, and if you make the switch, it’s going to take you a long time to do it properly.

Alicia Brown: Just near Stu, on the Darling Downs of Queensland, Jeff Bidstrup farms cotton at a property called Prospect. Jeff was the last person in Australia to try growing organic cotton. From the ABC studios in Toowoomba, Jeff told us how it went.

Jeff Bidstrup: It went terribly. It was probably the worst year we could have ever picked for it, and I think off 300 acres, we grew six bales, or something like that. Terrible.

Alicia Brown: How does that compare to what you usually yield?

Jeff Bidstrup: I think that year we probably would have grown 900 bales of conventional cotton on it. We just couldn’t control the insects. Probably the worst insect year we’ve experienced in the last 10 or 15 years. In hindsight, it’s not even sustainable, it’s impossible to put enough fertiliser on, the soils where we were doing it, on the Jimbour Plain, and all the plain soils erode, you need to keep stubble on the soil, and ploughing is just a no-no, ploughing all the time. A chemical weed control is the best way of weed control. Even then we spent a lot of money on hand chipping and inter-row cultivating, but since then, chipping’s got much more expensive in Australia. I don’t think we could do it, to be honest with you, Alicia. Unless you’re already an organic grower and doing it on a reasonably small scale, I don’t honestly think it’s feasible. I’m sure it’s not We couldn’t switch over, we’ve converted that farm back to conventional farming we use zero till , and we’re saving our soil a lot better, the farm’s a lot healthier for it. Even fertiliser on a large scale, you’ve got to appreciate, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, and there’s just not enough cow manure to do all that in Australia.

Alicia Brown: Obviously you wouldn’t ever see the world’s cotton demand being supplied by organic cotton then?

Jeff Bidstrup: That’s just never going to happen. Particularly when the organic certification bodies won’t accept GM. It may have some potential to work if they accepted GM, because GM will control the insects.

Alicia Brown: So for you, Jeff, if I said to you, ‘Organic’s the way forward for farming’, what would you say back to me?

Jeff Bidstrup: If you offered me five times the price, I’d still say, ‘Thank you very much Alicia, but I don’t want to go broke.’

Alicia Brown: Now according to Jeff, if the listeners wanted to grow organic cotton and make money from it, they’d have to consider using genetically modified plants to control the insects. Well they got the chance to consider using GM in the next challenge, when they were asked what type of cotton they’d like to plant.

Stu Higgins: There are four types of plants a farmer can choose: conventional cotton, which was first discovered 4-1/2-thousand years ago. The other three are genetically modified and registered to Monsanto.

The first is Ingard cotton, generically modified for insect control, so when a specific grub eats the plant, the plant kills the grub.

The second is Roundup Ready cotton, which is genetically modified to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup; so you can spray all the weeds in the field with herbicide without affecting the cotton plants. And the last one is a genetically modified combination: it kills the grubs and survives the herbicide spray.

But the listeners would have none of it, and phoned in to voice their feelings.

Alicia Brown: Voting went through the roof, but there was an interesting division. Everyone who voted by phone wanted to grow conventional, natural cotton. But those who voted online, through the website wanted to grow a genetically modified variety. Here are some readings from some emails.

Alicia Brown: We don’t really know why there was this difference Perhaps those who voted through the website had time to think through the complexities more than those who just picked up the phone.

Stu Higgins: The Grow Your Own listeners voted for the conventional cotton variety. They differed from the majority of cotton farmers. Out of the 1200 growers in Australia, 95% plant a third of their farms with GM Ingard cotton, and I’m one of them.

It’s not all about the dollars, and I understand the precautionary principle. I believe most cotton farmers choose GM cotton for lifestyle reasons and to reduce pesticide use. I’ve sprayed my fair share of insects over the years.

Pest management is not just about spraying chemicals into the environment, if I decide to spray, I want to do the maximum amount of damage to the pest, with the minimum amount of damage to the environment. That’s a very, very difficult thing to do because of the weather.

Telephone weather message: Average wind speed for the last 15 minutes is 10.5 kilometres per hour, wind direction …

Stu Higgins: The best time to spray using a tractor, is from midnight till 6 in the morning. It’s here the farmers’ lifestyle enters the equation. Less spraying means less staying up all night driving tractors. An average-sized cotton farmer might sit in his tractor for about 700 hours a season. That’s driving 24 hours a day for a month. GM cotton may cut this back by about 15%. That’s less wear and tear on the tractor, and less wear and tear on farmers like Jeff Bidstrup.

Jeff Bidstrup: I find myself thinking that the frank and fruit thing, the tomato with the fish genes is something that doesn’t appeal to me either. In the case of cotton, I do find it difficult. In the case of most plants, yes, the more you understand the more comfortable you are with it. In all, since we’ve been growing it, I would say we’ve lost money growing GM because it’s been a steep learning curve; that GM cotton was one of the first GM products introduced, and there were ways of managing it and the varieties that were first brought out weren’t as good. So on balance we’re negative, but lifestyle-wise it’s nett positive, environment-wise it’s dramatically nett positive, and we think it’s a very positive way to go.

Alicia Brown: Jeff Bidstrup. Now while genetically modified cotton might make life easier on the farm, specialist in human ecology, David Dumaresq says we should be worried about what it does off the farm. David talks about what he calls ‘the environmental load’, a concept that says everything we do in the environment has an impact somewhere, every human action from breathing to walking to farming, uses energy and makes waste.

And when it comes to genetic engineering, the community has to weigh up where they want to carry the environmental load.

David Dumaresq: Everything we do has an environmental load to it, whether it be farming or driving a car. And one of the things about technology such as the gene tech approach to farming, is that many people have concerns that the environmental load will be borne way outside the particular farm that’s using that particular genetically modified crop or animal. So that although that farmer might be able to use 70% less insecticide or whatever it is, people I think are concerned, quite rightly, that there may be other, very widespread, even if low level, but maybe long-lasting, environmental impacts elsewhere.

Stu Higgins: This question of where environmental loads will be carried was played out in the Grow Your Own project on Radio National. From the University of Western Sydney, Professor of Agriculture, Peter Cornish.

Peter Cornish: If I was one of your listeners, I’d have voted for conventional cotton, because I have some very deep-seated reservations about the origins of that technology and its appropriateness at this point in time, or necessity at this point in time. And yet with my head, I’d say that cotton is perhaps the best case for genetically modified crops. If there’s to be a classic case, it’s cotton, because it has so reduced the use of pesticide.

Stu Higgins: Do you think the fact that cotton is worn and not consumed as a food source plays some impact on people’s minds?

Peter Cornish: Well it may have, there’s no doubt that people are much more concerned about what goes in the tum than goes in the bum, as you say, it’s like a vaccine doesn’t concern people, what goes in the tum does. But I think that consumers are becoming much more sophisticated in their ecological understanding now, and understand that GM crops, not just about what’s good for us to eat, but what is environmentally good or bad, and what is even good or bad in terms of developing industrial agriculture, which is too closely linked to a few major multinational companies, or a more community-based agriculture which is more closely connected to the rural communities and to their urban consumers.

Alicia Brown: Peter Cornish. One thing cotton farmer Stu Higgins did as a nice compromise between neighbours and between ideologies, was to plant a buffer zone of sorghum between the paddocks.



Stu Higgins: Australia is the driest continent on earth and cotton loves water. Ideally, farmers should grow crops that best suit the Australian landscape, and ideally consumers should demand products that would best suit this unique environment. However, beef is still preferred over kangaroo, and cotton is simply more popular than hemp.

I chose a horrendous year to open up my farm to the listeners to try their hand at cotton farming. The dams were empty, the creek was dry, all I had was two bores. The farm was in the grip of drought.

Cotton doesn’t care, it had to be watered, and the listeners had to vote on how they’d do it. They could choose to use all their allocated water from the bore, cut back on their water use by 40%, or they could wait for rain.

Stu Higgins: Despite the passionate feedback on the phone and the website, the majority voted to irrigate the crop with all the bore water available.

For the water challenge, the number of votes dropped right off. For the first time, listeners were faced with the possibility of not getting a crop at all. It’s pretty simple really: No water, No cotton.

Maybe after going to the trouble of deciding how to fertilise and what kind of cotton variety to grow, the listeners just didn’t want their efforts to go to waste due to a lack of water.

I chose to cut back my water allocation by 40%.

Alicia Brown: From here on in, it was a curious thing that started to happen. The listeners’ ‘green’ idealism began to drop away.

Summer was coming and it was time to start preparing for insects and weeds. That meant dealing with the one thing the cotton industry is infamous for: chemicals. Here was a chance for the back seat farmers to take a stand, to show that their clothes could be grown without all those pesticides they hated so much. But without chemicals, weeds need to be pulled out by hand. That meant long days in 40-degree heat, walking up and down the cotton rows chipping them out with a hoe. The 5-acre field would’ve kept 5 volunteer chippers busy for one week a month. Understandably, only the committed were willing to put their hand up there.

For the first time here, they voted for the same ‘middle of the road’ choice as their cotton farmer landlord. When it came to weeds, they’d use a tractor to plough most of them out, but put a bit of chemical on as well.

It was the same for insects. To control heliothis, myrids, mites and aphids, listeners chose Integrated Pest Management. This is exactly the same system as what the majority of Australian cotton farmers use. It really translates to going as soft as you can for as long as you can, but once the bugs look like they might affect productivity too much, bring in the chemicals.

Things moved on. After all that planning, the cotton seeds were finally planted.

Stu Higgins: It’s just such a nervous time, because what happens over this day sets what I’m looking at for the next seven months or eight months, and if you get a crappy strike, you don’t like driving around your farm as often, because you don’t like looking at something that’s not nice. So then when you don’t drive around your farm as often, you’re not checking things as often, you’re not on the game all the time. Whereas if it’s a great strike and it looks good, I mean you’re living in it. It’s just a great feeling and you’re out there all the time, and you’re checking, and, ‘Oh, don’t the rows look lovely’, and when it looks great, you look after it more; when it looks cruddy, you just try and fool yourself and not go there as much. And if it’s not out of the ground by, say 10 days, you can kiss it goodbye. But yes, you put it in, you’ve paid your money, and you take your chances, that’s about it.

Stu Higgins: I find it a very difficult time. Most of the older farmers have advised me, and I’ve taken that advice that you’re better off just going away for a few days or a week, because there’s nothing you can do; all the hard work’s been done. You’ve put all the effort into selecting the varieties, placing it in the right depth, the right spacing, the right amount of, the right blend of nutrients and water and moisture, and there’s not much you can really do. It’s in the hands of, well as they say, you’ve just got to hope you’ve put them in facing the right way up.

Alicia Brown: We did put them in the right way, and we irrigated, survived dust storms, insect attacks, celebrated the first bloom, followed by our first cotton bolls. All the while the listeners were making the tough decisions needed to grow clothes, and Stu was reporting in from the field.

Stu Higgins: Thanks, Alicia. Well I’ve just finished having a really good look through the Grow Your Own field, and I’m on my way back to the four-wheel motorbike, and I regret to say that we’ve still got some serious flea-beetles in our cotton. We’re still faced with this big dilemma of do I control the flea beetles, and if I was to do that I would probably use a chemical called Dimethoate. I think if you go and have a look at your rose spray, it’s a pretty common chemical. It would do a good job on the flea beetles, it’s quite cheap and effective, but I run into this really big problem of taking out my beneficials. Just bending down and looking here, we’ve got some lovely ants, and we’ve got some lady beetles, and they’re just starting to build up in numbers. And if I take those guys out, I lose a lot of good, effective control later on on heliothis and some other baddies that we’ve got.

Weather for the week? Sorry about this, but nothing to really report there. Not too much bad weather, just no rain. And with those pleasant thoughts, I’m going to head back up to the shed and carry out some more maintenance in preparation for the big wet, so until then, oh, that is one hot bike seat. I’ll catch you later.

Motorbike starting

Alicia Brown: While Stu kept in touch from the field, on the radio the listeners’ minds turned to money. Farming is a business. But so far, Grow Your Own-ers hadn’t had to worry about their bank balance. And it became obvious that as long as people weren’t under any pressure to make money, they weren’t real farmers.

Stu Higgins: Cotton farmers only get paid once a year. A hailstorm can strip my income to the ground in a matter of minutes. You can’t insure against drought but you can insure against hail. For me, the possibility of losing my entire year’s pay packet through hail, is simply a risk not worth taking, and I’m joined by 95% of all cotton growers in Australia, who take out hail insurance to protect their incomes.

Alicia Brown: The back seat farmers just weren’t under the same pressure. They had nothing to lose. The majority voted to risk their whole season’s work and not sure the crop for hail. Rural Social Researcher, Neil Barr, says the fact that listeners decided not to insure showed they had no understanding of what it meant to lose a crop.

Neil Barr: When you don’t really have anything at stake personally, it’s a lot easier to take risks. Most farms are family farms, and the farm is there to fulfil a lot of objectives, but No.1 is to provide security for your family, and if that’s not met, then everything else doesn’t really matter. If you’re making an insurance decision about whether your family gets through next year, it’s a lot harder to take the risk than if it’s a question of ’Well it’s someone else’s money at stake; let’s see what happens. The odds are probably in our favour, let’s give it a go. I’ve sat and watched the hail destroy a crop on my parents’ farm, and I wouldn’t want to through that as a farmer, it was bad enough as a farmer’s son. And I don’t think the depth, the visceral depth, of fear when that hailstorm’s coming over the horizon, is actually understood unless you’ve been in that situation.

Alicia Brown: Grow Your Own-ers needed to feel that fear in order to understand what it was like to be a farmer. So we decided to do something about it.

Phone ringing

Woman: Hi, you’ve reached the Grow Your Own voting line. We’re trying to decide who to farm cotton for. You can choose between Frontier Services, Australia’s Volunteer Firefighters, or the Royal Queensland Bush Children’s Health Scheme. Please cast your vote, and thanks for calling.

Alicia Brown: From here on in, any profits the listeners made from their crop would go to charity. Now they had a financial stake in the crop.

Stu Higgins: The number of visits to the website tripled, as people voted on who should share the spoils from the Grow Your Own crop. Deciding how to spend the money generated by the cotton crop was clearly more popular than deciding on how to grow it, how to fertilise, how to irrigate, and how to control the insects.

Alicia Brown: Now that someone was going to make money out of the crop, listeners started to compromise a bit on their environmental ideals in order to get a higher yield. And in the wider picture of Australian farming, this is important. Cotton is the fourth largest exporter. In dollar terms, $1.5-billion of our GDP comes from cotton, fully irrigated, grown using pesticides.

The last thing for listeners to decide on was how to get the cotton bolls all opening at the same time, and the leaves dropping off the bush, so as to be able to pick the crop efficiently. Now you do that by using two synthetic hormones at exactly the right time in the growing cycle. By now, listeners didn’t hesitate.

Stu Higgins: Out on the farm, the reality was this: the Grow Your Own listeners had grown a cotton crop during the biggest drought on record. Like true hard-to-please farmers, it was picking time, and now we didn’t want the rain. Lovely white cotton sitting on a bush, hates getting wet. The showers did stay away, and we started the picker and got into the crop.

 



Alicia Brown: That is the sound of the first boles of Grow Your Own cotton hitting the bin in the back of the picker.

Alicia Brown: Hallo, and welcome to a momentous Bush Telegraph live from Jandowie, Queensland. I’m Alicia Brown and I am standing smack bin in the middle of the cotton crop you the Bush Telegraph audience have grown. It’s been 10 months since Queensland cotton grower, Stu Higgins gave us five football fields of land, and you became cotton farmers for the season. Now despite all the tough decisions we had to make, the drought, the dust storms, the stress over what chemicals to use or not to use. In front of me there are just endless paddocks of knee-high white fluff, and Stu is on the picker, making his way up and down the rows; we’ve got plenty of help on hand, too. Volunteers from all three charities we’re planning on donating our profits to are standing beside me. They’re armed with calico bags and they’re ready to get into the paddock and do some hand picking. And around us as well, almost 100 people from the local community are milling about –

Stu Higgins: Every May, at the end of the season, cotton farmers analyse their performance. Australian farmers are expected to get the highest yields in the world. In farmer-speak, the listeners grew just over 12 bales of premium cotton off the grow-your-own field. In consumer speak that’s about 12,000 top quality T-shirts worth of cotton.

Off my field next door, I grew a little over 20 bales, that’s nearly 21,000 T-shirts. The listeners yielded just over half of what I grew. That’s not a bad result, considering that’s twice what your average cotton farmer in the rest of the world would yield.

The next thing farmers talk about is ‘What did it take to grow the crop?’ The amount of water, insecticides and herbicides used to grow both my T-shirts and the listeners’ T-shirts, is posted on the Grow Your Own website, that’s abc.net.au/grow

In a $20 T-shirt there is 50-cents worth of cotton. That’s 50-cents back to the farmer. That 50-cents pays for the growing of the crop and the day-to-day running of the farm. The profit for the farmers is in there as well.

It took 730 litres of irrigation water to grow just one T-shirt from the Grow Your Own field. It took me 760 litres of water to grow my T-shirt. So when you were sleeping on a set of 100% cotton Queen size sheets, you’re sleeping on a virtual water-bed: 6,000 litres of water. The pillowcases, an extra 150 litres.

Alicia Brown: The reality is that the consumer is as much the environmental vandal as the farmer. There is an environmental price to pay for everything they buy.

Take an apple. Whether it be the way the apple is farmed, the petrol you use to get to the shops, or the water that flushes the toiler when you’re finished, what human ecologist David Dumaresq calls ‘the environmental load’ will be felt somewhere: in the soil that’s lost nutrients to grow the apple, in the air that’s coping with pollution from the car, or in the ocean that’s filtering the sewerage.

But the consumer forgets this, because food is found easily in the supermarket and our toilets cleanly flush away the waste.

David Dumaresq: If any of us decides to drive down to the local shop in the morning for a fresh loaf of bread, if we drive more than about 5 kilometres each way, the environmental load of driving our car far exceeds the total environmental load that’s contained in producing the loaf of bread and getting it to the shop for us to take away. An over-emphasis on targeting, say farmers on being the sole people responsible for environmental degradation in the whole human food system, would be misplaced when much consumer behaviour and just general social behaviour, has a whole range of impacts.

Alicia Brown: Consumers overlook their place in the cycle, and blame the farmer for ruining the environment.

David Dumaresq: The food system that we’re engaged in is global, and covers nearly all aspects of human activity, including industrial activity, of which farming is just one small part of that whole food system. And if we just think sustainability of say a human food supply can come just from changing farm management practices, then we’ve missed the point.

Alicia Brown: The point is, the farmer only puts a small amount of pressure on the environment growing the food. It’s the consumer, the middle men, and the politicians who set policy who cause most of the damage by demanding cheap food and textiles, lots of them, whenever and wherever it’s wanted.

David Dumaresq: Sustainability is about whether or not the whole of that food chain is possible to be perpetuated in the long term. And just to give you some idea: if we measure it by a measure such as external energy applied, only about 20% of the total environmental load of any particular foodstuff, is likely to have been carried at the farm level, about maybe 1% to 3% is carried at the retail level, and the major load is actually carried by everything that happens in between. The transportation, processing, packaging, preserving, repackaging, reprocessing, retransportation and distribution of foodstuffs. And in fact sustainability is as much an issue for what happens post-farm to food as it is what happens on-farm. And we might have a very environmentally benignly farmed product that is then put through some post-farm processing that has very high environmental costs. Going into a supermarket in Northern Europe, for instance, at the height of winter and buying organic strawberries that have been flown from Australia is not necessarily environmentally a good thing to do.

Alicia Brown: Buying those organic strawberries in Switzerland is exactly the sort of misguided choice that makes the consumer an environmental vandal. But most consumers are so far removed from the real life of farming, and so caught up in busy lifestyles, they just buy what’s there. Consumers do have potential power, but few of them are going to use it.

Michael Edwardson: We know now that consumers act irrationally. They make decisions out of emotions, and often straight out of habits. So all the brand building you see, all the lovely logos and the ads are usually based on getting consumers to act habitually. Or reacting to say branding, without having to think too much.

Stu Higgins: Do you think the consumer is thinking of the farmer or what it takes when they are purchasing a product?

Michael Edwardson: At the point of purchase, no. When they sit back and reflect and they’re watching ABC News, then yes; they’re probably socially aware when they’re rung up by a research company and that research company says ‘What’s your attitude to this?’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh yes, yes, it’s important.’ At the point of purchase and a busy day at the shop those attitudes can diminish. In the retail environment it’s the way the packaging is packaged, it’s the positioning on the supermarket shelf, or the retail shelf. It’s the suggestions of the retailer, the sales person, time-poor consumers, those are the sorts of things that are going to impact. So you find there’s a lot of behavioural pressures at the point of purchase that take away all those good-feeling attitudes and socially responsible feelings.

Alicia Brown: Michael Edwardson, consumer psychologist and lecturer from the University of Sydney.

Even if people could be convinced to buy responsibly, there’s another problem. The middlemen, they also have to make money, and it’s really difficult to get carefully farmed products through to the shop shelves at all.

Let’s go back to our cotton example. At the end of the Grow Your Own project, Bush Telegraph listeners had grown 12 bales of cotton using organic fertiliser, minimal chemicals and all the profits were going to be donated to charity.

We looked for a cotton merchant who would pay more for the listeners’ cotton because they’d farmed it so well. Colly Cotton, one of the big cotton buying houses in Australia, agreed to think it through with us. I told Richard Dalgeish, one of the buyers there, we needed to charge more for the listeners’ cotton because they’d used manure as a fertiliser in order to be kind to the environment, but their yield was lower as a result. I asked him would he pay a high price for greener cotton?

Richard Dalgeish: No, we wouldn’t, because at the end of the day it makes no difference to the final commodity.

Alicia Brown: Well what about we planted conventional cotton, didn’t use any genetically modified cotton at all; would you pay us more for that?

Richard Dalgeish: No, we won’t, for the same reason.

Alicia Brown: Well Richard, we used integrated pest management right throughout the season, so we really, really minimised our spraying. We only did one synthetic spray overall; would you pay us more for that?

Richard Dalgeish: That’s extremely important for the benefit of the environment, and sustainability of cotton production, but again, it makes no difference to the final commodity. Unfortunately our business comes down to economics, and we’d have to compete on the international stage.

Alicia Brown: A person at the big family-owned retailer, Gowing’s in Sydney, heard that conversation on the radio. They called in to say that Gowing’s might pay more for Grow Your Own cotton and put it on the shelf right alongside their hemp and organic T-shirts, which they sell for a higher price. They wanted a meeting to discuss the details.

Stu Higgins: So I left the farm and headed down to Sydney to meet the Gowing’s team, to see if we could make some Grow Your Own cotton T-shirts. We all sat around the board table and agreed how fantastic the concept was. I was to come back to them with a price.

I soon discovered the economies of scale were going to kill me. The cost to spin a small amount of cotton was nearly 20 times more than the commercial rate of 50-cents a kilo.

Luckily there was a company in Melbourne which was prepared to do the spinning for free, because it was for charity. So I went back to Gowing’s with what I thought was a reasonable price, but despite the free spinning, they told me it was still too much. The problem this time was the transport costs.

Basically, for the Grow Your Own T-shirts to get off the ground, I would have to sell the cotton to Gowing’s for less than what I could have sold it for on the open market. A Gowing’s representative said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter how good an idea you’ve got, in the end it all comes down to price. We’re not here to educate the consumer, we’re here to satisfy them. Maybe next year we’ll get back in touch with you.’

In the end, my cotton price was 50-cents a T-shirt more than the commercial rates. That was enough of a difference to break the deal. So I sold the cotton on the open market. The four bales were transported in bulk to be exported and it’s probably sitting in a warehouse in Indonesia about now.

I just can’t believe that it’s cheaper to send bulk cotton to Brisbane, load it on a ship, sail it to Asia, have it turned into T-shirts, then sent back by boat to Australia, than it is to send a few bales by truck to Melbourne, to be spun for free and then turned into T-shirts in Sydney.

Alicia Brown: That’s the free market at work, with few constraints about the use of land, water and other natural resources; and for the most part, no direct financial accounting for those things.

Consumers can’t fix that, neither can farmers. The Grow Your Own team felt frustration, if not a little despair. The public do care about the environment, but as yet there’s no mechanism for turning that warm and fuzzy goodwill into realistic systems that won’t cripple farmers and destroy the economy.

Who would break the cycle and take the pain? Leith Boully is one of the now-famous Wentworth Group who are trying to get change about all of this at the government level. She’s on the Board of the ABC, Chair of the Murray-Darling Community Advisory Committee, and she’s a cotton farmer, with a property right next door to Cubby Station in western Queensland. She says the answer has to be political leadership, combined with consumer awareness.

Leith Boully: I don’t think policy currently takes the consumer into account, and one of the things that the Wentworth Group has been calling for is for consumers to pay farmers in some way for the full costs of production. Now whether you do that through a levy or through taxes or through putting the price of food and fibre up is a question ultimately governments have to deal with. We have to live within the constraints of this really old, dry landscape, and at the moment we expect a really high standard of living, and we’re fairly vocal about refusing to pay for any of those services.

Alicia Brown: In the meantime, we’re all caught in a self-perpetuating cycle, the environment, the land the farmer must use, the farmer, the middle-man, the retailer, the consumer, and back to the environment again. Who is going to break free of the need to make money and buy cheaply? It’ll take long-term planning, politicians aren’t good at that, and it may even take a change in human nature.

Stu Higgins: Now Grow your Own is over, I keep thinking about what the listeners actually achieved. They grew their own cotton crop. Maybe I’ll bump into one of them at a dinner party one day, and they can tell me how hard it was to grow the clothes they wear.

Alicia Brown: This has been Background Briefing on ABC Radio National, based on the initial Grow Your Own cotton project from the program, Bush Telegraph. Our cotton farmer was Stuart Higgins from Jandowae in Queensland.

If you want to make any comments on today’s program, you can go to the Background Briefing website, or to the special Grow Your Own website at abc.net.au/grow

Co-ordinating producer, Linda McGinnis; Technical operator, Stephen Tilley; Research, Paul Bolger; and Executive Producer, Kirsten Garrett. I’m Alicia Brown.