Diwundrin
Well-known Member
- Location
- Nth Coast NSW Australia
OH! That is soooo cute! 
I dare say there would be places where an acre would support that bucolic pipedream... in Tasmania mostly. It rains in some sort of regular pattern down there.
There are quite a lot of people who moved to Tassie to live that lifestyle. It is now the basket case State that the rest of the country supports because it's industry is dying and most of them are unemployed and on the dole. The Greens ruled down there until those still with a spark of self preservation voted them out a few weeks ago. Their main industry was apples and forrestry timber processing but the Greens pulled that plug and all the supporting jobs and industries went down the tubes.
Even in Tassie there are only so many one acre plots that could support a family. Presuming that there are many left who really think that slogging away dawn to dusk is a preferable way to make a living than working 8hrs, stocking up at the supermarket on the way home, then putting your feet up with a beer to watch the footy.
I was just imagining the crapfight on the mainland if all of us needed an acre of prime soil in an area with a reasonable climate and a water supply to support our families on.
Good luck with finding around 8-10 million acres of that to go around.
We'd run out of bread and meat real fast because that is the kind of land that supports the population en masse. Break that up into one acre lots and we are out of business. The good land is taken.
Some may have seen a set up like that illustration somewhere, but I never have. I'm sorry but I burst out laughing when I saw that tiny little paddock with a couple of dairy cows in it. And the pigs within whiffing range of the kitchen door. And you could grow enough hay in that handkerchief size field to feed livestock long term? :rofl:
That green paddock in the illustration would be brown dust in two days with cattle walking about on it so you're gonna need an awful lot of hay to feed them on. Cheaper and easier to buy a carton of milk isn't it?
We don't calculate land quality by head of livestock per acre here, we calculate hectares per head of livestock. In some places sq.kilometres per head.
That illustration of a 'homestead' set up is the stuff of Enid Blyton to us. You won't buy that dream for much under a million bucks, and that probably won't include the 'mansion' pictured. One acre lots here aren't done as 'farms', they're done as high end low density dwelling developments, and cost a bomb! The smallest hobby farm development I've seen is 5 acre lots and the land was only fit to support an alpaca and a chook run.
Sorry... I'm just having a bit of dark side, cynical fun with this, I know it's only a lifestyle preferred by the very few, or even contemplated by the idealistically deluded.
It took months to get the message across to an American on another forum that we don't have the nationwide infrastructure here that you do because we don't have the population to make it profitable. And we don't have the population in the middle of the country because it simply can't support them. We all tend to judge the viability of theories and dreams against what we're raised with and used to.
We don't have your good soil on those vast prairies to farm. We have an inland like the Nullabor.
What you see as normal farmland we see as prime pieces of paradise.
Your forebears were luckier than ours in what part of the world they landed on.
You get a taste of drought now and then, but they are more the norm here than good years are. We aren't the leading experts on dry-land wheat farming for nothing. We can't afford to waste good arable land on wheat and we can't rely on rain.
Most of our fruit etc is grown in high intensity irrigation areas. That too is taking it's toll in altering the ground water levels and leaching minerals and salts to the surface.
OZ is almost the same size as the mainland US with under 10% the population, but with something like 5% of the arable land and a tiny fraction of the available water supply.
We don't do rivers well here. Even the biggest, the Murray, gets too low to float a boat on sometimes.
Many are bone dry for years at a time until the floods come. How well would America had fared had the Mississippi just usually trickled along except when it was in flood?
That Cubby Station I mentioned earlier? When it switched to growing cotton it sucked all the water out of the catchment rivers of the 2nd biggest river, which in turn feeds the biggest. That's what the fight was over. One big cotton plantation was sucking the life out of all the other properties further downstream for thousands of kilometres.
Farming can get damned hard here.
I dare say there would be places where an acre would support that bucolic pipedream... in Tasmania mostly. It rains in some sort of regular pattern down there.
There are quite a lot of people who moved to Tassie to live that lifestyle. It is now the basket case State that the rest of the country supports because it's industry is dying and most of them are unemployed and on the dole. The Greens ruled down there until those still with a spark of self preservation voted them out a few weeks ago. Their main industry was apples and forrestry timber processing but the Greens pulled that plug and all the supporting jobs and industries went down the tubes.
Even in Tassie there are only so many one acre plots that could support a family. Presuming that there are many left who really think that slogging away dawn to dusk is a preferable way to make a living than working 8hrs, stocking up at the supermarket on the way home, then putting your feet up with a beer to watch the footy.
I was just imagining the crapfight on the mainland if all of us needed an acre of prime soil in an area with a reasonable climate and a water supply to support our families on.
Good luck with finding around 8-10 million acres of that to go around.
We'd run out of bread and meat real fast because that is the kind of land that supports the population en masse. Break that up into one acre lots and we are out of business. The good land is taken.
Some may have seen a set up like that illustration somewhere, but I never have. I'm sorry but I burst out laughing when I saw that tiny little paddock with a couple of dairy cows in it. And the pigs within whiffing range of the kitchen door. And you could grow enough hay in that handkerchief size field to feed livestock long term? :rofl:
That green paddock in the illustration would be brown dust in two days with cattle walking about on it so you're gonna need an awful lot of hay to feed them on. Cheaper and easier to buy a carton of milk isn't it?
We don't calculate land quality by head of livestock per acre here, we calculate hectares per head of livestock. In some places sq.kilometres per head.
That illustration of a 'homestead' set up is the stuff of Enid Blyton to us. You won't buy that dream for much under a million bucks, and that probably won't include the 'mansion' pictured. One acre lots here aren't done as 'farms', they're done as high end low density dwelling developments, and cost a bomb! The smallest hobby farm development I've seen is 5 acre lots and the land was only fit to support an alpaca and a chook run.
Sorry... I'm just having a bit of dark side, cynical fun with this, I know it's only a lifestyle preferred by the very few, or even contemplated by the idealistically deluded.
It took months to get the message across to an American on another forum that we don't have the nationwide infrastructure here that you do because we don't have the population to make it profitable. And we don't have the population in the middle of the country because it simply can't support them. We all tend to judge the viability of theories and dreams against what we're raised with and used to.
We don't have your good soil on those vast prairies to farm. We have an inland like the Nullabor.
What you see as normal farmland we see as prime pieces of paradise.
Your forebears were luckier than ours in what part of the world they landed on.
You get a taste of drought now and then, but they are more the norm here than good years are. We aren't the leading experts on dry-land wheat farming for nothing. We can't afford to waste good arable land on wheat and we can't rely on rain.
Most of our fruit etc is grown in high intensity irrigation areas. That too is taking it's toll in altering the ground water levels and leaching minerals and salts to the surface.
OZ is almost the same size as the mainland US with under 10% the population, but with something like 5% of the arable land and a tiny fraction of the available water supply.
We don't do rivers well here. Even the biggest, the Murray, gets too low to float a boat on sometimes.
Many are bone dry for years at a time until the floods come. How well would America had fared had the Mississippi just usually trickled along except when it was in flood?
That Cubby Station I mentioned earlier? When it switched to growing cotton it sucked all the water out of the catchment rivers of the 2nd biggest river, which in turn feeds the biggest. That's what the fight was over. One big cotton plantation was sucking the life out of all the other properties further downstream for thousands of kilometres.
Farming can get damned hard here.
