![]() ![]() ![]() Massy’s joins a spate of recent books that seek to recast the basic assumptions on which Australian agriculture was built. The powerful ideological connection between Australia and agriculture is being increasingly and diversely scrutinised and comes to the fore in Charles Massy’s iconoclastic epic, Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth (2017), which throws into question 200 years of assumptions about what it means to graze animals in Australia. The crucial insight to emerge from such a thought-experiment is that agriculture in Australia is a religion - it is as much a religion as it is an industry. But really the scandal of this thought goes beyond economics and into the very soul of the nation. Towns that are slowly dying would collapse, jobs would go. It would affect our balance of payments - 60% of agricultural produce is exported and it contributes 13% of Australia’s export revenue. ![]() What if Australia were to stop farming? At approximately 3% of gross domestic product, the removal of agriculture from the economy would be a significant hit. ![]()
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