Let me first give some details about our lust for ‘crop and weed spraying’. BY 2006 our annual use of herbicides was over 18 000 tonnes and for insecticides over 8000 tonnes, fungicides another 3000 tonnes. This is the un-adulterated product. At a generally advised mix of 200 mls of the herbicide or insecticide per 100 litre of water that then gives every person (20.000.000 people) more than 600 litres of chemicals in which to spray crops, weeds. You could happily spray a litre per day and have plenty left at the end of the year. You can understand why we are leaving such an enormous ecological hoof/footprint every time when leaving the rural produce store. We are fond of chemicals.
Check it; www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/drs/indicator/196/index.html
So, once a year one receives a letter with a date whereupon a ‘Noxious Weed Inspector’ will come out to inspect weeds. He arrives in a large 4W drive car with a Shire logo painted on its doors and will ask how the poisoning of weeds is progressing. I generally act evasive and vague which is my nature and easy to comply with. He soon picks up on my lack of enthusiasm for spraying and killing dreaded weeds. After ten minutes or so of country banter we start on a walk towards the infestation of weeds along the river that might have survived or overcome the latest spraying of toxic poisons. I try and bring the conversation over to the subject of herbicide resistance. There is now a slight change in the demeanour of the Noxious Weed Inspector.
What makes a good Noxious Weed Inspector anyway? Do burning desires and ambitions lay dormant for years in a person before breaking out in an all consuming drive to become one? Is a fixation with weeds something one is born with, genetic predisposition perhaps? Are now, after all those years of study and hard work the essence of Weed Extermination in danger of being thwarted by “herbicide resistance”? How fickle life can be for Noxious Weed Inspectors.
www.weedresearch.com/summary/countrysummary.asp
We now have the world’s second largest list of herbicide resistant weeds, 53 listed weeds resistant to herbicide, including the Serrated Tussock. Herbicide resistance is, simply put, the ability for plants to develop genetic change and become resistant to the poisons. Nature has this amazing ability and iron will to survive. It only takes mankind to really defeat them.
The problem is that most weeds thrive in areas that have been over-stocked, over cropped, over fertilized and generally exploited for too long a period. Weeds are taking their revenge. The battle between farmers and weeds is not being won by the farmers it seems.
Our paddocks just have a very common but very invasive weed, Serrated Tussock. It is an escaped little plant from South America but the focus of much scorn and debate amongst Weed Inspector socials. It is invasive but allowing paddocks to lay fallow and allow native vegetation to restore a balance again seems a better option than spraying.
We don’t make a living at all from farming, so for real farmers weeds are taking away part of their income. Certainly letting land fallow seems a luxury that not many can afford. However, the enormous cost of fighting weeds chemically might well become a worse option now. About 2.5 % percent of total farm cost in use of chemicals in 1988 has risen to 9% of total farm cost in 2006.
Monsanto is looking smug here.
Our weed inspector is not too keen on talk about herbicide resistance and quite rightly sees this as another attempt and an inroad on his authority to order killing weeds. He increases the speed of walking and furrows are now on his forehead. I appease and talk a little about the high cost of the chemicals recommended for killing weeds. The cost of those chemicals is between $350. – And $550. – Per twenty litres.
He tells me he will impose an inspection cost/ fine of $110. – For any non compliance, he emphasises. Years of study, experience and inspectorial knowhow now come to the fore.
I casually tell him of NSW Water Catchment Authority and their concern of flow on of toxins in the river that at the end flows into the Warragamba Dam. That water will eventually be consumed by the people of Sydney. Never mind that. Just think of the platypuses. They get a direct king hit as soon as the herbicide washes into the river. Our small acreage has almost two kilometres frontage to a river, hence another reason for us not to be keen with spraying Glyphosate, Flupropanate or other chemicals with even more sinister names.
From our perspective and experience over the last fourteen years, it has shown that weeds will thrive under stressed conditions. Spraying with chemicals has often marginal results. They come up even more and stronger next time around. In any case, the weeds now have’ heroically,’ developed herbicide resistance.
Our Weed inspector has now finished his tour of duty and has given me the option of getting a contractor out who will spray, not just the weeds by spot spraying, but do the job by boom spray. A boom spray is a contraption of a series of spraying nozzles on a five or six metre boom towed behind a tractor that will spray a swath of weed killers over the lot. The weed killer is ‘selective’ and will have a fantastic ‘residual’ quality, he enthuses. He is throwing everything at me now but somehow senses my sullen reluctance to weed killing and toxic mixtures. He again mentions the ‘$110. – Inspection/fine.
The advice of chemical suppression is against the latest science. Problem is that the Noxious Weed Act is from 1993 (Section 18) and that Australia’s worst weed, the Serrated Tussock, has started to morph into a most resisting little weed. Herbicide spraying only gives it even more room next time around as native competing vegetation has been removed as well. Its dormant seed bank just sprouts up with even more chemical resistant tussock babies.
www.regional.org.au/au/asa/2003/c/18/kemp.htm
I tell him I will consider, but quietly reckon the inspection fee will be the preferred option, especially for the weeds. The platypuses have been giving a reprieve. The wombats are having a ripping time building and manning the ramparts. The blackberries continue with their impenetrable wall for future defence.
The Noxious Weed Inspector drives off.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Don’t ya just love wombats? I do. I know they’re stubborn difficult bastards at times, and almost always suit themselves, but you’ve got to respect that. They’re happy with who they are. They’ve got “bush cool” going for them. That and the fact that a fully grown male wombat is one tough bugger. They appear to have little sense of pain and males can do significant damage to one another before a victor emerges. Thankfully these encounters are unusual. I have seen a big wombat with his back against the wall scare the hell out of well made farm dogs. Two against one. He swiped one with his claws, dog yelps off, the other had him by the front leg. The wombat didn’t seem to think more of than than it limited his mobility. He was kicking and the dog wasn’t going to let go right up to point were the wombat took his ear nearly off. Dog lets go and retreats to were the other one is licking his wounds and joins in. Wombat shakes, turns and saunters off. His leg is bleeding, badly it seemed to me, but he didn’t limp, in fact he didn’t seem to be disabled in any way. It was one of those “bugger me!” moments. Over before you could fully take it in.
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Is that Gez?
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No, it’s me.
Got into a lot of trouble after. They weren’t our dogs and I wasn’t the most popular guy when I returned to the house with them both looking bloodied and considerably the worse for wear.
At first I wasn’t believed when I told them the wombat did it. It was the parallel slashes on the first dog’s guts that clinched it. Didn’t make me any more popular. Not for the first time I was given an “F” for dog control. My father always said I was too pally with dogs to ever be able to control them properly. I can clearly hear him telling Billy Boyle, “Don’t let him near your working dogs, they’ll be no good for anything after!”
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Of course, an old trick is to tell a young crying grandson with a grazed knee,’here is a minti, it will soon feel better’.
When all three of them were very young and most impressionable, we drove slowly past a dead wombat. It was a road kill on a dirt road, and as happens with dying wombats, they turn legs up. They are very top heavy. There was no blood.
The kids wanted to have a good look and I stopped the car. The wombat still had a look of total bewilderment in its eye. The kids looked but were a bit quiet, perhaps being respectful. Anyway, I asked the kids if they thought a minti might make it better. Yes, the youngest replied. So I put a minti on wombat’s eye.
For the next couple of months, whenever the kids were on the farm, they wanted to look at the wombat and the minti on its eye. Being mid-winter the minti and wombat were preserved reasonably well for a while, but of course the wombat did not get better. In fact, it got worse, a lot worse. Finally , the smell took care of anymore lingering around the wombat and the foxes had opened its ribcage..
‘Opa is a fibber ‘, I was later on accused of.
I can only hope that none of them will be sobbing in front of a councellor in years to come, and blame all misery on Grand-dad and his big lie.
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Serrated Tussock was the bane of my young life. It was so bad in areas surrounding Fairbridge that you couldn’t walk in shorts or bare foot for it. It didn’t seem to bother dad or the older boys but it took a toll on my soft toddler skin. All those siliceous phytoliths that make up the serration grazed my little legs. That took an ocean of lotion to calm. It also has a toxin that inflames the grazes.
Funny thing is, young Wordsworth has the same problem with Lomandra when we go bush walking. It doesn’t bother me but he seems to always get one or both of those vicious phytoliths that tip each leaf. I’ve taken to pushing the Lomadra back so he can pass when one of the plants blocks the track.
Maybe it’s a immune sensitivity thing. Accumulate enough of the toxin and your body creates a defense. Or maybe its just that as we grow older our skin grows thicker and tolerates the insult better.
It was the talked about weed when I was a boy, along with Paterson’s Curse and outbreaks of Prickly Pear. Experienced farmers would wring there hands in frustration.
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Lomandra longifolia is one of my favourite draught resistant native plants. Whenever some European type plant decides to cark it, I don’t cry, I just plant another Lomandra in it’s place. Lots of other so called draught proof Aussie plants are not a safe bet at all, they might survive, but they look so scraggly and they are almost begging to die…
So, I love Lomandra; so architectual or is sculptural ! Long live Lomandra!
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Yeah I love them too H, Gardens full of them. When we tore up the grass and mulched and replanted the whole front garden we planted Lomandra along all the borders and margins and anywhere the native rock was exposed. We also planted another native grass that I really like in a massed planting. Can’t remember it’s name though. Darker green and it has these emergent berries on stalks that are bright blue purple. I’m looking at one now. Its a bugger when you can’t remember something you should know immediately.
Dianella! That’s it. Phew. for a moment there I thought I’d forgotten it.
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We have Dianellas here too, very hardy and some vey nice clumps of a blue green grass in the courtyard and some in huge terracotta pots around the pool.
(I have forgotten the latin name of this grass)
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The serrated tussocks are spreading like wildfire and thrive on areas that are dry and over farmed. I had a major problem with Council not willing to lift a notice on our property for not complying with the noxious weeds act.
The Environment Defenders Office helped me with advice in a case in the Lands and Environment Court whereby I was the applicant. I won the action and have an official apology from Council.
Despite (or because )all the weed killers and all the spraying, the serrated tussock now controls more land then before. I think the answer is to let land alone but then what to do with farming and our European farming methods with sheep and cattle, super phosphate etc?
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A win for the good guys. Go G!
Yep, it’s inappropriate farming methods and the use of entirely inappropriate chemicals to control problems. A great deal of what passes for farmland in this country should never have been farmed at all, but then we didn’t know that then and anybody who might then have suggested change would be laughed out of the room.
The SA Wheat Belt being a point in case. What SA Wheat Belt you say. In the late 19thC a great deal of land was cleared by the early free settlers of SA and sown to wheat. It just so happened that the white guys appearance in SA coincided with the some of the best years for rain that area had seen in indigenous memory. Within ten years many had gone bust as their land turned to semi desert without the native cover and the rain they had thought was “normal” turning out to be “highly abnormal”. Most of that land is now National Park or Reserved. It looks natural because it has fully shifted to the new semi arid to arid regime. It will never “turn back” to what it was. Like all things in nature it took the damage in its striding toward the future. The only things that now betray its former agricultural use are a number of isolated roofless stone buildings, former farmhouses and outsheds. These charmingly poignant reminders that we don’t know everything are dotted all over this broad area. Open to the sky, all that remains are the stone walls composed of hand hewn blocks of the local high grade metamorphic and volcanic stone held together with a mortar made from local limestone. They’ll probably last as long as the local stone they’re made from.
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