Just discovered the ABC has an excellent rural blog, primarily written by ABC rural reporter Libby Price (Elizabeth Farren-Price). Interesting, factual, to-the-point and witty.
Fiona Lake Blog
ABC Rural Blog
May 28th, 2010Beef importation from countries with BSE (‘Mad Cow’ disease)
February 26th, 2010Who voted for a Government so utterly stupid, that they have decided to relax Food Safety rules and allow the importation of beef from countries that have had BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy – otherwise known as ‘mad cow disease’)? No Australians have been inflicted with the BSE-related variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and no Australian […]
The Seventh Day Adventist church have been funding a barrow push for animal rights extremists
May 1st, 2009As long as I can remember, there’s been Sanitarium Weetbix in our cupboard for breakfast. Well not any more – Vita Brits only from now on. Nestle may not be 100% Australian owned, but at least they’re not pushing vegetarian propaganda onto the general public. And guess what, Vita Brits are usually cheaper anyway. A […]
Australian agriculture’s bad image
April 24th, 2009Quadrant is one of the few genuinely independent magazines in Australia today. Most of our newspapers and magazines are filled with the same old shallow, repetitive, syndicated tripe, ‘advertorials’ and sensationalist scaremongering that isn’t backed up with verifiable facts. Quadrant writers are individual thinkers who are not afraid to disagree with and discuss popular views, […]
Victorian Producers Co-operative Company Limited (VPC)
April 12th, 2009Farmers are raised with a dislike of middlemen. The blokes between the grower and the end user are viewed as parasites who take few risks and expend relatively little effort, yet pocket a lot of profit. Farmer’s Co-ops are the result. This 2003 paper on VPC by John Gill (ex Chairman of the Co-operative Federation […]
Farmers are uneducated peasants who destroy the landscape and cause global warming
April 3rd, 2009In today’s Sydney Morning Herald newspaper Paul Myers, freelance journalist and former Rural Press General Manager, former editor of The Bulletin and R.M. William’s Outback Magazine, has written an excellent piece on the woeful state of the general public’s image of Australian farmers and graziers. Paul rightly points out that the world only grows enough […]
‘Go Green, Go Veg, Save the Planet’ advertising on SBS television
March 16th, 2009At the end of a long day I’m sitting peacefully watching government-funded SBS telly at peak hour (around 7.30pm) and up pops this ad showing a pie chart, with the top third taken up by cows. We are exhorted to ‘go green, go veg, save the planet’, because methane produced by livestock is causing global […]
PETA – at it again
February 7th, 2009PETA are said to want to ban guide dogs for the blind, and they have seized the opportunity to push for a ban on all horse-drawn carriages in Vienna, after a drunken driver caused an accident. I wonder, do PETA members squash flies, let ants and spiders invade their houses, and let ticks, fleas and […]
Alternative Rural News Source – Agmates
January 6th, 2009Agmates is a source of rural news that has gone unmentioned or only reported from one (very biased) angle, in the mainstream rural newspapers, which have a monopoly in most states. So as Steve Truman describes it, ‘Agmates’ is an alternative news source for rural Australians, in the same way that ‘Crikey’ is an alternative […]
Investment in Agriculture
August 17th, 2008An excellent discussion on investment in agriculture, on ABC Television’s Landline programme: http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2006/s2240230.htm Directors on the Board of Management of Pastoral Companies used to consist almost entirely of board members who had a genuine hands-on (as in ‘hands dirty’) rural background. Unfortunately this has slowly been changing over recent decades, with the board members of […]