Åsa Wahlquist

The Weekend Australian, March 6 – 7, 2010
A hand up, not a handout
Labor rethinks the assistance offered to farmers
Asa Wahlquist
      Droughts are not what they used to be, and changes to drought policy are long overdue. So when Federal agriculture minister, Tony Burke, this week announced interest rate subsidies would be axed from future drought policy, few who work in the area were surprised.  But they are still anxiously waiting for news of what will replace it.

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The Australian January 23-24, 2010  p 32
Tried and tested irrigation region becomes a vineyard graveyard
The oversupply of winegrapes has hit the inland areas of the Murray hardest
Asa Wahlquist

    On a hill near Merbein, high above a bend in the Murray River, lies the Pioneer Plantation. At the foot of upright Murray pines and under leaning desert gums are small metal plates bearing the names of the district's pioneers, the soldier settlers and their wives, the doctors, teachers and labourers who first settled this place.
    On the plains below, the land farmed and irrigated for over a century is being laid to waste hectare by hectare, farm by farm. Families who have grown grapes for generations are exiting the industry, the weakest link in an massively over-supplied industry.

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The Australian  November 18, 2009   page 27
Agricultural scientists are too thin on the ground
 

Agricultural science, food and natural resource management, have never been more important, argues Mark Adams, dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at Sydney University.
   "Carbon, water, food. This is what it is about," he says. "The world is going to be desperate for food, is desperate for food and will be increasingly hard pressed to supply it."

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Cattle and Methane, broadcast on Ockham's Razor, ABC Radio National,
August 12, 2012.

A lot of people, amongst them Britain's Lord Stern and Sir Paul McCartney, argue that eating less meat could help save the planet. But there is a growing body of evidence that it is not simply a case of less meat means less heat. Rural journalist Asa Wahlquist takes a closer look at this issue.

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