WE might have grown from a 19th century history that portrayed Australia as a nation riding on the sheep's back, but the country we call home in this age of climate change and COVID uncertainty is an increasingly urban one.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures published in May this year showed that just over 7 per cent of our businesses were in agriculture, forestry and fishing - a relative indication of farming's place in the national economy. Even so, such numbers can understate the significant role that primary production still plays in Australia.
Figures kept by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics show the overall value of our agricultural production has risen noticeably in the past decade.
With the arrival this southern hemisphere summer of a La Nina weather event, the bureau is predicting a 7 per cent increase in gross agricultural production this financial year to $65 billion, reversing losses caused by drought and other circumstances since 2015-16.
Despite the loss of farming land to urban encroachment and mining, the Hunter is still a substantial agricultural force, and as reporter Scott Bevan's profile today of Allyn River farmer Peter Lawrence shows, the region has shaken off the apocalyptic heat and fire of a year ago, with the landscape making a spectacular return to productivity.
The sort of optimism that Mr Lawrence and other farmers are now prepared to show was all but unthinkable a year ago, when his farm - along with millions more hectares of land across the country - was parched with dust and racked with uncertainty.
Almost every conversation about the extremes of weather nowadays is couched in terms of climate change, but whatever impact the planet's 7.8 billion people are having on our world, anthropogenic influences are perhaps just an overlay to the cycles of fire and drought that have uniquely shaped the Australian landscape.
It's there in the scientific record, and the terrible impact of drought runs through the canon of Australian literature from colonial times onward, and pervades Indigenous culture before that.
Hard times will come again, but in the meantime, the families of the land can make hay while the sun shines. And as we consume the bounty of their efforts, in all of its diversity, we should give thanks.
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