Minnipa Centenaries

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (12:40): Thank you, Deputy Speaker—slightly out of breath.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: And not even puffed, ready to go straight in.

Mr TRELOAR: Well, just puffing a bit, but Hansard will not pick it up.

An honourable member: He should have hurdled over the seat.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Next time.

Mr TRELOAR: So, thank you, Deputy Speaker. I rise today to move:

That this house—

(a) acknowledges the centenary of the Minnipa Agricultural Centre in September 2015, and the township of Minnipa in October 2015;

(b) congratulates the Minnipa Centenary Committee on organising a program of community events to celebrate the centenaries; and

(c) recognises the contribution of the Minnipa Agricultural Centre to the state's reputation for innovation and leadership in the agricultural research sector.

I would like to talk about the agricultural centre to begin with because, just last week on Wednesday 2 September, the Minnipa Ag Centre had its annual Spring Open Day and Field Walk which was attended by many hundreds of farmers from right across Eyre Peninsula and, indeed, right across the state.

Included in the crowd were, of course, minister Bignell, the minister responsible for agriculture, and also the shadow minister, David Ridgway, from the other place. The member for Hammond was there, as was Rowan Ramsey, the member for Grey in the federal parliament, who, incidentally, is a former chair of the committee responsible for the Minnipa Agricultural Centre. It was pleasing to see him there and he was able to make a speech. Also making a speech that day was Simon Guerin, a farmer from Streaky Bay, who is the current chair of EPARF.

The best thing about the day was that it rained. It rained all day. In fact, the parliamentary group arrived around lunchtime only to hear that, of the eight buses touring the field day site, four had been bogged in the morning. Given the patchy start to the season, there was not one unhappy farmer at the Minnipa Field Day because all the—

Mr Pengilly: I'll bet I could find one.

Mr TRELOAR: There was probably one, you're right, there would be something wrong—but I digress. We were all happy to see the rain. Bob Holloway, former director of the Minnipa Ag Centre, gave a keynote address. He is highly regarded and well respected within the agricultural sector and ran the Minnipa Ag Centre and its research diligently and very well for some years. He is, of course, the brother of Paul Holloway, former leader of the government in the upper house.

I spoke to him just yesterday and I am going to acknowledge him in my speech because I am going to give a good part of this contribution from his presentation that day. He summarises the history and the progress of the Minnipa Ag Centre in good detail.

In September 1839, Edward John Eyre travelled inland and east from Streaky Bay and looked across to the north-east to an area where Minnipa is today. Minnipa is, of course, in central Eyre Peninsula. It is farming country; it was mallee country. Eyre and his party camped on Minnipa Hill, which is now part of the Minnipa Agricultural Centre.

Stephen Hack was commissioned by parliament to explore the area, beginning from Streaky Bay in June 1857. Hack reported many of the prominent rock waters around Minnipa, noting that the local inhabitants, the Kokatha people, who frequented the area in wintertime when water was available, considered Yarwondutta rock, which is situated on the ag centre, to have a permanent water supply. A feature of this landscape is the granite inselbergs, which provide opportunity for water run-off.

Pastoral leases occupied the area from the late 1870s and agricultural development proceeded slowly northwards with the building of the railway line from Port Lincoln. That railway line arrived in Minnipa in 1914 and, in fact, we celebrated that centenary last year, so there are centenaries all over the place. The railway was critical. Minnipa was very much a railway town in the early days because the train from Lincoln went as far as Minnipa, turned around and went back and the train from Thevenard went as far as Minnipa, turned around and went back. So it was really the halfway point, or a bit more than the halfway point. It was very much a railway town and a focus for the railways and the farming community.

The year 1914 was a drought year across the state. In fact, I had a great uncle I was speaking to once, many years ago now, and he said at the time that 1914 was the worst drought he ever saw in this state. It was a particularly tough time for farmers right across the state; but Professor Perkins, the state director of agriculture at that time, toured the region, toured Eyre Peninsula, and settled on Minnipa as a centrally located site for an experimental farm on the Eyre Peninsula. Despite the dry conditions of that year, Professor Perkins reported favourably on the abundance and quality of potential agricultural land on the peninsula. You have to remember, Deputy Speaker, that almost all of it was still under mallee scrub. It would be brought into production in the ensuing decades and it provided admirable soil and climate for growing wheat.

The experimental farm was set up and a vegetable garden area laid out. The manager's tent was pitched in 1915, and there was a camp. There were even olive trees planted; there were plans at one point to grow about 500 acres of olives as the centre of a local olive industry. I do not think that many of those trees survive now, but they were trying all sorts of things in the early days, they were experimenting with all sorts of things.

The Minnipa Experimental Farm continued until 1931 and, as part of the local pioneering farming community, it was valued not only as a reliable source of information and advice but as a place to buy wheat seed, hay, chaff and livestock. Machinery and tools were regularly borrowed and loaned out. It was a frontier existence, with dingoes howling at night and Adelaide days away—and it still is in some respects. The railway was the artery connecting Minnipa with civilisation, bringing up essential supplies like mutton and water and taking way produce, generally wheat, in a nine-hour round trip to Port Lincoln.

The experimental farm, or the government farm, as it was also sometimes known, was covered with mallee scrub and the first task, of course, was to clear it. Different clearing methods were investigated—and some were progressed from those that were already in place on the Yorke Peninsula—as well as sowing of crops on new ground, fertiliser types and rates, testing of different cereal varieties and sowing rates, control of diseases in crops, and testing of as many new crops as possible. Even peanuts and castor oil plants were tried, safflower, sunflower, sorghum, millet, cumin and coriander; the list goes on. An endless number of crops were trialled, and in fact in this year's trial site I noticed some quinoa, the modern day superfood.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The rediscovered modern day superfood. It's been around forever.

Mr TRELOAR: The rediscovered superfood. It has been around for a long time, but it is just starting to be grown in Western Australia, in particular, but also a little bit here in South Australia. I think the challenge will be to produce it by mechanical means, because we do not have the opportunity with labour that they do in other parts of the world.

The property was eventually renamed the Minnipa Seed Wheat Farm in 1940, with the purpose of growing and distributing true-to-type pure seed wheat to farmers on the Eyre Peninsula. Of course, the new varieties were so critical for the improvements in yield, and Minnipa was used to bulk up and supply the surrounding farms—indeed right across the state—with the new varieties that were being developed and bred.

By the 1950s the soil fertility had begun to build and the pasture-based rotation was well-placed to support rapidly rising interest in sheep and wool. So we were very much seeing the development of a mixed farming enterprise based on a ley system where wheat paddocks were rested and sown with medic pasture or sub. clover pasture. Certainly at Minnipa, in those alkaline soils, it was medic pasture.

The rebuilding phase continued in the 1960s with the South Australian ley farming system. Rotations were tightening to utilise the high fertility with more frequent cropping. By the 1970s the South Australian ley farming system was being demonstrated in the Middle East. This was about the time I was becoming involved in farming, and I remember many of the Department of Ag. extension workers making a trip to Libya or other parts of the Middle East, Iraq, to extend the work and the developments that we had made at Minnipa to the Middle East. It was—

Mr Pederick interjecting:

Mr TRELOAR: Yes, and some of our agricultural equipment as well. There was a record wheat harvest in Australia in 1968-69, that led to wheat quotas and that led to a search for an alternative for many farmers, and at that stage a lot of farmers turned to beef cattle. So, the research continued, herbicides arrived in the early fifties, or the hormone-type herbicides arrived in the fifties, and the spectrum of weeds controlled widened as new types of selective chemicals were developed in the sixties. By the mid-seventies, it had become possible to control ryegrass in wheat with post-emergent herbicides hitherto considered impossible, and it gave farmers the opportunity to sow much earlier in the season and make much better use of the rainfall.

By the 1990s, the lessons learned in early sowing experiments had extended to the farming community and always, right through this time, the extension work carried out from Minnipa was so critical. The spring crop walks, the fact sheets they put out, the publications they put out were much sought after and read with great interest by the farming community. Cereal variety testing, which had been based at the centre since its inception, developed a mobile capacity to sow trials across the top half of Eyre Peninsula and, dare I say, it extended, in recent years under the guidance of the LEADA group, to the Lower Eyre Peninsula. As I said, the results from those trials have been published and widely recognised as important research. Some of the lupin trials were carried out on my place, the farm at Edillilie, so I was pleased to be involved with that.

By the 21^st century, equipment had become amazingly sophisticated, with air seeders, headers and sprayers guided by GPS and electronically steered to centimetre accuracy, with most adjustments possible on the move. It is extraordinary. Our grandfathers, I am sure, would be delighted but also surprised at the size and sophistication of much of the machinery that is now being used by farmers across the state.

Back to wheat breeding because the multiplication and product of the new wheat varieties was so important. The late Tony Rathjen, who was a former wheat breeder in South Australia and much recognised, stated that cereal breeding has increased—improved varieties have led to increases of about 1 per cent grain yield per year since federation (we are talking now 114 years). So, just on varietal improvement alone we have had a 100 per cent increase in over 100 years.

That does not sound much but if you put in all the other improved farming systems and other contributions that farmers have made along the way, you can see that we are really at a point where our yields are still improving, despite seasonal variability. We have become much better at producing consistently good wheat crops and I have no doubt that this year at the Minnipa Field Day site and the surrounding districts they will deliver another good crop. In fact, if I do my sums correctly I think that is about seven average or better than average years in a row. Once upon a time, that would have been unheard of.

I did take note of a couple of graphs that Bob Holloway produced that day at Minnipa. One is a graph of an inclining wheat yield, steadily inclining wheat yield over the decades, and the other one was a graph of 100 years of rainfall. Despite what anecdotal evidence might suggest, rainfall at Minnipa has remained at a constant average of 325 millimetres per year throughout that 100 years. What has happened, I think, is that farmers have gotten much better at producing more grain on the rainfall available, but also with fewer people.

I will close my contribution there. I know I have the right of reply at the end of this motion and I will talk more then about the centenary of the township itself. I will congratulate all those involved, not just with the centenary field day last week, which we were fortunate enough to attend, but all those people, and they are too numerous to name, who have worked at the Minnipa Agricultural Centre over 100 years, who have dedicated a big chunk of their working lives to developing the agricultural sector, the very important agricultural sector and particularly the dryland farming sector in this state.

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (12:54): I will speak relatively quickly to give the member the opportunity to sum this up and vote on it before the session ends. I would like to give the government support and my personal support to the motion from the member for Flinders. In particular, the Minister for Agriculture and the member for Giles also asked me to pass on their support for this motion.

As the member for Flinders said, the Minister for Agriculture was there with the member for Flinders and the member for Hammond on the trip up for the centenary, and I think everyone was delighted with their presence due to the fact that it rained significantly on their arrival, to the point that they had to go to Wudinna because they could not land at Minnipa. That was, obviously, a good luck point for those guys arriving in Minnipa and, no doubt, they will be inviting them back for the 101^st anniversary.

For the past 100 years, the Minnipa Agricultural Centre has been providing world-class research and development for the farming communities of Eyre Peninsula. In May 1915, the then minister for agriculture, Clarence Goode, and director for agriculture, Professor Arthur Perkins, visited the newly-cleared experimental farm to select building sites for a 3,000-acre farm to test all branches of agriculture.

Since that time, the centre has seen many important research achievements, including the development of the iconic South Australian ley-farming system between 1940 and 1970. The system is an alternative crop of legume cereal. The centre also assisted with the introduction of early sowing systems for cereal and legume crops in the 1980s and 1990s, utilising reduced tillage and improved weed control.

I would quickly like to acknowledge some of the outstanding staff at the centre over the past 100 years. Among them was Henry Day, who was the manager from 1947 to 1958 and was awarded the Order of Australia medal in 1976 for his outstanding services to agriculture. He introduced medics, which as most people here know are annual self-regenerating pastures to South Australian farming systems. These produced a remarkable increase in cereal yields and livestock production.

More recently, Bob Holloway—who I was interested to learn is the brother of the former agriculture minister, the Hon. Paul Holloway—managed the centre from 1976 to 2006 and played a major role in studying and undertaking the impact of the region's alkaline soils on nutrient availability. Dr Holloway was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for service to the community through dryland farming research and management practices in 2001 and the Order of Australia medal for services to primary industry, particularly as a contributor to dryland farming research and development in 2007.

Today, the centre is operated by PIRSA's research division, SARDI (South Australian Research and Development Institute). It is the base for a team of researchers and extension personnel, supported by the Eyre Peninsula Agricultural Research Foundation and other rural funding agencies and grain breeding companies. There is obviously a good collaboration between people in the government, the private sector and farms to make this work.

The work of the centre is crucial to remain innovative and discover best practice farm-management practices for low rainfall environments and, as was mentioned, it celebrated its centenary on 2 September. I think not only were the rains welcomed but I saw from the minister's release this morning that across Eyre Peninsula yields are up for this year, so obviously, the member's visit paid dividends and, no doubt, they will be keen to invite him back in the future. I would personally like to congratulate the organisers for these events to celebrate this important centenary milestone, and the member's commitment is greatly appreciated by everybody in this house.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (12:58): In the very brief time I have left, I would like to acknowledge the motion of the member for Flinders in regard to the centenary of the Minnipa Agricultural Centre and especially the part of the motion about its contribution to the state's reputation for innovation and leadership in the agricultural research centre. In the very limited time I have at this stage, I would like to say that governments need to fully recognise what agriculture does for this state, especially in regard to the Minnipa research centre, and not just pay lip service to it when the mining industry has had a little hiccup, as it has at the moment.

The research that goes on at this dryland research centre is invaluable not only for South Australian farmers but for Australian farmers as a whole as a dryland centre of excellence. I had one concern when I attended the field days—and I had the opportunity to be there at the centenary celebrations. I talked to some of the people involved with the centre regarding their concerns about how the farm was run by the department. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.