Recently, Landholders were informed that the Queensland Government had granted Tarong Energy a mineral development licence over the Haystack Road coal deposit. As a result a hastily convened Landcare meeting was held on Thursday 25th September to discuss the resumptions of prime agricultural farmland. There are very few cropping regions of fertile floodplains within Australia. This development will destroy one of the most productive agricultural areas for eternity – this at a time in when the world has consumed more food than it has been able to produce for the last 7 consecutive years. World grain reserves are at their lowest in 50 years and in the last 18 months, food riots have broken out in 37 countries. Our meeting unanimously called on the Queensland government to stop Mineral Development licences and Mining licences on iconic farmland. Our Landcare group feels strongly about the issue of food security and iconic farmlands. It is impossible to rehabilitate floodplain soils that have been laid down during flooding events over thousands of years. The benefits of natural soil fertility, structure, porosity and bulk density would be lost for thousands of years.
Much of the world’s best farming land is already lost through land degradation and urban encroachment. When the coal belt stretches almost the length of Queensland, surely preserving highly productive farm land and exploiting coal deposits in areas of low productive capacity is a better option. We believe our society must now consider whether it is prepared to sacrifice our most productive food producing land for a one off windfall gain from selling coal. Eventually when coal extraction from this natural floodplain is exhausted we’ll be left with a barren land. Our Landcare group wishes to work cooperatively with the Queensland Government to achieve the best possible outcomes for the land, the environment and Tarong Energy. While we are obviously concerned at our own future, Haystack Road coal deposit is really the point where mining morality and ethics must meet public expectations.
Across Australia, productive, environmentally sustainable farming land is under threat.
At Haystack on the Darling Downs, a mining
development licence has been granted by the state government to the
state government owned Tarong power to develop a mine on 13,000 hectares of prime agricultural country. This
country is farmed in an environmentally sustainable way and has won
national Landcare awards for the work done in the area to promote
ecologically friendly farming practices.
In the last year alone the area taken up by this mining licence has produced enough wheat for 68 million loaves of bread, enough sorghum to feed 14 million chickens as well as thousands of tonnes
of malting barley, edible chick peas and mung beans. In an era when
food prices are rising, a United Nations report recently predicted that
in the next 50 years the world will need to produce as much food as it
has in the last 10,000 years! Can we really afford to destroy this land?