North Queensland pineapple farmer Stephen Pace with his wife, Deanne, and children Kyle, 18, and Taryn, 16 Picture: Cameron Laird Source: The Australian
NEARLY 300cm of rain in just three months - it was some wet season this year for north Queensland pineapple farmer Stephen Pace.
Ferocious deluges come with the territory but Mr Pace, a third-generation grower, cannot help wishing more of that "liquid gold" ended up in storage, and not washed out to sea.
"More dams make sense," Mr Pace, 45, said from one of his family's 4000ha spreads at Rollingstone, 55km north of Townsville.
"We get a lot more rainfall in northern Australia than further south, so if you could find the right spot to put a dam, I'm all for moving ahead. I would rather see produce produced in Australia than having to import."
Mr Pace's main crop is pineapples, but he also dabbles in watermelons, pumpkins, sugar cane and beef cattle.
He has a licence to pump water for irrigation out of a nearby creek.
The closest dam for agriculture is the Burdekin Dam, 165km south of Townsville, to which he has no access.
"There's quite a deal of good farming land up here, and there's a lot of other farms suitable for growing all sorts of produce that could be converted (to food production)," he said.
But he acknowledged the challenges of farming in the north.
"The logistics mean it's very expensive to freight your produce to the market from up here," Mr Pace said.
"We have a distinct wet season, which makes it . . . almost impossible to have a lot of production at that time of the year. And cyclones are a challenge."
Bob Lawn, professor of tropical crop science at James Cook University, said northern Australia's farmers were ideally placed to capitalise on the rapidly growing Southeast Asian markets.
Professor Lawn, who has spent much of his 40-year career searching for new crops to thrive in the tropics, said northern Australia still held "substantial undeveloped capacity" for increasing agricultural production.
"In retrospect, some of the issues associated with water resources, generally difficult soils and the uncertainty of rainfall . . . these can be extraordinarily difficult circumstances in which to grow field crops," he said.
