Scientists 'solve' drought mystery

Yippee!! Now all we have to do is learn how to do a rain dance properly, get our water supply infrastructure 'sorted' and we're laughing! On a serious note, if this is correct, its a great breakthrough, our farmers need all the help they can get, so many of them are on the verge of bankruptcy. I was speaking to one a few weeks ago, he has had no farm income for over 4 years and have been living off his wife's weekly, office clerk wage.

I was under the impression that all farmers had to work a job to subsidise their farming habit.

I was under the impression that all farmers had to work a job to subsidise their farming habit. Unfortunately it is not possible to run a farm idefinitely on an office clerk's wage. A lot of the smaller farmers have been running on an ever increasing overdraft, sooner or later they run into a 'brick wall'. To compound the problem, the devastating bushfires in Victoria have destroyed so much infrasructure, businesses, livestock etc that many of these 'office clerk subsidy jobs' no longer exist. Then there is the loss of human life..............not good. These people are not hobby farmers, many ... [More]

Not to mention the fact that farming is a full time job on its own. There's a lot of things that need to be done. If a farmer had another job, he couldn't do everything that needed to be done on the farm. He would have to hire people to work the farm, and that can be counterproductive in some ways.