What’s Really Choking Prime Farmland? Hint: It’s Not Wind Farms

As I cycled across Ngunnawal and Gundungurra Country today from Canberra, to Goulburn and into the NSW Southern Highlands, I couldn't help noticing massive blackberry thickets smothering good Country everywhere. It made me think about the story that climate change denialist politicians like Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor love to spruik - that wind farms and solar are “taking over” productive land.

But here's the thing. The data says the complete opposite: invasive species are the biggest, ongoing hit to agricultural productivity and healthy Country in Australia. Renewables, in comparison, are less than a rounding error.

The evidence, in hectares and dollars

• Nationally, established weeds and animal pests cost farmers over $5 billion per year. That’s a direct, annual drag on farm productivity.

• Blackberries alone cover nine million hectares in Australia, with annual control and production losses at A$103 million. They reduce stock carrying capacity, alter water flows, cause erosion and harbour pest animals.

• Economy-wide, pest plants and animals cost $25 billion per year when broader impacts are counted.

• Feral predators are everywhere: foxes, for example, cover over three-quarters of mainland Australia. As killing sheep and chickens, they devour an estimated 300 million native animals each year.

  
  

Now compare that to renewables on farmland

• Wind farms typically occupy less than two per cent of the hosting land for turbine pads, access roads and substations. Grazing or cropping continues right up to the hardstand.

• The Australian National University's energy modelling shows that fully decarbonising Australia’s energy with wind and solar would “take away” about 120,000 hectares from agriculture. Blackberries, in contrast, already affect over 8,800,000 hectares!

• Blackberries cover 180 times more land in Australian than renewables currently use, and they'd cover over 75 times more land than we’d need for a fully renewable grid. And that’s before we even count buffel grass, serated tussock grass, lantana, prickly acacia, feral pigs, foxes, rabbits, and others.

If Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and Angus Taylor really did care about farmers and their livelihoods, they'd focus on invasive species as the immediate, fixable problem: not wind farms and solar panels. Invasives suppress farm yields, increase costs, degrade soils and waterways, and undermine biodiversity that agriculture depends on. Renewables, in contrast, pay farmers while using tiny physical footprints and keeping paddocks productive. Woke sheep even like hanging out underneath them!

If the climate change denialists respected Australians and cared about our kids and Country, they'd keep the conversation honest. They'd stop pretending wind and solar are “choking farmland” when the real choke is sprawling invasive plants and animals.

Blackberries harming prime farmland near Goulburn.