What has the drought cost me?

摘要

With the critical rain date for the southern pastoral areas of WA having now passed, and little recorded in the rain gauge, we are staring down the barrel of our fourth year of drought. Many pastoralists are now asking the question, What has it costme by not destocking nearly two years ago? We reckoned then that carrying capacity was about zero, but thought that it would rain soon and the shrub would carry us through. Unfortunately, that has not happened, and with the benefit of hindsight, a totaldestock almost two years ago would have been a good move. One station owner in the Murchison district wanted to know how much better off he would have been had he destocked in November, 2001. So we crunched the numbers, with the results shown in table 1.