Robertson's Drought Strategy: Farming Through Dry

15 September 2025

Video duration: 5 mins 47 secs

Introduction

This is the transcript of a video case study produced by the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund (FDF). The video features Hamish Robertson, a 2025 Drought Resilience Scholar. This project was funded by the FDF as part of the Drought Resilience Scholarships program, delivered by Nuffield Australia.

Learn more about the Future Drought Fund.

[Recording begins]

Hamish Robertson [00:35]

I'm Hamish Robertson, a 2025 Nuffield Drought Resilience Scholar, and I farm here at Austral Park Merinos at Austral Park Tarrenlea, and we farm fine wool merinos. I farm with my wife, Diana and two kids, Camilla and Harvey.

Austral Park is a 3,000 acre property in a 600mil rainfall, all improved pastures, Phalaris and sub-clovers dominantly with a bit of perennial ryegrass, and we produce a fifty-five kilo merino ewe cutting four to five kilos of eighteen micron wool.

What I love about being a wool producer is not only producing a beautiful natural fibre that we can wear, and in so many great qualities for us, but it's also being outside, working with animals and dogs in the environment. There is no typical day, every day is different and it's great.

As a farmer, I'm primarily a grass grower. Without the grass, we can't grow wool or lamb, but also to go with all those things, to grow the grass, to grow the wool, to grow the lamb, we've got to wear a lot of hats. From a vet and animal health to agronomy, pasture, soil, science, ecologists, looking at the environment, and different weather pattern, and how it's going to affect our farm, water flows, and then into the business side of things, you've got to know about finance and bookkeeping and budgeting to be able to produce that end product, which is lamb or wool.

A dry season or drought in this area affects our enterprise in a number of different ways. If we just have a dry spring, means we don't grow much grass, you mightn't have that surplus feed going into summer. If we have a late autumn break, you don't get any early growth and we lamb in winter and spring. In the last couple of seasons, we've had a failed spring, a failed autumn, an average spring, and now another failed autumn coming into winter and staring down the barrel of another really dry winter.

We're buying in feed, it costs a lot of money, so then you're trying to work out how to cash flow through that, to water being a big problem and you can't necessarily go and buy water and feed it out to the stock like you can supplementary feed.

Do you put down a bore? Can you build a dam? It might be too late to build it now when you're out of water. You're sitting at the desk, working all that out when you think you need to be out looking after your sheep.

For us here at Austral Park, being more drought resilient in the future will be having a water plan that's going to get us through 12 months or 24 months of no rainfall, that's going to be good quality and we can reticulate that system.

We're going to need a trigger point to say if we haven't had the rain by this point in time we're going to sell stock and that's going to be the most cost efficient, and then also looking after pastures, locking them up, not letting them deteriorate and getting the most out of them once it does rain again.

I think it's important to build drought resilience into the agricultural industry and more specifically, the wool industry, to keep that industry alive. It's a funny one, the term resilient, a lot of farmers don't like it because it gets thrown around a lot and they feel it's bit over used, but to me personally, I know now that I need to be more drought resilient in the future.

The weather variability is proven so we need to start learning about it and putting those plans into place to say, next time it doesn't rain for four or five months, what are we going to do?

We're going to sell sheep off, we're going to have our water sorted. We're gonna have fodder in the underground ready to go to feed the sheep, and then we can keep farming. The communities can stay alive in the rural towns. It's as simple as that.

What motivated me to look into drought resilience with my Nuffield scholarship was finding a research topic, we were in drought and the FDF provided a great scholarship with Nuffield.

My focus of the Nuffield research is building a more resilient business through drought and harder economic times in the wool industry, not only from the technical side of drought, with no water and limited feed, but also looking at the business side of things, cash flow and budgeting and diversity, off farm incomes, reducing costs, how we better manage to get through that with less impact in the business.

Some of the benefits of being a Nuffield scholar, not only for me, but hopefully for the wider community here. They do push you and they teach you to be a better public speaker and engage with media and come back and talk to the community and I wouldn't have done that.

It's like a ripple in a pond that grows talking to one neighbour, who will talk to two neighbours and talk to three neighbours. It'll have a really big effect on the whole wider community.

Now we're in our second year of drought, it makes me realise even more that we do need to really get on top of this drought and how to mitigate against it and chat to my neighbours and friends and the industry and I'm doing that this weekend, just talking at the local footy club about what I've learned so far.

Talking to people makes a massive difference, and there is a thousand different ways to farm. It's just that flow on effect to get that information and spread it in the local community and help people become better farmers, to produce better products for all Australians into the future.

Recording ends [5:47]