CANEGROWERS Around the Paddock
CANEGROWERS advocates on behalf of sugarcane growers in Australia. This podcast series examines some key issues and challenges and celebrates the successes.
CANEGROWERS Around the Paddock
Feral Pig Failure! Has government put feral pigs in the too hard basket?
Feral pigs are costing cane growers like Innisfail's Joe Marano, Luke Zammit and Donna Campagnolo tens of thousands of dollars each year in lost production. Baiting, trapping, hunting, and even aerial shooting programs have so far been unsuccessful at controlling pig populations, with the feral pests able to roam and breed freely in neighbouring national parks. Frustrated growers are calling on all levels of government to step up control efforts and stop failing Australia on feral pigs.
I'm Lake Claft, and this is the pigs run at an electric fence knowing that they're gonna get zapped and squeal as they go under the fence and then just go into the cane. They know they take a run-up and bang hit it and they know for that second they'll zapp and then they're through. I've seen it.
SPEAKER_02:Feral pigs. They wreak havoc throughout every cane growing district in Queensland, but none more so than in the wet tropics, where the National Feral Pig Action Plan categorises the pests as abundant and widespread. Cane growers Innesfale recently partnered with the Cassawary Coast Regional Council's Feral Pig Oversight Group to form a cluster baiting program, which had some success. To progress those learnings, it's more recently secured funding from the Commonwealth Government and MSF Sugar through the National Feral Pig Management Coordinator Programme, which is managed by Australian Pork Limited. That funding going towards improving the effectiveness of best practice feral pig management and monitoring techniques for the wet tropics sugar industry. I spoke to three local growers who've been trying to mitigate the damage.
SPEAKER_01:I'm Donna Campaniola and I farm at Waltelear Estate Road. I've got 60 hectares of cane, and it's bordered by National Park and Liverpool Creek. So that's why I have a pig problem. It's very difficult to stop them from getting in anyway.
SPEAKER_03:My name's Luke Zamet, and I farm at number four branch in Silkwood. And much like Donald, yeah, we boundary wet tropics, rainforest, lifestyle blocks, and Liverpool Creek.
SPEAKER_04:Joseph Morano, uh I farm at New Harbourline in the Marillion area. Um we've got about 430 hectares all up with uh what we own and what we lease. Most of our neighbours is the Australian Defence Force, National Parks, uh Council Land, and we've got about a hundred hectares of uh swampland.
SPEAKER_01:I don't bait, but I have a fence, I have pig hunters and I have traps, and we'd be getting pigs or if if the pig hunters were there, they'd be getting a pig every day almost.
SPEAKER_04:Check the cameras every second day, and um there's always pigs on the cameras. And we have 13 cameras. It'll be double what you think.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can guarantee it'd be a hell of a lot more than whatever number they come up with.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so often you see sows with the litters, and then you see the the solo boars, but then sometimes you'll see on the cameras you'll see the boar with the litter and the sows. So I think one time there on the camera there was like 15 pigs ranging from little piglets to a big big boar.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, we use a mix of trapping, shooting, baiting mostly. We haven't got fences. Traps hardly work. We don't use them. We got them, but we don't play with them anymore because the pigs won't go in the trap. You might get one every two months, which is not enough. Um and this problem started in our area about 2014.
SPEAKER_03:Up until I reckon not even the first few years when we put cane back in here in 9, 10, and 11 did we even see a one. Yeah. You know, that must have been transferring through the district at stages, but we didn't see damage like we've seen now. No, some. And it probably wasn't until yeah, after the cyclone, a few years after the cyclone, that we've seen a significant amount.
SPEAKER_04:Pre previous pigs I'd seen in well, I'd only seen one pig in 1968.
SPEAKER_03:Now you can drive through the main street of Silkwood and see them on the sides of the road behind the post office. Yeah. You know, like last week. Yeah, yeah. Uh up against a QR line or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:I've bought my father's farm and in 2005, and and we had the uh one of MSS farms as well, but there was the pig damage was not significant as it is now. So, like I had a estimate done on the farm, and the um cane inspector said, Well, what if why have you got a fallow patch in the middle of your cane? I said, It's not a fallow patch, it's that's where the pigs are living. It's like an acre. There's just nothing in there, it's all nothing. It looks like a piece of fallow. If you have a look at the fence line, the fence line we put in against the scrub, and you have a look at the damage that they're actually doing in there along that fence line. It's if that's what they're doing there, you can imagine what they're actually doing in the paddocks.
SPEAKER_03:I've had the opportunity to be in the area in the chopper while aerial shooting, and you can see the pads where the fences are and how much actual traffic is now coming to where the end of the fence is and things like that. And and obviously in the creek banks, drain beds, things like that where you physically can't fence across, the traffic's unbelievable. At a certain time of year, maybe in October, November, you can see them mobbed up, but once a crop's at a point where you can't see well enough to see them, well then yeah, it's very hard to see them mobbed up. You'll see them in grasslands and places like that where you physically can't shoot and things like that, but uh yeah, you definitely at the crop's got to be at a certain stage for be able to see them mobbed up that it's effective from the air.
SPEAKER_02:Uh Donna was just talking about the damage that they're doing in in her farm, you know, a whole part of a block.
SPEAKER_01:But the thing is, it's just not that. It's you know, you drive around the block and all you can smell is rotting cane. So when that cane goes to the mill, I think that paddock, I was lucky the mill even took the cane.
SPEAKER_03:It's covering more than 25% of the farms for the people who are boundary where the problems exist. A quarter. Yeah, more than a quarter of the farms.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and this is not a problem for everybody. This is a problem on the fringes boundary with the national park or scrub or that. You know, I I drove past paddocks through Marillion this morning, just coming here, not a stick out of place. But if we stop doing what we're doing, eventually they're going to move in there.
SPEAKER_03:We won't be able to find the backcountry that it used to exist up three branch and all that area has now come in closer to town for us. When I say town, I mean silkwood, but the backcountry's no longer there. So all that cane where we used to farm a wall road, all that stuff. We got out of that for the same reason because of the damage of pigs. And now, once we get out here, then MSF, Four Branch, and you know, some of the highest production dirt in our mill area will be under threat. And it's under threat now because of the population and the numbers are increasing over there. So, you know, the main street of town is copping the same or starting to cop the same damage, along with Caramine Beach. You talk to Stephen, you talk to people down the beach who are farming, who've never had a problem. They're all all catching half a dozen in traps, you know, weekly, if not sometimes in days of succession.
SPEAKER_04:So it's definitely getting out of hand. I I I had to do something for the bank, because the bank when when you get low prices, you always got to go and find some more money. And the bank over ten years from 2014 to 23, it we estimated we lost over 22,000 tonnes. Using a sugar price of I think I used 550 or something, it was six hundred and twenty thousand dollars of income, it was eight hundred and eighteen thousand of gross profit without you know, and then I took out harvesting costs and levy, so it was over six hundred thousand dollars worth of lost income over ten years, so that's sixty thousand dollars a year. Our our biggest year, worst year so far was twenty-two, where we lost nearly four thousand ton. Estimated, you know, it's only an estimate, but that's just tonnage loss, that's not counting the loss in sugar. And that's probably why, you know, sometimes the sugar's down because you're picking up all that dead stuff. You you can't just pick the cane off the top, sort of thing. And yeah, we've brought it to the mill's attention, they've put a few bucks in over time, but you know, nothing significant. Yeah, we've talked to the governments, we've talked to council. Yes, it is the landholders' responsibility, and I had that comment from one of the council people, well, they're running up and down the council road to come and get rid of them. Because, yeah, everyone's got to be in this. Um, and it costs a lot of money. It's the growers who are affected are losing a lot of money. But there's n yeah, probably ten percent of the area that's really bad. Thirty, forty percent of the area is probably minimal and the butt balance is not even touched, sort of thing. But for those growers that are affected, it's we're talking big dollars, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And it sounds like for those growers who aren't currently affected, it's only a matter of time. If everybody else, you know, drops drops the ball, then they're they're just gonna you know keep encroaching onto new areas, right?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and there was a bloke on from Ingham on the radio this morning on the Rule Report uh west of Ingham, it was Robert Lyons, and his he was him and his neighbour had a problem, his neighbour put up a fence and now he's getting a bigger problem so that he'll have to put up a fence because it's they're just impacting on him more now. And and fencing's not cheap. And how do you fence you know through swamps and all that? And where do you put the fence? And unless neighbours fence, yeah, it it's it's not simple, it's not a square block where you can put a like a cow paddock.
SPEAKER_03:You know what I mean? I've only got a hundred acres on this side of the range, and I think I've got eleven or twelve paddocks to go. It's not like you know, probably the bigger growers have 25 and 30 acre paddocks. Three paddocks probably wouldn't be a big deal, but I've got a three-acre and a four and a half, and a you know what I mean, another six and a half.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm lucky I've got one boundary that just bound it bounders in that one.
SPEAKER_03:We put fencing up at Walsh Road when we first had an issue up there, plus electrified seven wires for kilometres, and for the first few, I think first period it was probably not as bad as what it was. But then with our rainfall and machinery working beside the fence, it was always there's always a floor in the fence, or there was a hole, or there was something, some issue. The wet season had taken posts or something like that, and then soon enough you see this used to be an ongoing cost. So the fence, I just was adamant I wasn't gonna fence a farm. And if I wasn't gonna fence a farm here, there'd be something else in between the fence and a different crop growing.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's just well with my fence, I virtually have to check it to make sure that there's no holes, or they've haven't pushed under it, or or it when it rains that it gets washed away. So you've got to make sure you plug all the holes up because they'll find a way in. Yeah. And and they're pretty smart, they don't they know where they're going and what they're doing. And you can see where they've tried to push under the fence, and so you try and you know, bog it up so that they can't get under, but they just move along further along, so it's just constantly going. And I look we we did have a farm on Mariah Kareek National Park, and we had an electric fence there. That was a bad pig area, and we had an electric fence there, and I personally seen pigs run out of electric fence knowing that they're getting zapped and squeal as they go under the fence and then just go into the cane. So they know they know it's there, and they know they take a run up and bang hit it, and they know for that second they'll zap and then they're through. I've seen it. You talk to national parks and they go, Oh, we don't have any money to bait and stuff, but it's and and I think that's that's the annoying part is it's our responsibility to get rid of pests, whether it's weeds or or um animals, but for some unknown reason the government doesn't seem willing to do the same thing on their property. And and then with national parks, dogs are not allowed in national parks, so piggies can't go into national parks, baiting's not allowed in national parks. So we're sort of hamstrung, but we're responsible, but they're not responsible. So it's sort of I mean, Mission Beach themselves in the in the residential areas of pigs digging up their backyards. I mean, that's probably when the council will act because it's residential, but they're not all the all the land that they have, they they they don't do anything with, and it is their responsibility. If we don't do it under the Biosecurity Act, we can get it's our biosecurity obligation to maintain to maintain it. I don't understand why it's not theirs as well.
SPEAKER_02:And how frustrating is that when you're spending time and money combating these things? How much time do you reckon you'd spend per week trying to manage feral pigs?
SPEAKER_04:We'd spend at least 20 hours a week. That's involves putting bananas, cameras, getting footage, photo footage, sending them to the council to get bait, trialing different things, just driving around. And then when you drive around in the wet, you chop up the headlands. But if you don't if the council only gives bait out every first and third Wednesday. So if you miss that opportunity, then you've got to wait another fortnight. So you've got to go when it's wet. You you've got to keep doing it.
SPEAKER_03:At the end of the day, we're faced with a lot of constraints here with how close we are to watercourses on all our farms. And our biggest problems are right up against watercourses.
SPEAKER_04:Yep.
SPEAKER_03:So 1080 some places isn't an option where you need it because of that rule of how far are you from a water course or whatever they want to deem it in the and you've got to sign it, it's a legal document. At the end of the day, you no one's gonna put their uh rear end on the line when it comes to legality stuff. So we've got to look at how they're doing it. We'd like to see it done differently, take advantage. You know, I think we had 12 days of fine weather leading up to our season start this year, where they really, really ramped up here, and we probably should have been able to have something done daily rather than set by the calendar, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Completely different scenario in the dry tropics and and what they're doing with the the National Feral Pig Program because the point is that all the pigs go to water. We've got water everywhere, so we don't get an aggregation of 40-50 pigs in one hit. We've got pigs all over the shop in in little in small groups rather than really large, big groups. Like, you know, you can go out west and there'll be a dam, and there's this yeah, and so it's a little bit easier to bait and to to get pigs. Where here, even the pig hunters, they have to work quite hard. And and I mean, dogs, you've got dogs and traps and all sorts of things, but it's not they just don't come out and and look at you, you know. They one guy's chasing one pig for five hours, he finally got it, but that's a long time. I mean, yeah, okay, it's a hobby for one pig, but five hours at$50 an hour is$250 for one pig. And probably lose a dog in the process, or you know, have a$500 vet bill. It's not it's not a simple process. And I think the the idea of oh yeah, you can get you, you know, pre-feed the pigs, get them used to feeding, and then then then bait them, it's not that simple up here.
SPEAKER_04:There's other products, hog on.
SPEAKER_03:You tried that, it went mouldy and hog on was developed, I truly believe, for Western countries because there's no other food source within must be a hundred miles. Yeah, and I keep telling my kids, where would the pigs come and eat grain or whatever we put in the hoggon trap when they've got you know Roscoe's pizza right there? You know what I mean? Like they've got that much food source right here, they're not going to come and sniff out one hoggon box in the middle of a padding. We spent the money to try it at the end of the day, a lot of money, and they didn't even get close to it.
SPEAKER_02:Something else that has been trialled, and you've been involved with this, Joe, is this cluster baiting pilot. Can you tell me what was involved in that?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, we we put bait every three days, and that worked because you were constantly putting bait, and and you didn't need photos of pigs, you needed photos of bananas being eaten. You know, so you could put a pile of five kilos of bananas, and if the five kilos were gone, you estimated that's so many pigs, and then you put the bait for those so many pigs. Whereas the council won't do it that way, they want to see physical photos of pigs. I keep saying if they give you eight bananas to a kilo, you need two bananas, two bananas to kill a pig. But if the first pig is a guts, the others miss out. So you really need to put a decent pile there and then at the end of the next morning go and cover it up. I mean their concern is the cassowary, and I don't want to kill any cassowaries either, but there's ways of managing it.
SPEAKER_02:Do you feel like we know enough about their populations and their movements?
SPEAKER_04:That's part of what we're looking into. That's what we got funding for. But at the end of the day, unless you put a tracker on every pig, how would you know?
SPEAKER_03:There'll be um uh a government agency come out and say that they don't travel X amount of kilometres from their spot, but then you're gonna tell me when there's that many hunters in our district that a pig's not gonna travel. I know guys that have got onto pigs at Donna's Farms or in Lever Estate and they've killed them on this side of the river.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Yeah. Like they got a long way.
SPEAKER_01:I know Trevor Williamson, they did some work in the Tully Valley with the bananas, and they were saying that the range of those pigs was pretty well marched the Tully Valley, but they were still saying it's around 11 Ks, is their range.
SPEAKER_04:That's a fair thing.
SPEAKER_01:And that's that's a fair, yeah. And but the thing is, is the Tully Valley obviously a large concentration of bananas as well, so that that's a large food source. And I've I've talked to banana farmers in Tully and that have fenced farms for reasons, and you know, they go, Oh, I've seen some pigs down there and ring the chopper up and goes, Oh, I've seen a I saw 14 in that corner, and he came back and said, I just shot 47. So he saw 14, but they went in the helicopter and shot 47. And then the thing is, is even in the bananas, the pigs are smart. They hear the helicopter and bang, straight under the canopy. They they they're not they hide. What do we actually mean?
SPEAKER_02:Can we combat this?
SPEAKER_03:National parks has to lead the way. And wet topics. Government, government wet tropics, now they have to be we I remember asking only just at our local area in our mill area for a levy to try to do something, but it's hard to convince Joe Blow, who doesn't have an issue with it. Like Joe said, his farms and marinian, unaffected. How do you ask him to pay a levy for it? You know, he doesn't know that it's coming. But at the end of the day, it's it's difficult to us. So we can't just do it as growers through the mill or things like that. It's got to be something done through the government, local government.
SPEAKER_01:Swine food and food and mouth, right? If that gets here, it won't be$500 million they'll be spending, it'll be five billion dollars that they'd be spending if they want to keep it from getting past a certain line. And once it's gone past that line, they've lost it.
SPEAKER_03:But in the back of my mind, I think to myself, I've got three daughters who love walking around the farm. And do I really want them walking past 1080? All the time. All the time. Yeah. So in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, yeah, we've got this issue. We're gonna bait, we're gonna trap, we're gonna shoot, we're gonna do every single thing we possibly can to keep going. But at the end of the day, I don't want me daughters walking around the farm with 1080 everywhere. No, can't even ride a bike, can't even run our dog on your own farm because there's not a headland that doesn't have 1080 on it. Yeah. So, really? Is that the answer? We're gonna, you know, leave our farms in a state for our kids to use the most lethal poison known to man. It's got to be something like what they did with you know that nexomatosis or something. There's got to be the technology there now that we could do something with feral pigs only and not affect our domestic pork industry because no one wants to see swine flu or foot and mouth. You know, we've all got family members who are farming, grazing, and in the industry, not just sugarcane.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, there's got to be a better outcome than but is there is there a way is there a way to maximize the use of 1080 where you don't have to have it all around your farm where you can develop a pheromone to attract a pig to the bait to make it eat the bait, but it'll only attract most likely the boars, but you know, get rid of the boars, and and that that's the problem. You leave one boar that can impregnate all the sowers.
SPEAKER_03:Your stuff here is is hot spots, but I Matthew, though it was meant to be here today. I don't know anyone in our district who has spent more hours in a paddock at night time away from his family with a thermal or something like that, yeah. And he's done a hell of a job of it, mate. An excellent job. But that's on that side of the river, you know what I mean? Yeah. So whilst he's doing a fantastic job on that side of the river, it's sort of twice as hard this side of the river, you know what I mean. And mind you, I get that luxury because the second farm's across the road from him. But I don't know anyone who has spent more hours than he has, day and night, picking them off. But if he stops, if he stops, yeah, it'll be back again.
SPEAKER_01:Sound and give you what?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Anywhere from 10 to 20 piglets.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the first question I asked their feral pest management representative when they came was uh how much they have in the bucket, and she said the bucket's empty, which makes it very difficult to do. That was the National Therapy Coordinator. National Therapy Coordinator, yeah, sorry. I think she can see and understand and she gets it, yeah. But her hands are tired, she's got a job to do. And I told her the same thing I told you. Uh take a quarter of your income out, Heather, and that's what we're faced with.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Um And that's even after doing the 20 hours a week. You had a farm up Halls Road, you know, they solved the pig problem, got out.
SPEAKER_01:It affects us and our crops, and you go out west. A sheep is lambing and a pig's eating lamb as it's coming. So, I mean, that then it's not just us. There's there are pests everywhere, and you, you know, the cape digging up turtles' nests, all sorts of stuff that they they actually do. So you would think that anything that is developed within our industry is a benefit to all other industries as well.
SPEAKER_02:That was Silkwood sugar cane grower Donna Campagnolo ending that discussion with farmers in the Innespale district. Well, Mick Quirk is the environment and sustainability manager at Cane Growers, and he says the organisation is on the ground advocating for what the growers alluded to: a collaborative approach to feral pig management involving all land managers.
SPEAKER_00:We've heard from uh three very passionate growers about the major issues they face with feral pigs and the you know uh tremendous efforts they've made to get on top of those feral pig populations. I think that really illustrated how difficult that's been and how that's not sustainable into the future unless we address the problem sensibly, with all land managers and all land tenures being involved in a coordinated approach. Um it's not fair on growers um to try and keep suppressing these populations of feral pigs because it has to happen every year, otherwise there's losses of up to 25% happening. So, what we need to see is um government taking a lead here to ensure, particularly the state government, to ensure that at a local level there's a coordinated, well resourced program from uh all land managers, including national parks, uh, to so that we can get some suppression happening in a more sustainable manner that's not causing so much stress and anxiety and financial pressure on growers.