Although now retired from a lifetime of pastoralism, Bob McFarland is unlikely to turn his back entirely on the bush and its ever-emerging problems calling for innovative solutions.
Throughout his career, the bearded crusader from Oxley Station has been a rural activist, variously pestering and inspiring others with his infectious enthusiasm, and championing a range of causes, from saltbush to carp control to wool industry reform.
Although a sheepman himself all his working life, he despairs at the industry’s stubborn conservatism and pathological fear of change.
“When Jim Watts came on the scene with his revolutionary (soft rolling skin) ideas in the 1990s I thought he would be hailed as a messiah, but instead the Merino breeders closed ranks against him,” he said.
“The industry is still living in the past, compared to cotton. Why are we still using wool bales designed to hang from a camel’s hump? By now there should be a better system, perhaps one that enabled wool to be vacuum-packed in bulk plastic bags with electronic bar coding identification, for containerised transportation.
“And shearing, which used to cost about one-tenth of our wool proceeds, now costs nearly one-third, because we have to pay shearers huge wages to do a job that’s just too hard. The technology has barely changed in more than a century.”
Practising what he preaches, Bob made sure the new woolshed he erected in 2007 to replace the previous 50-year-old shed that was flattened by a storm, incorporated all the latest technology for labour saving and efficient wool handling.
Another person to influence Bob’s approach to land management was the late Dick Condon, the former Western Lands Commissioner whose practical and technical knowledge of rangeland issues Bob regards as unsurpassed.
It was at Condon’s instigation that Bob in association with Andy Sippel from Narromine planted extensive areas of Old Man Saltbush seedlings around the Riverina and adjacent parts of Victoria to rehabilitate scalded and salted land.
A local “livewire” for most of his working life, Bob was closely involved at branch level in the NSW Farmers Association, the Isolated Children’s Parents Association and the former Country Party (now the Nationals).
During the 1990s he served on the Lachlan Catchment Management Committee, as inaugural vice-chairman followed by three years as chairman, in which capacity he also served on the Murray-Darling Basin Community Advisory Committee.
A strong advocate for Landcare, Bob nonetheless believes the program saw too much money allocated to tree plantings and squandered on bureaucracy, resulting in long-term programs running out of funds, and other worthy proposals being rejected.
Bob’s interest in environmental matters found a commercial dimension with the establishment of Charlie Carp, the company he co-founded in 1995 to find a productive use for European carp, the scourge of Murray-Darling waterways.
As many as 50 tonnes a year of carp harvested from southern rivers by commercial fishermen and captured at traps adjacent to weirs are now made into fertiliser in the company’s Deniliquin factory.
Marketed under the Charlie Carp brand, it is sold Australia-wide and is penetrating export markets, resulting in the removal of millions of unwanted feral fish from our rivers.
He worries of ecological disaster if a supposedly carp-specific herpes virus now in the hands of CSIRO and seen in some quarters as a biological answer to the carp menace is approved for release.
Noting that an estimated 88 per cent of the fish across the Murray-Darling Basin are now carp-related, he fears inland rivers could become toxic “sewers” of dead and dying fish, with disastrous implications for towns reliant on river waters.
Far better, he says, to use the resource by extending the Charlie Carp operation across the basin and addressing the feral pest problem.
