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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

There are so many more interesting Australian native food plants that make more sense to concentrate on growing than native grasses. Not the most productive use of time and land.

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Can you elaborate on this? One of the main benefits of growing these grasses/grains is that they can grow on land that is otherwise unproductive (we have a lot of this in Australia). Do you have knowledge that this is not the case?

For commercial farming the question is: does it have a high enough yield to justify the harvesting cost? If it doesn't, it doesn't matter if the land is free.

You're right, but I think it is way too early to make a call on that. I would expect the cost to diminish dramatically over time with selective breeding and the knowledge gained through experience.

Grains are not able to be productive without huge inputs of fertilisers and agrochemicals. These marginal lands would be better off left as grazing country.

One thing we could do is improve the meat conversion of kangaroos and wallabies. Some serious selective breeding could provide a commercially viable way to use these lands without the environmental damage resulting from cattle and sheep.

These marginal lands would be better off left as grazing country.

From what I've read a lot of Australia seems to be over-grazed.

Yes because we graze imported ruminants - I am suggesting we try and make our native animals a viable grazing option.

Kangaroo is very tasty and low in fat. Selective breeding like we have done with cattle and sheep could make them commercially viable rather than be seen as a pest.

But wouldn't that serious selective breeding coupled with some pressure to increase number of grazers per acre lead to the same damage as with cattle and sheep? Environmental damage is not about what eats up the grass but about scale and trying to extract as much profit as possible.

I'm no authority at all, but I suspect the hooves of cattle are much more destructive than kangaroo hind paws. I've seen rural land in a regional area revegetate after cows were removed and the changes were very noticeable. Often kangaroo tracks are less obvious and areas without new growth are the small areas they tend to lie down in habitually.

Yes the hooves of introduced ruminants are incredibly destructive to this sensitive lands. Kangaroos are much less damaging to the environment as they have soft feet.

It seems we have a lot of people commenting here who have no idea about the realities of modern agriculture.

Not productive now. Just like every other intensively farmed grain, you start with something that will actually grow, then modify genome until economically efficient. This seems like solid research, because finding crops with the genomes that allow them to grow in the outback is probably useful elsewhere.

And I fail to see how some hypothetical bulked up kangaroo farm is going to be any solution. 'Selective breeding' kangaroos can't change "there's not many calories out here, and not much water" into a nice juicy steak that western palates will make economical. See: Masai cattle breeds.

Yes and if we did this we would end up with a grain that requires as much fertiliser and agrochemicals as wheat or barley.

Good thing kangaroos are adapted to low calories food and low water. Now all we need to do is make them a better food source than they are right now.

Well there never a guarantee of miracles. But wheat and barley didn't start out as marginal soil crops.

And kangaroos are adapted to low calorie food and low water now. If you bulked them out to be 'better', that is bigger, fatter, more tender, they would need more calories for fat and more water to support more mass. So, no, there is no "all we need to do...".

But when your attitude is 'these brown native people would never figure this out' perspective, it's easy to think in terms of "all we need to do...".

Actually wheat and barley did start out as marginal so it crops, but this is irrelevant to modern agriculture. The reason we can feed the almost 8 billion people on the planet is that we have selected for strains that respond to fertiliser and agrochemicals.

The selective breeding for improvement of kangaroos is not a binary choice - you can improve for multiple traits and balance for multiple requirements.

Where in the hell have I even hinted at “brown native people would never figure this out”? This is frankly very offensive.

Not OP but i think it's because grain farming is not really efficient overall without load of fertilizer (or burning forests), especially if you cna't use cover crops (if you can i think the storage capacity of grain make it a better product overall).

If you RTFA you'll see that these grasses grow well on degraded land. Wheat, barley etc does not. We have a lot of degraded land.

If you read Pascoe's book, you'll see that one of the reasons the indigenous agriculture disappeared so quickly is that stock sought out the delicious native grasses and destroyed them. Delicious means market opportunity.

stock = livestock for those who don’t know Australian.

Yes but they are not productive. The yield of grain is not commercially viable. It is much better to use these lands for grazing stock - in an ideal world native stock.

I have my doubts as to the existence of indigenous agricultural - this doesn’t mean that aboriginal people didn’t do things that had some similarities to farming, just that they never stepped over the line and became farmers.

I think I get Daniel's point. I'm inclined to favour seeing that outback land turned over to something other than grazing, but what? It's remote, dry, broad, etc. Those grazing animals are essentially autonomous bots harvesting disparate clumps of feed - like a hay that bales itself (as meat).

Australian (and pretty much everyone else’s) grasslands are threatened and while mowing them isn’t idea, it’s a lot better than many of the alternative uses. Growing something that wants to grow versus some water intensive crop, or cattle is a straight win.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...

Such as, and how/why?

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