It never rains, but it pours

Words Sam Vincent

EVERYONE knows that only bores talk about the weather – except for farmers, who talk of little else. How’s your season going? Get any rain? Bit dry, isn’t it? These are the mating calls of the primary producer.

A good friend of mine, a Commonwealth public servant, recently found himself chatting to a farmer at a wedding in Adelaide. The farmer asked him where Canberra’s weather comes from. My friend had never considered the question before.

In fact, there’s probably only one subject that animates farmers more than the weather: who forecasts it.

During the summer of 2019–20, which marked the nadir of four years of drought on my family’s farm near Canberra, my father became convinced a conspiracy was afoot each evening at 7.25pm.

“Listen to the glee in his voice,” Dad would say as the TV weather presenter promised us another fine and sunny day. “He’s enjoying it, isn’t he!” (At the time, I took such comments as proof my father was losing it. But since taking over the farm, which has coincided with wet years, I’ve engaged in my own conspiratorial thinking and have come to believe that the national broadcaster – catering to the urban majority who don’t want their summer holidays ruined by rain – holds an anti-La Niña bias.)

Among the forecasters, however, it’s not the TV weather presenters but the Bureau of Meteorology, known universally as the BOM, that is most maligned. Its influence cannot be underestimated, its forecasts taken so seriously they’re
held responsible for affecting commodity prices.

In September 2023, the BOM declared El Niño to be underway
and warned of likely dry conditions into summer. Many graziers, financially and psychologically scarred by paying high fodder prices to keep their animals alive during that Black Summer (and by receiving low prices when they finally sent them to the saleyards), began to destock, flooding the market and overwhelming abattoirs.

According to the Eastern States Young Cattle Indicator, by the end of the week of the BOM’s declaration, prices had dropped below $4 per kilogram (carcass
weight) for the first time since 2019. Wool producers also experienced a decline in the price of sheep, and many croppers opted to reduce or even cancel the volume of spring seed they sowed, thinking the harvest would be imperilled.

But then Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales experienced significantly wetter-than-average conditions from early that summer, leaving those farmers who had acted on the BOM’s advice frustrated. When questioned by Galah, a BOM spokesperson maintained that all this was accurately forecast and that “there is no evidence that the bureau’s El Niño declaration, which was issued in September 2023, at the end of a long run of destocking and price falls, significantly affected these destocking decisions or livestock prices in Australia.”

Given the Black Summer drought broke in much of southern Australia in February 2020, prompting prices to soar during the next three years as graziers rushed to re-stock, these claims seem dubious. According to industry body Meat & Livestock Australia, the price of cattle remained above the five and 10-year average across 2022; by October 2023 – weeks after El Niño was declared – prices were up to 70 per cent lower than a year earlier. In its “year in review” for 2023, Meat & Livestock Australia argued: “It could be said that there has never been a more seismic shift in the confidence of Australian livestock producers in such a short time than what has played out in 2023.”

While it’s true that cattle prices had been falling in the months before the BOM’s declaration (if not as precipitously as after it), the “year in review” points out that this decline mirrored intense media speculation that an El Niño declaration was coming, even though conditions for most farmers were still fine. In other words, market sentiment was based on fear of the forecast, rather than reality of the weather.

In response to Galah, the BOM spokesperson rejected the notion that farmers are losing faith in the bureau, saying only “on a seasonal level, our system is recognised as one of the best.” But the fact remains that the weaker-than-expected El Niño BOM forecast for late 2023 came on the back of community anger in north Queensland the previous summer at the bureau’s under-forecast of flooding rains.

“The government says farmers should plan ahead, but how can we do that when BOM gets the forecast so wrong?” Tobias Koenig tells me on a frosty morning a few months ago at the Capital Region Farmers Market in Canberra beside his stall of biodynamic potatoes and garlic.

By his own admission, Koenig is hard to please; when I point out his vegetable crops have competing rainfall demands with his beef cattle herd, he offers a wry smile. “All I want is fine weather for the garlic and nice rainfall on the cattle pastures.” Still, Koenig feels the BOM isn’t doing its job. “I’m not asking them to grow potatoes,” he says. “I just want them to provide me with accurate weather forecasting.”

Who, then, does he turn to? Koenig still consults the BOM, even if his wife has told him to stop for the sake of his mental health. (For the same reason, Koenig tells me of one farming friend who has “deleted all the weather apps” and now makes management decisions based only on “what’s in the rain gauge”.) Koenig also checks the forecast released by the agribusiness company Elders and, somewhat mysteriously, what he calls, “the Norwegian model”.

A few market stalls over, beef and vegetable producer Sue Armstrong, of Greenhill Farm near Bungendore in New South Wales, is more forgiving of the BOM, which she thinks does an admirable job in the face of budget cuts. Armstrong also checks the Elders forecast and, like Koenig, rates Norway’s ability to forecast Australia’s weather.

I’m still processing what this means when, a moment later, I run into a friend, a local merino producer, doing his market shopping. I ask him if he’s heard about what Armstrong calls “the Norgies” – and he says he consults them all the time. He says “the Norwegians” provide a specific forecast for his farm, as opposed to the BOM, whose nearest forecast is for a town five kilometres away.

What’s going on?

Ingrid Støver Jensen is the head of product development and editor of Yr, an online weather service jointly produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The service, which means both “drizzle” and “excitement” in Norwegian, is what these Australian farmers (and, she confirms, thousands more besides) are using.

By email, Jensen tells me the website Yr.no launched in 2007. The idea was that the public broadcaster and the public meteorological service, which had collaborated since 1923, would be brought into the internet age with a shared website. The meteorologists would provide the data, and the broadcasters would bring it to the public.

Yr was created, says Jensen, for Norwegians. “We have a long coastline and lots of mountains, and weather can be severe and hazardous. When you live in Norway, you need to relate to the forecast when being outdoors, whether professionally or private.” However, she adds, “Since neither the weather, Norwegians nor the internet stop at the national border, we decided our service should provide forecasts all over the world. In that way, it will be useful in many relevant situations for our users.”

Yr currently provides weather forecasting for one million locations within Norway and 12 million worldwide. Half its users are in Norway; although Jensen tells me “Norwegians travel, study and work abroad, and when starting Yr, we had all Norwegians abroad in mind.”

Of those who use Yr outside Norway, the vast majority are not backpackers from Oslo or mariners from Bergen. “I’ve received thank-you emails from a winemaker in Latin America, and a Malawian farmer offered us his private observations of precipitation in return of his use of Yr,” she says. Australia is the 23rd ranked global user. The biggest outside Scandinavia is South Africa.

Yr has a free and open data policy, and harnesses several supercomputers to create a 3D grid of the Earth’s surface, upon which it calculates weather development for each square of the grid. The distance between grid squares in Scandinavia is 2.5 kilometres, and the rest of the world, nine kilometres. The resulting Australian forecast offers a divergence from the BOM.

On a recent rainy day on my farm, I compared Yr’s forecast with the BOM’s. The Australian bureau predicted “0-5mm” for the spot on their rainfall chart where the farm is located; Yr’s specific forecast for my farm, albeit with the name spelled incorrectly, was 9mm. We got 10mm.

Although Yr is funded by the Norwegian taxpayers, Jensen tells me “there are no extra costs for us letting the rest of the world use our service, so actually we think it is nice that we have made a weather service that is useful to others outside our country. It makes us proud that people outside Norway find the service useful.”

It seems obvious, given how transnational weather is, that forecasting should be, too. Maybe one day the United Nations will provide a One World Government Forecasting Service. For now, there’s Yr – even if Koenig tells me “they used to be spot-on for precipitation. Now even they aren’t as good as they used to be.”

Perhaps the only way for farmers to be content with their weather forecaster is if they manage their land, where possible, in a way that prepares them for every outlook. Pork producer Sam Johnson, of Boxgum Grazing near Young, tells me his faith in the BOM’s forecasting has actually increased over time, citing its greater understanding and appreciation “of both the chaotic nature of weather systems and the longer-term drivers of weather patterns”.

Although he confesses that “being a farmer makes you a bit of a weather nut”, as a practitioner of holistic management and regenerative farming, with its focus on underlying ecosystem processes, Johnson is “less concerned about how the current season might pan out” and doesn’t “fret on a weather system to get us out of a jam”.

He takes a broader view. Farmers have “no influence on how much actual rain we might get or when it falls, but we have a huge amount of influence on how effective that rain becomes”, Johnson says. This means focusing on converting it into vegetation or ensuring it soaks into the soil.

In other words, maybe farmers shouldn’t ask each other how much rain they got, but what they did with it.