Informative Essay: The Agricultural Industry In Australia

Agriculture in Australia

Approximately half of the Australia total land area is used for agricultural purpose (ABS, 2016). Agriculture contributes to 2.2 per cent of the Australian economy and has a significant contribution in the export industry (AIR, 2015). The drastic increase in Australia’s population from 1.5 million in 2010 to 23.8 million in 2015 has put a larger burden on Australian agriculture (Metcalfe and Bui, 2017). This is because more agricultural products are needed to feed the increasing population, but amount of land for agriculture decreases as it competes with the urban expansion and other resources industry. Apart from that, Australian soils and vegetation also faces abiotic pressure from the changing climate which affects

One of the costliest forms of land degradation in Australia is secondary dryland salinity as it reduces grain yields of most annual crops such as wheat (Metcalfe and Bui, 2017). Each year, the estimated global cost of irrigation-induced salinity is about US$11 billion (FAO, 2005). National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA) in 2001 predicted that area affected by dryland salinity to increase from 5.7 million hectares to 17 million hectares by 2050 (Metcalfe and Bui, 2017). Furthermore, abiotic stress, such as salinity and sodicity is an expanding abiotic threat affecting almost 800 million hectares of land worldwide (FAO, 2009). Pannell and Ewing (2006) reported that it is considerably difficult to prevent the dryland salinity from occurring and therefore, having salt-tolerant crops and pastures are the only achievable option to

Furthermore, the different plant developmental stage has different degree of salt tolerance (Javid et al., 2011). For instance, salt stress has no significant effect during seed germination (Yildirim et al., 2006). Therefore, understanding the extent of salt tolerance at each growth phase of a plant is important to avoid misinterpretation of the plant’s tolerance level examined at certain growth stage (Javid et al., 2011). Other factors to consider on how plants respond to salt stress are the organ or tissue that is in contact with the stress, and the genotype of the plant (Bray et al., 2000). All these factors combined to decide whether the plant is tolerant or susceptible to the stress which will result in either survival or