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woody crops
Potential annual
biomass production
(millions of green
tonnes per year)
4.7 – 7.8 6.4 – 9.6 9.6 - 13.5
21 – 31 million
green tonnes
Sugar system
Sugar cane is grown mostly within 80 km of the coast, along the plains and in river valleys of
northern New South Wales and Queensland. The cane lands stretch about 2100 km in a discontinuous
strip from Maclean, near Grafton, New South Wales, to Mossman, Queensland (Figure 1.2). The
principal centres of production are in the neighbourhood of Cairns, Innisfail, Ingham, Ayr, Mackay
and Bundaberg. Queensland accounts for about 95% of Australia’s raw sugar production, and New
South Wales around 5%.
Sugar cane production is limited to areas of high and evenly distributed rainfall or where irrigation is
available. Rainfall ranges from 4000 to 4500 mm in the Innisfail area ( Tully, Innisfail, Babinda),
through 1750 mm at Cairns-Mossman and Ingham, 1500 mm at Mackay, 1100 mm at Bundaberg and
1000 mm at Ayr. All cane at Ayr is intensively irrigated. Some supplementary irrigation is also
applied at Bundaberg and Mackay.
More than 4000 sugar growing farms operate along Australia’s eastern seaboard. While the average
size of a cane farm is 70 hectares, with an annual sugarcane production of 7000tonnes, some are in
excess of 1000 hectares. While there are still a number of smaller farms, average farm size is
increasing each year, as the number of growers contracts and area farmed expands.
1.3.2 Nature of future expansion
Mallee system
Future expansion in WA will be commercially driven. The initial planting effort was strongly
encouraged by environmental management objectives and associated public funding, but
environmental drivers are now less influential than in the 1990s. Farmers with mallees are now
awaiting the development of markets and the harvesting of the resource they have already established.
This same pattern of strong initial farmer support followed by the adoption of a wait-and-see
approach before critical mass is achieved may be repeated in other regions of the wheatbelt of
southern Australia unless there is a coordinated whole-of-industry development process.
The pause in expansion of the WA mallee resource does not mean farmers are unaware of the
environmental benefits, even though these benefits are difficult to quantify and include in
conventional economic analyses. Farmers may adopt new enterprises for a range of reasons, not all of
which are strictly economic. The drought tolerance of deep-rooted woody vegetation, the ability to
utilise rainfall outside the winter cereal season and aesthetic values may all play a part.
A social survey by Baumber et al (2011) of prospective mallee growers in central NSW indicates that
a significant proportion of farmers do not see crops like mallee as being directly competitive with
annual cropping and grazing but more as a supplementary production system that may help to even
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