Predicting the weather is not an exact science — so how do we know who to trust?

The farmer couldn’t afford to feed the lambs over another dry summer with no relief in sight; the sale price for lambs and other stock had bottomed out, feed prices were high and it wasn’t worth the diesel to drive the stock to market. So, the farmer weighed up the cost of bullets and decided to shoot the lambs before burying the carcasses. In the nick of time however, thanks to a local newspaper telling his story, the flock was saved with the delivery of donated food from farming support agencies. It was a close call though.

Another farmer, following a forecast of El Niño’s return, made a decision in late 2023 to purchase seed and sow barley on the family’s New South Wales Central Western Plains property in anticipation of many months of dry weather, barley being known to perform best in a low-moisture environment. And then it rained. For weeks. Weather forecasting is a science with a real-life effect. Controversially, Australia’s main forecasting resource, the Bureau of Meteorology (known affectionately as the BOM) late last year warned of an approaching El Niño for the summer of 2023–2024. Many farmers acted on the forecasts only to suffer financial loss when the rains came. If the current water-cooler talk and media commentary is anything to go by, the question is now being asked: were we let down by the experts?

On September 19, 2023, the BOM’s National Manager of Climate Services, Dr Karl Braganza, published a media release: “The Bureau’s three-month forecast for Australian rainfall and temperature has been indicating warm and dry conditions for some time. An established El Niño and positive IOD [Indian Ocean Dipole] reinforces our confidence in those predictions. Based on history, it is now also more likely that warm and dry conditions will persist over eastern Australia until autumn.” El Niño events increase the risk of extreme temperature shifts, such as heatwaves and hotter days. A positive IOD contributes to greater fire risk over south-east Australia in spring, while El Niño contributes to elevated fire risk over both spring and summer.

What happened, as we now know, was a cooler-than-normal summer of storms and rain, and lots of it. There was widespread flooding in many parts of the country, the impact of which was even greater than usual, given that the new floods were coming on the back of the recent devastating flood events in 2022–2023.

EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

In early February 2024, the BOM’s official record of Australia’s climate for 2023 was released, stating “the August to October period was Australia’s driest three-month period on record since 1900”. Winter 2023 was the warmest winter on record and September 2023 was the driest September ever recorded in Australia. That said, three consecutive La Niñas had taken their toll, destroying homes, rendering townships unliveable and many homes uninsurable.

For farmers, it is a story of swings and roundabouts, depending on your location. If you didn’t lose infrastructure, crops or stock due to flooding, the heavy rains over the La Niña period could be seen as a positive. Some even welcomed the additional rain in early 2024. An agent for one of the country’s largest agricultural suppliers, Cameron Fletcher*, explains: “Our growers in central New South Wales and further north are pretty positive, actually. It’s moisture in the bank for next year. You never complain about the rain: the day you wish it would stop raining is the day it goes and doesn’t come back.”

In an ABC Rural report on January 22, 2024, Angus Verley and Jane McNaughton detailed farmers’ growing frustration, stating: “Livestock producers are claiming that unreliable long-term weather forecasts have played havoc with sheep and cattle prices.” A farmer from Hamilton in south-west Victoria told them he sold livestock after the dry spring, following the BOM declaration in September 2023 that there was an El Niño on the way. He said, “We got to November and prices weren’t great and the weather forecast wasn’t brilliant, so I made the decision to sell steers I probably would have kept, with the benefit of hindsight.”

“Shooting stock is a last-resort option for producers,” says Tom Hastings*, a mixed farmer from the Riverina in southern New South Wales. “But in winter 2023 there were sheep in parts of New South Wales that were ‘unsellable’ because of lack of buyer demand. In some yards, sheep were only attracting as little as $5 to $10 per head, not worth the transport costs and yard and agent fees to sell. Not many farmers are in this predicament, but for those who are, the mental health toll it has on a producer must be exhausting, seeing all their hard work of no financial value and buried.”

The ABC Rural report in January stated that lamb prices for spring 2023 dropped to almost half of the previous year’s prices, with “reports of sheep being sold for a dollar each while the main cattle value indicator dropped about 20 per cent over the same time”. Other factors included the high cost of feed after all the market disruption due to the weather, and that the prices had previously been so good for lambs that many farmers expanded their flocks. So when they sold lambs, the market was flooded and the price dropped sharply.

Tom Hastings confirms this experience: “Many sheep and long-term ewe breeders took a financial hit this spring selling season. One large sheep breeder and fine wool grower in central Victoria had ewes, which would normally fetch $300 to $350 per head when prices are strong, sell at $150 to $200 per head. He blamed the BOM weather prediction as farmers offloaded excess stock early, fearing feed shortage.” Tom revealed that his property’s lamb operation also took a financial hit with last year’s lambs selling for 30 to 40 per cent less than 2022. However, he adds, “the season was overall relatively positive and good pastures minimised production costs”. Swings and roundabouts again.

MAKING DECISIONS

There are conflicting views on what happened with the weather reports, and the BOM wasn’t the only forecasting agency to predict a hot, dry summer. Cameron Fletcher says, “The BOM was right. The El Niño from South America did come across the Pacific Ocean. It did happen, just not in the way they expected. No two El Niños are the same. The BOM butchered it, but what do you do? Weather forecasting istaking a hundred variables and trying to translate that into ‘is it going to rain next month?’ You have to play the averages.

“Ninety per cent of farming is timing and most farmers are reactionary. Good farmers, however, will adapt and have several plans up their sleeve so they can take advantage of the changes in the market and weather.”

Tom Hastings agrees: “The weather is not an exact science. Farmers need to use long-range forecasts as a tool to make decisions and for their own risk management.”

It must be acknowledged, however, that the capacity to make and carry out alternative plans is relative, and reflective of the depth of one’s pockets and the length of one’s arm.

For Simon Matthews*, an agronomist and third-generation farmer in the Central West district of New South Wales, the BOM is just one source of weather forecasting among many. He and his family run a busy operation of mixed livestock and winter cropping, while also maximising opportunities for off-farm income. He says, “We look at a number of weather sites. It’s addictive, checking all the different sites and models. They’re accessible on the phone in your pocket, so it becomes a bit of an obsession. The days are gone when you would only rely on the BOM.”

What happened at Simon’s family property in 2023? “The BOM was so firm on its dry prediction from mid- to end of 2023, we were planning for a long, hot spell. We got the harvest out of the way, and it hasn’t stopped raining since! Now we have a full moisture profile and are on track for an above-average year.

“The BOM doesn’t have any more of an idea than anyone else. As farmers, though, we listen to the BOM because they have all the resources. But they got it wrong. It led to destocking ahead of a drought and now those farmers have to buy back the stock at a premium three months later.”

Simon’s family was fortunate. They didn’t suffer with a lack of water during 2023 when dams were drying up, feed was diminishing, and rainfall was low. “We have underground water and were able to keep most of our livestock,” he explains. “West of us, water was a big problem for many farmers and
so they sold off. We were very lucky.”

The other point Simon makes is that farming practices need to, and are, changing in response to new technologies and a more nuanced understanding of the weather. “Everything happens in cycles,” he says. “But the extremes are probably worse now. Certainly, the thunderstorms are worse. It seems every second or third summer we get a really bad storm season, often with hail. Climate change is affecting the cycles so farming practices need to improve in response. Farming has been forced to adapt to new technologies that are continually being developed, assisting in managing the forever changing climate. If we farmed like 30 years ago, our production would be significantly lower and in some instances not viable. As for forecasting, I try not to get caught up in it. Whether it is predicted to be a dry year or not, we’re still going to put a crop in and we’ll work around it.”

It’s not the first time the BOM has been in the firing line in recent years. Notably, the Bureau has faced repeated criticism throughout the recent flooding events. On its website, the BOM states it provides flood forecasting and warning services for most major rivers in Australia. However, a Sydney Morning Herald investigation in December 2022 examined the performance of the BOM during the floods that year. Lismore locals complained that warnings came too late and failed to predict the severity of the flood risk. A BOM manager, Jane Golding, told the newspaper, “the forecast rainfall didn’t pick up the extremity of the event” and that the computer modelling of rainfall for the Northern Rivers was inaccurate. She said, “None of them really picked up 775 millimetres in the headwaters of Lismore. The upper range for the Northern Rivers was between 200 and 400 millimetres.”

Earlier, in March 2021, ABC Rural had also reported farmers’ complaints that the BOM wasn’t providing accurate or timely flood warnings and river height data following major flooding along the Dumaresq River on the Queensland and New South Wales border. The area had been in drought since 2014 and the floods decimated the first decent crop in years. Farmers complained of six-hour gaps between reports on river heights and inaccurate warnings on river peaks.

FUTURE PREDICTIONS

Obtaining accurate data during unprecedented weather conditions, then interpreting the data correctly and communicating the right message to the right audience at the right time appear to be the BOM’s challenges moving forward. Farmers, landowners and townspeople each look to the BOM for different reasons and require different information.

To address community concerns and improve communication, a new support team at the BOM was established within its agriculture program to assist with farming operations and planning. A spokesperson from the Bureau provided this response to Graziher: it predicted, “via its October 2023 to April 2024 severe weather season outlook, the possibility of cyclones and to expect a typical summertime risk of severe thunderstorms, and risk of riverine flooding. This has eventuated. The rainfall experienced over summer was not unprecedented for an El Niño event, especially in the south-east of the continent. Around half of the past El Niño events have included heavy rainfall events, particularly across parts of eastern Australia. This occurred in December 2009 and again in August 2015 where the Illawarra received more than 400 millimetres of rain in two days. Of the 28 El Niño summers since 1900–1901, 2023–2024 had the third-highest Australian rainfall total, behind 2009–2010 and 1994–1995.”

Cameron Fletcher says: “The BOM isn’t perfect and hence there’s now a large private weather forecasting market available to tap into: nevertheless, they’ve been known to get it wrong also. But the BOM cannot be held responsible for farmers’ decisions. You have to take responsibility for your own decisions on the land. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t. And there’s luck involved too. For instance, there are extreme variances in summer rain. You can get 100 millimetres, and two minutes down the road they didn’t get a drop. Farming is a tough game. You’ve got to be tough to play it.”

Trying to make sense of its rapidly changing weather pattern is Australia’s new national sport and everyone is invested in the outcome. We’re all gamblers in a country of extremities. There are a lot of eyes on the BOM and perhaps more scrutiny now than ever.

Katherine Beard is a senior lawyer and writer living in Bendigo, Victoria.

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