Our farms are our most productive and efficient solar panels, converting sunlight directly into food, fibres, fuels, chemicals, and construction materials –  on a very large scale. 

However, since we have been digging fossil fuels out of the ground, our farm-produced commodities have been losing market share to the fossil-fuel powered commodities. 

This can easily be seen by simply comparing wool and cotton, with synthetic fibres; solar-powered, grass-fed lamb and beef, with fossil-fuel powered chicken; timber with steel and concrete; and farm produced fuels with fossil-fuelled energy. 

All have lost huge market share, because the fossil-fuelled commodities aren’t paying the full price that the burning of fossil fuels is costing our planet and our society.

 The cost of climate change, increasing desertification, rising sea levels, sea walls around all of our major cities, major loss of prime real estate, and sea acidification, are just few of their costs that they aren’t paying for. 

If the price of their products covered these costs, then we would never be able to afford them; instead we expect our grandchildren to pick up the tab for them.

Making the fossil fuel industries pay for at least part of these costs, by putting a price on carbon, would provide huge opportunities to farmers. 

New, old crops, like hemp for fibre, bamboo as a construction material, crop residue used for plastics, are just a few that would give farmers new opportunities.

There would be many other opportunities for producing chemicals and energy on farms. 

Sequestration of carbon would become another new income altogether.

On the other hand though, if we don’t address global warming, then farmers will be most adversely affected. 

We already farm in a pretty difficult climate, and huge areas of our farmland are already marginal.

There is already a steady stream of farmers leaving the land, because their farms have become non-viable. This will increase exponentially, as global warming kicks in.

Farmers, who vote for a political party that won’t put a market price on carbon, but instead put coal mines in our best farm land, are like prawns voting for barbies.