Now if we asked you to guess one of the biggest agricultural disasters Australia has ever faced, I don’t reckon many people would answer …. a bunch of cactuses! Yet for a period there, it was causing absolute havoc.
The story goes that prickly pear was brought out because people liked the look of it and it made a handy hedge. Which seems innocent enough until you remember half of Australia’s environmental problems started with somebody saying “she’ll be right”…. and then next minute… Anyway, long story short, the cactus absolutely loved it here.
Not in a “grew a bit better than expected” sort of way either. By the early 1900s the stuff was spreading across Queensland and New South Wales at a ridiculous rate and before long, millions of hectares of productive farming land had completely disappeared under thick infestations of prickly pear.
Put yourself here though, imagine spending years building up a property, slogging away day after day, only to watch it slowly get swallowed by overrun cactuses.
Farmers tried pretty much everything they could think of. Burning it didn’t work, cutting it up just created more cactuses, chemical treatments weren’t making enough of a dent and the bloody thing seemed almost impossible to stop and every year it just getting worse and worse and kept spreading at a rapid rate!
At one point the Australian Government was offering rewards to anybody who could come up with a workable solution because the situation had become that serious… then some clever cookie suggested importing a moth from South America.
Now if you’ve lived in Australia for more than about 5 minutes, alarm bells should already be ringing. Introducing species has not exactly been our strong suit… but somehow, against all odds, this one actually turned out differently.
The Cactoblastis moth lays its eggs on prickly pear and when the larvae hatch they burrow into the plant and start eating it from the inside. What followed was one of the most successful biological control programs ever recorded, with the moth dramatically reducing prickly pear populations across huge parts of the country.
It’s actually hard to overstate how rare that outcome is, especially in Australia LOL! Most Australian stories involving introduced species end with someone asking how to get rid of the thing we introduced to get rid of the first thing.
The more you learn about Australian agriculture, the more you realise it’s full of stories that sound completely made up, like the wine bladder invented in Renmark becomes the Aussie icon, the goon bag. The military losing battles to emus and now a random moth saves millions of hectares of farming from psycho cactuses!
But that’s Australian agriculture for you. Behind every farm, vineyard and orchard is a history full of ingenuity, resilience, a bit of luck and the occasional solution that sounds completely insane until it actually works. And in the case of prickly pear, thank goodness it did!
