The most important factor in truly sustainable, profitable and self-reliant agriculture is a healthy covered soil surface.

The management practices that achieve this are widely known and well proven, but sadly they are not yet common practice.

These practices are also the same ones that build soil carbon levels, which Tim Flannery and Ross Garnaut among many others have identified as our best means to address climate change.

Enhancing soil carbon levels enables the land to better cope with drought and flood, encourages bio-diversity, reverses desertification, and begins the move away from depending on the Government for handouts towards genuine industry self-reliance.

It is also the only genuine long-term answer to healing the Murray Darling Basin - so there is something in this even for the climate sceptics.

The Government is waiting to hear agriculture call for the inclusion of soil carbon credits in the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme - Agriculture must start to call for this now - it is the best way we have to make a contribution, let alone one of the only ways we have to reduce our liabilities.

Clearly the exceptional circumstances funding would be better spent on finding deep fractured rock water for farmers and weaning them off surface water.

The deep fractured rock water (below 200m) is not connected to the surface water flows in any significant way.

This deep fractured rock water has sustainable flows in the Murray Darling Basin of between 50,000L -250,000L per hour.

This water is the only new water available to sustain farm production.

The public science belief that this water is connected to and supplied by rainwater is wrong. Did all of the water in the ocean, that is 70pc of the Earth surface and up to 6km deep, fall out of the sky as rainwater? Clearly, the answer is no - all water on and within the earth was created within the earth and this production system is perpetual.

If someone is unfortunate enough to be affected by drought but has had the forethought to make provision for such events, why should they be denied the benefits of this safe guard?

Use of creative structures such as trusts and the like means assets and cash can be separated from the operating entity, thereby making the operating entity eligible for support whilst some others who havnt used such structures are left outside the support loop. T

hese inequities need to be addressed if division and resentment are to be avoided. All or none should be the rule.

Most farmers I know just see the EC payments as a means to having grocery money until our farm can again suport us. We are going to survive and appreciate that these payments have lessenes our hardship for a short while, taking the strain off family relationships.

Cut out the dole and such payments because of bad self management? I dont think so. At least farmers are contributing something worthwhile and are earning their keep!

I do not agree with EC support for farmers. Our family has built a strong on and off farm asset portfolo to decrease our exposure to drought. Because of our off farm assets we have not been eligable for EC support while our neighbours have.

All EC support has done is keep inefficinent farmers in the game, degrading their soils through conventional farming methods, and causes land prices to be inflated and too expensve for efficient operators looking to buy up and expand.

Help rural Australia increase efficiency and adopt better farming techniques by stoping EC support for farmers.

I want the person that calls themself Soil Carbon to show us how it's done. Obviously the rest of us that manage the land are too incompetent.

After 23% interest rates of the '80s i dont think there are any bad farmers left only bad supermarkets, bad goverments and bad policy.

drought aid rewards bad farmers like public service subsidised wages reward bad public servants. If our public servants want to work for free then we will work for free during drought.

We too had off farm assets which we pretty well used up to get through years 4, 5 and 6 of drought. We farm no-till and are as "efficient" as possible. We did harvest some crop in 2005 but strangely after 4 years of drought prices were a low $100 t. We should have an EC in place to support not only farmers but their communities as well in periods of drought such as this. Fine tune it but don't wipe it. Pretty soon many of our towns will be shells, the few large farmers left will all send their kids away to school so they'll disappear...so much for advancing Australia. Easy to make "difficult decisions" about agriculture's future on a comfortable city wage - harder for us out here to live with the consequences.