Climate professor Roger Stone visits Maranoa to teach producers about climate maps

That’s the message University of Southern Queensland Professor in Climate Science, Professor Roger Stone has for Queensland growers and producers as the risk of an El Niño continues to grow.

Professor Stone visited Mitchell and Roma this week to deliver a Climate and Weather Workshop aimed at turning farmers into climatologists within three to four hours.

Workshop attendees were given seasonal weather maps and were producing their own forecasts by the end of the day. 

While the concept of forecasting weather “frightens the life out of people”, Professor Stone said farmers needed to stop relying on forecasts from other parties.

“If you are making a million dollar management decision you need to be able to work in very very closely with what this (weather maps) is all about,” he said.

“You can’t just accept things off the TV or the web, you have got to go to the next step and you have to own the information.” 

He said he had large concerns about where forecasts were heading for the rest of the year.

With Autumn being a pivotal decision making time for crop farmers and restockers he said it was important that people started to become cautious in their risk management.

“It doesn’t look good (weather wise),” he said.

“None of this (weather) training has any value unless it changes the management decisions of people.

“What might be happening out there is the people who have corps will be pretty cautious before they start buying urea and fertilizer for the winter crops and restocking may take a different approach (than normal).

“What we try to prevent is overstocking when going into drought because that means cattle prices drop and the land becomes very badly degraded.

“We don’t want people to go through those types of years again.”

Climate and weather workshops are being recommended around the world.

Growers and producers at the Maranoa workshops were already asking when Professor Stone would bring another workshop to the area, particularly in regards to applying their new climate knowledge.