States of Australia’s agri-environment: visual extractions from degraded landscapes

Abstract

Under perpetual growth-geared economic, governance and sociocultural systems, continued increases in agricultural output are necessary to feed an ever-expanding human population, as well as neoliberal appetites for financial profitability. These translate to intensifying and expanding agri landscapes. Yet agribusiness industries routinely seek to obfuscate visual tangibility of their production practices and impacts from public view. A gap exists in public availability of high-resolution imagery depicting Australian agriculture’s industrial scales, degraded lands and landscape impacts. This visualisation endeavour is situated between the blurry and pixelated resolution of freely available agricultural satellite imagery, and agri- marketings’ frequently glossy, colour-saturated and romanticised depictions from on-ground photography and video. Positioned between these two purviews, the drone-eye-view provides sharp and incisive imagery contributing new insights into agri- landscapes and practices. This visual essay draws from drone imagery captured during continental-scale field research spanning all Australian states and territories, all commodities and major industries, and all scales of commercial farming. As Australian agribusiness is landscape and resource extractive in its geometric pattern arrays, transmuted images are extricated from aerial stills and videos into compositional strips. Together with the poetic and interpretative text, the work reveals industrial and degraded landscapes at nested scales, links foods with their production contexts, and is suggestive of the state of Australia’s agricultural environment.