Driving around the gravel back roads of Corangamite Shire, councillor Jamie Vogels surveys the landscape where once-green, cattle-grazing pastures have been sprayed and cut into uniform windrows ready for blue gum seedlings.

Cr Vogels points out a nearby property, now bare of grass and cleared of farming infrastructure; fences, troughs, shelter belts and tracks, with all the flammable material put into a pile.

“They’re burning that at the moment so they can plant their blue gums,” Cr Vogels said.

As all of the farms being turned into plantations potentially had accommodated several families who worked there, it’s a significant loss of community members. 

Cr Vogels’ Coastal Ward takes in Victoria’s Twelve Apostles, Port Campbell, Simpson and part of the Heytesbury Settlement, which is considered one of the most productive food-generating regions in Australia. 

Corangamite Shire is now the nation’s richest milk-producing local government area, worth $455.7 million in 2020 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

But over the past year, Cr Vogels has watched as multi-billion-dollar German company Munich Re has snapped up 12 local farms — totalling an area of 2,100 hectares — for new blue gum plantations.

That’s on top of the company’s acquisition of 17,000ha of existing plantation estates, all located around the small farming town of Simpson in Victoria’s lush south-west.

‘Corrosive’ trend changing landscape 

Cr Vogels is one of many locals who fear the rapid influx of new plantations in such a concentrated area marks the beginning of a “corrosive” land-use trend that is certain to expand further.

It’s a trend many in the region fear will fray the fabric of their community and threaten the nation’s future food security.

As Mayor of Corangamite Shire, Kate Makin has been leading efforts to fight back against the timber takeover affecting towns including Simpson, Timboon and Cobden.

“My role as mayor is to protect my communities,” Cr Makin said. 

“We’ve got all this beautiful food being made right here in our backyard.

“But I fear that once we get the trees in here for a minimum of 15 years, I just don’t see the agriculture and the food coming back to this region.”

Heytesbury food bowl

The Heytesbury Settlement, in Eastern Maar country in south-west Victoria, is “the most valuable agricultural region in the whole of Australia” according to the Food and Fibre Great South Coast Strategy 2021-23. 

With rich soil, bountiful rainfall and a temperate climate, it was a vast forest that was cleared for agriculture in the 1960s and divided up for soldiers returning from WWII.

Cr Vogels and his brother run dairy cattle on 600 hectares in Scotts Creek, 30 kilometres inland from the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road.

He says conditions for dairy farming are perfect.

“Annual rainfall here would be somewhere between 800 millimetres to a metre, which pretty much guarantees that we grow grass without irrigation, which makes us highly efficient farmers,” Cr Vogels said.

Despite the booming dairy industry, Cr Vogels says the Heytesbury population, like many rural communities in Victoria, has been declining for decades. 

He fears the proliferation of timber plantations could be the final blow.

Canary in the coalmine

After milking 230 cows on a wintry Saturday, Simpson FNC committee member Ken Wight and his family head into town to join hundreds of farmers watching a muddy home game at Simpson Football Netball club.

A crowd dressed in black puffy jackets and club beanies watches through the rain, some huddled by a wood fire. 

Inside the club rooms, a rabble of children plays.

But with enrolments at Simpson Primary School halving in the past 10 years to just 50 students this year, the number of children running amok at these events is dwindling. 

“Everything in town is quiet on a Saturday, most of the community heads off to the game,” Mr Wright said.

“But the families are getting slim on the ground and our juniors are running very low — we’ve got about 14 under-14s at the moment, and you need 18.”

Mr Wright said that was the canary in the coalmine for a rural town.

President of the club Bree Jones grew up in nearby Princetown, where the football-netball team folded in the 1990s.

“When they folded, it really tore the community apart,” she said.

“Now, you wouldn’t say there was a Princetown community.

Ms Jones said the footy club was the heart of Simpson.

In recent times, the clubrooms have hosted regular footy and netball training followed by Thursday night dinners, as well as a funeral, the annual town ball, a craft weekend, and a community information meeting about the blue gum plantations, which was attended by about 120 locals.

“We’re like a big, happy family,” Ms Jones said.

‘It’s a business decision’

The main timber company operating in the area, Midway, is a woodfibre processor and exporter based in Geelong. 

Midway said in a statement that the plantations around the Colac and Corangamite region were expected to generate up to 260 jobs during harvests, in 12 or 13 years’ time. 

They said plantation managers would look after various estates across the region, but would not live onsite. 

“There has been extensive and ongoing consultation with the local community, including local councils and parliamentarians, regarding the establishment of eucalyptus globulus plantings,” the spokesperson said.

“These new trees will bridge the gap between wood fibre supply and demand, which is anticipated to quadruple by 2050 led by urbanisation, decarbonisation and housing demand.”

One farmer with several properties, who recently sold to Midway, said he understood the broader community’s concerns but, to him, farming was purely business.

He spoke to the ABC on condition of anonymity for privacy reasons.

The farmer said he decided dairying was too difficult compared to other agricultural options, and he worried about the safety of his staff driving machinery on steep, muddy slopes.

“The tree [company] bought all around me — my neighbours sold up … and I thought, ‘Oh well’,” he said.

He said that when he approached Midway to sell his land, dealing with the company was straightforward and fast. 

“In the end, I’m a businessperson. It’s a business decision,” he said.

“We would have been happy to sell to the neighbours and did offer it, but that didn’t work out. 

But there have been strong emotions, with the situation escalating at the start of August when $300,000 worth of blue gum seedlings were found to have been poisoned at a Midway/Munich Re plantation in the area.

Warrnambool Crime Investigation Unit detectives are investigating the criminal damage but no arrests have been made.

Nation-wide trend to come

Across Australia, food producers in rural communities are already competing for land with urban sprawl, transmission lines, mining companies and forestry.

But recently, successful lobbying from the key timber industry body, the Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA), resulted in policy changes and a flood of finance from both state and federal governments to allow for rapid growth of the timber sector. 

The AFPA has calculated that by growing one billion plantation trees, Australia could sequester 18 megatonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030. 

In 2018, the federal Coalition government introduced its Billion Tree Plan, which kicked off a wave of pro-plantation policy changes and removed legislation that interfered with plantation expansion.

In 2022, the Albanese Labor government carried through with the policy changes and continued to subsidise and fund the timber industry.

More than $500 million in state and federal government funding and subsidies has since been allocated to the forestry industry, both to increase timber output and to meet national emission targets through carbon sequestration.

These changes have seen plantations push into high-rainfall areas such as Heytesbury, and there are now nine plantation projects in the region registered to earn Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), which companies can buy to offset their carbon emissions.

Many of these projects are funded by a multi-billion-dollar German re-investment multinational, Munich Re, which has $200 million set aside to buy land for plantations in South West Victoria, money farmers find it hard to compete with. 

Now farmers in Simpson are worried that Australia’s best agricultural land is being used to earn carbon credits for Germany. 

But Midway has assured the ABC that carbon credits earned by Munich Re’s plantations will not be sold overseas and the carbon offsets will only benefit Australia and Australian companies. 

“Midway is managing the $200 million land acquisition program as part of Munich Re’s carbon neutral program,” the spokesperson said.

“The expansion of the plantation estate will make a significant contribution to Australia’s ‘net zero carbon emissions by 2050’ commitment.”

Farmers seek moratorium before ‘irreversible change’

At a recent public meeting in Simpson, locals called on Liberal member for Wannon Dan Tehan to lobby for a moratorium on more plantations in Heytesbury.

Late last month, Mr Tehan voiced their concerns in parliament and presented their petition, which had amassed more than 1,300 signatures.

“We’ve got to try and make sure that we don’t see a second company come in with another $200 million, because that would be absolutely disastrous,” Mr Tehan said.

Corangamite Shire has adopted a strategy document it hopes will protect the agricultural future and make it harder for plantations to take over dairy farms.

But in the end, the main legislative control over plantations in agricultural land use zones rests with the federal minister for agriculture, who assesses all new plantation projects that are applying to be registered for carbon credits. 

The minister is charged with determining whether a plantation project is eligible, assessed against any negative impacts on Australian agriculture.