Community & Business
31 August, 2023
Cecil Plains soil symposium: Save our Prime Ag land from CSG
Farming families and landowners gathered on Saturday to hear a range of speakers and voice their exasperation and concern over the looming threat of the coal seam gas industry on prime agricultural land around the Cecil Plains area.
Organised by Suzie Holt and Nangwee farmer Liza Balmain, whose husband’s family has farmed in the area for more than 100 years, the meeting drew a crowd
of around 120 to the
Balmain family’s property, Glendon.
“Today is about information sharing, listening, collaborative discussion, advocacy and a positive forward vision as to how best to protect Australia’s finite prime agricultural lands for our future generations,” Mrs Balmain told the gathering.
“We will hear first-hand, genuine and well founded concerns from local farmers living and breathing the impacts on a daily basis, to those who see the writing on the wall… as a coal seam gas invasion and associated impacts start to encroach and expand into new areas.”
Mrs Balmain said she had personally spent the last three years getting herself informed on such issues and the intricacies of coal seam gas regulation.
“I can safely say its an absolute minefield in itself and farmers face a horrendous uphill battle of trying to get themselves informed with very little support when the onshore gas industry invades their lives and livelihoods.
“Farming is hard enough without these extra challenges forced upon us, and I say forced because in Queensland the law has been established so that we have no right to veto the onshore gas industry accessing our land to extract their fossil fuels.
“Farmers are inherently time poor and many simply do not have the time to devote to getting themselves informed to an adequate level to be able to engage
on an equal footing with
the gas companies.
“Many are subsequently pressured and coerced into signing of unfavourable agreements often containing confidentiality clauses which will sit on their title deeds to be inherited by the next owners who will have
no say in the matter whether that be their children or a new business enterprise.
See the full story in the print edition of this week's Pittsworth Sentinel.
