Sheep

There are 67 million sheep in Australia. This is a lot of sheep, roughly 3 for every Australian resident. Ten years ago there were enough for 6 per person, a small flock per household.

Together with cattle, the current herd grazes across 430 million hectares or 56 percent of the continent.

If averages were a useful thing to quote, then each sheep might have 6 ha each, many times the area of the average suburban housing lot. It would seem that we are happy enough to let livestock roam.

Time will come when we will rethink this decision.

Milky

There are roughly 2.5 million dairy cattle in Australia.

Dairy farms send a tick over 9 billion litres of milk to the factory every year and around 2.1 billion litres end up on breakfast cereals and in drinks.

A city of one million souls uses 274,000 litres of milk per day. That is the output from around 27,000 cows.

Today there are 472 cities with more than one million inhabitants and 25 with more than 10 million.

These are amazing numbers.

Makes you think.
M

Greetings

Hello, my name is Mark Dangerfield and I think too much.

I spent too long at college being trained to think and now I think for a living. It feels like I think when I am asleep. So I figured that if I write some of my thoughts down, share them around a bit, then maybe I would use up some and think less.

So here’s my blog. It will mostly be about the environment but in the end about people and that glorious, frustrating, infuriating pile of neurons that we use to think.

Hope you find something to help you get some thoughts out of your head.

M