To set the record straight with muddled tourists, there is an Austrian tee shirt that reads, 'We have no kangaroos'. The name aside, it's hard to confuse Austria and Australia. In agriculture in particular, they occupy opposite ends of the spectrum.
In Styria, the south-eastern Austrian province where the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists held part of its annual congress, agriculture is central to the region's culture.
This is the defining difference between farming in the two nations. In Australia, agriculture is a business, but the broader community pays diminishing attention to farmers and farming. In Austria, farming is heavily subsidised, but it plays a central role in how Austrians perceive themselves.
Somewhere in the middle, between agri-business and agri-culture, lies the perfect farm sector.
The Styrian landscape is one of small hills threaded by miraculously clear streams: perfect for creating a diversity of micro-climates. Austrians seem to be occupying every one of them.
Houses are a big feature of Austrian farmscapes: the average size of the 44,000 farms jammed into Styria's 16,300 square kilometres is just 19 hectares.
Mini-forests are another feature: forestry accounts for more than a third of Styrian agricultural income.
Between the neat houses and neat forests are neat fields of forage corn, sunflowers and pumpkins, and orchards of apples, cherries, stonefruit and berries. Every farm has its patch of immaculate pasture, but sightings of actual livestock are rare.
So are sightings of actual farmers. They only seem to appear after 5pm, presumably having climbed out of the ties and uniforms they wore to their real job. Sixty-five per cent of Austrian farmers earn off-farm income, we learned.
To Australian eyes, these are toy farms, only saved from being hobby farms by the serious tractors and equipment in the fields. To Austrians, they are Austria, as much so as Vienna and the Alps. These orderly little farms are enmeshed into the structure of the country. They are part of Austria's economy, but even more so, they are integral to its culture. The Styrian farms feed the flourishing regional cuisine with products like apples, cured pork and pumpkins (Styrian pumpkin seed oil is a taste revelation). The farms, and the picturesque farmhouses with their windowboxes of flowering pelargoniums, form the landscape that defines Austria as a country, the Austria that appreciative tourists like myself come to see.
Franz Fischler, the European Union's Agriculture Commissioner from 1994 to 2005 and a Styrian native, told me that there is a case for removing most of the European Union's farm subsidies—but in his view, Europe's man-made landscapes must be maintained, with subsidies or some other mechanism, because they are the essence of Europe and European identity, and drive Europe's massive tourism trade.
Australia is another place, with a different history and different economic dynamics driving its agriculture. Yet our agriculture sector, forever on the back foot and politically on the defensive, can take some lessons from Europe.
Urban communities don't care much how successful agriculture is as a business, just as agriculture doesn't pay much heed to the wins and losses of the mining sector. But the thinking urban population wants rural areas that make visual statements about care for the land, integration with the natural environment, and the production of clean, green food.
A farm sector that delivers this sort of signal in its appearance, not just its rhetoric, is likely to invite a lot more urban sympathy than a sector constantly complaining that it can't make enough money.
Australia isn't Europe, and Australian farmers will never have the capability to garden their farms like the Austrians.
It's possible, however, to create landscapes and stories from Australian farmland that the urban elite will want to help defend. It's a matter of introducing some agri-culture into our agribusiness.
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