New England solar farm. Photo: Peter Hannam.
The Sutherlands, sixth-generation farmers near Uralla in northern NSW, are among landholders hoping the region’s dry spell this year won’t develop into a repeat of the “tinderbox drought” of 2019 that turned their farms into dustbowls.
The farm spent $1 million that year feeding livestock stranded on barren land. Hungry herds of cattle and sheep would rush from one end of the paddock to the other if a motorbike drove by. Some of the sheep would end up with broken legs.
“It was just heartbreaking,” Hugh Sutherland told Renew Economy during a visit to their farm, Deerargee, last week. “The cattle were fighting sheep for the feed.”
His wife, Cathie, shared a photograph of the dust clouds that swirled around the grand woolshed that has housed shearers every year since it was built in 1872.
“We got to the point [of asking], will we go in a couple of months,” Cathie says, as we chat around their dining table, beneath a painting of sheep waiting to be shorn. “And are we coming back?”
Renewable energy proponents, including Mark Waring of Walcha Energy, had also sat around that table, as long ago as 15 years. But the big drought helped the Sutherlands agree to set aside half their 1357-hectare (3400 acre) property to the next expansion phase of the nearby New England Solar farm, owned by Acen.
Energy Co., the NSW government-owned power infrastructure coordinator, will also pay the Sutherlands for hosting part of the backbone transmission line linking the New England Renewable Energy Zone to the existing network at Bayswater power station near Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley. It will also pay them for sharing the hosting of a substation, some 3 kilometres from their home.
Annual payments for the transmission hosting are typically $10,000 per kilometre and indexed to the consumer price inflation rate over 20 years.
The guaranteed revenues will help the farm ride out fluctuating weather and fund much-needed on-farm investments even while cutting debt.
“Debt has been a millstone around my neck forever,” Hugh says. “I reckon renewables will bring the next productivity boost for our business … We have lots of things we want to invest in on the farm. Everything now is piecemeal.”
The succession plans of the Sutherlands, both 61, also hinge on the REZ and solar farm expansion proceeding if 31-year-old son, Charlie, is to inherit a prospering property.
Such plans – and those of neighbours and other potential clean energy hosts across the region – have been thrown into doubt by the decision in June by the NSW Coalition to downgrade the New England REZ and drop support for the new transmission line.
Hugh Cordingley, on neighbouring Mihi Station, is another farmer whose plans hinge on the REZ proceeding.
“The money’s too good not to take,” he says during a chat last week. “We’re still sweating on the transmission…all the projects are dead in the water” without it.
That said, Cordingley is doubtful of the Coalition’s chances at next March’s state elections after its decision to detour from the state’s renewable energy roadmap that they legislated in 2020 when last in power.
“It’s probably the stupidest thing they could do,” he says. “It has to lose them votes in the cities.”
One developer has already taken an option on the 1650-hectare (4000 acre) Mihi Station, which has been in Cordingley’s family for 110 years. The 67-year-old farmer now mostly runs cattle after destocking in anticipation of conditions drying out.
The region, which averages about 800 millimetres of rain a year, has had about half its usual tally so far in 2026. Armidale airport, about 20 kilometres distant, had collected 215mm by the end of July versus the long-run norm of 428mm by then, according to Bureau of Meteorology data.
Cordingley, whose wife Shelley teaches at the Armidale City Public School, is adamant that “the vast majority of New England is in favour of the REZ. It’s jobs, whole new industries. It drought-proofs so many farmers.”
“This is the best area for solar and wind in Australia,” he says, adding that progress on the REZ is “being held up a handful of squeaky wheel people.”
“If the season turns out like it’s looking, you could get a really hot summer,” Cordingley predicts. “And then it’ll be ‘where’s the paperwork for me to sign to get my hands of that pot of money?’”
A third set of neighbours on the Talbarea property, Chris and Jen Laurie, have their sights on hosting a couple of turbines and solar panels on their 429-hectare (1050-acre) block.
“It’s literally life-changing for us,” Chris Laurie, 42, said during a visit near sunset, amid croaking frogs and the odd wallaby bounding by. “We’re looking at 35 years, with three 10-year extensions. I’ll definitely be pushing up daisies by then.”
“If you get a 3% return on investment [in farming alone] you’re doing well,” Laurie says.
Farmers can’t disclose financial terms but estimates for the region point to yearly payments of $40,000 per wind turbine they host.
Farming itself can largely continue as is, although cattle are excluded from solar farms but sheep are welcome – as Acen’s plant over the hill demonstrates. Roads to build and service the panels, turbines or power towers do take out productive land, they can also improve access to remote parts of properties, boosting productivity, farmers say.
The drought strained the community, with Chris’s wife Jen, a paediatric mental health clinician, on the front line at home and at work.
“Your backs are really against the wall,” Chris Laurie said. “Going out to pull animals out of the dam, it does play on your mind.”
The solar and wind farm proposed for their land would allow the family to improve their farm and leave it debt-free for their two boys if they go into farming.
Without it, “it will make economic things challenging”, he adds. “If they pull out, it will hurt.”
“If you get a series of bad years, it very well could be game over.”
The frustration that others might call the shots on the REZ and renewables – from near or far away – irked all the farmers Renew Economy talked to.
Hugh Sutherland, in particular, is frustrated outsiders seek to interfere in “the capacity to invest in our farm for our broader family’s future”.
“It’s freehold land, and I don’t like someone telling me what can or cannot do,” Sutherland says. “Should I just farm sheep?”
“We have the right to do whatever we want. It’s still a free country.”
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