AUSTRALIA has lost more than 18,000 of its farms in just three years, the latest official figures show.
The irrigation sector has done particularly badly, with land under irrigation declining by almost a third and water used slumping by an even greater proportion.
And lamb and sheep producers have seen their livestock numbers shrink by 20 per cent between 2006 and last year.
The disturbing revelations came in figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
In its Australian Farming in Brief publication, the ABS said there were 135,996 agricultural businesses operating last year, compared with 154,681 just three years earlier.
It means there were 18,685 fewer farms, a fall of 12 per cent during the period.
The area of agricultural land was down 6 per cent, or almost 26 mill ha, to 409 million ha, according to the ABS.
But the irrigated area fell by 31 per cent, or 785,000ha, from 2.55 mill ha to 1.76 million ha.
And the amount of water applied to irrigated land fell by almost 4.24 mill megalitres, or 39 per cent, from 10.74 to 6.5 mill megalitres.
In the livestock sector, sheep and lamb numbers were down by almost 18.3 mill head, falling from about 91 to 72.7 mill head over the three-year period.
Dairy and beef cattle numbers were only down slightly, while the only expansion was in chickens used for meat, whose numbers rose by 5.5 per cent to 82.8 mill.
