Grazing cattle dot the horizon of the King Valley, between hollowed out gum trees and the foothills of the Victorian High Country.
It’s a quiet spot, where a loud battle is taking place between farmers and developers spruiking a big solar farm, spanning an area the size of 280 fields the size of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The proposed Meadow Creek Solar Farm, 27 kilometres east of Wangaratta, would span 566 hectares and generate 330 megawatts of power.
Plans for its development were tracking well until the surprise discovery last year of the endangered Sloane’s froglet in the underlying ecosystem.Damien Michael, a senior researcher and landscape ecologist at Charles Sturt University’s Gulbali Institute, said the frogs were “pretty important”.”If you think of a paddock that’s got little hummocks, that’s called a gilgai wetland.
“Most people would just see a paddock and just think nothing of it.
“But these gilgais have all these little, shallow depressions … that is [this frog’s] core, natural habitat, which is slowly being lost in the landscape … and populations have been declining.”John Conroy from the Meadow Creek Agricultural Community Action Group said the presence of the frog, as well as the endangered bandy-bandy snake and the gang-gang cockatoo, was enough reason to call the project in for further assessment.
He went to Canberra last week with a delegation of farmers to try to convince the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) to review the project through the lens of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999.But Mr Conroy admits farmers and froglets are unlikely allies.
“We are generational farmers and we certainly care for the land – we’ve planted more trees than most over the years,” he said.
“I’ve never really given much too much thought to [the importance of] frogs until now.
“What we see as unfit about the proposal is that it’s an entirely safe, drought-proof, reliable rainfall agricultural district that never has a failed season.
“All the scientists are telling us that it’s going to get drier and warmer, we can’t understand why they wouldn’t be protecting the best agricultural regions for food production,”
