Two years of Agsolutely Fabulous, and we nearly missed our own birthday. To celebrate, three topics that have nothing in common except that they’re all about waste, one way or another: what happens to a solar panel when it dies, what happens to a sheep’s fleece besides becoming a jumper, and whether the “we’re about to run out of food” headlines deserve the panic they’re getting.
#88 | Agsolutely Fabulous Turns Two: Solar Panel Recycling, Sheep Zero-Waste, and Food Security Reality Checks – Agsolutely Fabulous
The Dubbo solar recycling hub: right instinct, wrong postcode?
The proposal is real: the Yurruga Indigenous Corporation has lodged a planning proposal for a solar panel recycling and processing plant next to the South Keswick Solar Farm on Sheraton Road, Dubbo, with council approving the rezoning for industrial use and more than 50 jobs promised. It’s genuinely early days, the project is still sitting with the state government at the “gateway determination” stage, which is bureaucrat-speak for “a long way from a shovel in the ground.”
Recycling the panels themselves is the right call. Most solar farms are built on a five-to-ten-year panel lifespan, and a lot of the country’s early rollout is already there, so the recycling capacity should have been built alongside the generation capacity, not proposed a decade after the fact. Where we’d push back is the location logic. Building the recycling hub where the panels happen to be sounds efficient until you remember it means more heavy industry, storage yards, and damaged panel stockpiles sitting on productive agricultural land, without the housing, schools or transport links a workforce actually needs nearby. South Australia has genuine alternatives sitting idle right now: the old Port Augusta power station site, already industrial and already compromised, with port access to ship recovered materials straight out. Repurposing existing contaminated industrial land beats bolting new heavy industry onto a farming region every time.
Same sheep, zero waste: lanolin’s overdue comeback
A young listener asked why lanolin, the natural wax sheep produce to weatherproof their wool, is suddenly being marketed as some new sustainable skincare discovery when farming families have used it for generations. The science backs up why it works so well: lanolin’s molecular structure closely mirrors human sebum, and it’s used in skincare specifically as a barrier ingredient that reduces water loss and holds moisture in the skin. It’s not a new invention, it’s a very old one that the beauty industry has rediscovered because synthetic alternatives can be trademarked and marked up in a way a natural byproduct can’t.
The wider point is the one we keep coming back to: livestock are not a one-product animal. A single sheep gives you fleece for wool, lanolin for skincare, and meat at the end of its working life, and none of it needs to go to waste if the supply chain is set up to use it. As always: patch-test anything new before you slather it on your face, natural doesn’t mean risk-free for everyone.
Are we actually about to run out of food? No.
Drought in the major cropping regions, herd contraction, and the fuel excise all landing at once makes for an alarming news package, but running out of food and paying more for it are two very different problems, and only one of them is real. Australia is one of the most food-secure countries on earth: on a three-year average we export around 70% of what we produce, which means domestic demand is a fraction of total output even in a lean year. What you’ll actually feel is supply chain friction, the same bottlenecks that made eggs scarce during the Victorian bird flu cull, not shortage. Prices go up because the true cost of drought, contraction and diesel gets passed down the chain; the food itself doesn’t disappear.
That’s not to say the pressure isn’t real. Reduced herd sizes, fertiliser supply hiccups, and higher input costs are genuine strain on the system right now, and it’s fair to expect prices at the till to stay elevated while all of that plays out. But stockpiling solves nothing except giving supermarkets an excuse to introduce purchase limits. The better move, same as it’s always been: back your local butcher, your farmers’ market, or a paddock-to-plate subscription, because that’s the part of the chain that doesn’t seize up when a truck route floods.
The bottom line
Two years in, and the throughline hasn’t changed: agriculture wastes almost nothing when it’s allowed to run properly, whether that’s a sheep’s fleece or a decommissioned solar panel, and most of the panic cycles around farming turn out to be a supply chain story wearing a scarier headline. Here’s to year three.
Leave a comment