The Top Ten New Stories in a Sentence

1. Rain affected towns in Victoria are holding council meetings to prepare for even more rain, with a band on the north east of the state set to hit again.

2. A review of lifestock farming has found that the biggest concerns for animal welfare are forcing premature births in dairy cows, docking heifers’ tails & mulesing sheep. They are looking to balance the benefits and risks of each.

3. A recent survey found that the 128,000 Australian farm businesses feed approximately 60 million people worldwide, including 24 million Australians.  That a total of about 1% of the entire world being fed with Australian-farmed produce.

4. Contestants of the show Farmer Wants A Wife have said that the show ‘ruined their life’, with one farmer hospitalised after struggling to cope with the experience.

5. A bomb that went of in a rich New York neighbourhood, injuring 29 people, is being considered an ‘act of terror’ but has not been connected with ISIS.

6. Bourke, NSW has one of the highest rates of crime in Australia. To combat this problem, they are aiming to spend more money on community-building, rather than the prisons and correctional facilities that are most often employed to solve the problem.

7. The Port of Melbourne has been sold by the Victorian government for $9.7 billion – most of it will go towards improving public transport but $200 million will go to a rural jobs fund.

8. Calls have been made to ban the ATA 5-shot semi-automatic shotgun after a farmer suffered brain damage when his gun exploded sideways during routine shooting.

9. A Brisbane bug breeder is selling predator mites that kill smaller mites that damage strawberry crops and have an immunity to chemical pesticides.

10. A farmer in WA is using a drone that emits bird of prey noises from a speaker to scare birds away from his crops.