Most imponderables are just harmless teasers that can send you crazy trying to figure them out, whereas our industry is facing an imponderable that, if we don't figure it out soon, could sentence us to a life of poverty with hard labour.

Those harmless imponderables include the question of why we will spend an hour searching for the TV remote instead of just changing the channel manually.

Or why we keep pressing the same keys on the computer harder and harder when it's obvious we are not pressing the right ones?

And then there is the age-old imponderable that asks: If a man is in the middle of a forest speaking, and his wife is not there to hear him, is he still wrong?

Go figure those at your leisure, but the serious unexplainable that requires an urgent answer is this: Why, when we are reading reports of record beef exports, growing international demand, and, seemingly, all the planets aligning in our favour, then please tell this hard-bitten producer why our farm gate prices, relatively speaking, are the worst in living memory?

For the record I am not a doubter. Five months of record export beef shipments, each exceeding 100,000 tonnes, a volume never seen before in Australian exports, demand up 23 percent on the same period last year, China coming into the mix, all these factors certainly augur well for the future.

Wonderful, but what about the now, that time zone which determines if indeed there is a future when we can reap the benefits of all these highly promising indicators.

The now is when we fill up with diesel that, unlike beef prices, doesn't cost less than it did 10 years ago. Now is when we pay our power costs that rise month on month, along with the rates and phone bills. Now is when there's no money in the kitty after a crippling drought and when we must market and showcase our current situation and cash flow to the banks in order to keep the business running.
Now is when we need the markets to kick, but we are still waiting.

But cheer up and be patient. The future, if we get there, is all rosy. Imagine if Sebastian Vettel was driving for Stud Bull instead of Red Bull, sitting in the pole position on the grid with the race apparently in the bag — conditions have never looked better, the tyres, the engine, the suspension all ready to roar.
Flag drops — accelerator pedal says to linkages go! Linkages reply please provide proper authorisation. Deduct 10 percent. Check. Linkage says to electronic pressure module get report on external ambient air pressure. Deduct 10 percent. Check. Issue requisition for appropriate volume of air for fuel injection system. Deduct 10 percent. Check. Electronic fuel regulator in turn talks to the crankshaft which talks to the drive shaft which sends instructions to the tyres which unfortunately have gone flat from standing too long on the grid.

That might be a rubbish analogy and I apologise for my lack of knowledge on the intricate mechanics of a Formula 1 cart but I do know that beef production and crop production today are both highly efficient operations finetuned using every scientific tool available. Every saving and advantage that can be achieved through genetic progress and management practices has been harnessed and applied. Farmer Plod retired many long decades ago.

But today's highly efficient beef production model is still standing at the tail end of the grid waiting for something to happen. History has taught us in this industry that upward movements in supermarket shelf prices for our product drip back very slowly and very diluted to the farm gate. If the price of a loaf of bread or a kilo of beef is suddenly doubled at Woolies the producer would barely notice an effect on his bottom line.

There is a massive problem with our whole agricultural production system. Somewhere in there, from the accelerator pedal to the tyres if you like, there is an imponderable blockage, and anyone old enough to remember will tell you there was no Bonanza at the Imponderosa.