While Queensland dairy farmers leave the industry in droves, the south east corner of the state is set to import 63 million litres of milk from Victoria for this calendar year.
The shortfall between actual production and consumer demand, primarily has been caused by the supermarket milk price war with retail prices as low as $1 per litre.
It cost dairy factories 55 61 cents a litre to import milk against the cost of local production at 50 57 cents a litre.
Retail price manipulation and poor returns to farmers from the supermarket duopoly has forced at least 53 dairy farmers out of the industry since January last year.
Queensland Dairy Farmers Organisation executive officer Adrian Peake said natural disasters also played a part in the demise of the industry.
He said the farming sector was hit by floods, cyclones and fires in 2010 2011, resulting in an estimated 50 million litre supply deficit.
Transporting milk to fill shortages was not sustainable, Mr Peake said, casting a pall over the future of the dairy industry in Queensland.
Meanwhile new figures released by the Australian Bureau of statistics reveal 100,000 people walked off the land between 1981 and 2011, leaving just 157,000 nationally, a fall of 40 per cent.
The average age of farmers is 53 with almost a quarter of farmers aged 65 or older compared with just 3 per cent of people in other occupations.
Of all farming businesses, 93,000 are family owned, debunking the myth corporate farm businesses are more efficient.
One half of all farmers worked 49 or more hours a week whereas only 17 per cent of workers in other industries put in a similar performance.
The average weekly disposable income of farmers is $568, considerably lower than that of workers in other occupations at $921.
The farm sector is staggering with debt as banks foreclose on more than 100 farming and grazing businesses across the state.
Recent fires have burnt out nearly 3 million acres of savannah grazing land in the north west of the state, starving tens of thousands of breeders, many of them calving.
State Government projections of doubling farm production have been labeled as nonsense by farmers, as they battle bushfires, drought, dingoes and banks to survive.