Category: Uncategorized

Do Coles and Woolworths control Australian Agriculture?

In the future is the market, the demand food in China, going to be a ‘Golden Fleece’ for Australian food producers? Are we capable of increasing our production to meet what we are told will be the ever-increasing markets for food in Asia?

More importantly those who should know, the ever-increasing number of ‘China experts’, claim that the growing middle class in China and other countries, like Indonesia, will be able to afford, pretty much at any price, what we produce and there are already several precedents that indicate that could be true. Milk as we shall see, Wagyu beef, premium wine and so on.

I don’t think Australia stands a chance when it comes to developing a bigger business in China or anywhere else. I think we will fiddle around the edges, make big of little things. The reasons for my pessimism are:

  • Productivity in Australia is going down. Costs are going up. We continue to fight among ourselves we refuse to become organised and speak with one voice.
  • Farmers are suspicious of everyone looking at agriculture with new eyes, especially if they are foreign and have money.
  • Farmers (generally) are heavily in debt so they believe, and they haven’t been told any different, that their potential to change and repay those debts in the short term so that change can happen, is limited. How to reduce crop and increase sheep for instance. Where will the money come from? Are the banks in favour of change? Will change affect the value of the land?
  • As the graphs below show we have a lot to do in the export arena just to catch up with where we were, once upon a time, and not just with China. We have also lost market share with Japan and Indonesia. Farmers need to know the reasons why. Those who process the food they produce for export are losing market share, market share in one of the fastest growing markets on earth. Why is that. Are we too expensive?
  • Given that progressive loss in other markets, what chance China?

Table 1.image003 Continue reading “Do Coles and Woolworths control Australian Agriculture?”

Is China Australia’s Land of the Golden Fleece?

There is a lot of ‘chatter’ mostly in the media and mostly from the uninformed like politicians that Australia has the agricultural productive capacity to become the ‘Food Bowl of Asia.’ Is it true?

Part 1.

There are those in the city who are plotting and have the money.

Is China Australia’s land of the Golden Fleece? Or is there a danger we could lose our money on the way to the goldfields? Fear not there is hope. Why? Well, for one thing there have been several very high profile meetings under the banner the ‘Global Food Forum’. Never heard of them? Not surprised, they were advertised in places where those on the land were unlikely to see the the advertisements.

When I saw the ‘Global Food Forum’ first advertised in The Australian and had a look at the list of speakers I thought they were notable in the world of finance and agribusiness if not agriculture, that is I couldn’t see many farmers on the list, but my interest was aroused non the less. I then enquired as to the price of a ticket and added on two nights accommodation in Sydney and the cost of plane ticket and the thousand kilometre round trip in the car to get to Perth, I decided the whole thing was out of my reach, way out.

Disappointed because I couldn’t afford to go, I gained some pleasure out of becoming cynical about the whole thing. Just another Pitt Street Cockie talkfest I reasoned, and those Pitt Street Cockies are so clever they know the answers before you ask the question and most of them don’t know where Western Australia is anyway!

I noticed the host of the event was a multi millionaire, one of the biggest carton manufacturers in the country, so he had a whopping vested interest.  I deduced he would have said to himself, ‘more food, more cartons, only two manufacturers in Australia so it’s worth a punt.’ I looked up the definition of the word ‘altruism’. Never met the man so I don’t know if it applies.

image003Will these men save or ruin Australian agriculture. We need to hear what they have to say.

Continue reading “Is China Australia’s Land of the Golden Fleece?”

The Future of Farming is in their Hands – Is it Safe?

If there is one topic that occupies the minds of farmers and those on the land more than the weather, or the price of wheat or wool or sheep or cattle – it is the future. Is there a future in agriculture for our children and grandchildren? If there is, what kind of future will it be?

Introduction – The Present – Where we Are.

There are statistics that show our agricultural productivity in Australia is declining not increasing. There are statistics that show increases in productivity are directly tied to investment in Research and Development. As a nation we are reducing our investment in research and development.

As we shall see later, there is evidence that bigger is not always better.

It is a worry that it was recently announced by Rabobank, one of the biggest agricultural banks in the world, that Australia is now the most expensive place in the world to grow wheat. It costs twice as much to milk a cow in Australia compared to the United States. Yet we compete in world markets with the United States for both dairy and wheat.

No grain grower will surprised to learn that in Australia it takes 16 trains to haul 60,000 tonnes of wheat to port, and in Canada it takes just six.

It is with almost regular monotony that we learn of yet another food processor closing down in Australia and moving overseas. It’s cheaper we are told to source the food overseas, process it there and the export the finished product to Australia, than it is to grow the food it and process it in this country.

Unless the world food supply changes dramatically, one way or another, Australia will increasingly rely on imported food. We are constantly bombarded, by politicians and this new breed of city-based agri-entrepreneurs with the proposition that Australia, can be the ‘Food Bowl of Asia’. What nonsense. We already import more processed food than we export.

What we export has very little if any value adding done to it. Boats full of grain and meat, raw wool, live sheep and cattle. It’s cheaper to import cakes and biscuits from Holland than it is to make them in Australia – why is that? We have imported bread dough from Ireland to be baked in Australia. Neither Holland or Ireland could be classified as a Developing Country.

We should not delude ourselves that the only food we import comes from countries with ‘cheap’ labour and costs. We have used that excuse once too often.

Our major retailers control over 80% of our food business. They have the ability to scour the world for the cheapest food they can buy. They do not care if it is cheaper than what is grown in Australia. If they do buy Australian then they drive the price down to the Australian producer to same price as they can buy it overseas. They have to protect their market share and profit.
On May 29 in the Farm Weekly  the Federal Minister for Agriculture, Barnaby Joyce, gave his views on the Muntadgin Farming Alliance and expressed some sympathy and empathy with the group and with farming in the eastern wheatbelt.
As a direct result of that interview, Ken Wilson, in the June 5 edition of the Farm Weekly, in the middle of seeding for many, put a series of questions to Nationals Member for Central Wheatbelt, Mia Davies, and Agriculture and Food Minister for Western Australia, Ken Baston.
At the Global Farmer, we believed the questions put to Ken Baston and Mia Davies by Ken Wilson deserved another outing, away from the rough and tumble of getting the crop in the ground. The Farm Weekly agreed so here they are. So now you can give these serious conversations some considered thought.
They are important questions. You make up your own mind on the quality, on the depth of the answers. Can we look forward to new future attacking old fundamental faults or just the same old parcel in different paper and a bit more tinsel, a few more balloons and a bigger whistle?
This time there are no time or space constraints. Read what Ken Baston and Mia Davies have to say and then have your say. Here are the questions:

Continue reading “The Future of Farming is in their Hands – Is it Safe?”

The Sadness that is Kojonup

The battle in Court between two farmers from Kojonup is one of the saddest events in my career in agriculture, which now spans over half a century.

It is sad because it has given those for and those against, this time GM Canola, but it could just as easily been ‘Yellow Vitamin A Rice’ another stage, this time a Coliseum, to vent in public their malevolence and witlessness.

I admit to being a bit dim-witted at times but is there any way anyone can stop the flora and fauna of this world spreading seeds, either by wind or defecation where ever and wherever they wish? When that foreign seed germinates on organic land how does the foreign plant automatically become organic?

To some on the against side, and one can only judge those against by what they say and write, truly believe that many scientists and farmers, those on the for side are monsters, purveyors of teratogenic engineering, which has the capacity to cause the most awful damage to mankind.

That is sad and grieves me that they hold those opinions. Mainly because it means they truly believe that the for side are or would be, could be, complicit in poisoning, killing, their own families. An outrageous thought.

To some on the for side, those against are Luddites, nihilists and in some cases vandals and despoilers. It is regrettable that some of those against have been vandals and despoilers. Those against have been labelled as anti-science.

It has been known for more than a decade that by 2050 there could well be 9 billion mouths to feed on this earth. To feed those people food production will have to increase by at least 50%, some say more than that. I know I write about this often, that’s because it’s true.

In my working life of over half a century the population of the world has doubled. At the end of WWII world agriculture was basically organic.

We, that is science, farmers and their advisers have fed twice the number of people we started with 50 years ago. Today some eat too much and others go hungry and starve to death. There is no shortage of food though, we just don’t get it to those who need it, we are too busy. Instead we fly over the countries with the starving millions and marvel at international travel, which will take us to the next banquet. Continue reading “The Sadness that is Kojonup”