Speaker 1: Nine podcasts.
Speaker 2: Now. The past few weeks, the media has been swamped
Speaker 2: with all sorts of foody stuff. The best restaurant, the
Speaker 2: best exotic dish, ow to cook something with two hundred ingredients.
Speaker 2: It's a foody time. But does anybody actually stop to
Speaker 2: think where the food comes from? I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Over the years, we Australians have liked to think that
Speaker 2: we are a rural country. Even people in the city
Speaker 2: tend to claim an affinity with the bush and with farming.
Speaker 2: It's been tested the past few weeks as parts of
Speaker 2: Victoria and South Australia staggered through and are still staggering
Speaker 2: through the worst drought in memory. Nobody really noticed in
Speaker 2: the city until it got very, very bad. In New
Speaker 2: South Wales, there are heartbreaking scenes of floods. I saw
Speaker 2: one farmer on TV so I'm just gonna have to
Speaker 2: walk away from the farm. Imagine the pressure that puts
Speaker 2: on it. Underneath this, there seems to be a general
Speaker 2: lack of interest from state and federal governments, particularly in
Speaker 2: the drought, but in all matters farming. There's a new
Speaker 2: system which supposedly recognizes the need for drought assistance. A
Speaker 2: national drought agreement. It doesn't work. They've been fiddling with
Speaker 2: it for a decade. Nobody seems happy. It is, in
Speaker 2: my view, gobbledegook. Agriculture is in our DNA, our roots.
Speaker 2: It is also a big part of the future of
Speaker 2: this country. Remember we're once going to be a food
Speaker 2: bowl to Asia. What happened. Farmers are starting to stand
Speaker 2: up and shout. Huge protests in the streets of Melbourne
Speaker 2: recently over a stupid new tax on farmers that couldn't
Speaker 2: come at a worse time. Increasingly, I got a feeling
Speaker 2: from people I speak to in regional areas that they
Speaker 2: think they've been forgotten. Tragically, there are even suicides, that's
Speaker 2: how desperate it has become. Emma Jumano is a new
Speaker 2: breed of farmers. She's been shouting for farmer rights, shouting
Speaker 2: for farmers to be heard, shouting for an understanding, outing
Speaker 2: for years and she was head of the Victorian Farmers
Speaker 2: Federation for four years. She once told me, unless governments
Speaker 2: sorted out a system to deal with natural disasters and
Speaker 2: organize the industry, we were sleep walking towards famine. We'll
Speaker 2: come back to that. Emma is a third generation farmer
Speaker 2: and a scholar, no less enough field scholar. I've read
Speaker 2: some of her report from eight to nine years ago.
Speaker 2: She had ideas, she had planned, she had thoughts. What happened?
Speaker 2: Did anybody wake up and listen? So Emma Jermano, Hello,
Speaker 2: hell are that now? We'll come back to this. But
Speaker 2: you're no longer an office bearer in the Farmer's Federation.
Speaker 2: You don't have to be nice to everybody like all
Speaker 2: lobbyists always are. You're off the leash. It's time to
Speaker 2: start barking.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't know that everybody would agree that I was
Speaker 3: nice to everybody all of the time while I was
Speaker 3: in there, but it's true. I don't have to be
Speaker 3: conscious of cultivating relationship where you do have to do
Speaker 3: that when you're in an advocacy position officially.
Speaker 2: Well, I was going to say, I don't think you're
Speaker 2: on the leash ll much as it was, but do
Speaker 2: you feel a bit liberated because what we want to
Speaker 2: achieve today is to hear from real people in the
Speaker 2: middle who understand what is happening and are able to
Speaker 2: tell us in very down to worth understanding the city
Speaker 2: type terms.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's not that I was never speaking freely,
Speaker 3: but you do have to be conscious of the fact
Speaker 3: that you want to be the person walking in and
Speaker 3: giving a solution to government when you're in an official
Speaker 3: role and you know they don't let you in the
Speaker 3: front door if you've just been bagging them out. Having
Speaker 3: said that, we I think we did that a couple
Speaker 3: of times on your radio program and it actually led
Speaker 3: to some good, good outcomes and immediate ones.
Speaker 2: Another thing that surprised me doing some reading for this,
Speaker 2: because I wasn't aware of it. You're not just a farmer,
Speaker 2: You're an academic, bloody academic, enough field scholar. You still
Speaker 2: got dirt under the fingernails? Have you?
Speaker 3: Ever? Since finishing up in my leadership role? The dirts
Speaker 3: back under the fingernails. And I was really conscious the
Speaker 3: other day I was out harvesting potatoes, so I had
Speaker 3: two pairs of gloves on to try and avoid getting
Speaker 3: the dirt under my fingernails and ended up with a
Speaker 3: hole in both pairs of gloves. So yes, I actually
Speaker 3: do actually have dirt back under the fingernails.
Speaker 2: Ah, this is a fent. That's nice. You're still a
Speaker 2: girl trying to protect your.
Speaker 3: Fingernauts absolutely, because when you rip them off on a
Speaker 3: clod of dirt. I tell you it's not pretty.
Speaker 2: We'll come back to that Nuffield scholarship later, but I'm
Speaker 2: going to quite seriously. I have read through you report,
Speaker 2: which is what seven or eight nine years ago, and
Speaker 2: ye ten, you certainly nailed a few things. Tell me
Speaker 2: about your farm company. It's called I Love Farms.
Speaker 3: Why with a very real answer to this is that
Speaker 3: I have always had a place in Melbourne to stay
Speaker 3: since I finished school and come up here for university.
Speaker 3: And on Bridge Road in Richmond there was a dumpling
Speaker 3: place or a Chinese restaurant, and it went from a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of different owners and it was called Panda
Speaker 3: Bar at one stage, and it never really did very well,
Speaker 3: so it changed hands a number of times, and then
Speaker 3: it changed its names to I Love Dump and it
Speaker 3: went gangbusters. And I thought, there's really something in this
Speaker 3: declaration that has worked here. So from there I thought, well,
Speaker 3: you know, we should call our farming business I Love Farms.
Speaker 3: And it's a reflection not just how I feel about
Speaker 3: my own farm, but during the Nuffield and then subsequently
Speaker 3: the roles that I've taken in industry, I've spent a
Speaker 3: lot of time on a lot of people's farms, and
Speaker 3: everybody loves their farm the best, and everybody thinks that
Speaker 3: it's the best place in the world and the best
Speaker 3: farm in the world, and so it just was fitting.
Speaker 3: But when we put I Love Farms on all of
Speaker 3: the boxes, I had a male dominated industry of wholesalers
Speaker 3: call me and give me stick about the name of
Speaker 3: my business. But it certainly resonates with people. And we've
Speaker 3: got a little retail shop at the front of our
Speaker 3: farm and it works there too, So it's really caught
Speaker 3: on and I'm quite proud of the name, and it
Speaker 3: says exactly how I feel about agriculture and about my
Speaker 3: own farming business.
Speaker 2: But what were those male males having gout for?
Speaker 3: Yeah, a bit sissy, or a bit cutesy or a
Speaker 3: bit you know, something something to do with me wanting
Speaker 3: to keep the dirt from underneath my nails, I think
Speaker 3: is where they were going with it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we love it, and our customers do too.
Speaker 2: What was your degree when you're living near the dumpling shop?
Speaker 2: What'd you do?
Speaker 3: I studied Arts and Sciences at Melbourne UNI, so I
Speaker 3: was doing which is really interesting because at the time.
Speaker 3: When I left high school, I was pretty good at
Speaker 3: school and they kind of say you should be either
Speaker 3: a lawyer or a doctor, and I'd kind of aspired
Speaker 3: to be a doctor, and I had been. I got
Speaker 3: into the second round offers at Monash University, but it
Speaker 3: was under the rural program and you have to go
Speaker 3: back to rural areas and practice your medicine for six years.
Speaker 3: And the joke was that I was like, there's no
Speaker 3: way I'm going to go back to the regions when
Speaker 3: I finished university.
Speaker 1: Don't want to do that.
Speaker 3: So I said, I'll do Arts and sciences at Melbourne
Speaker 3: because I really liked Melbourne University, and then I'll kind
Speaker 3: of work out which avenue I prefer most, whether it's
Speaker 3: the science and the maths kind of stuff, or whether
Speaker 3: it's the humanities and the art side of things. And
Speaker 3: I ended up not pursuing medicine or law. I ended
Speaker 3: up buying a restaurant in Bridge Road on Richmond in Richmond, Sorry,
Speaker 3: And from then this kind of story transpired, and now
Speaker 3: I'm certainly back in the regions and bought the farm
Speaker 3: from Dad, and it all turned out to bee that
Speaker 3: I'm quite dedicated to regional Australia. And that's the actual joke.
Speaker 2: What was the restaurant.
Speaker 1: It was called Grace Food and Wine.
Speaker 3: It was a kind of whatever you want, you know,
Speaker 3: that kind of modern Australian kind of cafe style, breakfast,
Speaker 3: lunch and dinner seven days a week.
Speaker 2: Oh how did it go?
Speaker 1: It went very very badly.
Speaker 3: I paid for a very significant I guess education in business.
Speaker 3: And it's funny because when you look back on things,
Speaker 3: obviously you realize, you know, what you've gained from an experience.
Speaker 3: But I was so and a bit like how I
Speaker 3: was anti going back to the regions after or a
Speaker 3: medicine degree. I was so anti in this story of
Speaker 3: like Nona's cooking and my mum's cooking an Italian restaurant style.
Speaker 3: I thought that was all, you know, a bit naf
Speaker 3: and like what an error because that's the style of
Speaker 3: food that Melbourne loves actually, which is that kind of
Speaker 3: home cooked or food with a story. And I, you know,
Speaker 3: another part of my heritage that I had denied and
Speaker 3: probably would have been far better off sticking to that authenticity.
Speaker 3: But in any case, it was a lot of money
Speaker 3: to learn a lesson. And yeah, and it ultimately it
Speaker 3: led me back to the farm. So I suppose all's
Speaker 3: well that ends.
Speaker 2: Well, how long did you run the restaurant? You lost
Speaker 2: a lot of money, lost a lot of money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, five and a half years and a lot of money.
Speaker 3: And the problem was there was always this promise that
Speaker 3: it was getting better, and it was getting better, and
Speaker 3: so we you know, you sign another lease and you
Speaker 3: aspired a saler restaurant rather than close it, which we
Speaker 3: did in the end. It was like it kind of
Speaker 3: got good right before the end, but it was time
Speaker 3: to certainly time to sell.
Speaker 2: And you bought the family farm. How did that come about?
Speaker 3: Well, that was a little bit because the restaurant had
Speaker 3: gone so poorly, so a lot of money had gone
Speaker 3: into keeping the restaurant afloat. And at the same time
Speaker 3: we had that was actually back when there was the
Speaker 3: last drought, so put financial pressure on the farm as well.
Speaker 3: And then we had a wholesaler, or Dad had a
Speaker 3: wholesaler who took a whole season's worth of cauliflowers and
Speaker 3: then didn't pay for them. So it was this compounding
Speaker 3: situation where all the money had gone very badly and
Speaker 3: we had the bank ready to foreclose on us, and
Speaker 3: through some perseverance and trickery is not the right word,
Speaker 3: but knowing more about my farming business than what a
Speaker 3: bank will ever know, basically ended up that we signed
Speaker 3: a deed of agreement with a bank that they would
Speaker 3: allow the farm to be subdivided so that Mum and
Speaker 3: Dad wouldn't lose their house which is on the farm,
Speaker 3: and that we had to put the rest of the
Speaker 3: farm on the mark. So we did that and I
Speaker 3: bought my farm back at auction on a very miserable
Speaker 3: South Gippsland drizzly day, although we would call that a
Speaker 3: glorious day in this season. But you know I stood
Speaker 3: there and bitted for my well, I didn't actually end
Speaker 3: up bidding, but I ended up buying the farm at
Speaker 3: auction from the bank essentially, and they had to write
Speaker 3: off some debt and so succession happened by accident on
Speaker 3: our farm. And it's interesting because I had always said
Speaker 3: when I first went onto the farm and became involved
Speaker 3: in industry that the biggest problem with farmers is that
Speaker 3: they are emotionally connected to their land and it forces
Speaker 3: them to make decisions that a business person otherwise wouldn't make.
Speaker 3: And so after all of that criticism that I had
Speaker 3: said about farmers and the decisions that they make based
Speaker 3: on this emotional connection, I ended up standing, you know,
Speaker 3: like I said, at an auction to buy this farm,
Speaker 3: which was like, was it a good business decision? Yes, partially,
Speaker 3: but that certainly wasn't the overarching reason. And as to
Speaker 3: why I was standing there bidding on the family farm,
Speaker 3: it was because it becomes a member of the family
Speaker 3: my you know, the work that has gone into it.
Speaker 3: It's a migrant story. The way my dad felt about
Speaker 3: the farm. I couldn't imagine what my dad would be
Speaker 3: like not on the farm, like we thought, well, you know,
Speaker 3: what will Dad do? And so I was there because
Speaker 3: of an emotional connection to the land. And I kind
Speaker 3: of think that, given that nine out of ten Australian
Speaker 3: farms are still family farms, that if farmers didn't have
Speaker 3: that you know, emotional connection, if that farmland wasn't part
Speaker 3: of the family and part of the identity of the farmer,
Speaker 3: we wouldn't have farmers stick it out through what are
Speaker 3: brutal droughts and floods and everything else that goes with farming.
Speaker 2: Which is one of the reasons it's so hard when
Speaker 2: you see, as I did this week on TV, a
Speaker 2: farmer up in the floods in New South Wales saying,
Speaker 2: I'm just going to have to walk off. There's no option.
Speaker 2: I've just got to walk off and leave it. And
Speaker 2: I thought that guy could have had this farm for
Speaker 2: generations as your family has.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I mean I could sidebar here into why,
Speaker 3: you know, unrealized capital gains on super funds, where so
Speaker 3: many farmers have been told this is how we should
Speaker 3: do succession, and this is how you can have a
Speaker 3: meaningful retirement and you know, invite the next generation onto
Speaker 3: the farm and make it financially possible for them to
Speaker 3: be there. That when decisions like that are made, it
Speaker 3: totally belies the fact that farmers are often multi generational,
Speaker 3: have been there for as many generations as financially viable
Speaker 3: in most cases because of that connection. To start taxing
Speaker 3: that we really start, you know, breaking down the fabric
Speaker 3: of what keeps farms running and to leave a farm.
Speaker 3: You know, I went into debt and bought the family
Speaker 3: farm because I couldn't imagine Dad walking off. It was
Speaker 3: it's goes to the heart of like I said self,
Speaker 3: identity and value and purpose. Often a lot of farmers.
Speaker 3: And I know it's stereotype and where it's supposed to
Speaker 3: be more modern, but often a lot of farmers. The
Speaker 3: kid at school, you know, finished my dadish when he
Speaker 3: was fourteen years and nine months and went straight on
Speaker 3: the farm and worked for his dad and then you know,
Speaker 3: inherited part of it and worked for another part of it.
Speaker 3: And they don't even know where they would fit in
Speaker 3: society if it wasn't for what they do on their farms.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any danger of you being the
Speaker 2: stereotypical farmer, Emma.
Speaker 3: No, well, no I'm not the stereotypical farmer, which runs,
Speaker 3: you know, runs us into more problems. And I think
Speaker 3: as much as this is like we shouldn't say, you know,
Speaker 3: but when we're being politically correct, we're not supposed to
Speaker 3: say all these things.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I think the reason why I can connect with a
Speaker 3: Melbourne audience or a Metro audience is because I have
Speaker 3: an apartment on Bridge Road. I've come to school here,
Speaker 3: I like to go out to the great restaurants. I'm
Speaker 3: living that lifestyle too. When I walk into Cole's or Woolworths,
Speaker 3: and do my shopping. If I'm being completely honest, I
Speaker 3: shop like someone who's in a city like I often
Speaker 3: don't look at the prices.
Speaker 1: I don't compare products.
Speaker 3: I just get the thing that I like, so I
Speaker 3: can relate to kind of both sides of them, both
Speaker 3: sides of the ledger there. So I think it's important
Speaker 3: that we don't just have a stereotypical idea in our
Speaker 3: mind about who farmers are. But we do have to
Speaker 3: be cognizant that most of them are still the stereotype
Speaker 3: of what we imagine, and we have to keep that
Speaker 3: in mind when we think about how do we talking
Speaker 3: about drought support or any kind of farming support. I
Speaker 3: might be sitting around on Google and able to contemplate
Speaker 3: what things are available, but the sixty year old multi
Speaker 3: generational farmer whose kids are not back on the farm
Speaker 3: has so much difficulty understanding what a national drought agreement
Speaker 3: is and what does it mean and how do you
Speaker 3: apply for assistance or any other thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd like to get to the National Drought Agreement
Speaker 2: and get your interpretation of it, because I find impossible
Speaker 2: get to that later. But how long ago did you
Speaker 2: buy the farm? Has it been a successful business decision.
Speaker 3: Yet it's certainly been a good business decision. Actually, my
Speaker 3: dad asked me on the weekend, and I should answer
Speaker 3: your question. I think it's twenty eighteen that I bought
Speaker 3: the farm, and then I bought another piece of land
Speaker 3: off my auntie that adjoins us in twenty nineteen. On
Speaker 3: the weekend, Dad and I had gone for a drive around.
Speaker 3: And often when he says, hey, can we go for
Speaker 3: a drive around, it's because he's got an important conversation
Speaker 3: that he apparently he needs to warm up, you know,
Speaker 3: for the driver around to the farm. And you know what,
Speaker 3: I think that unconsciously, that's probably that let's all remember
Speaker 3: the emotional connection when we drive around, because that's what happens.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Dad's driving around on ground that he's been driving around
Speaker 3: on for the last seventy years. So we're out having
Speaker 3: a drive and then when we got back, he said, oh,
Speaker 3: do you want to sell the farm? And I said,
Speaker 3: do you want to sell the farm? And he said no,
Speaker 3: bit I'm asking you. And I said, well, i'm asking
Speaker 3: you and he said no, but I want to know
Speaker 3: your answer, and I said, well, I don't really have
Speaker 3: an answer. That is separate to your answer, because if
Speaker 3: you said to me you don't want to be here anymore,
Speaker 3: or you want to think about retirement in a different way,
Speaker 3: then I would obviously contemplate all of that in regards
Speaker 3: to my answer. For me, my answer, or if I
Speaker 3: try and separate mum and dad and that emotional connection away.
Speaker 3: I think that farmland is the best real estate investment
Speaker 3: you could possibly have because we're not making any more
Speaker 3: of it, and in fact, governments make decisions that take
Speaker 3: more and more of that farmland away every day. We
Speaker 3: do have challenges with a drying climate, or at the
Speaker 3: very least a climate that seems to be shifting and changing,
Speaker 3: and I know that that's you know, them's fighting words,
Speaker 3: so let's talk about that a little bit too. But
Speaker 3: you know, there is an increase in that land value
Speaker 3: year on year, So every year that I keep the farm,
Speaker 3: that increase in land value is meaningful. There is opportunity,
Speaker 3: certainly there's opportunity, but it is really hard for opportunity.
Speaker 2: I love that conversation with your father. I think you
Speaker 2: should have been a lawyer.
Speaker 3: After an answer, lot Ray, I've spent a lot of
Speaker 3: time with lawyers over the last few years now, so
Speaker 3: I actually worked out that it would drive me nuts
Speaker 3: because it doesn't look like how it looks like on TV.
Speaker 1: That's for sure.
Speaker 3: I've been in the court room a few times over
Speaker 3: the last few years.
Speaker 2: Your grandfather Silvatore, when did he arrive at this piece
Speaker 2: of land?
Speaker 1: So he it was very early.
Speaker 3: He was actually one of the early migrants and his
Speaker 3: father came out first in nineteen thirty two, and then
Speaker 3: my grandfather came out in nineteen thirty eight, and he
Speaker 3: left my grandmother. They had just gotten married, and she
Speaker 3: said to him before they got married, I've heard that
Speaker 3: you're saying that you want to go to Australia. And
Speaker 3: he said, no, no, I'm not going to do that,
Speaker 3: and then he married her, got her pregnant, and then said, oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, I'm going to go to Australia, but
Speaker 3: don't worry.
Speaker 1: You'll be able to join me shortly after, like great.
Speaker 3: Who like, let's leave the piazzas of Sicily to come
Speaker 3: out to the bush, which was literally just the middle
Speaker 3: of nowhere back then. And then the war broke out,
Speaker 3: so she actually didn't get to join him for ten years,
Speaker 3: and they he had bought the farm in Gippsland, I
Speaker 3: think about a year or two before she arrived. So
Speaker 3: what does that make forty six forty seven around then
Speaker 3: on the pocket of land that we're on now.
Speaker 2: And it's a hard start to married life.
Speaker 1: Isn't it. It's a hard start.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely in his I mean just the migrant stories
Speaker 3: and ugh, like they got on a boat, it took
Speaker 3: them six weeks to get here, couldn't speak a word
Speaker 3: of English, did their very best to build for their family.
Speaker 3: But I think it's really important. I think my family
Speaker 3: story is really important because it talks about leaving a
Speaker 3: place where there is no opportunity and no food, like
Speaker 3: they were literally at the point where their families were
Speaker 3: starting to grow go hungry, and they came here secily.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And my mom's side of the family, which often gets
Speaker 3: left out of the story. And I kind of have
Speaker 3: realized that as I've gotten older, because I was a
Speaker 3: daddy's girl, and you know, mum was just the lady
Speaker 3: who bought great food. And have certainly grown my respect
Speaker 3: for my mum over the last probably decade where I realized,
Speaker 3: actually my loud mouth is straight from her and her
Speaker 3: side of the family. They migrated actually a bit later,
Speaker 3: so my grandparents, they were from different parts of Italy
Speaker 3: than my dad's family, who was Sicilian. They migrated and
Speaker 3: went to the Yarra Valley and started picking fruit. Then
Speaker 3: they lived in Melbourne actually for a period of time,
Speaker 3: and then my grandfather decided, oh, we should just go
Speaker 3: and buy a dairy farm in Meoburn North because there's
Speaker 3: an Italian community there and we've got family there and
Speaker 3: wouldn't it be just so great to have a dairy farm.
Speaker 3: So my uncle is now still farming on that bit
Speaker 3: of land too, so it's farmers on both sides of
Speaker 3: the family.
Speaker 2: You famous I remember famously told me in one of
Speaker 2: the first times I talked to you that you grew
Speaker 2: cauliflowers and hated them.
Speaker 3: So there's two things that are not that have shifted there.
Speaker 3: So firstly, the reason I hated cauliflowers was well, firstly
Speaker 3: because when you grow anything and you realize how difficult
Speaker 3: it is, you know. Actually I was going to blame that,
Speaker 3: but that's not true. Because I love potatoes and always
Speaker 3: loved potatoes. Cauliflowers make me feel quite unwell. So I've
Speaker 3: got a bit of an allergy to the whole brassica family,
Speaker 3: which is getting less. If I really really well cook
Speaker 3: a brassica, so a broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, it gives me
Speaker 3: less digestive upset. But by the time you've cooked the
Speaker 3: life out of a cauliflower it can be a bit
Speaker 3: ordinary to chew.
Speaker 2: On course, so you don't grow them anymore.
Speaker 3: No, well, we've I say, we've had a break, but
Speaker 3: I can't imagine us ever getting back together with the cauliflower.
Speaker 3: We haven't grown them for the last three seasons. Essentially,
Speaker 3: growing vegetable crops is very, very difficult in the Australian market.
Speaker 3: It became more and more difficult as the years have
Speaker 3: gone on. And the last time we grew cauliflowers like
Speaker 3: that entailed me accessing workers under the Pacific scheme. You're
Speaker 3: paying workers about thirty six dollars an hour, you have
Speaker 3: to have a house for them, the requirements. And I
Speaker 3: don't mean to say that we shouldn't be looking after
Speaker 3: migrant workers. Of course we should, but it gets to
Speaker 3: the point where the return on investment for the risk
Speaker 3: that you take is not it's not viable to me.
Speaker 3: So that bit of ground we at least some of
Speaker 3: it out to some cabbage growers over the last two years.
Speaker 3: That proved to be a bad business decision based on
Speaker 3: the weather. If it had kept raining over the last
Speaker 3: twelve months, it would have been a good business decision.
Speaker 3: But yeah, we've got then, were you It was bad
Speaker 3: for us actually because they managed to they would have
Speaker 3: had high costs. Absolutely, because your irrigation costs go up,
Speaker 3: your fuel costs go up. You know, all of that
Speaker 3: is more expensive during a drow out. But because the
Speaker 3: least guaranteed them access to water, that meant that we
Speaker 3: had you know, we were the first ones to dip
Speaker 3: out on the access to the irrigation water for sheep.
Speaker 3: So we've actually gone heavier into livestock over the last
Speaker 3: few years and been focused more on.
Speaker 1: Prime lamb production.
Speaker 2: You said you grew up daddy's girl. Does that mean
Speaker 2: you're out in them every day, feeding the animals or
Speaker 2: driving the tractor? What's your first memory of being on
Speaker 2: a farm?
Speaker 3: Oh, when you say that, it's funny and you just
Speaker 3: go to the this that ends up being like psychoanalytical psychology.
Speaker 3: I think the first memory I have is probably of
Speaker 3: feeding lambs and driving around with Dad in the ute,
Speaker 3: so would put us in the ute, which I think
Speaker 3: is really cute. So we'd go around with Dad and
Speaker 3: he will always recall and even now, like the other
Speaker 3: day when I was grading potatoes with him out in
Speaker 3: the paddock, you know, he parroted to me what I
Speaker 3: would say when I was about three years old, which
Speaker 3: is what time is it, dad?
Speaker 1: And he'd say, why, what does it matter?
Speaker 3: And I'd say, oh, I think play school's about to start,
Speaker 3: like I've got to get home, or I'm want to
Speaker 3: go home now, or I don't want to play anymore
Speaker 3: or whatever else. So that's my first memory is kind
Speaker 3: of driving around with dad. We did chores that certainly
Speaker 3: not like some other farm kids, like I know kids
Speaker 3: and particularly boys. I think my dad didn't think that,
Speaker 3: you know, he'd be having to farm for another generation
Speaker 3: of farming. We had a conversation about inheritance, which was
Speaker 3: more like, oh, one day, when I'm really really old
Speaker 3: and I die, you'll inherit a farm, and you know,
Speaker 3: I hope you don't just sell it without regard to
Speaker 3: the amount of work that's gone on this farm, the blood,
Speaker 3: sweat and tears that has shifted obviously from the conversation
Speaker 3: that I had with Dad the other day around you know,
Speaker 3: do we sell or do we not? He's more conscious
Speaker 3: of not passing on this kind of emotional burden. I
Speaker 3: supposed to keep the farm, but certainly it was that
Speaker 3: I would inherit the farm and myself and my sister,
Speaker 3: and you know, why don't you put some cattle on
Speaker 3: and you'll have some extra income. Was the idea when
Speaker 3: I was probably about ten years old.
Speaker 2: What. Yeah, you mentioned going out getting your hands dirty.
Speaker 2: But you're clearly you're also managing director at the company,
Speaker 2: aren't you. What's your average day? How much time is
Speaker 2: out there being a farmer? How much time are you
Speaker 2: being a business person?
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a I mean, it's a good question, and
Speaker 3: I've spent the last I'm going to sound defensive. I've
Speaker 3: spent the last probably five years where I've been involved
Speaker 3: in industry leadership kind of justifying whether or not I'm
Speaker 3: a farmer and.
Speaker 1: What is a farmer?
Speaker 3: I guess, So, do I spend you know, eighty percent
Speaker 3: of my time thinking about or doing work towards the farm?
Speaker 1: Yes? Is that eighty percent of my time spent driving
Speaker 1: a tractor? No?
Speaker 3: I you know, get out there usually when someone needs help,
Speaker 3: like you know, I was out there harvesting potatoes because
Speaker 3: he needed an extra set of hands or But when
Speaker 3: it comes to the decision making generally speaking, and I
Speaker 3: don't mean to kind of you know, have glee around
Speaker 3: the power dynamic, because we certainly make decisions together. But
Speaker 3: Dad will say to me, so, can we grow potatoes
Speaker 3: this season? We should be this, or should be that.
Speaker 3: I guess ultimately the decision lies with me as to
Speaker 3: the direction that the business takes. And I have to
Speaker 3: be cognizant of the pressure that puts on Dad and
Speaker 3: having staff and that sort of thing. So I would
Speaker 3: only spend probably ten percent of my time doing what
Speaker 3: you know other people would say is farming.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, your family's almost one hundred years in this
Speaker 2: farming in this area. And that's one of the things
Speaker 2: that concerns me about the way we're going on issues
Speaker 2: of drought and floods for that matter, is there is
Speaker 2: an enormous amount of inherited knowledge amongst farmers. What are
Speaker 2: your fan what does your family what does your dad
Speaker 2: say about drought, about flood about what we're going through
Speaker 2: at the moment, I mean emotionally it must be hurtful.
Speaker 2: But does he talk about we had a similar drought
Speaker 2: in X, Y and Z that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, Like he'll say, oh, I remember that that
Speaker 3: creek over there, you know, never, you know, never has
Speaker 3: stopped running, or you know, when my grandfather chose that
Speaker 3: parcel of land. The reason he said, well, this is
Speaker 3: what he says, that were his decision. You know, the
Speaker 3: points of decision was that firstly, there would be no
Speaker 3: land encroachment from the city, Thanks grandfather, because that means
Speaker 3: that our land never went to one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: thousand dollars per acre, and we couldn't sell it to
Speaker 3: a you know, a property developer. But that you know,
Speaker 3: his mission was to farm for the next you know,
Speaker 3: umpty in generations. And the second was that, you know,
Speaker 3: as the legend goes that when he got to our farm,
Speaker 3: that he found a piece of brack and fern and
Speaker 3: he stuck it into the ground and that there was
Speaker 3: like water, you know, there was always water, and he said,
Speaker 3: there's always.
Speaker 1: Going to be water here.
Speaker 3: So my farm is in an area that has you know,
Speaker 3: usually unbelievable water security. And to say that we are
Speaker 3: in drought I absolutely believe to be true. To compare
Speaker 3: it to the way that other people or other farmers
Speaker 3: that are impacted right now by this drought is almost
Speaker 3: unfair because we've still got green pick, We've still managed
Speaker 3: to get those cabbages, or you know, off our.
Speaker 1: Animals are still fat.
Speaker 3: So I was driving around the other day saying, here,
Speaker 3: we are suffering in drought, but if you look at
Speaker 3: all of our animals, you wouldn't know. So no one,
Speaker 3: you know, there's no pictures of the emaciated sheep on
Speaker 3: our farm. And that is because of that water security,
Speaker 3: or that that rainfall security, which is what really bothers
Speaker 3: me about the way that government thinks about farming, agriculture
Speaker 3: and farmland because they have not been particularly conscious of
Speaker 3: the different types of farming regions for food security moving forward,
Speaker 3: when they're putting up transmission lines left, right and center,
Speaker 3: don't we'll.
Speaker 2: Get to that as well. But let's talk about the drought.
Speaker 2: Massive dust storms South Australia and Northern Victoria, red dust
Speaker 2: blotting out the sun. What's that telling us.
Speaker 3: Oh, there's no soil structure and that we're now moving
Speaker 3: top soil around Australia because it doesn't want to stay
Speaker 3: put because it is unbelievably dry. I think the bit
Speaker 3: that's shocking to me is that because it hasn't that
Speaker 3: there's signals. I think farmers know when there's a drought
Speaker 3: and when it's not raining, like we absolutely know about it.
Speaker 3: The city only starts to understand that there's a thing
Speaker 3: called drought when either they can't get a product, food
Speaker 3: becomes really expensive, or there's literally water restrictions as to
Speaker 3: when they're allowed to water their lawn. And because those
Speaker 3: signals hadn't hadn't happened, then we've been really slow to
Speaker 3: acknowledge that there is a drought and it feels to
Speaker 3: me like that's only happened in the last few weeks
Speaker 3: when actually people.
Speaker 2: You're part of the reason. When you spoke so.
Speaker 3: Were you, you know, I was kind of shocked that
Speaker 3: it wasn't that the message wasn't out there to the
Speaker 3: Metro audience, and that's the majority of the population in Australia.
Speaker 3: If we do not have city people on our side
Speaker 3: knowing how important and how unbelievably awesome it is that
Speaker 3: we have food security in this country and that we
Speaker 3: have farmers out there doing the thing. We're in serious
Speaker 3: trouble because we make up such a small percentage of
Speaker 3: the voting population that we see decisions being made by
Speaker 3: governments because they do it based on where the votes are,
Speaker 3: that they know that there's no implication to them of
Speaker 3: getting policy wrong for farmers. And there's this unfortunate belief
Speaker 3: that we have so much food that we will never
Speaker 3: go hungry, and yet the supply chain is quite fickle
Speaker 3: in Australia.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, let's bring it down to basics and we'll
Speaker 2: look at both the people on the land and the
Speaker 2: people in the city. What does drought, How does drought
Speaker 2: affect How does it touch the lives of people in
Speaker 2: Melbourne or in Capital City.
Speaker 3: Because if in periods of drought we lose numbers of farmers,
Speaker 3: or farms become less productive, or the output is crippled,
Speaker 3: or we end up with a national herd that is diminished.
Speaker 3: But then you know, grains prices to chickens and eggs
Speaker 3: and all sorts of things. If you undermine the resilience
Speaker 3: of the agriculture sector, it affects you when you go
Speaker 3: to the supermarket. It either affects you in the amount
Speaker 3: of choice you have the price of the products on
Speaker 3: the shelf, and it even affects us. And this is
Speaker 3: the bit that's kind of really far removed. It affects
Speaker 3: us from a national food security perspective, which has an
Speaker 3: impact when it comes to geo political relationships between countries.
Speaker 3: There is no question about that, but most people are
Speaker 3: not thinking about, well, what happens if there's a wall.
Speaker 2: Explain that to me. How does it affect the geopolitical situation?
Speaker 3: Because when a country has food security, like it's the basis.
Speaker 3: Food and water security is the basis of security in
Speaker 3: a country, So we have to have robust supply chains.
Speaker 3: It's great that we can feed. You know, sixty percent
Speaker 3: of our product goes offshore, but it doesn't take long
Speaker 3: for that to shift and change. We might have a
Speaker 3: mentality that, oh, if the Australian farmers end up less
Speaker 3: productive and there's less output, okay, maybe prices go up
Speaker 3: a little bit, but it's fine, you know, and in
Speaker 3: worst case scenario, we can just import.
Speaker 1: In a global world, you know.
Speaker 3: Reality where relationships mean a lot, we might not be
Speaker 3: the first people that can actually purchase products from overseas
Speaker 3: pretty simply so having Australian farmers producing Australian foods predominantly
Speaker 3: and primarily for a st alien mouths is such a
Speaker 3: blessing that we just take for granted. And I think
Speaker 3: maybe I know about it or am more cognizant of
Speaker 3: it because of that story that I just told about
Speaker 3: my grandparents not having eight potatoes to share amongst ten
Speaker 3: family members and then getting here and being obsessed with
Speaker 3: food security. There is not a scarek of food that
Speaker 3: gets thrown in the bin in my household now, in
Speaker 3: our family, and we're three generations away, so we're not hungry.
Speaker 3: We have an abundance of food because we can just
Speaker 3: go out to the paddock and get at but nothing
Speaker 3: ever gets wasted. And it's a mentality that I think
Speaker 3: has drifted away from Australia post World War Two and
Speaker 3: our prosperity.
Speaker 2: What do you do with the things I would call scraps?
Speaker 2: To give them to the dogs?
Speaker 1: The dogs like that.
Speaker 3: You would never put meat never ever gets wasted. So
Speaker 3: I was taught as a kid, you know, an animal
Speaker 3: died for that meat to be on the plate, and
Speaker 3: now you're just going to chuck it in the bin.
Speaker 1: So that would always go to dogs.
Speaker 2: That's powerful, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Well, I think so, and I this is a.
Speaker 2: Cruel farmers who just liked a mystery their animals.
Speaker 1: I mean, the great.
Speaker 2: Animal died to give you that meat.
Speaker 3: Don't waste it, absolutely and the great I think it
Speaker 3: looks ironic to people on the outside. We have had
Speaker 3: such significant fox pressure over the last few months, more
Speaker 3: than you know. Dad can remember, and lambs being taken
Speaker 3: by foxes, and it truly breaks my dad's heart. Like
Speaker 3: I watched him on his hands and knees crawling around
Speaker 3: in the hay shed the other day looking for some
Speaker 3: lambs that he had moved out of the weather. A
Speaker 3: U had had three had triplets, had three lambs and
Speaker 3: two of them were gone. And he has been out
Speaker 3: there doesn't And I know he doesn't actually want to
Speaker 3: shoot foxes because he always misses. And he said, why
Speaker 3: do you think I miss? And he shows me his
Speaker 3: target practice and he's like spot on, like from one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty meters can literally hit the middle of
Speaker 3: the cross that he's the target that he's made for himself,
Speaker 3: but can't shoot a fox. And I said, it's because
Speaker 3: you don't really like doing that. Like we wouldn't use
Speaker 3: traps or anything that's inhumane because I don't know, we
Speaker 3: have a lot of respect for animals. And the bit
Speaker 3: that really pisses me off the most is that you've
Speaker 3: got people who are animal activists out there telling you
Speaker 3: how much they love animals and the reason why they
Speaker 3: have all of their positions that they have, and that's
Speaker 3: that's fine, But there is no love for an animal
Speaker 3: then going out at the middle of the night to
Speaker 3: try and protect it from foxes, to be moving them around,
Speaker 3: to be cutting, you know, skinning dead lambs, to put
Speaker 3: a little coat of dead lamb skin on another lamb,
Speaker 3: to try and get you to adopt it who's lost
Speaker 3: their own lamb. And you think there's all of this
Speaker 3: effort that goes into it. Ultimately that lamb once it's
Speaker 3: grown out, and we know what their ultimate purposes purpose is,
Speaker 3: it's to feed people. And I think that there's great
Speaker 3: integrity in being able to hold those two things to
Speaker 3: be true at one time. We know that as a
Speaker 3: maximum we're probably going to get paid two hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty dollars for that lamb. There is a lot more
Speaker 3: than two hundred and twenty dollars worth of effort that
Speaker 3: goes into protecting these lambs. So it might seem ironic,
Speaker 3: but to me it's actually certainly in my family, respecting
Speaker 3: animals was absolutely tantamount, like so, yeah, and I know
Speaker 3: that we eat them, right, like, I know that that's
Speaker 3: what we do.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to tell vegan no. I I find
Speaker 1: the premise of veganism.
Speaker 3: I think everybody can make their choices right, and I
Speaker 3: have no problem with people who say that they're not
Speaker 3: going to eat mat for whatever reason. But the premise
Speaker 3: of saying I am a vegan because I care about
Speaker 3: animals is absolutely misguided.
Speaker 1: It is a farce. It is a trend.
Speaker 3: Because I was looking at how kangaroo kangaroo leather has
Speaker 3: been banned from or you know, some of the shoe companies,
Speaker 3: the sporting companies have agreed that they won't use kangaroo leather.
Speaker 3: Couldn't help myself but to comment on this post, and
Speaker 3: I usually don't because otherwise you end up down a
Speaker 3: rabbit hole. And I said, oh, great, what product are
Speaker 3: they going to use now? And some you know, very
Speaker 3: passionate animal activist said, oh it's great, They're going to
Speaker 3: replace it. With synthetic materials, so a wind for all
Speaker 3: animal species. It's like, that's petrochemicals making foux leather. That's
Speaker 3: not a wind for the environment. When we've got, you know,
Speaker 3: a huge population of kangaroos who often starve to death
Speaker 3: during droughts because there's not enough food for them out there,
Speaker 3: a product that is already making its kind of climate emissions,
Speaker 3: and here we are celebrating.
Speaker 1: The fact that that's not the case.
Speaker 3: I'm like, that's it's so misguided, and I find it
Speaker 3: particularly disrespectful for farmers, who, you know, in ninety nine
Speaker 3: out of one hundred cases, will do anything to protect
Speaker 3: their animals and nothing in a drought is as distressing
Speaker 3: as the impact that that has on your animals.
Speaker 2: The kangaroo situation is interesting. I spent a lot of
Speaker 2: time in the mornington Beninsu. I've never seen as many
Speaker 2: kangaroos as are around at the moment, and none of
Speaker 2: the locals and it's not mostly grazing countries, so you know,
Speaker 2: if they're not knocking down fences, not doing a lot
Speaker 2: of harm, but never seen as many. The road culled
Speaker 2: the kangaroo, and Paul McCartney told us they are endangered.
Speaker 2: I went with Porn mcartney about that, though never actually
Speaker 2: did reply, but I thought, you think they're in dangered,
Speaker 2: come here or drive for an hour and so hundreds
Speaker 2: of the buggers.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: They're lovely animals and they're national icon over the animals.
Speaker 1: That's right, Chandela.
Speaker 2: You can look after them.
Speaker 3: And what I'm saying is as a farmer, you can
Speaker 3: hold those things both to be true. I can love
Speaker 3: a kangaroo and you know, resonate with Skippy and feel
Speaker 3: like I'm finally going home when I step onto a
Speaker 3: quantas plane with the giant kangaroo on the side if
Speaker 3: I'm overseas, and also understand how we're part of an ecosystem,
Speaker 3: that it is okay to use animals for a purpose.
Speaker 3: There is this thing called nature. It's like, is it okay?
Speaker 3: You know, do we blame a lion for eating a zebra?
Speaker 3: Like do we say that is immoral? And it's you know,
Speaker 3: it's cruel and it's terrible. No, we don't, like we
Speaker 3: are part of an ecosystem. It's almost like at a
Speaker 3: point we start denying the natural world of the thing.
Speaker 3: For me, the line is where as farmers and agriculture.
Speaker 3: We enslave animals, and that's when the moral obligation is
Speaker 3: to what our you know, what our obligation to those
Speaker 3: animals is shifts once I put sheep into a paddock
Speaker 3: and that it has a fence around them and they
Speaker 3: cannot escape. It is my responsibility as a pastoralist to
Speaker 3: make sure that those animals are safe from the predation
Speaker 3: of a fox. That's where the line is different, and
Speaker 3: I think talking about farming practices with the wider community,
Speaker 3: we should welcome that as farmers, so that we can
Speaker 3: point out why in some cases we've got a caged
Speaker 3: chicken egg industry, and balancing food security and the needs
Speaker 3: of humans with how we'd go about treating animals.
Speaker 2: Another important species, You have rabbit trouble, and how do
Speaker 2: you deal with if you do?
Speaker 3: We haven't actually in some places like my uncle's backyard,
Speaker 3: there are five billion rabbits. We haven't had heaps and
Speaker 3: heaps of rabbits on the farm. And I suspect that
Speaker 3: that's also to do with drought and the amount of
Speaker 3: fox pressure that we've got. I suspect that the foxes
Speaker 3: are running out of other things to eat, so lots
Speaker 3: of little lambs in a paddock. That defense off is
Speaker 3: easy game for them.
Speaker 2: Oh, we started talking about how to affects the city.
Speaker 2: I think we've expanded there and I want to come
Speaker 2: back to how it affects people in the country because
Speaker 2: my concern about the draft. A few weeks ago, which
Speaker 2: is when I called you initially and you talked to
Speaker 2: throughout w was a call from a person who's in
Speaker 2: the medical profession in the regional Victoria who was aware
Speaker 2: of several farmers they knew well, resilient, strong, experienced farmers
Speaker 2: presenting with suicide suicidal thoughts. And we've since heard of
Speaker 2: a number of farmers suiciding. Are you aware of them?
Speaker 3: I think it was something like seventeen in the last
Speaker 3: few weeks. Seventeen, yeah, I think so. I saw it
Speaker 3: statistic the other day. I don't know if that it
Speaker 3: might have been nationwide seventeen suicide deaths and it was
Speaker 3: in the kind of context of the fire services Levy.
Speaker 3: I'm not talking about, you know, seventeen in a number
Speaker 3: of years. We're talking about in weeks. And I would
Speaker 3: just say that those farmers that presented, they're the anomaly
Speaker 3: because most farmers do not present.
Speaker 2: That's what this person said to me. They're very brave
Speaker 2: to do its normally because there's plenty of means on
Speaker 2: a farm. Isn't it to take your life if you
Speaker 2: want to? Absolutely so, Okay, explain to us why how
Speaker 2: rather not why because that's the decision. How people could
Speaker 2: become so desperate to take their life.
Speaker 3: Because there is no way out. I think it is relentless,
Speaker 3: it is ongoing, and it feels like there is no
Speaker 3: way out. If you are contemplating as a farmer like
Speaker 3: I'm I can relate to it, just ever so slightly
Speaker 3: because of what happened on our farm, and you know,
Speaker 3: ultimately the decision for me to purchase it my dad
Speaker 3: at that point in time, and it's a journey that
Speaker 3: he's gone on to and maybe shifted his thinking somewhat.
Speaker 3: But my dad at that time could not imagine who
Speaker 3: he was without the farm. So to contemplate having to
Speaker 3: sell up, and you're not making a choice to sell up,
Speaker 3: you are selling up as a failure. In a farmer's mind,
Speaker 3: it is brutal. You'll often be left with nothing. You
Speaker 3: don't know whether or not you're going to be able
Speaker 3: to get a job, whether or not. I mean, there's
Speaker 3: still this stigma around being the person that failed. There
Speaker 3: is still stigma about being you know, a brave, tough
Speaker 3: farmer who goes out and protects it, you know, protects
Speaker 3: their animals or grows a crop. You know, you have
Speaker 3: so resilient and so self reliant and so independent to
Speaker 3: get to a point where you need to ask for mental.
Speaker 1: Health support is difficult.
Speaker 3: And also someone said to me the other day because
Speaker 3: I said, either there's a rural financial counseling service, why
Speaker 3: don't you call them? What's someone get I wouldn't have
Speaker 3: mental health issues if there was money in the bank.
Speaker 3: You know, people will say I'm not inherently mentally ill
Speaker 3: or depressed or whatever. It's because of the circumstance. So
Speaker 3: unless this external sit circumstance changes, how do I get
Speaker 3: out of it?
Speaker 2: But you've also touched another point there. And I've got
Speaker 2: friends in the medical profession in various parts of Victoria.
Speaker 2: They tell me mental health beds are almost non existent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well in regional Victoria that farmers or people who are
Speaker 2: mentally unwell, not just farmers, are turning up and sitting
Speaker 2: in an emergency for days, which is even more traumatic
Speaker 2: for a person who's what do we do? What do
Speaker 2: we do about that? I mean talking about life and
Speaker 2: death here, what do we do.
Speaker 3: There is a problem before that. I think we're getting
Speaker 3: to the point where we're kind of thinking about the
Speaker 3: last ditch attempt to fix a problem and what we
Speaker 3: have to be because I've been racking my brain, you know,
Speaker 3: whether it's about drought or whatever the circumstance, it's like,
Speaker 3: what's the silver bullet approach? And there isn't one. It's
Speaker 3: about death by a thousand cuts. So can we go
Speaker 3: back and look systemically? So we're talking about mental health
Speaker 3: care beds right this very second. Good luck getting into
Speaker 3: your GP. Good luck seeing the same GP twice. Good
Speaker 3: luck if you end up slicing your hand open and
Speaker 3: you've got to go to one of the regional hospitals
Speaker 3: to emergency, you're going to be there for hours upon
Speaker 3: hours upon ours. We have a problem in regional Victoria,
Speaker 3: and I could say regional Australia, but let's just talk
Speaker 3: about Victoria for a second, where the regions have been
Speaker 3: left behind now for decades. The roads are crumbling and
Speaker 3: we've not seen even close to the amount of financial
Speaker 3: resource being put into regional roads as to what we've
Speaker 3: put into removing every level crossing in Melbourne. Our infrastructure
Speaker 3: is terrible. If there is a storm, of flood, a fire,
Speaker 3: any sort of emergency event, you don't have phone access anymore.
Speaker 3: You are cut off from the rest of the world.
Speaker 3: Just so many systemic problems. We're paying more for our
Speaker 3: rates in regional Victoria, whether you're a farmer or another
Speaker 3: regional Victorian, you are paying a disproportionate amount of rates.
Speaker 1: You are paying more for services.
Speaker 3: All of those things lead up to Yes, then a
Speaker 3: drought event happens and we say, oh, farmers are committing
Speaker 3: suicide because of the drought. No, farmers are committing suicide
Speaker 3: because they have been forgotten about for two decades in
Speaker 3: public policy in this state. And that's the bit that's unacceptable.
Speaker 3: We can sit here and we can say what are
Speaker 3: the policy leavers that we you know, what's the silver
Speaker 3: bullet now that there's a drought. And the thing is,
Speaker 3: maybe there isn't a silver bullet. Maybe assistance is going
Speaker 3: to be difficult to come across. But at the same
Speaker 3: time that all of this is going on, you announce
Speaker 3: as a state government a fire services levy, so that
Speaker 3: the people who literally go out there and put the
Speaker 3: fires out for the state, for the government, because the
Speaker 3: government's you know, woefully under resource this. The very volunteers
Speaker 3: who turn up to protect other people's lives and property
Speaker 3: are the people you will slug with a one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty percent hike when it's bad enough what they're
Speaker 3: doing with taxes to every Victorian. But then let's just
Speaker 3: give it to the farmers, because what are they going
Speaker 3: to do about it? Protests for a day who cares?
Speaker 2: The Premier says, well, yeah, but that in itself, getting
Speaker 2: that sort of protest for extraordinary. But the Premier says,
Speaker 2: of course, people who are firefighters are exempt. But doesn't
Speaker 2: that just cover the house paddick or something like that?
Speaker 1: Is it the exempt?
Speaker 3: And again, like, we'll give you an exemption after you
Speaker 3: fill out fifty two forms to get your exemption, and
Speaker 3: aside from anything you've still targeted or you're the like.
Speaker 3: I get that we are in serious trouble here from
Speaker 3: a state perspective around our financial performance. I get that,
Speaker 3: But to the ultimate disrespect for me is to dress
Speaker 3: it up and say, oh, we're doing this because we're
Speaker 3: helping the emergency services workers. We know that the events
Speaker 3: are going to be more often, and they're going to
Speaker 3: last for longer, and they're going to be more severe
Speaker 3: and all of these things. So we're doing this to help.
Speaker 3: You know, the emergency services have new radios. You've got
Speaker 3: all the emergency services lined up at Parliament House telling
Speaker 3: you don't worry about the radio, just don't tax us
Speaker 3: in this manner.
Speaker 1: So you're exempt. But I don't think it's the full exemption.
Speaker 3: It's the narrative that goes with it that is a
Speaker 3: kick in the teeth to that community that have trying
Speaker 3: to still put food on everybody's tables, that are out
Speaker 3: there isolated and managing these problems by themselves. It's maybe
Speaker 3: the government doesn't have an answer or a package that
Speaker 3: it can come up with financial support, sure, but don't
Speaker 3: at the same time kick those people in the teeth
Speaker 3: with your disrespect by saying it's to help them. No,
Speaker 3: you stuffed up the state budget, you've got no revenue,
Speaker 3: you're looking for income, and all they're doing sitting around
Speaker 3: there in the labor state government is coming up with
Speaker 3: cute marketing ployees to get away.
Speaker 1: With the tax that they're raising.
Speaker 3: That's the bit that is unacceptable and that is the
Speaker 3: problem systemically with why we have farmers who suicide at
Speaker 3: a rate ten times the rest.
Speaker 1: Of the community.
Speaker 2: Suicides, talk of suicides. These are the sort of issues
Speaker 2: that get to the very heart of the problems we're
Speaker 2: looking at. Talking to Emma Jumana, former official of the
Speaker 2: Farmers Federation, third generation farmer in Victoria, what about flud shortages?
Speaker 2: What about the future? What about the government? What can
Speaker 2: does the government even understand what is going on here?
Speaker 2: Or from Emma Jermana at Amma, Let's let's move on
Speaker 2: then to the that's the personal side. What about what
Speaker 2: about the official side? What I read the National Drought
Speaker 2: Agreement recently. It was signed in December last year after
Speaker 2: ten years in existence. They fiddled it to your secret
Speaker 2: I've got no idea what it was on about it.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, did you get to the
Speaker 1: end of it?
Speaker 3: Know anything about the National Drought Agreement because it's just words,
Speaker 3: words and words and reams and reams of paper with
Speaker 3: words that don't say anything at all actually other than
Speaker 3: we don't declare droughts anymore. And it's like that's great
Speaker 3: because every farmer knows whether or not there's a drought
Speaker 3: or there's not, we can declare.
Speaker 1: It for you.
Speaker 3: So what does do Basically, it says that we always
Speaker 3: have to be responding to drought and that there are
Speaker 3: you know, there's before a drought, there's in the middle
Speaker 3: of the drought, and then there's after a drought, and
Speaker 3: after a drought just starts the cycle again because after
Speaker 3: a drought is before a drought. I don't disagree with
Speaker 3: that premise, right because what we should be doing is
Speaker 3: growing resilience all of the time in the sector to
Speaker 3: be able to face these challenges. I'm just going to
Speaker 3: sidebar a second. I think that the politicization of climate
Speaker 3: is part of what the problem is here because it's
Speaker 3: so politicized. Well, I mean, now you talk about if
Speaker 3: there's a flood, like the first thing people say is, oh,
Speaker 3: because there there's climate change. But that's why we've got
Speaker 3: to shut down coal, or that's why we've got to
Speaker 3: have more renewables, or that's why we need a transmission line.
Speaker 3: Every event is politicized for the purpose of climate change ideology.
Speaker 3: And that means that the way that we even receive
Speaker 3: our news regarding the weather has shifted as well.
Speaker 1: So last year not last year.
Speaker 3: The early last year there had been the Bureau of
Speaker 3: Meteorology had suggested that it was going to be super dry.
Speaker 3: They were probably a little bit early on their prediction,
Speaker 3: and farmers, who have gotten better at managing climate resilience,
Speaker 3: I guess, had offsold a lot of their livestock and
Speaker 3: then it didn't transpire. It actually continued to rain in
Speaker 3: most places. And then the industry said, well, the Bureau
Speaker 3: of Meteorology got it wrong, and we made all of
Speaker 3: these decisions in regards to how we farm based on
Speaker 3: the conversation. Now, I suspect then the Bureau of Meteorology
Speaker 3: have been more well, it seems to me from the
Speaker 3: outside they've been more conscious of not just coming out
Speaker 3: and saying it's going to be a really dry spell,
Speaker 3: because they don't necessarily want farmers making business decisions based
Speaker 3: on the weather forecast, even though that's exactly what happens.
Speaker 3: But this beating of the drum of oh, it's climate change,
Speaker 3: it's like you have a conversation about climate change instead
Speaker 3: of having a conversation about the weather. Now, if we
Speaker 3: accept that there is anthropogenic climate change and I don't care.
Speaker 3: Like to me, it is irrelevant whether it's anthropogenic or not.
Speaker 3: The outcome is the same. You still have a flood,
Speaker 3: you still have a fire, you still have a drought.
Speaker 2: Define anthropogenic, Oh.
Speaker 3: That it's caused by humans, you know, burning fossil fuels
Speaker 3: essentially and putting it into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: For me, I look at it and I go, let's
Speaker 1: let's sidestep that and.
Speaker 3: Just say if, like anything, if humans use something and
Speaker 3: there is a byproduct that is waste, we have to
Speaker 3: be conscious of what happens with that waste. So we
Speaker 3: should just as a matter of course, be trying to
Speaker 3: be more sustainable all of the time. That's fine. I
Speaker 3: mean whether or not you you know, you increase the
Speaker 3: you export your emissions to other countries. Let's be frank,
Speaker 3: you import the renewable energy stuff so that Australians can pay,
Speaker 3: you know, triple and increasing prices for their energy, whether
Speaker 3: or not that actually fixes climate change. I mean you
Speaker 3: don't have to be a climate scientist to understand the
Speaker 3: economics of that. So again, if we know that these
Speaker 3: events are happening more often than what we think on average,
Speaker 3: they should And when I say events I mean fire
Speaker 3: like bush fires, floods, droughout, whatever. Then why are we
Speaker 3: not actually investing so much more resource into resilience around that,
Speaker 3: whether that is ensuring that a local community have the
Speaker 3: capacity to put out a fire when one starts, whether
Speaker 3: that is making sure that there are watering points infrastructure,
Speaker 3: so if there is a drought, that farmers have watering
Speaker 3: points that they can go to. These are the things
Speaker 3: that we should be talking about and investing in, but
Speaker 3: instead all we do is argue about whether or not
Speaker 3: climate change is real, whether or not we've gone too far, all.
Speaker 2: Of that that's happening because climate change is a vote
Speaker 2: winner or a vote loser. Really, yep, is what you're
Speaker 2: talking about irrelevant? I mean to the politicians. And you've
Speaker 2: got a national party which supposedly is in part at
Speaker 2: least represents the agricultural industry, that represents farmers. So the
Speaker 2: politicians not get it. I mean, what you're saying makes
Speaker 2: a lot of sense. But does anybody ever say it
Speaker 2: to them? Do they not get it? Do they not?
Speaker 2: I mean, is it just or we'll go and protect
Speaker 2: that vote in Brunswick, in a city city somewhere because
Speaker 2: they're concerned about climate change and we won't worry too
Speaker 2: much about the farmers because they're going to vote national anyone.
Speaker 3: What strikes me is the most fascinating is that, I mean,
Speaker 3: not at the last federal election we've managed to get
Speaker 3: rid of I say, we've managed, but Australia got rid
Speaker 3: of Adam Bant in the seat of Melbourne. But it's
Speaker 3: generally the more city centric you are, the greener you are.
Speaker 3: And I mean there is an irony in that, isn't it.
Speaker 3: I mean, what are you managing from an environmental perspective
Speaker 3: when you live in the tram tracks of the Melbourne
Speaker 3: CBD and yet these people are dictating to the rest
Speaker 3: of the world what it is that they to me?
Speaker 3: The bit that annoys me is that you can walk
Speaker 3: out on the street and say to people, hey, what's
Speaker 3: a carbon cycle? Nine people out of ten and are
Speaker 3: going to say, I don't know what is the carbon cycle?
Speaker 3: But they will, you know, be zalots around the fact
Speaker 3: that we've got to manage missions.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I don't want to sound like, you know, I am
Speaker 3: so far right that I don't agree with it. To
Speaker 3: my point, it's just like, of course we should do
Speaker 3: things better of course, we should develop new industries and
Speaker 3: be innovative and think about how to do more with
Speaker 3: less and have less of an impact on the environment
Speaker 3: that we're in one hundred percent, but to turn it
Speaker 3: into the new religion and then have practical policy outcomes
Speaker 3: that are affecting our economy, that are affecting real like
Speaker 3: we're talking about farmers, that are affecting farmers on the ground.
Speaker 3: When you are there and you are happy to protest
Speaker 3: and say no, there must be renewable energy, and you're
Speaker 3: not the person that has to have a transmission line
Speaker 3: over the top of your property. It's just a bit rich,
Speaker 3: and it's trendy, and it's not necessarily well informed.
Speaker 1: That's the bit that shits me.
Speaker 2: I did hear a rumor that you actually attended a
Speaker 2: greens meeting at one time.
Speaker 3: I did, actually because I think that you should engage
Speaker 3: with people that have different beliefs. And what I learned
Speaker 3: by going to that greens meeting was that the people
Speaker 3: at that meeting, in absolute earnest, want to do the
Speaker 3: right thing by the planet. They want to do the
Speaker 3: right thing. They are good people who want to do
Speaker 3: the right thing, and they need to have the information
Speaker 3: in order to understand the implications of decisions that are made.
Speaker 3: So one of the kind of one of the points
Speaker 3: that they raised was we've got to ban glypha sate, right,
Speaker 3: And there's a conversation all the time about banning glyph
Speaker 3: a sate round up yep.
Speaker 1: Now, the thing about round up.
Speaker 3: As a tool, particularly for our broad acre farmers, is
Speaker 3: that by utilizing roundup, and we're talking about machines now
Speaker 3: that will spot the weed. It doesn't just blanket spray
Speaker 3: round up over everything. It'll spot the weed and it'll
Speaker 3: literally inject the little spray of glypha sate exactly on
Speaker 3: that weed. That's how meticulous we're getting in regards to
Speaker 3: the way that we use our resources in farming and
Speaker 3: consciousness of the environment. By using glyphasate, we are able
Speaker 3: then to not till the soil, which saves lots of
Speaker 3: climate emissions. So I get at greens that you want
Speaker 3: to bang glyphasate right, and in and of itself, if
Speaker 3: it's a standalone policy, you might say that's a great idea,
Speaker 3: But what people who don't farm the land don't understand
Speaker 3: is how that impacts everything else. So you don't want
Speaker 3: us to use glyphasate, So should we go back to
Speaker 3: tilling the soil and releasing all of these carbon emissions,
Speaker 3: Like you choose you want the glyphasate or you want
Speaker 3: the carbon emissions. And it's like, that's the decision that
Speaker 3: farmers make every single day on their own properties. It's
Speaker 3: the same with balancing animal welfare. With the use of antibiotics,
Speaker 3: for example, it's like you can't just from the city,
Speaker 3: catch onto something cute and demand it come hell or
Speaker 3: high water when you don't understand all the implications that
Speaker 3: it has on a food supply chain.
Speaker 2: Did you also give them a spray about their golden retrievers?
Speaker 1: I did, No, I didn't.
Speaker 3: It just was ironic to me that while they were
Speaker 3: suggesting that, you know, we have to reduce carbon emissions
Speaker 3: and all of those things that there were, and they
Speaker 3: were lovely golden retrievers, they were fantastic dogs, and they
Speaker 3: were sitting in a room alongside where this meeting was happening,
Speaker 3: both of them lying happily on the couch, you know,
Speaker 3: legs splayed on their backs, sitting under the heater, and
Speaker 3: I thought, here we are. We can afford to heat
Speaker 3: our golden retrievers, who arguably. You know, maybe if they
Speaker 3: are a farm dog, they'd be out the back in
Speaker 3: a drum with a couple of spud bags and they'd
Speaker 3: be pretty happy. You know, that's the thing about inner
Speaker 3: city people, and I don't I'm not saying that we
Speaker 3: shouldn't love our golden retrievers. I'm just saying we've got
Speaker 3: to be so mindful when we go out with our
Speaker 3: big opinions that we are not hypocrites. And the richer
Speaker 3: you are, the more ideol ideology that you can afford
Speaker 3: to have. There is just no question about that.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the future. Let's talk about your scholarship
Speaker 2: and your report on that. You once told me unless
Speaker 2: we woke up, we'll sleep walking towards of famine, and
Speaker 2: you copped a lot of flack over that, and I
Speaker 2: think you did say, well, or maybe a little bit
Speaker 2: too strong, what was the point? And are we sleep
Speaker 2: walking towards a food shortage if not a famine?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, if I had have just said, oh,
Speaker 3: we're not conscious enough of food security in this country
Speaker 3: and we should think about that over the next two decades,
Speaker 3: it probably wouldn't have got the intention. And by the
Speaker 3: time you've got you know Dan Andrews with his famous
Speaker 3: you know the comments of the VERFF president and are
Speaker 3: matter for the VERFF president, Like by the time he
Speaker 3: says that you know that it's hit a nerve somewhere,
Speaker 3: are we sleep walking?
Speaker 1: Yes? Could it be famine?
Speaker 3: I mean the dust is blowing from South Australia into
Speaker 3: Victoria right now. We've got half the country in drought
Speaker 3: and the other half of the country under some of
Speaker 3: the worst floods we've ever seen. For anybody to suggest
Speaker 3: that me saying that we could have a food security
Speaker 3: issue is over the top, Well, you are living in
Speaker 3: Lalla Land. We saw during COVID, which was a totally
Speaker 3: different issue, but we saw how fickle the supply chain
Speaker 3: can be. There were empty shelves, there was no question
Speaker 3: about it. If you weren't quick enough, if you weren't
Speaker 3: rich enough, if you didn't have the means you missed out. Now,
Speaker 3: the fact that Australians go after toilet paper first demonstrates
Speaker 3: how secure we believe ourselves to be. But very soon
Speaker 3: after there was no you know, the shelves were bare.
Speaker 3: Now we haven't had all the shelves bear since then,
Speaker 3: but we're seeing pockets of it all of the time.
Speaker 3: There is still an egg shortage. It is still pretty
Speaker 3: difficult to get eggs, and that is only going to
Speaker 3: get worse as we bring different production systems offline. Because
Speaker 3: ideologically we say that that's not going to you know,
Speaker 3: that's not going to matter. I think to my point
Speaker 3: earlier is that whenever you took take one little issue
Speaker 3: that impacts farmers and you make a big deal of it,
Speaker 3: it sounds like you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
Speaker 3: My concern is that all of these little tiny mole
Speaker 3: hills they add up. And that's why I say death
Speaker 3: by a thousand cuts because okay, you know, we say,
Speaker 3: well ourselves up. You know, somebody else buys them out
Speaker 3: and keeps producing food and it's like yeah, and a
Speaker 3: lot of the time that's coming from superannuation funds that
Speaker 3: are foreign foreign investment. Does that matter? Are we happy
Speaker 3: with that? Or do we want Australians to have Australian
Speaker 3: farmland and do we want Australians producing Australian food. They're
Speaker 3: the questions that we actually have to answer, and we
Speaker 3: have to answer that collectively.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the future in your scholarship. Are we
Speaker 2: these awful floods we've seen around New South Wales just
Speaker 2: devastating And I see a man walking off and saying,
Speaker 2: I've just got to walk off, I've got to give
Speaker 2: it away, just so emotionally devastating. Is this the future?
Speaker 2: Floods and drought? I mean, regardless of the cause of
Speaker 2: climate change. Is this the future? Is this what we've
Speaker 2: got to manage for? Oh?
Speaker 1: I think so.
Speaker 3: I mean the last decade has surely demonstrated that to us,
Speaker 3: and that's why we have to have that conversation, probably
Speaker 3: have it constantly. So it's great to say we want
Speaker 3: farmers to be resilient by themselves. If the outcome of
Speaker 3: allowing farmers to be resilient by themselves without too much
Speaker 3: of subsidization or supports or whatever is what we stand for,
Speaker 3: there will be consequences to that. And now I'm not
Speaker 3: necessarily saying that we should have state owned farming. God no,
Speaker 3: because that would be a sure way to famine. But
Speaker 3: if we you know, should we have a national stockpile
Speaker 3: of feed and fodder? Do we need to have more
Speaker 3: mechanisms in place that we actually collectively via the government,
Speaker 3: think about this food security and this resilience in a
Speaker 3: different way like and my now Field report actually looked
Speaker 3: at how other countries approach the issue of food security
Speaker 3: and it is very different from the way that we
Speaker 3: consider food security in Australia.
Speaker 1: And you know that's that's a given.
Speaker 2: We're a bit blase about it. Oh yeah, we'll be wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we're right because the things that people say.
Speaker 3: Oh, you know, for Jamano to say we're sleepwalking into
Speaker 3: famine is ridiculous. We export sixty percent of what we grow. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's great, and then all of a sudden we miss
Speaker 3: out on something called ad blue, which most people didn't
Speaker 3: even know what it was, and we've got trucking companies
Speaker 3: saying to us, we've got five days left of being
Speaker 3: able to move food around the countryside because we've run
Speaker 3: out of ad blue And where do we get ad
Speaker 3: blue from. It's like the whole supply chain has to
Speaker 3: be mapped and we have to know where all the
Speaker 3: little bits and pieces sit. Because you might say, well,
Speaker 3: you know, farming is fine, we produce so much. But
Speaker 3: if one particular, very specific product can it lead to
Speaker 3: food security issues for some people, then we haven't mapped
Speaker 3: it well enough. And the other thing that we do
Speaker 3: is that we don't pay a lot of attention to
Speaker 3: people who are poor because we don't think that there
Speaker 3: is abject poverty in Australia. So we don't consider food
Speaker 3: security maybe in the way that an India does, or
Speaker 3: in how China has lifted two hundred million plus people
Speaker 3: out of abject poverty. We don't think about it like
Speaker 3: that in Australia. But there are more than two million
Speaker 3: Australians who go to bed every night and they're hungry.
Speaker 3: There are people who cannot afford fresh fruit vegetables in
Speaker 3: this country because it's too expensive. We absolutely have a
Speaker 3: food security issue. And until there's no one who is
Speaker 3: facing that, we can't say that we've nailed it. And
Speaker 3: until we know that irrespective of flood fire, you know,
Speaker 3: drew out whatever it is that we're going to be okay.
Speaker 3: Until a government can show me that on a piece
Speaker 3: of paper that it's actually considered all of those things,
Speaker 3: then yes we're sleep walking.
Speaker 2: I'm speaking to Emma Jumano, a passionate, articulate, entertaining, determined farmer.
Speaker 2: A lot of questions to come yet, Emma Jumano, former
Speaker 2: farming official. Now she's off the leash and barking. Okay,
Speaker 2: you will nuffield report. As I said about ten years ago,
Speaker 2: I'm a number of recommendations. Number one industry levy for marketing.
Speaker 2: That happened.
Speaker 3: No now, because I suspected that you might ask me
Speaker 3: about this, I did a little read of my knafeld
Speaker 3: very quickly in the taxi on the way, and I
Speaker 3: was looking at that and I thought, oh God, the
Speaker 3: veggie farmers are going to say we don't want another levee.
Speaker 3: And that's not how I meant it. So that was
Speaker 3: my first reaction to that. What I meant was we
Speaker 3: are already paying substantial amounts of levees for marketing, sorry
Speaker 3: for research and development. We are not allowed to use
Speaker 3: them to market our product, and that a portion of
Speaker 3: that should be carved out to use specifically for marketing.
Speaker 1: No, that hasn't happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, port facilities with treatment of pests and diseases.
Speaker 3: That happen, not in a very meaningful way. There are
Speaker 3: hubs that are trying, and we do have like irradiation
Speaker 3: in some places, but it's not to what I had
Speaker 3: imagined or what I was recommending. There There should be
Speaker 3: you know, it should be upfront and center and those
Speaker 3: facilities should be available to make it easier.
Speaker 2: Well, you recommend the government prioritize long term food security.
Speaker 2: We've dealt with that faster trade negotiations.
Speaker 3: I would say, just back on the last one that
Speaker 3: I can trybuted to the inquiry into food security, and
Speaker 3: so we get to the point where the recommendation, one
Speaker 3: of my strong recommendations, was a food security plan. And
Speaker 3: the government doesn't come out and respond to the recommendations
Speaker 3: of the inquiry that they set up. They just wait
Speaker 3: for an election. And one of Labour's promises federally was
Speaker 3: that they were going to map it out so they
Speaker 3: never waste the opportunity for it to be politicized or
Speaker 3: to try and win votes out of it. So it
Speaker 3: is good that we will hopefully get one that's meaningful.
Speaker 2: What was the next one, shifting away from coal and woolies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the only way to shift away from coals and
Speaker 3: woolies because I hear people banning around divestiture policy policies
Speaker 3: and I think that is so dangerous. The impact that
Speaker 3: could actually have to food security is very dangerous. No
Speaker 3: one hates the coals and a woolies better than I do.
Speaker 3: Like I'm the one that's cried, you know, at five
Speaker 3: am in the morning, when I've had coliflowers be rejected
Speaker 3: from one distribution center but accepted in another one.
Speaker 1: So it's like are they good or are they bad coliflowers?
Speaker 3: You know, to the fact that the market dropped overnight.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 3: I absolutely cried and that was when I in fact,
Speaker 3: it's really good when you eventually cry, because what I
Speaker 3: did after crying that day, I was like, that's it,
Speaker 3: I am done. I hate it. There is no integrity
Speaker 3: in what we do when we allow these companies just
Speaker 3: to reject our produce overnight because the market price changed.
Speaker 3: And that was when I went out and made my
Speaker 3: first Singaporean consignment. That was the first time I exported
Speaker 3: couliflowers on the back of once you've made me cry
Speaker 3: it we've gone too far. So that led to developing
Speaker 3: our own export market with the cauliflowers.
Speaker 2: Let's get into that area. It was once a talk
Speaker 2: of Australia becoming a food bottle to Asia. The way
Speaker 2: you're talking, we'd be lucky to be a food bowl
Speaker 2: to Australia, is there still a prospect and is enough
Speaker 2: being done to develop us as an exporting an agricultural exporter.
Speaker 3: So for all of the criticism that farmers and agriculture
Speaker 3: generally have towards labor, like we kind of usually, you know,
Speaker 3: you'd certainly get the the vibe that the agricultural industry
Speaker 3: prefers a coalition government to be in place and that
Speaker 3: their ideology I suppose or their philosophy better aligns with
Speaker 3: what we do. Labor have been very good actually at
Speaker 3: this market access stuff, so their ministers have been going
Speaker 3: in market talking to their counterparts and we've seen a
Speaker 3: lot of movement from a trade perspective on the back
Speaker 3: of some of the work that the Labour government's done. Now,
Speaker 3: I'm sure that any of the Nats and Libs will say, oh,
Speaker 3: we started that and they just picked it up where
Speaker 3: we went along. But ask rock lobster fishermen, you know
Speaker 3: how that's going for that went for them, huge difference
Speaker 3: when labor stepped up and started talking to their counterparts. Internationally,
Speaker 3: I think there is still great opportunity in farming and
Speaker 3: in agriculture. Obviously because I still have a farm and
Speaker 3: I'm really committed to that for the future. We do
Speaker 3: need to continue thinking about this market stuff because you know,
Speaker 3: why did I stop growing cauliflowers and we've continued to
Speaker 3: our livestock and with the prime lambs because there is
Speaker 3: an overseas market to multiple destinations for those lambs. Colson
Speaker 3: Wiolworths are only one player in the market, you know,
Speaker 3: and a small player in the in the livestock market,
Speaker 3: and it means that I have very different you know,
Speaker 3: business outcomes because I can sell my sheep to a
Speaker 3: lot more destinations and that's the same you know, that
Speaker 3: transpires the same for horticultural produce. Vegetables are often the
Speaker 3: hardest and that's because most countries will start with vegetable production.
Speaker 3: If we look at the table grade market or the
Speaker 3: citrus market from Australia and production that started to be
Speaker 3: exported more and more. When we export more, we have
Speaker 3: better leverage in the market with the duopoly of Coles
Speaker 3: and Willworth.
Speaker 2: Just to wrap up, Emma, how many acres you got
Speaker 2: by the way.
Speaker 1: About three hundred?
Speaker 3: Okay, Now it's not the size of your farm, Neil,
Speaker 3: but it is what you can do with it.
Speaker 2: That's very true, what's harder being a restaurateur or a farmer?
Speaker 1: No, being a farmer is harder than being a restauranteur.
Speaker 2: As stressful, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yep? And it never stops your farm with your family,
Speaker 3: so it truly never stops. And I was having this
Speaker 3: conversation with my mother yesterday and I said, we are
Speaker 3: totally lacking in any discipline around because what happens is
Speaker 3: when I'm at home and I'm with Mum and Dad,
Speaker 3: what I tend to do is be the mediator between
Speaker 3: their arguments because I can see the lunacy of both
Speaker 3: sides of my family and just a lack of communication.
Speaker 3: So I just step into the gap. And I was
Speaker 3: saying one of the things that it's like, from let's
Speaker 3: talk about some my parents' marriage, why not on a podcast.
Speaker 3: When I see their disagreements or their communication, you know,
Speaker 3: most of the time, it's about the lifestyle that they live.
Speaker 3: That the farm is part of the family and it
Speaker 3: always has been and it always will be. And so
Speaker 3: you're constant. And it's the same with me and me
Speaker 3: and dad or me and mum. We're often talking about
Speaker 3: the business, and you'll be talking about the business at
Speaker 3: nine o'clock at night, when it should be like log
Speaker 3: off and don't worry about it anymore. So it adds
Speaker 3: a different dynamic when you're in business with your family
Speaker 3: and then when you're in a business that never stops
Speaker 3: called farming, Well, you know, that's what we do, and
Speaker 3: we do it together.
Speaker 2: So why do you do it? Why do you do it?
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, because I'm from a long line
Speaker 3: of peasants and that's what we do. And I used
Speaker 3: to think that that was derogatory, but now I'm incredibly
Speaker 3: proud of that. I think that there is no more
Speaker 3: noble profession than going out every single day and working
Speaker 3: with Mother Nature to make sure that not just you
Speaker 3: and your family are fed, but you are feeding you know,
Speaker 3: thousands upon thousands of people with what you grow. It
Speaker 3: is so important, it is so despite how difficult it is.
Speaker 3: It's like with great difficulty comes great reward. It is,
Speaker 3: you know, like having stepped back from the leadership roles,
Speaker 3: and you know, the satisfaction might be getting a bit
Speaker 3: of policy through or talking to you on the radio
Speaker 3: and then realizing that the treasure of cans an idea
Speaker 3: that was going to really impact farmers you know, there's
Speaker 3: a that's a really heavy reward that happens. And the
Speaker 3: other day, when I was coming back from harvesting potatoes
Speaker 3: with Dad, I stopped and I saw one of the
Speaker 3: sheep with one of the that was the second lamb
Speaker 3: that we had tried to kind of get her to adopt.
Speaker 3: And we got to the point where it's like, do
Speaker 3: you skin the second lamb now, or you know, do
Speaker 3: we just hope for it? And when I pulled up
Speaker 3: into the yard, because she was just in a little
Speaker 3: containment yard, I could see this lamb sucking off her
Speaker 3: and I just stopped. And I mean it sounds it
Speaker 3: might sound a bit ridiculous that I get emotional about it.
Speaker 3: It's like all of that hard work that my father
Speaker 3: and myself, you know, we'd pulled this had to help
Speaker 3: her with the birth of the lamb that was dead,
Speaker 3: and you know, it's really it's very emotionally harrowing. But
Speaker 3: to see that's the outcome of your effort, it is
Speaker 3: really rewarding. And then to look at it and say
Speaker 3: that is going to that lamb is eventually going to
Speaker 3: produce about twenty five kilos of meat for people to
Speaker 3: eat and keep and to sustain them that it is
Speaker 3: so rewarding, and you can there is opportunity in farming
Speaker 3: if you were resilient, and if I'm honest, if the
Speaker 3: government would just get out of the way and stop
Speaker 3: putting ridiculous, stupid policies in place, we would be able
Speaker 3: to do it a lot easier. And so how do
Speaker 3: you help farmers. The first is you start by respecting
Speaker 3: the fact that what they do is so important and
Speaker 3: demonstrating that you respect that and care about that, and
Speaker 3: you want to nurture that as a government and as
Speaker 3: a society. And I think that whilst we might never
Speaker 3: work out, you know, you and I could sit here
Speaker 3: and try and rewrite the National Drought Agreement. We might
Speaker 3: not be able to do that, but in the event,
Speaker 3: where farmers were absolutely respected and valued, rather than feeling like,
Speaker 3: you know, they're raping and pillaging the land, if you
Speaker 3: look at some of the narrative around it, I think
Speaker 3: that that would go a long way to food security
Speaker 3: and to reducing the amount of suicides that we're seeing
Speaker 3: in farmers and seeing more prosperity and better productivity. Because
Speaker 3: it's nice to feel valued in what you do. And
Speaker 3: I think that that is the kind of foundation of
Speaker 3: what we need to be focused on.
Speaker 2: I was going to say, you're off the chain, have
Speaker 2: one last bark, but you just did it.
Speaker 3: That won't be my last one, right because it makes
Speaker 3: me so cross politics?
Speaker 2: What about it? Come on, Look, you've just we just
Speaker 2: talked for an hour and he probably made more sense
Speaker 2: than any of the politicians have in the past year.
Speaker 2: And you know, you're coming from a position in a
Speaker 2: high bar all care, no responsibility in a sense, you're
Speaker 2: not running things, and that's as a journalist, I know
Speaker 2: that's always easier to sit on the outside and have
Speaker 2: an opinion. What about getting in the middle, getting your
Speaker 2: hands dirty.
Speaker 3: I think I would be being disingenuous if I said that.
Speaker 3: That wasn't appealing to me in some way. I have
Speaker 3: just had a little baby's go of it. I've been
Speaker 3: in the kiddie pool of politics by being in agri politics,
Speaker 3: and for me there has been Having finished my job
Speaker 3: at the VFF, I kind of have a little bit
Speaker 3: of a sense of disillusionment. Because you can make all
Speaker 3: of the sense in the world, you get a lot
Speaker 3: of resistance, and you get a lot of resistance for
Speaker 3: a lot of different reasons. I look at my natural home,
Speaker 3: which would you know, if I'm being really honest, it
Speaker 3: would be kind of the Liberal Party. I guess from
Speaker 3: an ideological perspective, I don't know if culturally that that
Speaker 3: feels like a fit at this point in time. And
Speaker 3: then I think about some independence have had the opportunity to,
Speaker 3: you know, start conversations, but then they don't form government
Speaker 3: like however you like it.
Speaker 1: We've kind of got a red team.
Speaker 3: And a blue team, and all leads, all roads lead
Speaker 3: back to the red team and the blue team, and
Speaker 3: we've had all this conversation about preferences. I feel like
Speaker 3: I will continue to follow the passion of you know,
Speaker 3: kind of public service. And I really believe that God
Speaker 3: puts the opportunity in front of you that you're supposed
Speaker 3: to have at a particular point in time. So I
Speaker 3: won't say, oh no, I'd never do that and make
Speaker 3: as if you know that I don't want to do that.
Speaker 3: But also it's got a fit and it has to
Speaker 3: be authentic because to your point, I think when you
Speaker 3: become a politician, you've got all of these different agendas
Speaker 3: that you have to balance in your mind at one time,
Speaker 3: and so people are often not frank, and we don't
Speaker 3: often know what goes on behind closed doors. But my
Speaker 3: frustration is that you might disagree with what I say,
Speaker 3: but you'll respect me for saying the thing that I
Speaker 3: believe to be true. I think authenticity is so unbelievably
Speaker 3: missing in public leadership and in politics in Australia, and
Speaker 3: most Australians why they don't care for all of the
Speaker 3: details they can see. You know, Australians are so good
Speaker 3: at picking bullshit, and we need more people who will
Speaker 3: say the right thing irrespective of what the political costs
Speaker 3: might be, because I think if we all started doing
Speaker 3: that then we would get better outcomes rather than well,
Speaker 3: we'll say the thing that won't cost us too many votes,
Speaker 3: or will say the thing that will buy us the
Speaker 3: most votes, and we get the answer wrong. You're on
Speaker 3: the high way to nowhere when that's the attitude. So
Speaker 3: I hope the opportunity arises. I think, even though I
Speaker 3: know the public sorry, the personal cost of any kind
Speaker 3: of public life is great. I think Australia is a
Speaker 3: really great country. And you know, when a friend of
Speaker 3: mine and I were looking at it, going all right,
Speaker 3: this place is cooked we're going to have to get
Speaker 3: out of Australia. We're in serious trouble and the worst
Speaker 3: is yet to come. And we pulled out the world
Speaker 3: map and said no, not here, No not there, that's
Speaker 3: a terrible idea. These people wouldn't let us in. And
Speaker 3: we got back to it. It's like Australia is still
Speaker 3: the best country on earth. And my frustration is that
Speaker 3: instead of harnessing how awesome this country is and the
Speaker 3: opportunity that we have, we seem hell bent on squandering
Speaker 3: away our collective wealth. And that's the bit that I
Speaker 3: think we need to be fiercely patriotic about.
Speaker 2: Emma Jamano, thank you. I think that was just your
Speaker 2: first that's your maiden speech.
Speaker 1: Care I will see, We'll see. Neal, Yeah, so much.
Speaker 2: It's I mean, maybe you're going to recuse you being
Speaker 2: in authentic. Great to talk to you. What's what's next?
Speaker 2: With potatoes are done? What's next?
Speaker 3: Ah?
Speaker 1: You start thinking about planting more potatoes.
Speaker 3: You keep praying for rain. You know they say the
Speaker 3: come of a rain dance is your timing. So Dad
Speaker 3: said to me the other day, Oh yeah, I got
Speaker 3: that one right. I was out dancing yesterday and I
Speaker 3: was like, that's good, we got twenty six mel Yeah.
Speaker 3: Just continuing to try and make the business more resilient
Speaker 3: and getting my own house a little bit in order,
Speaker 3: because I've been so distracted trying to help everybody else
Speaker 3: the last few years, and I've got to get that
Speaker 3: stuff sorted out. You can only give from a full cup,
Speaker 3: and so I'm trying to fill up my cup again.
Speaker 2: Good luck with the cup, Emma Tremaino, Thank you, thank you. Now,
Speaker 2: just before I leave you to your life, I want
Speaker 2: to first congratulate you on showing the good scenes to
Speaker 2: listen to my podcast, Neil Mitchell asks why there's one
Speaker 2: rule to this podcast. It's got to be interesting and different.
Speaker 2: I always try to get inside the head of the
Speaker 2: person I'm talking to before I go. I wanted to
Speaker 2: take a moment to thank three point Motors the Mercedes
Speaker 2: dealers for their continuing support sponsoring the podcast. There were
Speaker 2: long time supporters of my radio program, and I'm delighted
Speaker 2: to say that continues here. I'm something of a dinosaur
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Speaker 2: provided superb support for one of my favorite charities, which
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