[Introduction Music 0:00:06.3]
Amanda:
Welcome everyone to Farming Together’s third webinar in our series of seven on collaborative business models and structures. Tonight’s topic is Galvanising Hidden Strengths, building community, knowledge and support networks. And tonight we’ve got three special guests who we’ve invited along, because even though some of them may not think they’re really good at building trust and engaging their farmers, we know that these people are actually exceptional people in their community, building and supporting those relationships with farmers. So we’re really looking forward to hearing their discussion tonight and their experiences, sharing with us, Simone do you want to talk a little bit about how this works from a Zoom perspective?
Simone:
Yeah, certainly. And welcome everyone, thanks for joining us live, and thanks for tuning in if you’re listening to the recording as well. So in terms of the Zoom functionality tonight we’ll just keep mics on mute, if you’ve got a question just pop it into the chat. Each speaker is going to have a presentation or have a chat and then we’ll open the floor for some Q&A, so plenty of time to ask questions throughout the evening but just pop them in the chat. Thanks Amada.
Amanda:
Fantastic. Alright so we’ve got our three fantastic guests, the first is Diana Fear who’s the CEO of Central West Farming Systems Inc., the second is Ken Drummond a member of Stirlings to Coast, but also Ken are you Chair of the WA Producer’s Co-operative?
Ken:
Yes I am, yep.
Amanda:
And Niki Curtis who’s the acting CEO of the Grower Group Alliance. So without further ado I would like to welcome you all, and open to you Diana.
Diana:
Thanks everybody for having me, it’s lovely to be here with Ken and Niki, and I hope you all enjoy the presentation. So I live at Condobolin in the Central West of New South Wales, and I work for Central West Farming Systems, which is a not-for-profit farming organisation that was brought into existence by local growers in 1998, to try and get some funding for low rainfall research in our area. It was a bit more difficult to get that sort of funding out here, so our growers took it upon themselves to start up this organisation.
So I feel like my life is actually all about collaboration, I live in a small rural community, and for those of you that live in these types of communities you know that we all help each other all the time. We all know what’s going on with each other, my work is all about collaboration, and then on the family front we run a family farm so that’s also all about collaboration. And I have two teenage children, although the collaboration probably ends there and it turns into a bit of coercion at many times. So I’ll give you a bit of a presentation of Central West Farming Systems, so let me see if I can share my screen and get in to this for you. So Simone can you all see that?
Simone:
Yeah perfect, thanks.
Amanda:
Yes.
Diana:
Okay excellent. Okay so CWFS is the acronym for Central West Farming Systems. So as I’ve mentioned before, we’re an independent not-for-profit farmer driven organisation, we cover an area of 14 million hectares in this low rainfall mixed farming region of Central West New South Wales. We have all types of activities, we do RD&E, so we have research, we do demonstration and we have extension. They’re probably falling into a lot of extension activities at the moment, particularly after three years of drought where most of our trial work didn’t come to fruition. So our trials include all the regional issues such as weed, disease, pest management, crop nutrition, soil health, water use efficiency, crop rotations and soil acidity.
So we generally cover most of the agronomy that our growers are looking for in this region or are dealing with. That’s just gives you a bit of an idea of where we sit, so Condobolin’s actually right in the centre of New South Wales, so I think we’re near the dead centre actually, which in 40 degree heat in summer it feels like it. So our extension and collaboration, and I know Niki and Ken will be exactly the same, about how to really maximise collaboration levels with stakeholders and our extension, getting our message across to farmers, to advisers, to local businesses, to community members and universities.
So part of the success of CWFS is because it is farmer driven, so what we give the community and the farming community out here is what they’re really looking for, so that’s really important, I think you have to know your audience well. And we also involve stakeholders from across the whole of the Ag sector, we bring in national people, we bring in local, state, and we look at encouraging people to think about how the future of agriculture and farming’s going to be, and thinking outside the square, so that’s a really important aspect of what we do. And look I put this up because I think this is really important to emphasise, how important it is to know your audience.
So what we say to dogs is ‘okay Ginger I’ve had it, stay out of the garbage’ and what they hear is ‘blah, blah, blah’, so unless you can engage an audience and do something that people want, it’s pretty much wasted time and money, so I think everybody needs to keep that as a top priority. So some of the activities that we do we have lots of crop walks and field days, that’s a robot from Sydney University, and we have partnerships. They’re some of our partnerships that we have currently, we’ve got a few more actually that I haven’t updated that tonight, but look we wouldn’t exist without strong partnerships and collaboration. The other thing about collaboration and partnerships is knowing what both of you want out of that partnership.
So as you can see this cartoon makes the point that they both want the same thing but they’re not sure what they can bring to the partnership, so that’s important, to be very clear about what you can all do for the common purpose. One of our major projects that I’ve been involved with for a long time now is the Women and Youth Project which was established in 2009, and that really was to increase women’s participation and highlight career opportunities for young people to stay in the agricultural sector. I’m not sure about Niki and Ken, but a lot of young people particularly moved out into higher paying industries like mining, so we had a bit of a drain of young people in our area.
So we’re really trying to increase their participation and also to really encourage women to play more of an active role. Sometimes they have come from good jobs in metropolitan cities to marry farmers, or have moved out here, work at schools and then they play a role in the farming business. So upskilling those women to make more decisions in that farming business has been a big ting, and it’s been great to see over the last 20 years that that’s really happened, it’s amazing to see how many women agronomists we’ve got now, so it’s very satisfying. This is one of our flagship events which is the Women and Youth in Agriculture Conference we have at the Ag station here at Condobolin.
But a key note speaker was Fiona O’Loughlin the comedian, which was great, so that was in 2019 in March, and we were in our 3rd year of drought, so it was a particularly great opportunity to get everybody together and celebrate and forget the drought for the day. In 2016 CSFS was invited to India with CSU and the Indian NGO PRADAN, and that was to look at women’s self-help groups in rural areas. And we visited Delhi for a conference which was looking at transformation of the rural areas, and part of that was through the development of these women focused self-help groups, which was amazing to go and see, and it certainly taught us a lot, and I think you can see a photo here.
So these women are at one of their meetings, and on the ground they’re looking at some of the photos that we brought over which was our children, our farming lifestyle, which is very much broad acre. So these women have been working in farms that are tiny, and we were all in it actually together to look at how to increase production, increase profitability, increase the sustainability. So PRADAN has set up these groups and taught them marketing and taught them about crop rotations and soil sufficiency, and they’ve had a massive massive impact on those rural communities. I think there’s actually about 65,000 of these self-help groups now, so there’s been a big domino effect.
And these women have really had to fight to make those decisions through a much more hierarchical, religious, economic and political structure that they’ve got there, so they’ve done some amazing things. So actually from that visit in India we came back and we started an Ag marketing market which was funded by Farming Together, so we created two self-help groups of women in our area and brought them together. We took them to various organisations and looked at marketing strategies, so we really focused on marketing of commodities. So often women may be at home with children and there’s an opportunity there for them to be able to take over some of the marketing of their own farm commodities, particularly at the moment it is harvest and it’s frantic.
So it’s sort of an opportunity that some of those women thought were a good way to participate more in their farming business, so that was a really successful project, a lot of women there were very keen to continue that. This is just another photo of one of our field days, and really it’s very hands on, very grassroots, and I think that’s really the success of organisations like this, it has to be needed and we need to be a single voice for farmers in our region, so there’s a commonality, a purpose. And I think that that’s been the main thing for us to really push what we do and to give farmers more of a voice in parliament, in some of the RDCs, so it’s been a great experience to be involved with such a group.
At the moment actually one of our recent funding was a project with FRRR, so we’re looking at upskilling people to work remotely from home from some of their isolation, you know they face issues about isolation and they might be a long way from town, which is quite good timing with covid-19 really, I think everybody’s understanding that to have more access to work from home is really important. And obviously some of the challenges we face are connectivity issues, so really we’re excited about this project, but it will really bring to the fore what needs to be done in outback New South Wales to make the farming businesses more profitable.
So what else, so I’ll just quickly say as well that my role is basically very focused on collaboration, and we work with other farming system groups, we work with government, we work with our local LLS groups, we work with local Councils, we work with community organisations, and we wouldn’t exist without that sort of level of collaboration. And I think obviously what makes part of this job so rewarding as well is to meet so many people there that all want to do the same thing, which is to keep our rural communities resilient, improve the Australian agricultural industry, give a sustainability food security, or work with that common goal. So I have been very fortunate to be in this position, so yeah that’s probably my little bit about Central West Farming Systems.
Amanda:
Thank you very much Diana. I just want to know how you manage it all, it sounds like there’s so much going on.
Diana:
There is a lot going on, and I often don’t manage it all Amanda [Chuckles]. Look I think having a good team is really important, and we have a really fantastic team so that makes it all possible. I think also we’ve got a very engaged Board and most of them are local farmers, so you can ring them up at any time and say ‘quick what do I do, I need a truck or I need this’, and they’ll come on board. So it’s very much a team effort, so collaboration is just everything, every day is collaboration, so it’s a great thing.
Amanda:
Is this question time now Simone?
Simone:
Yeah I was wondering if anyone had any questions for Diana? And thanks for sharing Diana it’s always a pleasure hearing and learning more.
Diana:
Oh that’s a pleasure.
Simone:
Yeah, amazing.
Ken:
I’ve got a question if that’s okay?
Simone:
Yeah it’s amazing the power of collaboration; you know when you do it well.
Diana:
Oh it’s true, that’s so true, and I just think we forget. I mean I’ve actually found covid-19 quite challenging, because I do find it much easier to physically be with people, and I find there’s sort of the tribal social nature of what I do–really has been quite challenging. You know just trying to organise a video workshop, a field day, is much more difficult to engage people because they’re not on the ground. They’re not doing all that incidental chatting and asking questions and hearing someone say something, and the next door neighbour saying ‘oh well what about this’, and everyone suddenly gets on board, so I really miss that in the last nine months.
Ken:
Well I’ve got a question if that’s okay?
Simone:
Yeah go for it Ken.
Ken:
Do you have enough resources Diana?
Diana:
No [Chuckles], no we’re always looking for resources. So I guess that’s part of the problem really, we are always dependent on funding from a range of organisations. I think funding’s become more competitive so funding is a major issue, so we’re always continually looking for opportunities. I think we work so collaboratively with people that we’re always managing to be okay, but no I mean funding–we probably need a plot header, and so I’ve got to try and work out how to get that sort of funding for next year, because it’s frustrating to have old gear that you need upgrading. So Ken if you have any funding opportunities just give me a call offline as they say.
Ken:
And do you think the current systems okay then with the funding?
Diana:
Oh I don’t know. I should be careful of what I say here. It’s a little bit frustrating because I think everyone is competing for the same bucket of money, and that can be good because we can all collaborate. But often I have found that we are asked to do more and more for less and less, and that’s a little bit frustrating. And I don’t know whether it’s because we’re not-for-profit too, people expect us to do a lot for very little, and I’ve noticed that some of the funding organisations they don’t–I think they expect everybody to do a lot for less, I don’t know whether you’ve found that recently?
Ken:
Yeah.
Amanda:
Do you find a similar situation Ken?
Ken:
Yes I do, but it’s always the biggest problem with the grower groups of course, I think it’s a bad system, I really feel like you should be able to put forward an agenda rather than wait for opportunities. And also not enough is made of leverage with industry, you could attract as much money from industry or private industry–yeah so I really feel like we need a better system for sure.
Amanda:
I think we’ve just set a whole new topic for a whole other webinar.
Ken:
[Chuckles].
Diana:
Can I just mention too, and Ken you make a really good point there. Because groups like mine you have to be very careful that you don’t chase funding for funding sake, and not be doing what the growers that you have want you to do. So that’s the key thing, you have to make sure that you don’t just want to go and write some project that isn’t relevant to your growers, so that’s the other thing you have to be a bit careful of.
Ken:
Absolutely.
Simone:
Okay we’ve got no questions in the chat so thank you Diana, if anyone’s got any questions Diana’s going to–you’ll stay on I’m assuming Diana?
Diana:
Yes I will, yep.
Simone:
So if any come up we can address those later on.
Diana:
Okay, thank you.
Simone:
Thanks Diana. So our second speaker for this evening is Ken Drummond, and Amanda do you want to introduce–?
Amanda:
Sure. So yes Ken I think you were a founding member of Stirlings to Coast if that’s right, which is also a farmer led research group, but you also through the work with Stirlings to Coast formed the WA Producers Co-operative for which you are now Chair. So I guess you’ve got two hats on, but it would be lovely to hear both stories.
Ken:
Yeah, thanks Amanda, lovely to see you Sam, haven’t seen you for a while. Yeah so it took a while to get, we’re a new kid on the block, so we’re one of the youngest groups in Western Australia, and it took us a while to convince my fellow farmers that they needed to join the club. And Niki you know we’re from [0:22:21.6], there’s always the standard, the standard that we always wanted to go for. So that all went okay, we sort of got going etcetera, but one of our main things is that we wanted to try and be self-funding so that we could have an income and not rely on grants etcetera, so that’s where the opportunity came along through this initiative with Farming Together. And so we started on that process, and I must say that our CEO at the time of Stirling to Coast Farmers, Christine Kershaw, I’m sure that you all know has just been instrumental in getting us going. And through her we’ve had the resources and the expertise etcetera and the confidence to go for these things or to try and build something, so that’s where we’re up to. And Sam’s here from the New South Wales Co-op Federation, so Sam did a lot of work with us in establishing the rules and setting up our Co-op.
Amanda:
So tell us a bit about how you brought people along on this journey with you Ken, because I imagine when you’re pitching a really big concept like a Producer’s Co-operative, some farmers could get on board really quickly, but others want to sit behind and watch and get proof in that concept before they’re willing to step forward. Can you talk about that experience, what it was like getting people on board?
Ken:
Yes, well I must say it’s been disappointing with the number of people that have joined us. So we are Stirling Coast Farmers, we do have 80 farm businesses involved, and we do cover quite a lot of the production down south of the Stirling Ranges to Albany, and east of Boxwood Hills and west to Frankland, that might be our geographical area. We’ve only been able to get at the moment–we’ve got about 15 members that have joined up, and I think one of the big things is we’re not too sure what our plan is, so we’re still developing where the market is and what the plan is. My motivation is that smaller farmers are leaving the industry, and the motivation for me is to try and increase their production per hectare so that they can farm on smaller acreages, and also to try and be a price setter rather than a price taker, that we’ve always had.
And so last year we had a pilot program selling lambs with a processor V&V Walsh, and they gave us a premium and we guaranteed them a certain number of lambs at a certain quality. So that’s what we’re trying to do at the moment is just be a supply Co-op, and I can see as many synergies behind the farm gate with productions, genetics, provenance, and food security and all those things, and actually asking the customers what they would like and trying to provide that. So we’re saying okay we’re going to have a WA Producer’s Co-operative lamb, so this is the standard lamb, and eventually hopefully that we will have our own branding and processing. There’s a Co-op in New Zealand called the Alliance Group which are very very successful, and they’ve got 4,000 members, they’ve been going since 1943 or something like that, but they turnover 1.7 billion so they do the whole lot.
And at that conference at the Farming Together, they had an American CEO I think it was of a huge Co-op over there, and it seems to be in America or in certain places that they have a Co-op in each area, and those Co-ops they provide just about everything. So anything that’d cost to our farmers and taking the leap is a bit difficult, particularly when there’s been so much money spent on it. We’ve had a huge amount of support from Federal and State Governments and local government, everyone wants us to get going, so they’ve put a huge amount of money in. And to belong to the Co-op is not very much, it’s $3,500 dollars to become a member, and then you have to buy a $500 membership, just one share, and then there’s $350 a year for membership.
So those people who participated last year in our lamb pilot they made all that money back, so they returned their money already, but also now they own a 15th of whatever we’ve got, so their return has been quite enormous. But difficult times with everything going so well with commodity crisis, people don’t really want to upset the system, so it’s pretty difficult to get this going. And we’re also wanting to brand and to do exporting, there’s some trials there, that’s been difficult with covid, the export side of things has just been wiped out.
Amanda:
So Ken it does sound like quite a good proposition, do you think that people are nervous about making change? Or what do you think the reason is that is stopping more engagement at this point?
Ken:
I honestly don’t know, and I think one of the problems is they don’t have enough time to do the research to find out about us. Most of these people are people I grew up with and I know them very well, and they know our track record etcetera. And I say to them ‘don’t you want to set up something for your children and succession planning and get involved?’, ‘yeah, yeah we do, it’s a great idea’, I say ‘well what’s your problem?’. So I don’t know, that’s where we’re up to, maybe we don’t have a good enough plan, because I can see us in the future having a communal feedlot which most small farmers don’t do it that well. Maybe they’re not forming partnerships with quality mills, and there are lots of opportunities, and we’ll explain it to prove providence and traceability on wool, and then everyone sees–this is what everyone’s looking for, the customers, but there’s sort of this gap there.
Amanda:
Well I think it’ll get there; it sounds like it’s a good proposition, and just keep pushing through. And I think covid has disrupted things a bit this year, but it’ll come back around I think.
Ken:
Well sorry Amanda but I think in some respects it’s quite fortunate that we don’t have very many members, because I think we’d be in a lot of trouble if we all of a sudden had a 100,000 lambs to sell. So this has given us the opportunity I feel to consolidate and go very slowly, and we don’t have any rose coloured glasses, it’s probably going to take us four or five years to actually get up and going and doing something with this. So we’re just concentrating on our governance and all those things, because there’s been so many failures out there. And also we’re not naïve about branding, branding’s obviously huge, and as soon as soon you lose supply then you’re done. I’m still optimistic about it, and we’ve got an excellent Board, we’ve got three independent members, and then we’ve got three other farmers on the Board, we’ve got three women involved, so we’re quite well set up to succeed.
Amanda:
Fantastic. I’m also interested in what other work Stirlings to Coast has been doing?
Ken:
Well a big part of this and also a big part of the Co-op is this digital, digitisation or whatever it is, and the fact that this data is going to be valuable to you on your farms and it’ll be on your balance sheet. So we’re focusing quite a lot on that, and Christine’s doing a project at the moment with Hitachi about building an app, and being able to capture that information and receive it in a reasonable way, and so electronic tags and all of that sort of thing. So we’re in the offices doing Coast Farms, and we’re also sharing the information. In retrospect we should’ve tried probably not to have a Co-op, but try to make Stirling to Coast Farmers the collaborative body or whatever, so all of a sudden that we would have all those members part of it, and particularly with the aim that we wanted to be self-sufficient with our grower group.
But we’ve had Geoff Duddy over a couple of times, so we’ve had workshops about production, about capturing information on the digital side, and we’ve been busy with Pivotal. We’ve set up I think it’s 15 or 20 towers, so we have our own connection, so we don’t rely on NBN so we have our own network. So at the moment we’re busy putting in weather stations, so I think there are about 40 to go out. So we see the weather as one of the issues that we can have localised information, and in the future have better algorithms and decision making about what you do on a farm and how you do it. And then of course genetics, that’s the other side of things, so a lot of our farmers are not 100% stock, so most of them are about 30% and 70% cropping. And so the expertise is really not there to be exactly correct or exactly precise on your feedlots etcetera, so there’s a lot of wastage there, so that’s where I feel that the Co-op can help.
Amanda:
And our first webinar session we had was actually talking about data Co-operatives or data sharing, so I can hear some synergies there, and the opportunities for using that data to as you say reduce waste and so forth, there’s a really powerful opportunity there.
Ken:
Yeah, yeah. No it’s very exciting but it’s just huge and it’s hard for farmers to get their head around. So if they’ve got a friend who’s working for them like the Co-op, surely it’s going to make things easy.
Amanda:
I like that, a friend like the Co-op.
Ken:
Yeah well it’s trusted because we’re not trying to profit from the farmers, we’re trying to increase their profits, so it’s a nice thing to have, a nice resource to have.
Amanda:
Absolutely. Simone I think I saw some questions pop up.
Simone:
Yeah I’ve got a couple of questions in here for you Ken. So the first one is from Gregg who has got sheep in Boyup Brook, and he says hi Ken I’m a farmer, although not really quite in your area. But it is hard for me to identify your point of difference that is really going to give me an additional return. The cost is an investment in an unknown and must be considered a barrier to entry, from a marketing point of view I find it hard to identify a clear elevator pitch to consider when deciding the benefits.
Ken:
Yeah and that’s fair enough. And I suppose we’ve had some help trying to develop our QA standard etcetera, and I suppose we can just look at what’s happening in other places around the world. You know there’s a Co-operative or a standard cooked scotch beef in Scotland, and they attract 100€ extra on all their animals because of that traceability etcetera. It’s a fantastic marketing tool if people know how those animals have been treated honestly. The Alliance Group in New Zealand are concentrating on taste, and so in muscular fat, so they’re making that a point of difference, not necessarily growth rates.
So there’s all sorts of things that we can do, like Lamb Co is a lamb Co-operative here, it’s a processor, so they are wanting a carcass of 22 kilos, which is [0:37:07.4] source over here. And also in the Eastern States, in Dubbo, they want a 30 kilo animal, so if we could increase the standard so that we’re delivering a 30 kilo animal, I mean that’s a fair bit of money, $7 bucks a kilo. So it’s hard to prove these things, but that’s the resources we have being a Co-operative, that we can find out about what’s going on in the world and what else is happening, and it’s pretty difficult as an individual to tap into that.
Simone:
It sounds like it gives you a lot of control and power back over what you’re actually doing.
Ken:
Well hopefully, yeah. And so everyone’s saying that they want food security and provenance etcetera, well yeah you can do it, but it’s very difficult to do it individually.
Simone:
Yeah, yep exactly. We’ve got another question here for you Ken from Ross Hardy, and he says hi Ken, do you know what insights you are hoping to find from analysis data? He’s just given some context too. I should say I’m new to farming and have a small hobby farm in Macedon Ranges Victoria; I do understand the tech world and have been looking at Ag-Tech.
Ken:
Yeah so I’m not too sure, but if he’s a sheep producer, so using Australian breeding values and what to look for and what sort of rams to buy etcetera. Yeah I suppose the Co-op has got a huge amount of information and resources on nutrition etcetera, and what’s achievable and what’s not. So rather than as an individual as I’ve done in my career to find out what works and what doesn’t, you can very quickly get the right information that’s just saving you that sort of hassle.
Amanda:
I think Ken what we’ve heard generally from a lot of farmers is that they recognise that collectively there’s a heck of a lot of data available that could be really valuable for the farmers, but part of the problem is how to aggregate and analyse that data in a way that is really useful on the ground to the farmers, I think it’s still seems to be a lot of talk about how that can be done.
Ken:
Yeah, and it can be done, you just have to have the right expertise to do that. And like I say as an example Hitachi has been involved in a feedlot in Dubbo, and the owner of the farm came and presented at our Spring Field Day at a Stirling to Coast Farmers Spring Day. And so here’s a 40,000 head feedlot, and in 2018 which was a very bad drought in Dubbo, they increased their production by 20% just by that data, having the right data about the animals that they were putting in, and about how they were treating them. So there are plenty of great examples that can really increase your profit by having up to date information I suppose. This is part of what Stirling to Coast Farmers do, it’s that extension, I’m not telling you anything new.
But you go to conferences and you have scientists and people with expertise telling you all these great things that you can use on your farm, and I say ‘well I’m not too sure how to go about that, can you come down and show me how to do it’, [Chuckles] and they don’t seem to come down and say ‘okay this is what I’ve got for you’. The variable rate inputs which has just taken off in Esperance but probably not many other places in Australia, I’m not too sure, but it’s only because they have the expertise down there and the business that provides that information. The guy that developed it, the scientist, was like 20–Niki would be able to tell me, 20 to 30 years ago and the uptake has just been tiny. It’s such a wonderful tool, but the farmers just can’t get their head around it and spend that time in the office or whatever in setting it up.
Simone:
Ross just commented as well that app [0:42:18.8] building is very very expensive and it takes a long time to build, you’d need $100,000 plus.
Ken:
Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re getting that support from the industry, from MLA and from the State and Federal Government. And that’s the benefit of the Co-op also I think, is that’s it’s a community group or whatever for the benefit of the farmers. And so as long as they’re doing what they said they’re going to do and spend the money wisely, there’s a huge amount of resources out there that’s available.
Simone:
And Gregg’s said hi Ken, does Livestock Data Link, LDL, tie in your groups journey at all? And thanks for the discussions.
Ken:
Yes absolutely. We’re not about to try and reinvent the wheel, so any collaboration or any partnerships with industry or whatever we’re into, and I probably don’t know enough about that, but certainly any opportunity that we can use. There’s a lady in Albany that’s developed a program, Lucy Emerton about decision making, so are you going to [0:43:45.0], or when is the best time of the year to sell them and all that sort of thing, so that sort of information. I went to a Food Agility conference and a workshop, this big app, you know it was all going to happen and I think the whole thing fell apart. But one of the first questions was well in ten years’ time what sort of decisions are you going to be making on your farm. And the answer was well not many, most of the decisions will be made for you, that you can have that information, so you can take the risk out of it, you can make farming less risky I suppose, more secure.
Amanda:
It sounds like another group that’s got a lot happening Ken.
Ken:
Yes it has, and unfortunately I was the inaugural Chairman of the Stirlings to Coast Farm group, and we’re trying to have a turnover every two years and now we’re stuck, we can’t find anyone that’s going to put their hand up, and so I’m back doing it again. And people get sick of the same people, so it’s that apathy of well we just find it very difficult, and the confidence, getting farmers to put their hand up. And you say to them ‘look you’re quite capable’, but a lot of people just don’t have the confidence. Millennials would do it but they’re out there building their enterprises and having families etcetera.
And I try to get my peers to say well–with a group everything that we do is to put it $1 per hectare, so this is how much you’re going to save or you’re going to make by adopting this practice. And then the argument then is well you need this group to make more profit and so this should be included in your workload. So I don’t have any kids coming back to the farm, but I certainly would be saying to them that this is the opportunity for you to get the information and also upskill yourself on Boards and all this kind of–it’s just further education, but they just want to go and drive the tractor.
Amanda:
Yeah that’s a real challenge.
Diana:
Can I just make a point too Ken about provenance. I think consumers need to be educated too about food and farming, because often they don’t understand, or have a level of ignorance or misinformation. And I think that’s something that really needs to be encouraged more so that we don’t have–and often I’ll look at some food and I’ll wonder is it marketing or is it actually true. So I think there is a really big gap there that people actually have to understand a lot of the aspects of farming. And if you’re going to increase your value for that product why it is worthwhile etcetera, so I do think education needs to be on a number of levels.
Ken:
Absolutely, you know that social license to farm, what the community expects of you and what their standards are, and in a climate where that’s getting more and more removed. When I was younger most people in the city knew of a farmer or went and visited a farm sometime, and now you have that total disconnect, and I think that’s something that farmers haven’t done well at all. Now it’s a little bit of suspicion about is our food okay and is it genetically modified, you know all those things there, mule sheep and all that sort of thing, how they’ve been treated, so absolutely it’s a valid point.
Simone:
Gregg just asked if there are any rural leadership programs in your area Ken?
Ken:
Yes there is I think, I’m not too sure about–I don’t know much about that. But there’s certainly a huge amount of courses for governance, being a director, running companies, so there’s a lot through business Council etcetera. So there’s a lot of programs and there’s a lot of opportunities to upskill yourself for sure.
Simone:
Well thanks Ken. Might move over to Niki now, and did you want to introduce Niki, Amanda?
Amanda:
Sure. Welcome Niki Curtis, the acting CEO of Grower Group Alliance, thanks for joining us.
Niki:
Thanks everyone, and thanks Ken and Diana for your presentations, it’s really great to hear that. And I think it’s mean for me not to be able to see you all, but I can see Amanda and Simone, and it’s funny to see that you’ve both got your lights on there and here it’s broad daylight [Chuckles], which does make you look better I think, well I’m looking at myself here in bright light. So I’ve got a presentation, but I just wanted to first say that I just love working with growers and grower groups, and I think people like Ken are so inspirational, the amount of time that Ken’s provided that’s been free and for his industry. And I’ve loved working with the growers mostly in the Esperance region like Ken, and that makes it such a better job when you feel like you’re working with people for all the right reasons, so Ken I think that it’s fantastic what you’ve done.
So my background is that I come from a farming family in Esperance, and my parents and brothers still farm down there, they’re in cattle farming, and my husband’s a consultant in Esperance. And I worked with the South East Premium Wheat Growers, which is a grower group in Esperance for nine years prior to taking on this position two months ago, while the CEO takes maternity leave with her first baby at the age of 45. So before that I worked in communications with the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development in Esperance. So I’ve just prepared a bit of a slide which hopefully is going to come across right. How’s that?
Simone:
You’ll just need to click on the green share screen down the bottom there Niki.
Niki:
What’s that?
Simone:
You need to click on that green share screen button.
Niki:
Oh the share screen, yes I forgot about that, okay.
Simone:
There we go, perfect.
Niki:
Good?
Amanda:
Yep.
Niki:
Alright.
Simone:
Thanks Niki.
Niki:
Okay. So as I said I’m now with GGA after working with SEPWA for nine years, so I’ll start off just talking a little bit about GGA. So the Grower Group Alliance was established in 2002, and was mostly funded through GRDC before the Department of Primary Industries took on funding it in 2014. And then in 2019 a Collaboration Council was formed, and the Minister for Agriculture here provided over 4.3 million dollars I think it was for four years to support the organisation. So GGA is about supporting grower groups like SEPWA and Stirlings to Coast, in all it’s got just under 60 grower groups across Western Australia, and from that map you can see just how large Western Australia is.
We do have a couple of groups in the north but mostly out in the south west part of the state, which is where most of the agriculture is in WA. And I think it would be fair to say that WA we’re different in many ways, as you’d all know in the Eastern States it’s not just about closing our borders where we’re different, but also it’s about the way that we have our farming systems here, we’re a Mediterranean climate and most of our commodity is actually exported. So we are quite different to the Eastern States, and I think that’s probably why we’ve had such strong grower groups remain in our state. Whereas it’s been different maybe in other areas of Australia, because in order to service our areas it’s quite difficult to do so, and so growers have had to take on a lot of that supporting their own industry themselves.
So GGA’s aim is to support a producer led system of innovation and adoption, and we do that with three main themes which is about capacity building in our groups, building and driving research and development in WA, and also showing leadership through support of our grower groups across WA. So just a bit of background on the collaboration agreement there which I think I’ve already covered off on, and capacity building, research development and leadership. The capacity building we do through such things as providing a calendar to our network, and information is sent out on a fortnightly basis. We do training and workshops for such things as project management and leadership as was talked about earlier, governance and strategy, public speaking, there’s numerous capacity building workshops that we provide across the year.
And then research and development, we have a number of programs that we broker to bring into Western Australia that we work on nationally. And at the moment we’re working strongly with a drought hub program, one of eight across Australia that’s just been released by the Minister for Ag. So over to SEPWA which was just a joy to work in and probably still where my heart lies, that’s a group that has had a huge amount of success, and I think it’s fair to say that probably that success has come because they’ve remained clear to their strategy. They were originally formed out of adversity in 1993, when they realised that they had a problem, commodity prices for most of the farming systems were low.
They had issues with soil erosion, because the Tillage Cropping programs that were around then were just at the time of No-Till coming in, and the varieties that were coming from the Eastern States didn’t really suit the Esperance Port Zone region. So they realised that they had to take matters into their own hands, so they formed their group and set about trying to fix things, and they still have the same core business today that they had back then, which was to understand what the issues were in their system. And that mainly came through demonstration sites that were established at the time, to test for varieties that were coming in, and today there’s just under 50 farmer scale demonstration sites that are still put in every year around the Port Zone, of which it’s about a 350 kilometre radius.
So they have 25 to 30 sponsors which provide that core funding to the group, and last year there was over two million dollars’ worth of projects that we were running along with tours and events. There’s about 300 farming members and they represent about 80 to 90% of the grain grown in the Port Zone. So Esperance I think remains quite different probably to other parts of the state, it’s very isolated and it also has quite large farming operations there. And so it’s interesting what Ken was saying, it’s a chicken and egg thing I guess. I think we have the fastest turnover of new machinery in Australia, and a lot of 100% cropping programs, so I guess with the bigger machinery and bigger farms you can afford to have people come in and support you when it comes to things like the right technology.
So that has been something that’s been a point of difference with SEPWA maybe to other areas, and I think growers have seen the results of pulling together and working together to collaborate, to share the information that they’re learning. And so SEPWA has I think gained a name for being quite innovative, and I’d like to say it’s because of the staff that they have there, but it’s actually not. It’s because of that culture of collaboration that’s come from right back at the start where they learnt through that adversity, that if they worked together they could achieve things. And so that still remains today, and they still go on tours overseas to understand their end users, and they still run those same trials and demonstration sites, to be able to try and push the barrier and fix the issues that they have, and as staff members we were there to support that and to of course drive the governance of the organisation.
So I can go on forever about what they do but that’s probably in a nutshell. I just wanted to close and just say that I think that growers and grower groups are at a key time at the moment, where the Federal Government is talking about this 100 billion by 2030. And it’s all about collaboration and innovation, and that can only be achieved from the ground up. And I think it’s an exciting time for grower groups, and I hope that the support finally comes. Diana was talking about it and Ken too, grower groups run on the smell of an oily rag, and it’s quite frustrating sometimes; you see a lot of research that sits with universities and governments and grower groups.
As the support in the regions has shifted we’ve been left–well I still say we, are still having to fix all of that, and we had bushfires go through Esperance in 2015 and it was SEPWA that actually had to respond to that. There’s just so many things that grower groups do now, so it would be great if there was a stronger support from government, especially Federally for groups, and I feel that there is a shift and that is coming.
Amanda:
Thanks Niki. We’re big fans of from the ground up, Farming Together all believe that it starts with those relationships with farmers, working together with others out of need. And I think your point of collaboration and starting out of almost a necessity or adversity, gives it all the more power and strength in terms of the likelihood of being successful, because it really strengthens everyone around that core vision and purpose. So absolutely that resonates with what we’ve seen and heard as well. I’m interested in the gap; obviously Farming Together is part of a university as well, Southern Cross University, so we’re always really interested in this. Sometimes what seems like a gap between research and practice, and whether it’s farmer led research projects that are solving on the ground problems, or whether it’s a translation problem between research and then translation to farmers. I’m just interested in your views on that and why you think that gap exists?
Niki:
I think it’s about networks. So I know in Esperance we’re 750 kilometres from Perth, and we would hear from a research organisation when they needed us to endorse their application for a research program, and we pretty much didn’t hear from them again. And I’m not really having a go at universities, because it’s usually where that happened, but I think that what we’ve found and I think that’s what is the general consensus now, is that there’s been a lot of investment in research, and especially as RDC’s like GRDC have just gotten more and more money.
But actually a lot of it is not having much impact, and there’s a discord between growers and what they’re trying to achieve and the research that’s happening. And I think growers a lot of times, especially in the Esperance region; they’ve just started doing their own research because they are wanting to have a faster turnaround on what it is that they’re trying to get to the bottom of. So I think that that’s a sentiment I’m sure Diana and Ken would agree, and I’m hopeful that there is going to be some change. I think the latest reports that have come out from Minister Littleproud have spelt that out quite clearly.
Amanda:
Great. Simone have we got any questions up in the chat box?
Simone:
No, there are none. If anyone does have any final questions for Niki or for any of the other guests this evening please pop them in the chat box now, and if not it might be time to say thank you very much for an amazing evening here and afternoon over in WA as well. It’s been really valuable, it’s been really informative, and you’ve got very inspiring stories. I think what Amanda shared at the start around how humble you all are, it was very true, you’re doing absolutely amazing–to me revolutionary things in the industries that you’re working in, and it’s fantastic just to hear you share those stories.
Amanda:
And look we’d love the opportunity to share them all as well through our Farming Together network, so if you’ve got any great stories to share send them through, we’d love to let everyone know about what’s happening in your worlds, because I think it’s through sharing those stories that we get the opportunity to learn as well. So thank you all very much for joining us tonight and thank you to our audience for the questions as well. We’re going to make this recording available on our website at www.farmingtogether.com.au, and I think we’ll email out the webinar recording as well. Now next week Simone, what number are we up to?
Simone:
Yeah I just wanted to say thanks to our audience as well, and did you have anything else you wanted to say there Ken? Sorry I think I cut you off before.
Ken:
Well I could go on for ages, but I would like to thank Simone and Amanda very much, without people like yourselves it sort of gets wasted, but farming needs people like you so thank you very much.
Amanda:
Thank you very much Ken.
Diana:
I concur, thank you Simone and Amanda.
Amanda:
Oh we love our farmers.
Ken:
Good on you.
Amanda:
Like Niki said it makes your job really enjoyable when you’re working with people that are the salt of the earth, and we love what we do, so thank you.
Simone:
And lots of thanks to the chat, to the guests this evening too, so everyone’s really enjoyed listening tonight. So next week, drumroll–
Amanda:
Same time, same place. We actually are talking about sharing data again, because it seems to be such an important topic at the moment, so this is about building trust and the power of collective data. And it’s about two different groups of beef producers who have worked together through benchmarking to improve their performance and profitability. And they’re two quite different stories and they’re really fascinating stories, so if you want to learn more about how to build trust, share data and improve profitability, same time same place next week.
Ken:
Well done.
Amanda:
Alright, thanks very much everyone.
Simone:
Thanks everyone.
Amanda:
Goodnight.
[End of Webinar]
