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