Agriculture

Agriculture

We just love supporting farmers by delivering innovative business solutions and sound commentary on the current risks and future opportunities of Ag. Communities rely on farmers daily so we don’t intend to get down and dirty into the stifling Ag political environment - we’ll leave that up to the hard-nosed lobby groups. Our goal is to step outside of all the negativity and present a fresh, vibrant and sensible platform that is completely solutions oriented. At the moment young Aussies will find it almost impossible to start farming. The price of farms is too high. We believe that needs to change.

**Digital Transformation**
In 2014 SMEA CEO Dean Logan was working with peak Ag groups to develop a future plan around the Digital Transformation of Agriculture. It was an exciting initiative that stalled due to a lack of funding. Whilst farmers are some of the fastest to take up technological innovation, policy at home needs to move with global trends. Technology plays a massive role in reducing costs for farmers and thereby making farming more efficient. Technology and Ag is a real focus of ours and an area we will be pushing policy makers hard on

We are thrilled to have partnered with Cultivate Farms to make farm ownership a reality.

**Does decentralisation Actually Work?**
A few years back the Federal Minister for Agriculture Barnaby Joyce was pushing hard for the decentralisation of a number of commonwealth agencies - RIRDC, FRDC, APVMA - to ensure more bureaucrats were stationed in regional Australia. The decision in theory sounded reasonable, but was it? Farmers were torn on the decision arguing it would lead potentially to higher costs and increased duplication. Others suggested having regulators closer to regional Australia made sense. Regardless of ‘opinion’ did it make policy sense? For some agencies yes, for others no. So we met with the Federal Minister to argue exactly that.

The Future of Farming

The Ag sector has some real challenges ahead when it comes to an ageing demographic. Children are simply not taking over the family farm in the numbers they did decades ago, choosing instead to head for the city to explore more lucrative career opportunities. The mining sector often takes a lot of young potential farmers from rural and regional Australia and then there is the sheer price of land making it very hard to package up enough cash to even get started with a viable patch of land. Add to this an average age of farming reaching close to 70 and some serious challenges lie ahead. How do we get younger famers and their families onto the land and farming? We explore one very clever organisation doing exactly that. It’s an Ag succession plan that delivers young families into farming, whilst ensuring retiring farmers continue to derive an income into their retirement. CLICK