THERE is keen interest in a new $14.9m national push to bind primary producers together in co-operative collaboration.
The Farm Co-operatives and Collaboration Pilot Program has already attracted interest from 150 separate groups since its launch late last month.
One of these emerging collectives comprises 400 women representing as many livestock and cropping enterprises in the Central West, and another made up of 80 Western Queensland graziers who learned to get along while building a shared dingo fence.
“Once they all realised they could work together the next logical step was to ask, ‘what can we do next?’” said program director Lorraine Gordon.
Under the pilot program money and hired help are available for groups as small as two people to nurse those great ag ideas.
Minimum paperwork involves ‘just 15-20 minutes’ to complete an on-line self assessment and its simplicity excites Ms Gordon who aims to see 2000 separate farmer groups formed before the pilot’s close at the end of June 2018.
“If a projects meet legacy status, meaning that it might be a game changer for industry, or still going long after we’re gone, then there is some serious federal funding available,” she said.
“You’ve just got to believe in the good of the whole; that you are better off as a group.”
The pilot program was born from the current agricultural competitiveness white paper and at the federal agriculture minister’s funding announcement last April Barnaby Joyce spruiked the benefits of co-operative marketing.
"Agricultural co-operatives allow farmers to own and control more of the food supply chain themselves,” he said.
Ms Gordon, formerly the Mid North Coast CEO of Regional Development Australia is excited about her project’s potential, based out of Lismore’s Southern Cross University - which already has a global reputation in plant breeding research.
The former Rural Woman of the Year has personal experience when it comes to producer unity, and is passionate about the concept of collaborative farming, calling it a ‘game changer’ for modern agriculture.
She comes with earned experience, being a founding member of Ebor Beef which today employs a full-time marketing co-ordinator whose primary job is putting together lines of members’ cattle for various markets.
“I was sick of being a price taker,” she said of her decision to unite producers 27 years ago. “Numbers talk.”
When not visiting her trade steer beef property at Point Lookout Lorraine is amassing information for her Phd on ‘grazing systems from a triple bottom line perspective’.
For Lorraine the idea of district collaboration between producers of like minded lines makes so much sense.
“For the purposes of our pilot program we define a group as being just two or more people,” said Lorraine.
“Or it could be half a dozen farmers who share machinery, and labour. It’s just collaboration. Old fashioned ‘working together’.
“If you get on with your neighbours then have a serious conversation.”