Wanted: Farmers for overseas mission to help defend Australian ag

On-farm experience is needed to help deliver first-hand explanations, and read the consumer and policy-setting mood in influential markets, particularly Europe.

Options to do more include harnessing the skills and practical experience of dozens of articulate and successful Australian producers who spend time overseas each year on programs such as Nuffield scholarships and industry study tours with machinery companies and other big agribusinesses.

Ms McCluskey is Australia's government-appointed, but independent, special representative for agriculture.

Her role has opened overseas government and industry doors for her to advocate on behalf of Australian farmers, while also reporting back on sensitive trends and attitudes she has encountered.

"But we can't rely on one voice or one person to get our message across - we all have to be in this together," she said.

"The power of collective farmer voices and experience will be much more effective at winning the hearts of those we need to engage with and show the rest of the world how we work collaboratively as an agricultural industry."

Ms McCluskey said more deliberate farmer engagement on the international stage would also help Australia do a better job of "looking over the horizon at the risks coming towards us".

Overseas activists and trade barriers have previously caught the local farm sector belatedly defending mainstream Australian activities such as vegetation management, live animal exports, mulesing, chemical use and even the names used to identify our wine and food products.

She said unfortunately the industry assumed too often that the world would simply understand Australian agriculture, despite it being markedly to the northern hemisphere landscape - and unsubsidised.

In some situations our farm sector waited far too long to engage proactively on global environmental or animal welfare issues which invariably also grew into domestic controversies.

Ms McCluskey said her industry representative role frequently saw her "inundated with invitations to speak" at global decision making events such as last year's COP28 in Dubai, or Rome's United Nations' World Food Forum, or presenting the Australian farmers' case to Britain's House of Commons inquiry into the UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement before it became law.

"But it doesn't have to be just me," she said.

"My role can help open doors for others with boots-on-the-ground experience and practical understanding of the issues."

She told the Farm Writers' Association of NSW how the House of Commons experience had been a revelation about how little UK decision makers understood some hot button topics such as mulesing.

As a NSW primary producer herself she could explain, frankly, how mulesing had almost no relevance to Australian lamb production or future exports to the UK - meat sheep were not mulesed.

Mulesing was, however, an animal welfare necessity in certain wool production situations because Australia's blowfly and environmental challenges created cruel and deadly situations for Merino sheep if not managed appropriately.

Similarly, often-unrealistic European assumptions and expectations about Australian farming systems and pest management strategies, developed for vastly different environments to the northern hemisphere, had to be answered by conversations which "touched their hearts and backed up with facts for their heads".

"They simply didn't know any different over there," she said.

"It's a typical problem we're confronted with, particularly in Europe and the UK where the power of lobbyist NGOs is immense."

Providing real life experience and context to food production issues was not just a chance to highlight agriculture's economic and social impact in regional and remote Australia, but also put food security in context in relation to our customer nations in the Asia-Pacific.

"We need to do more fact finding and truth selling, working with customers like Indonesia to explain how sectors such as the live export industry are delivering valued, safe and reliable food security," she said.

Fortunately, she believed, if co-ordinated properly, there were opportunities to let smart, young and genuine farmers help advocate Australian agriculture's point of view with support from farm sector representative organisations and businesses, or even specialists from bodies such as Meat and Livestock Australia.

Ms McCluskey is back in Europe this week addressing an agricultural agtech event in Germany, attending a sustainability forum in the Netherlands and the World Farmers Organisation annual meeting in Rome plus other meetings.

Conveniently, this week's events coincide with several National Farmers Federation representatives also being in Europe for the WFO conference.