Pete Lewis:
Welcome once again to Cooperative Conversations, the livestream series, where we connect you with the real stories from Australian Primary Producers who are working and growing together cooperatively. Hi, I’m Pete Lewis. In one way or another, I’ve been helping Australian farmers tell the great stories of Australian food and farmer production for the past 25 years. We’ve just been chatting with Stephen Thandi from the Oz Group about their cooperative on the Mid North Coast in New South Wales, around Coffs Harbor. They’re in the Berry Guide and he explained very eloquently how joining forces to work together has delivered better returns.
Pete Lewis:
This is an excellent springboard to now talk about how small producers can gain market power by working together. Joining us for today’s round table discussion are three outstanding business leaders, agribusiness leaders, working with cooperative farming models. We’re delighted to welcome Dick Groot Obbink from the EAT Truffle Marketing Power, from Braidwood in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Good to see you Dick. Greg McNamara, a fifth generation dairy farmer on the North Coast of New South Whales, and a former chair of the Norco co-operative. Glad to see you Greg. It’s fantastic to have Doriana Mangili back with us from the Sweeter Banana co-operative. From Caranarvon, Western Australia, and of course as usual, to help us pointed in the right direction, we have Melina Morrison who is the CEO of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals. Welcome one and all, and thanks again for your time.
Pete Lewis:
Before we start though, if you have a burning question as a result of tonight’s topic, ask away to our online team or our chatbox which is located on the right side of this stream. Don’t forget, you can also vote, for your favorite question via the vote button. We’ll try and get to as many of those questions as possible in the time that we have.
Pete Lewis:
Now, as we’ve indicated, we’ve just heard about the enormous growth of the OzGroup, that has occurred in a relatively short amount of time, by joining forces and pulling resources of marketing power in the production of blueberries. Dick, truffles is a product that is really seeing some growth here in Australia over the past five years. You could relate to the growing pains of the OzGroup. Tell us a little bit about the truffle marketing cooperative, how it formed, and what it does.
Dick Groot Obbink:
Well, thank you very much Peter. Yes indeed, the truffle season has just finished, and we’re just starting to put our feet up and get into other things. But our co-op is a small co-op. It probably started around 2010, when enthusiastic people started talking about forming a cooperative together. After a long period of time, the cooperative was finally registered in 2017. We decided to market as EAT Truffle. Standing for Eastern Australia Tablelands Truffle, and we thought that was a very appropriate acronym. And the majority of our growers are all located in the Eastern Australian great Divide, from as far north as Armadale, and as far south as Jindabyne. But the two main clusters around the Canberra area, and around the central tablelands. The truffle co-op was set up initially because we realised that as a single truffle farmer, this was very labor intensive to be a farmer, marketer, traveling salesman, courier, and then also to have to cope with ad hoc sales of the truffle in a very short season.
Dick Groot Obbink:
What was very important with forming a co-op is everybody who has joined us realises that they have economies of scale now, in order to expand our truffle industry. All the individual members, have ownership, and ownership I think is essential with any particular co-op. We were lucky to get a grant from Farming Together in 2017, which really gave us an enormous kickstart and this enabled us to get professional help to carry out a marketing research project to incorporate a produce inventory software to have money to do some research into truffle washing, package transport, and truffle storage, and also further accreditation through HACCP accreditation of some of our members as well. This really gave us an enormous boost, The truffle industry in Australia is now the fourth largest truffle producer in the world. We’re only small players in this. The majority of the truffles come from Westers Australia. But as a co-operative, we are now set to expand our activities, and to set ourselves up for export into the future.
Pete Lewis:
Well done, Dick. Well from one of Australia’s newest cooperatives to one of its oldest. Greg McNamara guest, what goes for the EAT Marketing Truffle cooperative, goes equally of Norco. You’ve been in the game for 125 years and each and every one of those challenges, an opportunity as Dick outlined, would apply as well. How do you market milk, and the other dairy products at Norco, and how important is it?
Greg McNamara:
Thanks Peter. I think the benefit of being around a little bit longer than what Dick has described is that we’ve actually been able to build a solid marketing team, sales team, logistics team, to actually do the things we need to supply the product pretty much across the Australian landscape and into the export market. As the business has grown over time, it’s been able to source people into employment that actually allows us to have an advantage over probably some of the smaller businesses starting up, and we’ve been very aware that even though we live in an environment on the East Coast, doesn’t always have access to good people, we can attract good people now because the values of co-operatives are growing. That collective thought process, that building a sense of community is important.
Greg McNamara:
As Norco has grown, over time I would say the industry evolve, we’ve now come back almost full circle when the business started in 1885 around farmers that owned the business elected people of their board, who actually employed people to run their business. You could say that we’ve taken on the new mode of people actually wanting to have a connection to their community and to the people that grow their food. As our business grows, we’ve created channels in the market, we’ve marketed into the retail channels so the Coles, Woolworths and Aldis of the world, we’ve got access to those markets. But we’ve also built a solid distribution market in what we call the route trade, the café market; small shops in those areas to make sure that we aren’t one-hundred percent relying on one customer.
Pete Lewis:
Now you’ve heard, as we indicated, had a lot of skin in this game for a while. For you, what is the co-operative competitive advantage? What is it about co-op’s that give you the edge?
Greg McNamara:
In our new marketing campaigns, we’ve actually very much centered our marketing around our farmers. So you’ll see our farmers in the ads, you’ll see them on billboards, you’ll see them on milk bottles from time to time. So it’s that authenticity that we’re an Australian owned company, that we actually care about our people. And you’re also judged on what you do in the community. I don’t think that we should underestimate how important community values are, and this new drive to actually build a sense of community. Especially the new COVID-19 environment we work in, it’s certainly building that environment we want to build. An Australian manufacturer to ensure that we have food everyday on their plate.
Pete Lewis:
Doriana, regular viewers of our series will know that you joined us a little earlier to tell us the fabulous story Sweeter Banana co-operative in Western Australia. But for people coming in fresh, tell us a little bit about how it was created, and what’s your point of difference in the banana market?
Doriana Mangili:
Well, Sweeter Banana was created around 20 years ago by a group of growers who were unable to compete with the larger, prettier Queensland Banana, so we were selling it below the cost of production and going broke very quickly. The growers decided to get together and essentially create a brand and from that, creating a brand, and creating a product with a point of difference, which was our smaller, Sweeter Banana. We’ve created a now packing operation so we can standardise the processes or pack the same standard. We can also do all the things in terms of food accreditation, to be able to access all those markets in the supply chain, and by working together, creating that volume that allows us to access the bigger market, so you’re talking about, as Greg said, the Coles, the Woolies, the Aldis, all the different market segments. As co-operative, you can access that, whereas individual producers its very difficult to get into those markets. And product differentiation by working together you can fund collaboratively a marketing program, to then promote that point of difference.
Doriana Mangili:
In simple terms, we pack bananas and we sell them but obviously, it’s a lot more than that. It’s getting right into that supply chain and it allows us to sit on the same level as big corporate players and behave in the same way. But, while still being able to grow bananas on our small family owned farms.
Pete Lewis:
And anybody who spent any time at all at your splendid new sporting stadium in Perth will know that you very proudly show off the Sweeter Banana story at that footy and cricket ground.
Doriana Mangili:
We have yes, we had an event there, and we covered the stadium with Sweeter Banana signage which was very exciting.
Pete Lewis:
Everybody, Melina, in Ag is looking for that little edge, that little point of difference. Bring us up to date with the state of play when it comes to marketing produce. How is it generally done, is it by industry bodies, or by the smaller producers themselves, and why do you think a co-operative approach works so effectively?
Melina Morrison:
Thanks, Pete. Well, I think we’ve heard some great examples just now of why the co-operative approach works really well. It enables that economy of scale, it allows that collaborative marketing campaign. The Holy Grail, as Greg said is really farmer-owned and produced. It provides that provenance that people are after, that clean green egg produce that we’re all after. But also the connection to the farmer’s story. And whether it’s done by an industry body, and we’ve seen very effective campaigns on Australian wool, rice, cotton, seafood, done by industry bodies, again that’s a kind of collaborative approach, because the members of those various councils pay money towards the collaborative branding, or whether it’s done by a co-op, it’s all about creating the economy of scale and the consistency of supply of the product to keep serving that market. Once you’ve set up a great brand put out your shingle and say this is what you get here.
Melina Morrison:
I will say that the one advantage I really think that a co-op has is that the farmers own the marketing brand. They own the brand advantage. If you look at a story like Dairy Farmers, where the marketing arm is split off and is owned by it think Kirin Brewers have it at the moment, the supply chain to the farmgate is still farmer-owned. But the valuable part of the business, the marketing and the brand, is owned by investors, that’s an interruption in supply of value back to the farm gate. Quite often when a co-op demutualises, the brand stays with the new owner, and that’s a sign of just how valuable that part of the business is. An example is Devondale, which was owned by farmers under Murray Goulburn before. We’ve seen that a lot over Australia’s history.
Pete Lewis:
Over the past six months Melina, we have seen and heard the catch-crye, “We’re all in this together”. To your way of thinking, has agriculture responded and risen to the challenges of COVID-19, as well any other industry sector do you think?
Melina Morrison:
I think Australian farmers have done an incredible job. Whether they’re in co-operatives or not, they have really shown that when it comes to the things that you need to rely on, in a crisis like meat on the table, milk in the fridge, bananas in the fruit bowl, if you’ve got a domestic supply chain right back to the farmers, you’re in a very good position. I note that the National Farmers Federation and other bodies have really gone strong to say, “Don’t panic-buy, Australians, because we do produce enough food to feed ourselves”. That’s something we have to hold onto. We must never lose that food security.
Pete Lewis:
Greg, do you see that the Australian consumer is now much more aware of where their food comes from, and how important is our whole issue of food provenance, paddock to plate, it seems to have become really top of mind and even trending.
Greg McNamara:
Our experience has certainly been that our consumers are far more aware of where their food comes from, and they actually want to know about it. So, our marketing programs focus very much on that. And that’s not just in magazines or general media, it’s actually very much now on Facebook. So, making sure our people are very much into having consistent feeds on Facebook, also making sure we’re attending local markets and we’re quite visible. So our focus is very much from a ‘we’re not just here to sell your product, we’re actually here to be part of your community’ and we want people to visualise that. That’s part of our provenance story, it’s about making sure our farmers are front and center or there are people in our workplace who are actually front and center of that marketing campaign. So the provenance story is incredibly important to our agriculture of these communities today.
Pete Lewis:
Dick, from the truffle perspective, how important, and what difference does farmer owned make to your customers? Do you capitalise on your Aussie farmer credentials and being as close as possible to your market?
Dick Groot Obbink:
Yes, just to reiterate on that, provenance is particularly important to us. Our market research has shown us that the truffles that we produce in the Eastern Tablelands are more intense in their aroma and flavor than truffles grown in other parts of Australia. And this is most likely due to the fact that our climate is very similar to Italy, Spain and France in terms of hot, dry summers with thunderstorms, and then during the ripening part of the truffle season, lots of frosts, which make a big difference to the intensity of the aroma and the flavor of the truffle. Now, COVID has dealt us an interesting serve this year because all overseas markets quickly shut down and the export market disappeared. But, the other side of it, which has been beneficial, is people have been cooking at home, people have been staying home with money to spend, and people have been demanding of restaurants that are open to supply them with truffles. So we’ve had a huge demand in the Sydney market and in the Canberra market in particular for truffles to be on the menu.
Dick Groot Obbink:
We’ve been able to control the quality of that truffles through having grading sessions with all the growers, making sure that when we sell something that we call grade A or eighth grade, everybody’s talking about the same thing. And of course just the proximity to the capital cities in fresh, bring top of the list, we’re able to supply that.
Pete Lewis:
And Melina, of course, it is a fact that some of the most recognised and much-loved brands both here and overseas, when it comes to food, are brands developed and swept along by co-operatives.
Melina Morrison:
That’s true Pete. Just to give you a few, that’s probably landing on your plate sometime, Danish Crown, Bacon, and ham, pork products, we’ve got Arla Butters, Ocean Spray cranberry juice if you like vodka and cranberry juice as I do. They’re great at marketing co-operatives. Particularly these global brands. What they’re not great at doing is connecting that up with a co-op story I would say. I hazard a guess, many people wouldn’t know those brands were co-operatively owned. I think we’re doing better in Australia. Norco’s brands, OzGroup Berries, they say farmer-owned on the packet, and it’s connecting that story up.
Pete Lewis:
Doriana, from your experience, is it somewhat easier to promote a Aussie farmer-owned and produced product as a co-operative, compared to another structure?
Doriana Mangili:
Well, certainly, for us, being Western Australian, we market within western Australia and that’s been our focus, that it’s WA-grown, cause we might know, we’re very parochial over here. But anything you do collaboratively is more effective than trying to do as individual in a very crowded marketplace and people making decisions about the 50 grocery products they’re buying that day, they don’t want to be thinking about every single thing. So being able to brand as one group instead as 50 individual brands, allows you to consolidate your marketing budget and your reach goes so much further. There is no way that we could market at all really if we were doing it as individuals, it has to be collaborative.
Pete Lewis:
Greg, one of the big marketing pluses for Australia that we have heard now over the last 10 or 20 years, is Australia’s clean, green reputation and all the things that encompasses. Where does Australian agriculture stand internationally in terms of its product range and its food quality, and all the things that help underpin the brands that take advantage of that?
Greg McNamara:
I think it’s a given when you’re marketing your product on the export market, that it has all those attributes that you just described, clean grain, healthy environment, I think that’s just a given. I think the challenge for us now is to actually make sure that we competitively price in the markets we operate in and that we have that innovation in the product. So I think going forward, if Australia wants to take advantage of it we need to think about, just not the clean green, but how do we have that innovation, how do we have that price sensitivity. International markets are incredibly sensitive to price and therefore we need to find those innovative ways to…if we’re going to be more expensive, we’ve got a very expensive labour market in Australia, and logistically, as Dick described, we’re so spread out that we need to actually find ways to make sure that whenever we market our product, it’s actually at a competitive price to our competitors, whether that’s New Zealand or whether that’s something from Argentina.
Pete Lewis:
Well you mentioned the Kiwis. Are there lessons to be learned from their spectacularly successful 100% Pure campaign, it seems to hit all sorts of buttons about all the major things that you want about your product, including, as you just indicated, of as much as possible a premium price for it.
Greg McNamara:
I think it’s interesting that everyone compares ourselves to New Zealand from a marketing perspective, but I think that, that door’s closed on Australian agriculture soon. We’re much more diverse, we’ve got a lot more international investors in Australia, or organizations being part of our corporate agricultural environment. So, I think we’ve got to find another way, and I think the co-operative movement is probably the one that can lead that environment of, how do we create a collaborative brand that brings value, whether that’s completely an Australian arsenal, like the New Zealand model where they actually market the pure New Zealand or the Long White Cloud. I don’t think Australia’s necessarily got that advantage, but someone else might have a different view of that.
Pete Lewis:
Dick, you got a niche industry…a luxury aspiration product in truffles. How do you go competing against some of the very formidable competition internationally from most generally regarded as the home of truffles?
Dick Groot Obbink:
As a strike of good fortune of course, we’re in the southern hemisphere, Peter. So, our truffle season is six months different from the northern hemisphere. As such, we do quite well in being able to export back to export to the northern hemisphere in their summer. Our main competition really, is with Western Australia, which produce the bulk of truffles in Australia in terms of export numbers and amount. But we’re working very much on the quality and the consumer demand by chefs, of our particular brand of truffles and trying to make that as distinctive as possible.
Dick Groot Obbink:
We know that our industry has to export in the longer term, and therefore we’re trying to break into different export markets selectively. But in the mean time, most of our demand comes from the domestic market as such. We’re also increasing our product overtime, whereas in the northern hemisphere, people have the yields of truffle in France, for example have been going down steadily over the years for various reasons, and Spain is now the major producer over there. What’ll happen from this point on, with the export side of it is that we’re going to be looking at value added product as well, and being able to combine that with non-competitive industries, as an example, combining it with butter, in the lobster export market. Those are all things that we’re getting advice on and looking to do.
Pete Lewis:
Makes me hungry just thinking about that. Dick, what a fantastic image you’ve presented. Doriana, in the banana game, there’s nothing more difficult than trying to take the big guerrilla in the business which is the Queensland industry so, West Australian producers have had to be very innovative, very clever and very targeted about where they’ve settled and the particular variety of banana that you’ve settled with. How important was it to find that differentiation in the market for your co-operative?
Doriana Mangili:
Absolutely Pete. Bananas are considered a commodity industry, so we had to break out of that and set a differentiated market, and doing that through branding. Initially, was that that was smaller, we focus now on the sweetness, we focus on the provenance, we focus on the fact that we are spray free, and you don’t need to re-invent yourself every five minutes, but you do need to evolve and meet the market in terms of what the market expectations are, because that does change, and people are looking for different things as community attitudes change. So you’ve always got to keep in touch with your market, and work out what is important to them now and evolve that message.
Doriana Mangili:
And the other thing we’ve had to do, is try and find a home for everything. So initially it was the lunchbox banana, we then had a lot of second grade produce that we were throwing out, so we came out with a product called Smoothies which was less-than-perfect bananas, that is being sold in retail since 2009. Finding a home for everything in terms of working with farmers markets, finding a home with people that do value-adding, so partnering with people who may make banana products, and making sure they’re using West Australian bananas. Looking at doing our own value-adding, banana bread, and we’re continuing now to evolve that story to look at finding more value-added homes because you’re always going to get times when you have too much supply and you’re always going to have product that isn’t sell-able on the retail market, but is still perfectly edible.
Doriana Mangili:
It’s evolving that, and again, through the power of co-operation and through being able to do that collaboration you can invest and trial things, work with universities, the sorts of things that a farmer are working on their own day to day, would find very difficult to fit into their day.
Pete Lewis:
Well you’re all in the business of producing highly valuable, and highly perishable products, distribution is the key. Greg McNamara, how has Norco taken on this challenge? What are the secrets, and what are the keys to your success in this area, you developed for 125 years?
Greg McNamara:
I think Doriana made a really good point a moment ago around how we need to evolve. If you think back not that long ago, 20 years ago we were actually delivering a fair chunk of our milk predominantly with a delivery man and that delivery man or person would’ve actually known every customer on the street and they did drops and they had school kids actually helping them deliver morning and afternoon. That environment has completely changed. Our relationship now is more with distributors in what we call a route market, that’s more IGA -style stores or cafes. So those distributors in that market are really important because we depend on them to be almost part of our sales course, so having a relationship with a distributor, and then the distributor then has a relationship with the consumer, in that sense is actually a very important part.
Greg McNamara:
Doriana also made a point earlier around the fact that, some would say, “I don’t want to enter the big retail market”, but in Australia, there’s predominantly three retailers and to ignore that channel I think is…it’s not a smart move playing in business and I think it’s actually finding a way to have a relationship with the retailers and value add your products to that retail market is actually really important so we’ve put a lot of energy into having a good relationship with the retailers, not just on price, but around our whole provenance, and understanding that we can bring to the consumer in their customer base. It’s an evolving pace, and we will continue to evolve that program as we go forward.
Pete Lewis:
Well the price in milk has certainly generated enormous amount of controversy. It’s been a huge issue for your producers, but as you say, in the Australian context, given the power of the big supermarkets, you really can’t cut them out of the equation. Ant it would seem that there is a lot of customer loyalty building towards private brand milk, such as yours. And keeping those big name brands supported, despite the price competition that you come over.
Greg McNamara:
We spent a lot of time talking to our own members around how important it is to have a relationship with the retailers. We get into meetings with our farmers and then we often make points around why we deal with retailers that just want to discount their product. But by and large, 60 to 60-something percent of our milk in Australia sell to three of the major retailers, so it’s really important if you want to have a reasonable sized business in the dairy game in Australia, that you have a good relationship with those retailers and some it is about selling private labels, some of it is selling about a more generic style product so we try and play in both those markets within the retail channel.
Pete Lewis:
Doriana, how do you get all the members of your co-operative on the same page when it comes to things like distribution?
Doriana Mangili:
Just going on what Greg’s just said, completely support that. It’s about communication and ensuring that all your producers are aware of how the market works, because sometimes farmers see their responsibility as just up to the farm gate and they don’t really understand what happens beyond that. So, as part of our growth as a co-op, as we are learning, that knowledge is passed on to our producers so that they are learning as well and becoming familiar, because that’s important as well because some of those producers then become board members, and become the leaders in the co-operative so it’s really important that everybody begins to understand and be on the same page about the market place. And as Greg has said, you can’t discard a particular retailer because somebody thinks that they’re not good to deal with, or they’re not good people. 80% Of West Australians buy their groceries from major retailers so if you’re not in that market, you’re limiting yourself to only 20 percent of the market, so that’s really important.
Doriana Mangili:
Transparency is another one where we actually have on our internet site, exactly what we’re selling, to which retailer, which market, at what price, all that’s all very clear and everybody understands that that’s what we’re doing, and explaining the reasons behind that through a weekly report. And not having all your eggs in one basket, because things can change and you need to have a diversification of markets. Particularly at times, with farming you’re always in a situation where they can bring on unexpected oversupply and you’ve got to have your hands in as many markets as possible sometimes to deal with that. So transparency and communication is really important.
Pete Lewis:
Dick, as you’ve indicated, you’ve got members and producing truffles firstly from one end of New South Wales to the other. How have you gone about solving the issue of distribution and ironing out any of the difficulties and challenges there?
Dick Groot Obbink:
We have had to be very inventive Peter. And a lot of it’s been trial and error over the last couple of years. We have a virtual warehouse for our truffles where individual growers are responsible for their own harvest, for cleaning up the truffles, and for grading the truffles. But when it comes to delivering to the customers, if we have to combine shipments, we try to organise so that truffle growers that are relatively close can combine the shipment to send out in one particular package. We’ve had to use Australia Post, we’ve used couriers, we’ve used individual members driving to Sydney or taking truffles into Canberra. The problem with packaging is one that we’ve addressed so that we can make sure the truffles stay at four degrees over 48 hours in an insulated package, if it gets sent. Things have gone astray with frustration, but in the future when we produce more truffle, we’ll probably look to having one particular refrigerated or tube locations where truffles can be stored, before they are distributed.
Dick Groot Obbink:
The WhatsApp software works very well. We can communicate with each other almost straight away, saying “Customer X wants so many truffles who can supply?” And immediate response from our members. It’ll continue to work that way probably of another year or two, until we become larger in our operation.
Pete Lewis:
It sounds like the collaborative approach has certainly proved effective. Melina can you see that forming a co-operative would help in the distribution and the relationship building part of these businesses?
Melina Morrison:
Well I think we’ve heard three really great examples from the speakers of how it’s helped. You’ve got the economy of scale that creates the opportunity to trade into a retail distribution network like the large supermarkets. But you also get the bargaining power along with that so that you can get a better deal for the individual producers by having more bargaining power with that part of the distribution channel. Because of you don’t own it from one end to the other, you are at some point going to have to negotiate into it, and you want to be able to collaborate. But Dick’s just pointed out, that the third way that it’s helping is really though co-operation amongst people and thinking of innovative and inventive ways of managing even the most niche and refined distribution trail that could be from paddock straight into the restaurant plate.
Pete Lewis:
Thanks Melina. Just a reminder we are running a poll in conjunction with today’s co-operative conversations. And the poll question is: What are the biggest [inaudible 00:36:11] of a farming co-operative, there are a few options of you to choose from. Just click on the pole in the live chat to the right of this screen and select your answer.
Pete Lewis:
Greg McNamara, farming’s not a consistent endeavor so can you give me the form and keep up with a steady message. How do you manage risk in the messaging and what happens when it dos go wrong?
Greg McNamara:
It’s about honesty. It’s not a perfect world so sometimes things do go wrong. If something’s wrong then we need to fix it really quickly, so we do that. And the messaging… and now you hear what the massage is and who it is to. But it should be a genuine consistency amongst that message, so if you’re talking to a consumer, then they need to understand that the farming community would also understand that same messaging. We don’t employ people to make sure that we have over sensitising the message, what we want to do is actually make sure that there is a level of integrity behind the message and it’s open, it’s transparent. We do that right across the business. The members get regular updates, the employees get regular updates, and the consumers are certainly updated via the social feeds that we put through Facebook on a regular basis. I would say it’s about openness. If something’s not quite right, then you need to be very transparent about how you’re going to fix it.
Pete Lewis:
Doriana, farming often brings together, or invariably brings together a lot of rugged individuals and they have rugged individual views about how things should proceed from time to time. Does it often make for a pretty willing and robust discussion about the important directions of your co-operative?
Doriana Mangili:
Yeah, of course, and I think passion is one of the things that brings people together to form a co-operative, so without that passion you wouldn’t be here so that’s quite understandable. But over the years, obviously sometimes co-op is not for everyone so people do leave, and want to go their own way and that’s fine, but that’s sometimes a benefit of the remaining members who can be on the same page. We do have robust discussions, and you get everybody’s point of view. Everyone’s looking at things from a slightly different angle, but once you get tot hat consensus at a board level with your members during our annual strategic planning where everyone comes along and er re-set the strategic plan for the next year to look at what we’ve achieved and see if we’re still on the right track or if we need to change, when everyone walks out of that room, they’re all comfortable with the vision. And again, it’s about communication, it’s about transparency, and sharing.
Doriana Mangili:
Just recently, we’ve had an issue with, obviously we can’t get staff in the regions in horticulture at the moment, without the usual backpackers and travelers that come through the seasonal jobs, we made a decision that we needed to pay our staff more, and implement bonuses, and we communicated to our members the reason why, and we’re actually paying people to not work, we’re paying them to not come to work, just to keep them with us until we get through our crisis of winter period. We had some growers obviously raise that with us and discuss. That’s pretty foreign, telling a farmer you got to pay people to not to work, but again, through that communication and trust, they came on board with that and now we’re starting to see some real staff shortages on their own side. Robustness is good, because it gives youth opportunity to explain why and then everyone’s on board.
Pete Lewis:
So the Job Keeper scheme was actually invented in Carnarvon everybody! Well done!
Pete Lewis:
Dick, it’s only early days for your co-operative, but how do you go on managing those probably non inconsiderable egos and individuals within your co-op?
Dick Groot Obbink:
Peter, I think the main issue that a lot of co-ops face, and ours has in the past, is having members think of the co-op as being themselves, rather than them versus the co-op. Because, the worst thing that can happen with our co-op is if individual members sell their best truffles privately, and then sell the rest of their truffles to the co-op. So the co-op is really left bearing the cost at the expense of one of the members. I think we’ve been generally successful in having people come around to the way that all in is better than half in, half out and doing their own thing. The only way that this is going to work well in the future of course, is if we can have a big enough turnover within the co-op, so that people can see the obvious advantages in terms of both labor, and in terms of reward.
Pete Lewis:
Melina we’ve particularly seen in 2020, and given the enormous challenges, not just COVID-19 but obviously, there’s been seasonal factors, drought and other events that have affected food production. Are we seeing a renewed focus on co-operatives because of that collaborative, together approach, helping people through these big challenges?
Melina Morrison:
Well, we’re certainly seeing a renewed focus on the need to co-operate in order to survive, and hopefully thrive through this current crisis. But also some of the other conditions around farming that are making the sustainability more volatile. There’s a lot shifting in our export markets that have to do with geopolitical forces, climate events seem to be much more extreme. So there are issues around how farmers provide themselves with risk protection and insurance, and of course now with COVID, there’s just so many issues. As Doriana has said, anything from supply chain disruption, through to how are you going to get your seasonal labor. So traditionally, the journey of many co-operatives is to respond to crisis, to market disruption by acting collaboratively or collectively or co-operatively. And that’s what we’re seeing. And combined with that, there is a resurgence in interest and awareness of the co operative business model. And that’s the formalized structural way that farmers and producers in different sectors can think about working together to problem solve and to grow their bottom line, their profits and their sustainability.
Pete Lewis:
As we’ve seen throughout this series though, co-operatives have an enormous and potentially and in actual fact, have an enormous impact on the communities in which they operate. And Doriana, you are currently in the middle of the Gascoyne Food Festival, how important is it for members of your co-operative to be really actively involved in that, and then how dos that also re-reinforce your brand, and your labeling and the whole issues of regional provenance?
Doriana Mangili:
It’s people from outside our region into the region, so you can do all your marketing in the metro areas where most of your customers are, but to really tell your story, you need those people to come and visit the farms and see what you do. So at this festival, we bring chefs, we bring media, we get a lot of government representatives, ministers, all kinds of people involved in the supply chain, retailers coming to the region. Chefs are showcasing your product at its best, and people are actually…there’s just such a difference when people step onto the farm and meet the farmer, and see how things are grown, compared to just being in a retail environment, or in a city environment and talking about it. So it’s about making that connection, and it’s about the major exposure that follows, and it’s a great event of the community because everybody has this real pride in this beautiful region that we live and that produces not just bananas, but seafood, and beef, and a whole range of fruit and vegetables. And it instills in the community this pride that we have all these visitors that come and celebrate that.
Pete Lewis:
Greg McNamara, you’re a big advocate of a national food plan for Australia, why is this important to you, and what role do you see for co-operatives in this strategy?
Greg McNamara:
In the last couple of state elections and federal elections, when local politicians around, or we’ve got access to some of the federal politicians who I’ve always asked the question around the national food plan. Because, I think there needs to be a framework around national food plan, it should be encompassing the sovereignty of our food, it should be encompassing the sustainability. How we actually manage things like fire, floods and droughts, should be very much a part of it. I’m very much against consumers putting money into tins at the front of the supermarket or a local café. To actually support farmers, we should have a viable farming system that is vibrant, that people want to be a part of and when we actually unknowingly denigrate the farmers that have actually produced food because we’re asking them to go and get money from the Salvation Army or some other agency, I don’t think we are actually being fair to the long term future of farming and if we want our farmers to have the next generation, and encourage our children to be farmers, then we need to have a positive environment on farmers. Farmers need to feel good about themselves. So I’m very much in favor of developing a plan that actually encompasses a broad reaching framework that ensures that we touch every part of the puzzle that should actually build a sustainable farming system in Australia.
Greg McNamara:
I think the collective collaboration that the co-operative movement has, is almost the catalyst of the entry point to actually having that conversation with the community that we can do these things, and we could create a national food plan, and we could have a community sense around that. It’s the perfect time to have that conversation. COVID-19’s hit us, people are wanting the agriculture community or the manufacturing community in the agricultural space to grow. People are very much impacted. People on East Coast of Australia have been impacted by the fires last year. People have been hurt by that dramatically, and I’m not sure that we’re actually going to capture the opportunity we could to create the change from that. Not that we want to create change… see those fires again. But we need to learn from what we’ve done and I think the nation food plan could be the catalyst to actually start that conversation around, what we should do to create a sustainable farming system, in Australia.
Pete Lewis:
Thanks, very much Greg we are just about out of time, but I really did want to thank all tonight’s presenters for making themselves available once again we had Doriana Mangili from the Sweeter Banana co-op from Caranarvon, West Australia. Great to have her back on the series. Dick Groot Obbink from the Eastern Australian Tablelands Truffle Marketing co-op or EAT Truffle Marketing co-op, based in Braidwood in the New South Wales Tablelands. Greg McNamara, whose an envoy for the co-operative conversation farming conversation series and a fifth generation dairy farmer, coming from the [inaudible 00:48:38] and of course Melina Morrison the CEO of the business council of co-operatives and mutuals.
Pete Lewis:
This live stream series is part of Co-operative Farming a new online education resource for farmers. Also through Co-operative Farming, farmers, fishers and foresters, as well as members of co-operatives can access educational bursaries to cover up the 90% of course costs for relevant co-operative education. You can jump online at Coopfarming.coop and learn how you can find out more about that. You can email Co-op farming at coopfarming.bccn.coop.
Pete Lewis:
Once again, a big thank you to our guests for being a part of tonight’s round table. Coming up next on this series later this month, we’ll be speaking to Emma Robinson up in Charters’ Towers in North Queensland and Emma will be talking to us about why members are so important for co-operatives. Her success for running in co-operatives and how to get consensus and engage in a critical conversation for all co-ops over the board. Full details of all those episodes and everything that we’ve done so far, and everything that is to come, you can head to conversations.coopfarming.coop and remember, all seven episodes are available both now and on demand. Thank you very much for your company tonight. We hope you’ve enjoyed tonight’s round table, and we look forward to seeing you next time.
