Outside – and inside – the tent

Tasmanian farmers may have been left outside the tent during the forest peace talks but we were well and truly inside the tent at Agfest, spreading the farming message and our own brand of optimism.

Agfest was, once again, a resounding success with an estimated 65,000 people through the gates. Anecdotally, they came, they saw and they spent.

Agfest is an annual reaffirmation for us that we are doing, we are doing right. Yes, this allegedly low-growth, low-productivity, low-margin, low-skill industry is Tasmania’s quiet achiever. We lead the way.

The annual value of production at the farm gate approaches $2 billion, six per cent of gross state product; we employ 17,500 people, and we have everything going for us – water, soil and sunshine – provided the regulators stay off our backs.

That was my message to the farmers at a talk I gave at the ANZ centre at Agfest. If we can be left to get on with what we do best, we can make a huge difference to this struggling economy.

Agriculture is a growth business, with rising productivity, high skills, and, in some cases, rising margins. Our annual rate of growth averages 4.5 per cent. If all Tasmanian industries could achieve that, we would be laughing.

Our market in the future is the growing Asian middle class, an urban middle class of higher expectations.

The agricultural commodity cycle will continue to oscillate but the underlying trend will likely be up, not down.

The boom in the last decade has been in hard commodities – iron ore and coal. The next boom is in soft commodities: food and fibre. That’s why BHP is willing to bet $40 billion on potash mining.

What we have to do in Tasmania is to make the optimum use of those resources in which we have a natural advantage, namely water, soil and climate, the prime ingredients for growing food and fibre. Have I mentioned we grow very good trees in Tasmania?

Tasmania is becoming a centre of excellence for agricultural research that is symbiotic with the skill, knowledge, enterprise and ability of our farmers to think laterally.

For a whole range of reasons, we are not yet utilising our agricultural assets optimally. If the planets align, and we were able to use our land to its full potential, the results would be surprising for individual farmers, for the agricultural sector and for Tasmania as a whole.

If we can realise $5 billion additional earnings for the state, it is equivalent to $10,000 per person. An additional $10,000 per person would make Tasmania the richest state in Australia, per capita.

So that is our strategy: to substantially increase the added value of agriculture, aquaculture and high-value food production in the next decade to move the state to the position where it would be perhaps not an economic powerhouse, but a state that can look WA in the eye and say, “we are doing our share”.

The benefits for us are social, economic and environmental. We maximise food and fibre production and food security; we improve health and well-being and we continue to operate our businesses in sustainable landscapes.

That is not a bad scenario for a “low-growth, low-productivity, low-margin, low-skill industry”.