VICTORIA'S peak farm body should look overseas if it wants to survive, says ANDREW LANG
The Victorian Farmers Federation is in decline, yet it is an organisation the farming community owns, needs and benefits from.
In times of crisis the VFF has proved time and again to be of real importance.
It is the VFF which lobbies politicians.
It represented farmers over live sheep export and during the wide combs dispute.
It represents farmers in negotiating wages and conditions for farm workers.
Working through the NFF, the VFF represents Victorian farmers on matters of national animal health and quarantine protocols.
We can't afford to lose this body. We are heading into unknown territory with climate change and the issues of greenhouse gas offsets and carbon sequestration, not to mention animal welfare, wildfire, and dealing with conservation fringe groups and an increasingly disconnected and uncomprehending city population.
So, how do farmer representative bodies in other countries manage to stay financially afloat, relevant and effective?
Two national examples are worth looking at.
Finland has a similar land area to Victoria and about the same population, although far more people live in the country and regional urban communities.
Over the past 100 years Finland's land use has moved steadily from agriculture toward small-scale intensively managed forestry.
Finland's farmers and forest owners are represented by the Union of Farmers and Forest Owners - normally known by the abbreviation MTK.
The Union is actually two parallel organisations with separate governing boards, one for farmers and one for forest owners.
MTK makes its money from several sources. It owns a rural newspaper and prints three times a week.
It owns its own city office building in central Helsinki, thanks to the forethought of its founding fathers and rents space to other tenants.
It receives dividends from a forestry business that it spun off as a public company, Metsaliitto, one of the world's larger pulp and paper companies.
And it has a number of commercial activities which provide some income.
One of these is to help entrepreneurs set up businesses supplying woodchip to organisations requiring heat.
Sweden is about double the land area of Victoria and double the population at about 9 .1 million.
As with Finland, the population is far more decentralised than Victoria.
Swedish farmers belong to two main organisations.
The Swedish Farmers Union, LRF, has a turnover of about 2 billion Kroner ($320 million) and about 2000 employees.
Its income comes partly from membership but mainly from seven subsidiary businesses.
The largest of these, LRF Konsult, provides legal, accounting and tax advice to members.
Others provide services and subcontracting, manage a quality stamp for Swedish farm produce, organise bulk buying of travel, machinery and farm consumables. They broker insurance, publish rural magazines and a paper, and manage a conference centre.
Lantmannern, the Swedish Farmers Supply and Crop Marketing association, is a profitable organisation with subsidiary businesses that have direct application to its farmer members.
It has 56,000 members, an annual turnover of about 2.3 billion Kroner ($370 million) and employs 10,000 people with offices in 13 countries.
The subsidiary businesses deal in new and used machinery, trade in grains and supply biomass to bioenergy plants. They are involved in R&D with products such as bioenergy and plant breeding, sell consumable items and are a source of finance for farmers.
These two national farmer unions are active and effective in lobbying for farmer interests in climate change, emissions trading and greenhouse gas offset measurement.
They operate at the EU level and form alliances with the farmer organisations of other Nordic and northern European countries to ensure their members interests are looked after.
Membership is high and stable and the organisations are well-funded due to their commercial activities.
They play a key role in driving R&D and in keeping agriculture and forestry competitive in their respective countries.
They have evolved to be responsive to the changing situations of modern agriculture.
In fact, they are more akin to the Birchip Cropping Group than the VFF.
The BCG is a private research group run and financed by farmer members. It conducts cropping R&D, sometimes in its own right but also with industry partners both government and commercial.
The VFF should look at these and other national farmer groups for how to change, go forward, and rebuild membership and relevance.
- Andrew Lang is a Lismore farmer, Churchill Fellow and a board member of the World Bioenergy Association. Last year he was awarded a Goldstein Fellowship to study how large volumes of waste from family forestry is turned into bio-energy in Finland and Sweden.
