GRDC in Conversation: Matthew Durack

Matthew, welcome to the GRDC in Conversation podcast. I'm looking forward to. I know we've had a little bit of a chat off here and I'm looking forward to continuing it now with you, so welcome.

Cool. Thanks Ali.

Yeah, mate, I'm interested. We're back in your hometown.

Yep.

Toowoomba. How long have you been back living here?

For about 10 years I guess now. Yeah.

And quite a big road in between.

Time wise, geography wise, not all that did the obligatory disappear overseas after finishing uni, but then down to Moree and Warwick and then back down to Moree and then back up to here. So yeah, not a massive geographical spread.

All within. Within the same area. Where else did you head overseas?

Just to England. Yeah. So 82 when I finished vet studies the, the vet market was. There wasn't. There wasn't a job to be had in the, in the, in the country. So I think probably about 80% of my year disappeared overseas within. Within six months and, and did locums and that sort of thing in the, in the uk. I headed up to the north of Scotland and had a fantastic time up there for nearly a year and then back home.

Isn't it 40 years is worlds away from where the vet industry was to where it is now.

Absolutely, yeah. The shortage, the shortage of. I'm not sure there's a shortage of small animal vets, but the shortage of production animal veterinarians appears to be pretty critical.

Absolutely.

We've got some views on how that could and should be solved, I think, but it's part of the overall problem of attracting people into the sector.

We'll have to bring that back to episode two, because I think today what I'd be really interested to draw out from you is your perspectives around I guess especially the grains industry, but that road for you and the involvement in the sector. But starting off the involvement in farming and agriculture growing up in and around Toowoomba, like I presume it was always on your radar as a vet, but why'd you leave the vet profession to pursue farming?

Yeah, My dad was a suburban architect in Toowoomba. So Toowoomba was a country town back in those days and arguably still is. So you're surrounded by ag, but in our family, no, we were not a farming family but for some reason it always. My holidays were always on mates farms, you know, for some reason it was always what I wanted to do and I did vet science with the. An idea that that might lead. Lead me there it. And maybe it, maybe it did. But the first opportunity was a Dean Starman who was a lived in Toowoomba. I used to treat his wife's dogs. And one day he said to me, how'd you like to come down and manage a farm? And I said, yep, absolutely, and went down to Moree. That would have been about 1987.

Why was it such an, I guess an interesting pursuit for you? Why'd you jump at it?

It's just growing things, creating things from the soil and sun, you know, is. I don't know. I don't know why it is, but it's endlessly intriguing and endlessly satisfying. And, you know, right from a youngster, I guess I always was that intrigued and fascinated me, growing vegetables, all those sort of things. I just thought it was. I just thought it was amazing. And the opportunity to do it and get paid for it, man, that sounded pretty cool.

What kind of property did he get you down managing?

It was a pecan farm. Pecan nut farm. I remember at the time saying to him, dan, why do you want me to do this? I don't know. I don't know much about farming. I know I want to do it, but I don't know much about it. I don't know anything about agronomy. I don't know anything about engineering. I don't know anything about agricultural finance. I don't know anything about. I don't know all the other big list of things I didn't know anything about. And he said. He said, now, I know, I know that's good, so you'll worry about it all. And I think that actually has been good advice for me. And that when you do employ someone who is good at something, they have a tendency to want to do that at the exclusion of other things. So if you're hopeless at everything, you might actually become better at all.

Did you find that not completely overwhelming going into the proper deep end?

I'm not sure. The crew down there were all old hands. And I just kept asking, asking a lot of. A lot of questions. And the advantage of the pecan industry is that it didn't have. In Australia, at least it didn't have a tradition of how you did things, so we could start from scratch. And Dean Starman himself, who owned the property at that time, was always open to a new idea. And, you know, his constant refrain was, whatever you do will be wrong. So act at once, you know, move forward, find a better way every day. And we, you know, I think we did. We did find better ways. We managed to get that orchard up to being the Top performing pecan orchard in the world for nearly 10 years. Wow. And I remember going across to the States to give a talk at some us thing. And I said to Dean, Dean, we don't want to tell these buggers over there how to do it. And he said, oh, don't worry, Matthew, they won't believe you. And he was perfectly right. So, yeah, the advantage was that I wasn't trying to repeat the past. We were trying to build the future. And that's how you should approach any form of pretty much anything. The past is useful, but not that good a guide as to what you should do tomorrow.

How long into that tenure do you think it took you to start to get comfortable and confident in the role?

I don't think I ever. No, I don't think.

Always on edge.

Yeah, no, I don't think that. Yeah, no, no, still not. That didn't happen. That didn't happen.

Tell me about that relationship that you had between the owner and yourself. Cause it sounds like it was a pretty special relationship relationship. It.

It was. So Dean at that time would have been about over 60, I guess, and looking to retire. We, we, we used to argue incessantly, I guess, but he was open. But, you know, we had to. To win an argument was quite a, quite a serious, quite a serious endeavor. So I got my. I did my homework before I went and had a crack at things. But yeah, we continued to be very good friends. I worked there for 10 years, at which point in time I was keen to expand that business and then at that point wasn't. He was happy to sit on it. And it's one thing I have learned about businesses. If you flatline, it is very difficult to retain good talent. And that's a challenge for agriculture and particularly a challenge for the family farm that flatlining is. There's probably no sort of financial reason not to flatline, but there's a talent won't stay. Not that I was great talent, but yeah, good people don't stay around a flatlining business. And so, yeah, I moved on at that point but continued to have pretty much not nightly but at least two or three times a week, an hour's conversation with him. Really?

You were that invested in the business? Yeah.

Or together we would just discuss and argue about how. And I'd tell him what a stupid idea, what stupid things he was doing.

And he'd easier to throw rocks from the outside.

No. What did you move on to at that point? I actually bought my wife Jenny and myself bought a small irrigation block out towards Warwick. And I thought, you know, I was a farmer now. I'd done it for 10 years, I could do this. And we bought the block, pretty quickly realized that, that, yeah, you need a second job if you're going to survive off a thousand acres of dirt. And so I managed to secure the role of director of the national center for Engineering and Agriculture, which might sound like a bit of a strange gig for a veterinarian, which was based at USQ. And I spent 10 years there principally focused on irrigation management research. And we established the CRC for irrigation futures. Again, it was about. And it was during that period of water policy reform and a very rapid expansion or improvement in irrigation efficiency. So it was a pretty exciting time to be involved in that area. And yeah, I did begin to learn a fair bit about that. This idea of doubling water use efficiency was not very difficult at all. In fact, quadrupling it would be a better. We've doubled it across the industry pretty much in the last 20 years. We better get ready to do the next doubling.

Can you explain that to me a little bit more? When you say doubling water use efficiency, is that in particular crops or just across the.

Pretty much across the board. Efficiency is the output divided by the input. So it's bales of cotton per megalitre of water. Used to be one, it's now two or more. And you can do that. And if it's tomatoes, you can do it with tomatoes. So that's the basic driver, is to increase the efficiency. It's not to say it's megalitres per hectare. That's not an efficiency, that's an application rate that doesn't really make any difference how many megalitres you put on. It's what you get off. And I think we can continue to look at that. The sort of things that the easy wins that we've had over the last 10 or 15 years or 20 years have been associated with the losses that occur in irrigated systems. So losses below the root zone, deep drainage, evaporative losses, water logging, those types of things. I think maybe we've got most of those easy engineering or hydraulic fixes now. It's probably continuing to look at the agronomy side of things and genetics to try and get the next stage up. But yeah, I'm sure we'll continue to drive down that track.

And you mentioned cotton there as, I guess the K measure of metrics. Were grains a true focus in that irrigation South Sea as well?

No, they, they weren't because I guess we were. I Was mainly based in the, the summer rainfall zone and irrigated grain cropping is not, not a significant. Cotton was the, was the, is the primary user of water in the, in the northern basin. So grains didn't you know, the focus wasn't associated with irrigated grains production of course in southern, in the southern part of the system grown. We did do quite a lot of work on rice. Of course they've achieved extraordinary improvements in their efficiency, but the same opportunities exist in grain. If you're going to irrigate. The issue is can you make enough money out of grain to bother applying the water to it in the first place? That's the challenge.

How did you go going from, I'll say, like the growing pecan business back into that research development landscape within the.

Pecan game we were fairly, we were a fairly intensely R and D focused business. So we, we had done a, I had done a lot of research within that, within that business around, firstly around pest management. We managed to. I remember the, the first year I was there, I put 14 aerial sprays across the farm to control Arborer and Green Vegetable Bug. I think about 10 of them were a product called Hallmark, which is one of the synthetic pyrethroids. A horrendous thing to think that I could have done that. And it didn't work. And I remember saying to Dean, we're not winning here, Dean. And he said, well, what are your options? I said oh well, we could stop and find a better way or try and hit them harder next year. And he said which one do you want to have a go at? And I said I think we might have a crack at stopping. And we then did a pretty big research program with CSIRO over a five or ten year period and managed to go cold turkey on insecticide inputs into that farm from that date on. And there's never been a pesticide applied to that farm since. So that was a big research program. Same deal on irrigation. An argument that I didn't win with Dean, which was that we could convert the whole farm across to drip as opposed to flood. He couldn't quite get his head around that. Given the fact that the whole US industry knew for certain that pecans died if you tried to irrigate them with drip, drip irrigation. Not exactly sure why they died, but they knew that for certain. So we didn't make that change at that time, but we'd done the research to prove it that they didn't actually die. But he wasn't a great believer in research. Well, he used to Believe in research. He wasn't a great believer in that shift.

Well, you know, one thing I've learned on this trip through chatting with all sorts of different people and I'll say, and I think this is the complexity of agriculture when it comes under the umbrella. But like, yeah, I just thought across the board crops were getting sprayed with insecticides, pesticides, whatever it might be. But the advancement in the use of chemistry and science in the paddock, it has actually blown my mind over the last couple of weeks.

It is, there's, there's a lot of things that, that should be blowing your mind. Yeah, but, but pest management certainly is one of that. That's if that to be able to go cold turkey and pecans is, is a bit of a unique opportunity. Orchards in general, they're not monocultures, they're, you know, they're actual full blown ecosystems. They've got an understory that you're growing all sorts of weird and wonderful things, mostly weeds, but they've got pollen and with pollen becomes the ability to feed beneficials and have this, this biodiverse environment. So orchards are intrinsically easy things to achieve. A biocontrol environment in that a cotton, monocultural cotton crop is difficult. One of the things that we bred up to control this borer was Trichogramma wasps, which I was going to make my millions out of maintaining for heliothis control. But unfortunately for me, the BT cotton gene came out at the same time, which is a much better way to solve the problem. But they again went from, you know, weekly spray routines to I don't know that they often get to zero, but they certainly have very, very low insecticide inputs.

Yeah, well, someone had mentioned to me that they'd used one in three years, which is, as you said, had gone from 10 to 14 a year depending on what was happening.

Yeah, yeah.

It was extraordinary coming back to the pecan farm. So you, you ended up going back to it, is that right?

Yeah, I was out for 10 years. Dean was, was getting old. Yep. And I remember saying to my, and, and I, I'd done my 10, 10 odd years in public sector research. Fascinating time. But I wasn't getting any great stories out of it to come home to the kids, you know. What do you, what did you do today, Dad? I had a meeting. I was getting a little bit bored with it and, and the farm out at Warwick was, we were starting to kick some goals there. Getting, you know, had it developed and up and running and doing pretty well. So I was just about Ready for a change. And I said to my wife, Dan, I think I'll give, I'll give, I'll give Dan a year. We'll, we'll spent a year on the place getting it ready for sale because that's what needed to happen. And she said, oh, okay, just so long as you don't do anything stupid. And I don't know. Jeff Dodd, who was another ex employee and myself came back to try to get it heading upwards and onwards because it slowed down a bit and within six months we put in an offer and within 12 months we'd managed to secure the finance to, to purchase. Luckily, just prior to the October 97 financial crash. Yeah, well, because otherwise we wouldn't have got the finance.

Did that crash impact you and the business?

I remember saying to our banker at the time who was Rabo. We were three months in and things had started to turn rather bad. The, the. And I said to him, he said how are you tracking? And I said, well, I think we might be right. Just need a few things to go our way. Firstly, I need the dollar to drop from a dollar because it had got to parity and we were an export focused at that time, predominantly export focused. I said I need the dollar to drop to 65, I need the price of fuel to go from $1.40 back down to 80, I need interest rates to go from 12 to 6 and I need the price pecans to go from $1.75 to $3. But I said if all of those three happen within the next six months, we'll be sweet.

Not asking much.

No. And he was rather stressed by that. All of those did come to pass effectively.

So it wasn't a flipping comment by you or was it?

Not at all. No, no, it was, it was, we had. It was a reasonably tight sort of position that we got into. But there were ways that we could have managed predominantly through. The first change was to. Was to double it. We invested in Drip straight away and managed to get half the water effectively available for sale. So we could have sold a lot of permanent security water into the Gwada system and were in fact required to by the bank. But luckily I managed to convince them not to force that on us. And because all these magic things happened and that then allowed us to use that water to expand from 700 to 1400 hectares in the Gwada, which it's now sitting at, I think slightly more than that.

And so you ended up going through and selling that business, but at the point of sale you developed the 20 year vision for what it could be.

Yeah, we, it wasn't my business and it's a different. It was Dean's business and I was really looking after it for him. And so it wasn't something that I saw as a destiny for, you know, family, dynasty or any other. And I don't have that view on anything really. You know, when I'm gone, I'm happy for my footprints to be erased in the sands of time very, very quickly. But we were building it to take it to sail at some point, whether it was at five years, 10 years or 20 years, it was heading down that track. And a very important part of that is to have a vision and have a vision that's much larger than your current situation. So we had a 20 year plan that saw us with 1400 hectares, a thousand hectares of macadamias, an almond operation and a walnut operation all under the one roof. We had the marketing and we had this marketing pipeline, a system of doing things. We had the management team capable of doing a lot more than they were doing because very quickly you start, once you get good people, their capacity to expand their touch, their influence is significant. And if you don't keep growing then they run out of enthusiasm. So we had this plan and that's I think as much as anything when we came to actually put it on the market, it was the assets that we held, but it was this vision of where we could go. That psp Public sector Pension fund from Canada, they signed on and in fact part of my brief of sale was there's three things you gotta sign up to if you buy this business. One is you gotta pay the right amount of money, which they didn't argue about. Secondly, you've gotta sign up to the vision and thirdly, you've gotta sign up to the crew that I've got on board. And they signed up to all, to all three and now they've achieved that. They did the 20 year plan in about four years. If you pour money in the top end, that rapid growth comes with challenges. But Ross Berling, who is running that business now, was up to those I couldn't have run the business that he has ended up running. And extraordinary. And he started at that farm, he lived on the farm next door. He started as a 15 year old apprentice plant mechanic down at Truola and he's now running one of the largest horticultural businesses in Australia. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty exciting.

Tell me what retirement was like.

Ah, well, I don't really use that term, but certainly after the sale, there was a period of maybe not doing too many things, but I did have a few unfinished things of business. One was I had been in the macadamia industry for a very long time and I wanted to grow macadamias. Secondly, I'd always been exasperated by the grains industry's failure to find a vertical vertical integration that within Starman Farms as the pecan operation, we were fully vertically integrated. We grew them, we packed them, we cracked them, we stacked them, we packed them into 100 gram packs and we sold them to supermarkets and we had mail order and we were direct to consumer and direct to supermarket right through the full chain. So there wasn't, not too many. We clipped the ticket as many times as we possibly could on whatever we did and tried to stay out of the commodity trading environment. And in the grains industry, I'd always had some engagement with the farm at Warwick and with others. But when I met up with Stewie Tighe in Morey and saw what at the time was Boola Farms, the relationship that he had with the Mulster in Brisbane, BBM at that time was part of the Grain Company Corp. Stable. He was the first time I'd seen this vertical integration as someone in the grains industry who was actually dealing with a customer as opposed to the market. And I think if, if there's anything industries that operate within a market, stay away from them. Yeah, it's very, very difficult though in the grains industry it's exceedingly difficult. But Stewie had had really made the first step to achieving that.

Well, and I want to ask you, and it's a simple question but like so in the grains industry, why is it difficult for them to stay away?

Because grain is such a relatively low value product and you and, and customers don't care all that much is one is one thing. And customers in this sense is manufacturers or first stage manufacturers. So in with milling wheat and I don't know that industry particularly well, but it's not clear to me that millers care all that much about the grain they receive. Certainly they have some technical requirements, but they have managed to technically resolve a lot of the special wheat requirements that they used to have. So they can solve for lower protein, they can solve poorer issues by putting adjuvants and various things in the milling process to achieve a loaf of bread and coals and woolies that none of us will know was any different. So you don't really have customers. That care is the first is the main issue. Whereas when people are buying nuts, they're Buying health food. And so I think they, they to some extent do care a little bit more about where it comes from. Beef is, of course, another example of an industry which is commodified pretty much entirely. And that's another industry that I'm involved in and it really stresses me that we've managed to take something that really is quite an extraordinary product and turn it into protein. And we have an industry that holds protein conferences. Need to nearly swear in that instance, just to me. Protein for sake. What are we doing selling protein? Beef is the lobster of red meat and we're selling it as protein. It's the most difficult protein to create in the world. If you want protein, eat soybeans, for God's sake, don't eat beef. So, yeah, finding customers that care and the malt industry, they don't care all that much, but they do care a bit. They have particular reasons for caring and particularly around germination and other specific requirements and varietal requirements. You know, you don't hear Millers talking about varietal impact on a life of bread. I'm sure that there are impacts, but you don't hear them saying, oh, I won't take that variety to put into. No, they just after primary hard wheat and they're not even necessarily after Primard. But the malsters do have specific requirements. They're getting smarter and figuring out ways of being less dependent upon the supply chain, delivering them exactly what they need. They can't get away from the requirement for germination, though. That's a dead set. But as an industry, if we start growing with them, it's easier to talk to us to solve your problems than to go to a chemist and get the problem solved. And your ultimate consumer, I think, will be more interested in the problem being solved in the paddock than being solved in a chemistry lab.

Absolutely. And I think probably the listeners might be thinking, well, why are we talking about macadamias and nut industries and things at the beginning? But I think it's such an important context to understand where you've come from. So coming across Stu, who we sat down with him and Lyndall the other day and he talked about understanding who your customer's customer is and then working my back so you can solve their problems. Given your background, what have you been able to bring to the grains industry with that customer focus?

I don't know, maybe not all that much. Firstly, I think just to give Stuart and little confidence that there's at least one other person that thought they were on the right track. You know, the focus of agriculture, speaking earlier today is so much on doing more, better and faster. You know, just being bigger and better at what you currently do. That's, that's really. And so actually starting to head off to one side and not, not, not necessarily becoming bigger, but, but more intensive or more, more more specific around what you do is not, not, not how. It's not where the role models of success in agriculture exist. And that then one of the big things that I make a differentiation in ag is around asset holders or farm owners and farm operators and I think we really miss that or mix that up. The real wealth in agriculture has. You're running two businesses, a real estate business and a farm operating business. Well, the wealth has been generated up until this point and arguably it seems probably likely to continue from the real estate business. I find that the most dull and boring thing to be, you know. Yeah, I didn't enter ag to be in real estate. So the operating business is where the excitement, the excitement is and, but investing in how to do that better and not just buying the neighbour and buying the neighbour and buying the biggest spray rig so you can farm the neighbour. That is a different path to go down than the sort of standard one. And yeah, I think, if anything, it might have been just to give Stuart Little some confidence that there was a path to track down there. It's not the path that's well trodden. So it's not all that easy to get down. But. And you've got to do the other one. You've got to do the expansion in order to stay relevant to your customers. Because, you know, once you've got one customer, you need to find the next one. You can't say, oh, yeah, yeah, we're doing. Yeah, but we haven't got enough for it. You've. You've got, you've got to be able to say, yes, and continue to expand.

How important? So. And I find that really interesting. So obviously going, all right, we're going to vertically integrate our grains business. We're going to work with the millers or whoever it might be, but then going, well, actually, how do we make sure we're not overexposed to customer X? And that's where the scale comes in.

Yeah, well, you've always got the fallback of the market.

Yeah, true.

You've always got the fallback of the market, which is kind of the bottom rung. It's the rung that everybody else is on. So, yeah, your exposure, so long as you. And in grains in particular, you will always have that, the fallback to the market position. So, yeah, being exposed significantly to one customer is a dangerous thing. Absolutely. But you do have some protection in the grains industry, so you can take a risk.

Where do you see it heading in the short to medium term?

We had made an assumption that much of this stronger connection between the grower and the end user or the processor would be driven by a consumer demand for this relationship to be stronger. Right at the moment, that's not happening. We talk about the conscious consumer and the fact that they are interested in, in where their food comes from and where their beer comes from and all that sort of stuff. And that is true at a theoretical level, but practically in today's economic environment, with inflation being where it is and the cost of living pressure, the average consumer just might want to be conscious, but can't afford to be too conscious. So the consumer demand for more transparent supply chains is not there. But at a corporate level, corporates, their investors, or where they're getting their cash from, their investment from, be it loan funds or equity, increasingly those investors, they are interested in better understanding the supply chains and seeing that transparency and that direct connection. And not primarily, I guess, on the ESG side of things, the ecological, social governance stuff. The investors don't like to be embarrassed by the behavior of the companies they invest in. But I think generically investors want to see transparent supply chains and start to see these businesses that are only operating at a commodity trade. Their supply chain is simply buying out of the trade. They're seeing those as unstable supply chains. And Covid certainly sort of made that clear. So I think that's the bigger driver over the next 10 years, maybe not the consumer, unfortunately, because there's a lot more story we can tell to a consumer than we can tell to an investor. But.

It'S a fascinating point you make there because I think in some of the conversations I've heard or been privy to say around carbon and people saying, well, actually it's not the consumer that's demanding this, it's actually, as you say, it's, it's the investor. By going, well, actually, if I'm putting money here, I want to make sure that I'm not exposing myself to risk.

Yes.

And therefore putting pressure on businesses to start reporting or whatever it might be.

And you sort of think, oh, that's not very exciting. But the pressure is real and it's, and it's building quite rapidly. And it's, and it's consistent across all, all of the investment portfolios. I think these sort of really high, high spruiking green investment funds, I'm not sure that they're going to be quite as hot in the marketplace as, as they might have looked like they were going to be for a while. But yeah, just the average.

You know.

The Heinekens and the, and the Asahis and I would think ultimately the large milling companies and feedlot operators, all these guys are going to want transparency in their supply chain. And that underpins an understanding that they're not going to be embarrassed by the ESG position that their supply chain's in.

So where do you see. And I guess it comes down to maybe a mindset question, but like the mindset of the ag community, especially grain farmers in this, what say the next 10 years looks like, as you're kind of saying that pressure coming from investors around transparency in it. What do you think we'll see at the farm level and what are maybe some of those first indicators of a movement towards transparency?

Are we up for it as an industry? The people wise, are we up for the change of attitude? I would say I think we, we probably are in the grains industry. Certainly the discussions we've had within our supply chain network around, you know, would you be interested in being part of a, of a, of a carbon reporting scheme? Yeah, sure, absolutely. It's going to cost you a bit to get in and all that. Yeah, no, no, it's, it's a happening thing. It's. It's what? Don't understand it. Don't know where the money is, don't understand. But we got to be in it. We've got to be part of this. We're part of the problem, we better be part of the solution. In general, that does seem to me to be. So I've actually been somewhat surprised. The grains industry, I haven't been in it in depth in my entire life and I guess I look at. It doesn't have the energy and dynamism of some other industries. I guess looking specifically at cotton, it doesn't appear to have that same. But I think in respect, in this respect, I think we are up for it. Give a grower a chance to interact with an end user and they are very excited because they've never seen one in the same way that an end user's never seen a farmer. That complete disconnect that we've managed to create through these large consolidated trading entities that have put this barrier between the grower and the end user that's created generations of disconnection when you Break it. When you actually get a wormhole through the. There's great excitement when you get those two parties together. So yeah, I think people wise, we're up for it. Obviously the younger generation I'm sure is definitely up for it, but I don't think the Saolis are going to hold things back too much.

No, certainly there's some of the people I've seen and I think what I've found really interesting about this southern Queensland, northern New South Wales region is I don't want to say it doesn't happen down south, because it does, but it certainly seems like there's a mindset here and some of the businesses I know, Doolan Agriculture at North Star, working quite closely with bakers and making sure they're bringing them on farm, as you say, Stuart and Lyndall with Malsters and whatnot. And I know it's happening, but it certainly seems like there's a hunger up in this region to be driving that and I'll say in control and pulling levers as opposed to being the puppet.

Yeah. The difference between Southern Australian agriculture and Northern, I think would be. I don't fully understand, but we are younger up here as an industry. You know, it's a Southern Australia's got 50 to 100 years on us kind of thing in terms of tradition and all of those things. Queensland, we're brash and a bit young and not very well dressed and don't have brick houses. So there probably is a little bit. That being said, we're not very good at working with each other, which I think in the southern agricultural belt people are a lot better at working together. And that's. If you want to be relevant to a global brand, you ain't going to do it on your own, you're going to do it through working collectively. We need to get better at that.

With that customer centric agriculture and farming. And I guess it's a provenance question. Do you see it coming down to individual farmers? Do you see it coming down to regions or is it brand Australia? What do you see in the conversations and things that you're privy to?

I think it's going to be customer specific, but we have the technology now to make it paddock. You know, there's not a. It's pretty much not a load of grain that we couldn't, couldn't say which paddock it came out of. Yeah, you know it all. So then you ask your customer, what do they want to know in general, they won't want to know the paddock. They might want to know the farm, they definitely want to know the region. And it's pretty important you don't tell them what they don't pay for as well. So yeah, just because you know it don't. No reason to tell them.

Tell me more about that.

I've got these things that upset me, but a ticket to play. This assumption that traceability in particular or environmental compliance or any of these things are tickets to play that as farmers we simply have to bone up and get with the program and once you've done it, then you can join in the market and participate. I remember back when I was at Stoneman's, we were the second food processing company in Australia to be ISO 9002 accredited. The first was another macadamia business and we were about 4 hours difference in timing between when he was accredited and when I was accredited. Bugger. He just happened, he happened to be closer to the auditor than I was. Anyway, it was a big deal. It was very soon after this with a piece of paper and my ticket, I went across to Japan and thought, man, this is going to be it. This is the door. This is going to open the door for everything. And I slapped it on the table and, and they had a look at it and said, ah, very good. Now Mr. Durek, the price. And I thought, wow, I haven't used this at all. I haven't created any advantage for myself at all. I've used it simply as a ticket to play. I had to have it, but I hadn't got a premium out of it. So I think as we track down this process of traceability and transparency and accreditations and whatever else, we need to make sure that the customer actually does want what we're doing. And the best way to figure out whether somebody wants something is that they pay for it. So try not to get into a situation where you're giving something away for free. If they get it for free, they won't respect it, they won't use it, they won't value add on it. Whenever I hear that term ticket to play I get very stressed and think that's it's not going to end well for both sides because you know, we're not getting paid sufficiently to do it properly and it'll become a compliance based tick that's a meaningless. There are a whole lot of those accreditations in all of our industries that really don't mean a lot, but they don't cost a lot. People say, yeah, I'll be in that, yeah, no worries. Well why be in it? If it wasn't hard to do, then it wasn't worth doing.

I like that. So what's the focus for you over the next few years? In the different things? I know you've got the beef side, but also from a grain perspective through pure grain and others. Like what are you looking to focus on and where are you looking to have your impact in the near term?

Too much, I must admit, when you get. I've never really believed that older people had great. Had a. What's the name in some. What's the name of wisdom or some experience is not a great teacher. It doesn't help all that much that you've been around for a long time, I don't think. And so I think we as older members of the game need to be careful that we're not trying to lay out the path forward. So I've got no bloody idea what the path forward is. You've got a much better idea of where agriculture will be in future than I do. I've got much, much better. All I've got is 40 years of baggage that's obscuring my view of what the future looks like. You've got less years of baggage that's obscuring your view. So I don't think it's strategic direction or anything like that too much, but it's people trying to encourage and empower people to. To go for it and trying to get better people into our industries. I think we kind of. The Agricultural club's not an easy club to join. I joined it from the outside and I know it's not a club that you're welcomed into very easily. It's not a club that looks very welping or I shouldn't say that for sure. That's not entirely true, certainly these days. But yeah, I think more my focus would be on trying to make sure that we get smart people in and that retain smart people and we give the smart people we've got confidence to do what it is they can do. As for where we should be tracking, I'm less certain that I know where that is. And as for what technology is going to change the world and all that, again, I don't even know what they are, let alone where they. Where they. I mean, I still love technology, I still, I still love tracking it. But as for the ones that are going to make a difference, I'm not too sure. But I do think that as older members we need to step back from the driving reins and sit back more to empower those that are upfront on the, on the seat.

Well, Matthew, thank you so much for coming and joining us and having a chat. That's, it's fascinating and I love that kind of thinking at the end there. Yeah, I'd say it's a refreshing, refreshing view, but also one that is so empowering and I think provides optimism for where the future of ag's going with that mindset.

She certainly can. Well, has been an awfully fun ride for me and it's going to continue to be a fun ride for whoever wants to join the bus.

One question left then. If you were walking into the agriculture industry as a Fresh faced, young, 20, whatever year old, what do you reckon would be an area that you'd be looking to pursue today?

I'd pick an industry or a sector where you found people that, where you found people that you enjoyed being around. That's the number, number one. And some of our industries are a bit too, a bit too. Boys, clubbishes or whatever else. And if that's not you, if that's your scene, join it, go for it. It's not your scene, don't. Yeah, but find, find an industry that's got people in it that you enjoy being around and go for it. But any form of ag is going to be exciting.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Matthew.

Cheers.