CORRECTED VERSION

RURAL AND REGIONAL COMMITTEE

Inquiry into the capacity of the farming sector to attract and retain young farmers and respond to an ageing workforce

Timboon — 18 October 2011

Members

Mr D. Drum Mr I. Trezise Mr G. Howard Mr P. Weller Mr A. Katos

Chair: Mr P. Weller Deputy Chair: Mr G. Howard

Staff

Executive Officer: Ms L. Topic Research Officer: Mr P. O’Brien

Witness

Mr M. Nevill, dairy farmer, Mepunga.

Necessary corrections to be notified to executive officer of committee

18 October 2011 Rural and Regional Committee 54 The CHAIR — Welcome to this public hearing in the Rural and Regional Committee’s inquiry into the capacity of the farming sector to attract and retain young farmers and respond to an ageing workforce. I hereby advise that all evidence taken at this hearing is protected by parliamentary privilege as provided under relevant Australian law. I also advise that any comments made outside the hearing may not be afforded such privilege. For the benefit of Hansard, could you give your name and address please?

Mr NEVILL — My name is Mark Nevill, Great Ocean Road, Nullawarre or Mepunga.

The CHAIR — Would you like questions as we go at the end of your presentation?

Mr NEVILL — Yes, I would like an informal discussion really. That is the way I think we get most out of these sorts of forums, where we can just roll on.

The CHAIR — Could you just go through what attracted you to farming?

Mr NEVILL — I have not got an answer for that; all I can tell you is that for as long as I remember I was going to be a dairy farmer. I do not know why. We are not from a dairy background but we were brought up in a small town.

The CHAIR — What was your background?

Mr NEVILL — I wanted to do dairying and I went — —

Mr HOWARD — Your family background.

Mr NEVILL — My father was in agriculture. He was brought up on a farm and he went into agricultural contracting. By the time I was three or four he was out of that and into the Department of Agriculture, as it was then, bleeding cows for brucellosis. He worked for Kraft as a field officer and ended up in the petroleum game for probably 15 or 20 years. That was as I was growing up.

Mr TREZISE — So you were not brought up on a farm then, mate?

Mr NEVILL — No, 7 acres out of town. Anyway, I have not got a good reason why I want to be a farmer. All I can tell you is that it has been there since day one and so I was pretty focused on all that.

The CHAIR — Where did you start, and where are you now in the industry?

Mr NEVILL — As parents would do, I suppose, just trying to source what is the best thing, ‘How are we going to get this fellow into dairy?’, and all the dairy farmers I spoke to said, ‘Get him a trade. You have to have a trade to fall back on.’ That is the no. 1 problem. That is the mentality because agriculture is not good enough. That is the message you take home from that information.

So we take that all on board and enough people tell you that you really should get a trade so you go and get a trade. I am a plumber by trade. On the day I finished my apprenticeship I got into a dairy traineeship and it was all organised before I finished. So we went into that, did four years there, a dairy trainee on a reputable dairy farm run by a well-known, successful fellow. I guess with my career path I had two options for employment there. A lot of it is to do with the experience that you gain and the sort of mentor that you have and I chose the right path, I suppose you could argue, and that has helped me — it helps everyone, doesn’t it — if you have someone who can teach you the right way.

Mr TREZISE — I might have missed this point but what are the two paths you had?

Mr NEVILL — I had another employer who would not have taken me as far, I believe, with my training and learning the correct methods, if I can put it that way. So that was lucky, if I can call it luck. It was my decision the way that I went. So I did that. I was a trainee for four years and then moved on to a small sharefarm, 17 per cent, and bought some cows and part of that was a motorbike. How many cows was it? I cannot remember. It might have been 40 or something like that. A very small amount.

The second hurdle is that accessing money for young people is really tough. Now it is a heaps easier for people to get money. But it is the first step that is really difficult because you have nothing behind you. You just had to

18 October 2011 Rural and Regional Committee 55 save as much money as you could and then come to the bank and say, ‘Righto, we want to buy this and have cows and a motorbike and then we want to go sharefarming here’. You could do projected budgets of the farm that I was going to. So that was difficult. But we got it.

Mr HOWARD — As a bank loan?

Mr NEVILL — As a bank loan, yes. Looking back now, you start thinking, ‘Why couldn’t I get 40 cows and a motorbike?’.

Mr TREZISE — How long ago was that, Mark?

Mr NEVILL — I think I was about 21 or 22 when I finished my plumbing apprenticeship, then four years in the traineeship and then two years on the sharefarm — —

The CHAIR — So you were maybe 28?

Mr NEVILL — Yes, something like that. But I knew we had to get bigger. Everyone you spoke to in the industry said, ‘Get big or get out’, and we wanted to be big enough to employ people so everyone could have time off and have a lifestyle and change this view that if you are a dairy farmer, you do not get time off; you are 24/7. That was our goal. So we sharefarmed there and I grew from 40 cows to 90 cows or whatever it was. Then we started looking around for a rotary dairy because we could not milk any more where we were. We were hamstrung at growing our cow numbers. We were milking 430 or something; it was 8 hours a day in the dairy. It was full on. So I took the numbers as far as he would let me take them there and then we had to look for something bigger and we did. Then I got tangled up with a girl and it all went downhill from there. No, it didn’t — I didn’t say that. It was pressure.

Her parents are dairy farmers and we were looking for a rotary dairy and so they said, ‘We’re building one’. We ummed and ahhed and they offered us a job there. We ummed and ahhed because a lot of family things go pear-shaped and you put a lot at risk and you do not want to ruin relationships over chasing a career. They offered that to us like the old days by saying, ‘You come in and work for me and we’ll see how we go. We’ll pay you.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not interested. We have to go on a share. We have to improve my 17 per cent share to a 50 per cent share’. We were ready to do that. So we said, ‘We want 50-50 or we’re not coming because if it goes pear-shaped, at least I have improved my position and I can walk out with X amount of cows and move on’.

Anyway, we came to that arrangement and we were there. Then we bought land, an out-paddock. So we bought all the cows on a lease purchase arrangement when we went there. This is where it sort of gets a bit, ‘You had family help’. But it is getting someone to take a risk. So we did it commercially — we paid interest on these cattle and all of that — but it was getting someone to take the risk and banks would not take the risk. So we did have family help in the fact that they structured a loan at commercial rates and then took the risk on us so we could buy more cows. We bought 300. I think we had 430 cows when we went there and we just kept breeding our numbers up, and we are up to about 650-odd now.

In the meantime we bought out-paddocks and a place adjoining. Then we got to a point where the bank would lend us enough money to buy our own property so then succession planning comes into it and how that was all going to unfold. I guess it was old school, ‘It’ll be right. You’ll get the farm’. I was not going to sit around and have that either. It is a hard thing to say that, ‘We don’t trust that it is going to happen’. There was a little bit of drive in me to do it myself rather than get it handed to me. So we said, ‘We’re ready’, and in the end they said, ‘Okay, we’ll do something’. So they have sold us most of the farm. We still lease 70 acres. We went and got a bank loan and paid them out and we have been farming in our own right for the last three years.

Mr HOWARD — Do they still live on the property?

Mr NEVILL — Yes, part of the agreement was they kept their house. We own it. It would get messy if we had to try to slice off a piece, so we will let them have access for as long as they wish, and that is fine by us. We get on really well with them. You do not sack your best babysitters. And if a bloke has been brought up there all his life, you do not want to be shifting people off the land.

Mr HOWARD — So you have two houses on the property?

18 October 2011 Rural and Regional Committee 56 Mr NEVILL — We have two houses and we have recently bought another one. We employ three people. Then you shift to thinking about how you are going to look after staff and maintain them. We realised we needed housing. We really believed we needed housing. We have to focus more and more on the staff that we have and offer what we believe is a good package to attract and keep people. We have just finished building a house, and that frees one up for our second-in-charge fellow who lives there. He has our old house. Eventually when the in-laws do move out that will free up another house. We should be able to house everyone who works for us on the farm. That has been our goal because our life is good if we have good people around us.

Our team includes staff plus myself. Two of them are on a 40-hour week. They get four days off a fortnight and a three-day weekend every second weekend. We try to give them a life. If they finish milking by 6 o’clock, they can go home to their family. We try to structure it as close as we can to what everyone else in the real world is trying to do. That is what we are doing at the moment.

The CHAIR — When you advertise for someone to work for you, how do you do it? Do you just advertise or is it word-of-mouth?

Mr NEVILL — Yes, advertise or word-of-mouth. We advertise because that will get word-of-mouth going. We employ a lot of people from overseas. We have sponsored two. One girl came to us for six months and stayed with us for seven years. We ended up sponsoring her and she has citizenship now. She is from Poland — —

Mr HOWARD — From where?

Mr NEVILL — From Poland.

Mr TREZISE — Do you still employ her?

Mr NEVILL — No, she is now a masseuse up at Ayers Rock, up at Uluru. It was just time. A girl living by herself on a farm does not last forever.

Mr TREZISE — Why did you go down the path of migrant workers?

Mr NEVILL — Why do we go down that path? It is hard to find people who really want to do dairy farming. So we just opened up any avenue we could. We have had Pommies and Germans and Danes. We have someone from Ireland at the moment. But every now and then you will get one like her, who stuck for seven years. She came for six months and never left. We had a Zimbabwean there for two years, and he came in from New Zealand. We just did an interview over the phone. He was a good operator — a good cow man, a good pasture man — but he was pretty ambitious and wanted to move on to the next step, and that is great. He was really good for us for two years. I guess you take those risks that some people are not willing to take. He looked for jobs in Australia for a long time. No-one wants to take the risk of someone they do not know and someone they cannot see. Sometimes you take a risk and you get it right and sometimes you take a risk and you get it wrong. You probably go through 10 to get 1 good one, I suppose. We want people who really want to be in the industry rather than filling it with someone who is looking for a job.

The CHAIR — You did a traineeship.

Mr NEVILL — Yes.

The CHAIR — Do you have trainees on your farm?

Mr NEVILL — Yes, we had two trainees. Now I have one fellow who is going through a diploma. That is the other thing we try to offer — we try to train them and educate them if they want to do a traineeship or a diploma. The fellow we have now is an Australian fellow; he is second in charge. He took over from the Zimbabwean fellow. He did the traineeship with us and has now moved on to the diploma with Glenormiston. We sent him to school and paid for that, and he is working through that. Now I have a 40-year-old who has been with us for only 18 months. He is not the sort of fellow who will want to take up that type of thing, we do not believe. It is on offer for him, if he wants to.

You have to try to read who you have got and what they want out of it. Like the girl here before was saying, you try to tailor it if you can. If you have got a job and someone likes cows, you push them that way; if they like

18 October 2011 Rural and Regional Committee 57 machinery, you push them that way. He is just someone who had never done dairying before. We try to not worry about that. If you get someone who has never done it before you can probably teach them the way you want to teach them. A lot of people kicking around in the area are kicking around because they are probably not what we are looking for. I am happy to take on someone who has never done it and train them our way. If they stay, they stay; if they don’t like it, they don’t like it. You could take on someone who does know and still lose them in six months time. Or you could take on somebody who has never done it before and they fall in love with it and you are probably better off.

The CHAIR — Obviously you have had a few employees and that sort of thing. Has your business ever been interrupted because you could not get one?

Mr NEVILL — Yes, but we just lift a gear and cover it. Yes, definitely. You lose every second weekend off. I would rather — now I do not rush back in. Doing the 40-hour week allows you that flexibility. So you step all those guys up 10 hours a week to cover the missing person. We sharefarmed on that farm for seven years once we first got there, on a 50-50 share, before we bought it. You are sort of caught between trying to pay what you think you should pay, trying to keep the bank happy and trying to take the next step, and it is a real juggling act. To be honest with you, if I was telling my sons to go out and get a job, I would probably say, ‘Don’t go to sharefarming’. The reason is they have got so much to balance. They are trying to buy machinery, cows, land and whatever. On the other side of the flip coin, if you are under a lot of pressure, that could be very good if they are pushing to succeed. You could learn a lot, too.

Mr HOWARD — Any regrets?

Mr NEVILL — No regrets, I would not — —

Mr HOWARD — What does the future hold? What is your plan for the next 10, 20 years?

Mr NEVILL — We will probably have to retire some debt. Recently we went into partnership and bought a grain storage facility up north of Warrnambool. It is part of our business to bring in grain straight off the header and store grain for the year, to try to take a bit of risk out of that. That is something we have diversified into. It could lead somewhere. We could end up being able to trade in a bit of grain and anything coming through the door — you just always have your eyes open, I suppose — or land, if it became available. If I was still back plumbing, there is no way I would have put together the assets we have now. In plumbing working for someone else is not that well paid, yet everyone says, ‘Get a trade’. It has been good; I have learnt a lot from the trade and I bring a lot to dairying.

Mr TREZISE — Do you now think that that was good advice, about going to get a trade? Or do you think it was a — —

Mr NEVILL — People ask me this, and I am still a bit divided. I find it very, very disappointing that we cannot say to young people, ‘Go and get into dairying’. I would say to my kids, ‘If you want to do it, do it’. But you have got to be passionate about it; you have got to want to do it. There is no point going into it to fill in time as a job. You have got to want to do it; it is too demanding. In plumbing working for someone else there is not a great wage; you have got to be working for yourself. There is no difference in running a corner store or a plumbing business. They would be doing long hours, those people. It is not just dairy farmers.

The CHAIR — All right, Mark. Do you have any concluding remarks or is there a message you want to leave us with?

Mr NEVILL — I would like to see the government backing agriculture harder. For example, I have got young people working for us at home and they see this Indonesia thing and the export up there being shut down.

The CHAIR — Live cattle.

Mr NEVILL — Live cattle. They turn around and say, ‘The government is not even supporting agriculture and it wants to do knee-jerk reaction things like that’. It is sending a pretty bad message to everyone that: what support have you got? That is just one example. We need, somehow, young people being able to access money easy — someone to take a risk. I do not know how you do that; I have not got the answers. I guess we have

18 October 2011 Rural and Regional Committee 58 probably come a long way because someone took a risk on us at that earlier stage. It was all commercial rates, but someone said, ‘Yes, we’ll lend you the money to do that’. They are two issues that I find difficult.

The CHAIR — We have heard that message before, particularly about financial institutions or someone being willing to take the risk at an earlier stage and not being so demanding about getting a deposit up-front of 25 per cent or whatever.

Mr NEVILL — Yes. I know you will say I am still young, but you have your energy when you are at your youngest, and you can really go and do something with that opportunity if someone gives it to you. I do not know how you fix that, though; I have not got that answer.

The CHAIR — Thanks very much for your presentation and your time here, Mark. We did not know that you became a father again yesterday. Congratulations.

Mr TREZISE — A boy or a girl?

Mr NEVILL — A boy, the third boy, so buying land might be on the cards yet for the future — that is, if they even want to do it. I would say to them — —

Mr TREZISE — ‘Go and get a trade’.

Mr NEVILL — No. I would say to them, ‘You’ve got to want to do it; and if your heart’s not in it, go and get a trade, go and do something else’.

The CHAIR — In about 14 days you will get a draft copy of the Hansard transcript. You will be able to make any changes to obvious errors, but other than that it will be as it is.

Mr NEVILL — So this goes forward to?

The CHAIR — What happens from here is that some time early next year we will write a report. By about May next year there will be a report from this committee. There are Labor, The Nationals and Liberal members on this committee. The report will go to the Parliament of Victoria, and the government will have six months to respond to the recommendations in that report. I know it takes a long time and farmers like to do things quicker, but that is just the time it takes in Parliament. So in May the report will come out and by November the government will have to give a response as to what it will do about our recommendations.

Mr NEVILL — Yes. I just reckon — I could go on for a while; I had better get out of the way — there are a lot of issues, like water and accessing water for us in this area. That is an issue where it is very difficult to do. For example, I have a neighbour who would give me water — physically, with no cost and no money changing hands — if I was running short. But we cannot trade in our aquifer to get that water if I was running short of water. It just does not happen. It is red tape, you know. It is just crazy, and it is going to hold back the industry if we want to go forward. Anyway, I have probably said enough.

The CHAIR — Those are all relevant things that need to be looked at.

Witness withdrew.

18 October 2011 Rural and Regional Committee 59