SHOW the world you are a proud beef producer, Consolidated Pastoral Co boss Troy Setter told a Beef 2024 audience yesterday, suggesting the industry should take a leaf out of the success of the Yellowstone TV series.

“I think we apologise too much as farmers in Australia,” Mr Setter told a breakfast seminar yesterday.

Prue Bondfield, Troy Setter and Sue McCluskey at this week’s McCullough Robertson breakfast

“Look at the United States. They’re super-proud to be ranchers. They’re super-proud to be croppers. They wear their hat. They wear their boots.

“We don’t wear a hat proudly through the airport like they do in the US and South America. We need to stop jumping at consumer shadows that don’t exist,” he said.

Former Palgrove principal Prue Bondfield, who is now serving on a number of boards, recalled her first directors’ dinner meeting with a conservation group.

“I thought they’d be ordering the vegetarian meal. They all had steak,” she said, adding: “We’d fit quite well in some of those groups. We have the same outcomes in mind.”

She diagnosed a gap in beef’s public relations platform. “We treat each other well, but we treat the media with some disdain, especially the metropolitan media. I think the utilisation of those avenues is going to be a good outcome, one that we get to create ourselves.”

The industry could not look to its representative groups to be the sole public spokespeople, Mrs Bondfield said.

“It’s not just their job. They can only do so much to promote and progress the industry to the outside world. The problem with representative organisations is they still have to please and communicate to their own members, because it’s the members who give them support.  I think what they’ve done for a long time is to please the members to what they might like to hear.

“But we also have to keep middle Australia happy, the lady who is shopping at the supermarket, and that’s a really tough thing to do.”

Su McCluskey, the Federal Government’s Special Representative for Australian Agriculture, told the gathering that every time she tried to speak to media, it had gotten to be what people in the city are listening to, and what they’re reading.

“I am trying to find a way to those people who understand that they need to eat, and making that connection to what we do as farmers.”

McCullough Robertson’s Duncan Bedford chaired the breakfast, saying his three small children brought home from school stories about farmers and what they did.

“They don’t talk about food and fibre, they talk about knocking trees down and killing koalas. And they know so much about methane. When I was their age we made jokes about methane.”

The group discussed several new initiatives in agricultural education, especially bringing it into the classroom earlier in the curriculum.

Mr Setter warned:  “Education is expensive and you’re competing for space against lots of other industries. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, but there’s all sorts of little things we can do. Anything we can do that isn’t huge cost, where people don’t have to pay a lot of money for, is where we all have to be pushing.”