FAMILY farming advocate Emma Robinson is a step closer to seeing a beef cooperative become a reality in northern-central Queensland after being named winner of the Queensland Rural Women’s Award for 2016.
The mother-of-three was taken by surprise when the announcement was made at a gala dinner in Brisbane but is looking forward to consolidating her research and taking the concept to the industry this year.
Mrs Robinson will use the $10,000 bursary to progress her producer co-operative model to help family farms achieve greater scale, efficiency and market advantage through co-operation.
She wants to make her project a “shopfront” for producers and industries interested in connecting with the cooperative idea, with a forum earmarked for later in the year.
“I want to promote cooperative agriculture through social media,” Mrs Robinson told the North Queensland Register. “There’s a lot of research being done and I would like to pull that together so its in a useful form for producers.
“There’s experts that I would like to contact and work with to nut out some of the details of forming cooperatives and I’d also like to connect with producers interested in the cooperative model.”
Mrs Robinson, who helps run a breeding and finishing operation across 52,609 hectares and three properties at Charters Towers and Clermont, has been toiling away at the idea, prompted several years ago after calls were made to end “ma and pa farms” if Australia was to position itself as the food bowl for Asia.
In 2015, she used a Winston Churchill Trust Fellowship to travel to America, the United Kingdom and Canada looking at beef supply chain innovation and how farmers were getting more market leverage by working collectively.
“In my travels I saw lots of companies leveraging the family farm brand,” Mrs Robinson said.
“Consumers are increasingly interested in where their food comes from and cattle producers are having to show a better connection between the paddock and the plate.
“As producers we need to own that brand rather than passing it on to someone else to make a margin out of it.”
Her ultimate goal is to see a beef cooperative established in northern-central Queensland for finished cattle.
