5 May 2026. Shane McCarthy, AgForce General President.
As every day goes by with the current price of fuel and fertiliser and growing unease about supply, it gets us closer to a crisis point.
It's not just the fact that we're worried about reliability of supply - there's more concern now over the rising price. The price of fertiliser and the price of fuel has now more than doubled in just six short weeks of this latest unrest.
But even if my costs as a producer have doubled, I'm not getting double at the farm gate.
We run on a slim margin as it is. So to have two of our biggest input costs more than double, while still getting the same price for what we produce, means we've got to make some tough decisions. As a farmer, this comes down to whether I can afford to plant, and whether I can afford to harvest.
Myself as a livestock producer, I now have concerns about my animals getting to where they need to go. Whether that's fattening country, feedlots, or to market. I have concerns about them getting there not only because of supply, but also because of what's it going to cost me. What's the ultimate price that I will have to pay?
Then there's the price of and the availability of the right produce at the feed lots. Is there enough produce out there for the feedlots to keep upright?
So the burden soon becomes that you fall below the cost of production.
This is what we worry about. We can see it coming. And add onto that the impact of the oil refinery fire in Geelong. How much more pressure does that put on everything?
With the Strait of Hormuz closed, the lag time between ships getting through and getting to where they need to get to is concerning. It all goes back to our sovereign risk.
It doesn't matter how much gold or critical minerals we're pulling out of the ground. While we still need those for mining companies to make profits to employ people and to keep the national accounts ticking over - it's hard to eat those products.
I can't sell cattle at a saleyards and then say, "By the way, there's a 40% surcharge on them". I can't sell a crop of wheat or chickpeas and say, "By the way, there's a 40% surcharge on those." Yet a lot of the time the producers are not only bearing the cost of getting the crop off, but the cost of getting that to the market.
With all our inputs going up along with interest rates, how many producers is this going to be too much for, and they end up going out of business?
Food security is currently our greatest concern. We don't want to get to the point where people start wondering what's left on the shelf at the supermarket.
There was a federal paper released last year that stated that agriculture needed to be put up on a pedestal with defence and other critical industries. We need to see it that way and really put agriculture in a far more valued position. That's what we need to learn from this.
AgForce has now put a Fuel and Fertiliser Taskforce together to not only work on this problem, but to come up with solutions to take to government to help get our way out of this. Because we need to not only take our problems to government. We need to be willing to take solutions as well.
