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Audio and transcript

Roy Hamilton

Roy Hamilton

We've got 1200 hectares of wheat in and 700 hectares of canola, and then about 150 hectares of triticale.

We've got a flock of ewes; we've given Webbers away because there's not enough money in wool to make it worthwhile, running just wool cutting sheep at the moment.

We believe we're probably doing, as an industry, and I suppose I'm talking about the grains industry now, we're as close to best practice that we possibly can be because we're the least subsidised of any of the nations that are growing wheat.

Say this place had a gross income of a million dollars. I think in the States it would be about $320,000 of that would be coming from the government directly, in the EU it's about $420,000 and here it's around about $40–50,000 and that's extensions that we get provided with from the Department of Agriculture and those sorts of things.

I really feel sorry for people who worked in what was called the Department of Agriculture because the state government has screwed it around that many times and this short-term thing of ... There was one brilliant example a few years ago that they decided they would give redundancy packages to around about 40 per cent of their agronomists, and some these guys had been at the Department 20–25 years and this is this knowledge and the feel for the area.

And then 18 months, two years later they decided they had a chronic shortage so they got all these kids coming out of college, as raw as you can get them, they'd come out here and you ask them something and the poor little fellas they'd be looking in the book.

They just stuffed 'em around so badly, that sometimes I feel that we're better off without the government saying we're providing all this when it's really not.

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