 That's the last set of seminars I was involved in. It was called Young Farmer Boot Camp. And it's where the issues of young farmers, aspiring young farmers really were brought to my attention from my normal perspective, which is this one. 30 or 40 community seminars over five years across rural Victoria talking about, with communities about the issues that concern them and going through the data about them. And one of the perennials that came up was the issue of young farmers. This one's from a northeast Victorian community. I can just give you a summary of, a one sentence summary of three of the communities around this area, the big issue. This one, it was faith that the young sons will take over the farm when they retire at the age of 60. Considering that that's two hours drive from the nearest supermarket, that was a pretty brave expectation. Another community nearby, total anger at the government and everybody else in the world because their kids couldn't afford to farm after them. And then Buckin, I'll mention Buckin, that's an interesting one. The anger there was against one or two farmers who were responsible for depopulating the whole region to the north by basically buying up farms to aggregate. So, this is filtered up through communities to government and I was commissioned to look at the issue of young farmers for Rurdec a couple of years ago. And that study started off with this graph which sort of explains in simple terms what the concern's about. That shows the number of young farmers in Australia that's aged under 35 from 1976 to 2001. That's a 75% decline. Now in face value that looks shocking. I hope you like the pictures next to it by the way. It shows that the young farmer issue has been a bit of a noble aspiration through the generations. We did some modeling looking at how to explain that decline. And when you start looking at the factors it all seems to make a lot of sense. 61% the green of the decline is just due to the decreased number of farms, farm aggregation. You have fewer farms, there are fewer opportunities for young people to get into farming. The next line, the next sector, 21%, that's due to changes in the workforce that are common across the whole of the workforce. Basically, education taking a greater proportion of the preparation for joining the workforce. And also entering the workforce later because of the growth in gap years and the like. Then the green is about, that's about retiring later. People are living longer on farms. They've got better health. There is better equipment for labour saving, particularly on grazing farms. You look at what's happened in hay preparation, for example, hay storage. And if someone lives longer, works longer on the farm, it takes longer for an opportunity for someone else to come up. And then you've got another small amount, 4%, people are marrying later. And for every farm household, there's one member of that farm household, the couple, that's come there through marriage. And if you're marrying at 30 rather than 23, that means it's a lot later until you start appearing in the statistics. And the final yellow there is what's left that wasn't explained by this modelling. So when you think about all that, I don't see any reason to complain about longer periods of education. I think marrying later is just one of those things that's happened. I don't see there's anything morally undesirable about that. And being able to work later, work longer in the career that you love is certainly a gift that shouldn't be sneezed at. So all that's left really is farm aggregation. So I'm gonna look at a bit more into this in some detail. We did some extra investigation. We looked at three types of farmers. The word farmer in the ABS has three meanings. One's owner operator, one's employed farmer and manager. And then there's a group called farmers working for nothing on the family farm. And they are a reasonable number. And finally, there's farm labourers, which we excluded from it. They don't count as farmers there in other categories. But I'm gonna have a look at, I'll just leave the, I know you had a little bit of giggle in some of you at the unpaid family labour. I'm gonna leave that one aside. That's for another time. But I was talking about owner operators and employed farmer managers. And the totally different occupational behaviour of those too and what it means for the youth of our farm sector. Hang on. This is dividing up those three groups. It's a percentage of each age group. And I'll just make a simple point here that the blue is owner managers. And the owner managers, there's very few in the young age groups. I think there's a fair bit, a little bit of boostering of one's position in how one feels in the census even potentially for the 15 to 19 year olds. But that increases up to about the age of 45 and then it's reasonably constant. The contributing family workers, that tends to increase with age. You can make a few explanations for that. My own looking at it is one of them is, it's part of the transition between generations on larger farms. But there's also an element of the farm acting as a refuge against an unfriendly workforce for other members of the family in their mid-career who've suddenly found themselves unemployed. There's an element of that as well. And then the green is employees not owning a business. And that's, that is certainly highest in the younger age groups. Looking at the two, just going to go through two measures for you to get to this what's a calling and what's a job. This is the exit rate by age from owner operators. And it's stacked with different sorts of exit. I won't go through in detail. I don't think I've got time. But I'll just say in there, there's going from owner operator to unpaid work for the family, that's large. Going from owner operator to taking off farm work and still working the farm, that's big. Retiring in later years and staying on the farm, that's large. They're the three main occupational movements amongst owner operators. The purple one there, the purple is actually leaving agriculture for another industry. And that is about half a percent to one and a half percent per annum amongst mid-career farmers. It's very small, high occupational stability there. And then there's retiring and leaving the farm, which isn't very large, and moving into paid management as a farmer, which is hardly there at all. So essentially that looks to me like farming as a calling. It's not a job, it's not even an occupation. The things that farmers do are all directed at staying on the farm. You might say that's to protect capital, but it's also because of, I think, the sense of being one's own master of independence. A whole lot of explanations out there. One of the downsides of that is this map. This comes from a new data set, an experimental data set that we've commissioned, NATSEM, to create a synthetic data set of farm household income and income structure using the survey of income and housing, artificially linked to the University of Canberra's survey of rural welfare, rural wellbeing. And that shows that in parts of rural Victoria in 2011, the estimates were that there were up to 30% of households in some areas were living on incomes below the poverty line. That happens when people will make a direct, a conscious decision to keep farming despite the low returns and the hope that it improves, or just because they don't want to do anything else. In our own survey, 30% of households are quite explicit saying they're prepared to do that, to avoid having to work off the farm or to leave the farm. So that's the downside of calling. It's very stable, but you have these income problems. You compare that with the farm managers, the employed farm managers. This is their exit rates. And the only colors that stand out are retirement in later years, that's the green and the purple. Remember the purple on the previous graph, which was leaving agriculture and moving to another industry? That was hardly visible on that graph. On this one, it's about 12% per annum. It's about 10 times the rate of exit from agriculture for own operators. So that doesn't look like a farming as a calling. That looks like this is just a job. So it's not the activity of farming and farm management that makes the difference. It's the sense of being to a degree in control of your own destiny, I suspect. So it sheds light, this, on a few things, like the recruitment problem into agriculture. We keep hearing that we have a recruitment problem bringing professionals into agriculture. Perhaps we have a recruitment problem because we have a retention problem. As an observation on that, in the state I come from now with the new Melbourne model, I think it takes five years to get an agriculture degree, in those five years, half the people employed as salaried farm managers will have left agriculture. So there's a guaranteed continuing demand while that turnover remains. So I've gone through this for a purpose to come back to the young farmer question. You can look at an absolute numbers and you get that frightening graph to some people that I showed at the start of the 75% decline during my working life. But this is another take on it. This is young farmers as a percent of the total farmer population for about 35 countries. And I'll just make the comment that the left of the graph, the red is Australia and the only one to the left of us with a higher percentage of young farmers in New Zealand, that's because they've got more dairy farmers and people don't hang around on dairy farms in later years, which gives them an unfair advantage. So in a sense, you could say that we have, we don't have a young farming, if anyone has a young farming problem, we're sure it's a young farmers. It's countries in the other parts of the world, like Japan, which is the pink one, which is about 3%. The USA is on about 5%, that's one of the Greens. Canada is on 9%. So we're exceptionally well-placed in that regard. The other side of looking at this, though, is that half of those people that are counted as young farmers in that figure will be salaried rather than owner operators. And we've got a high turnover there. So in a sense, the high turnover ensures that the replacements are young and that maintains our high score on the young farming percentage. So I don't know if that's good or bad. It's sort of like different, it's glass half full or glass half empty. While we have a high turnover, we're going to continue to have a younger farmer population. And while we have large farms, as we get increasing numbers of large farms that have to employ a manager, then we're going to have more people in that category. So we might actually see an even younger workforce in the future. So my declining comments on this come back to how I deal with this when I meet the anger in those rural communities I was talking about at the start. The declining number of young farmers, it's important to the state of rural communities. And they're not concerned about employed farmers. When they say farmer, they mean owner operator. And they basically mean their own children. But for the farming sector in aggregate, what counts is the proportion of young farmers, not the number of them. And there, we don't seem to have a problem compared to other jurisdictions. In fact, and it's even better than those numbers suggest because we have this situation where there's a really strong correlation between size of farm and age. The older the farmer, the smaller the average farmer size. So when you're in just the age, the calculation of farmer age for scale of farm output, one way looking is rather than looking at a group of farmers in Australia and picking the median age, say let's grab an apple from the supermarket. What's the most likely age for the person who produced that apple? And that brings the measure of the median farmer age down from 55 to 45 by a number of calculations attempts we've done to do it. Which means in terms of production, our farmer age is quite young. It's younger than a lot of other professions. And you start comparing it with managers as a whole. It's pretty normal. But part of that is because we have that retention issue. And so it's a matter of judgment as to whether the industry thinks it's better to have a retention issue or a young farmer population. And I just finished by saying it's going to change as the number of large farms increases and the retention issues are going to increase. And I think that's time to hand over to the university person on 15 minutes. Well done. Thanks very much, Neil. Maybe just if I could get a bit of a break there for a minute. Before we move on to the next speaker, I just thought we'd do a quick check that maybe there's any immediate questions or clarifications. So we will keep moving through the rest of the presentations before we open up for questions. But is there anything anyone wants to just clarify with Prisbar before we move on? Yep, very quickly. You might need to speak very loudly. No, you can stay and speak from the chair. I can't see much evidence of that. The exit and re-entry is associated with part-time farming. My suspicion is, and I think there's a worthy research project which I'm not going to do, so here's a hint down there, my suspicion is it's got a lot to do with isolation, partnering, issues that are very hard for the employer to manage. The re-entry happens, those people that are taking off-farm work, once they hit 55, they come back in droves. Once the kids are independent, they no longer need that extra income, they really want to farm, and that's where the massive re-entry happens. So next speaker, I'll introduce him from here. I think that's probably going to be easiest.