MC: Past President Peter Dakin
Reflection: Past President Adrian Nelson – the transcript of Adrian’s reflection is included later in this bulletin.
President Philip welcomed all to the 37th meeting of the Rotary year and our 5,120th meeting in the club’s 105-year history.
President Philip especially welcomed Guest speaker, Charlie Thomas, CEO of the Victorian Farmers’ Federation, and Club Guest Catherine Freeman to be inducted as a Rotary Melbourne member at this meeting. Full details of all visitors and guest are included later in this bulletin.
President Philip then invited Susan Barton to come to the podium, to introduce our new member, Catherine Freeman, for Catherine’s induction ceremony. An introduction to Catherine is a separate article in he bulletin.
After welcoming Catherine to the club, President Philip announced that all members will shortly receive an email message inviting contributions to Rotary Melbourne’s annual appeal which provides invaluable support to Club projects.
He then drew the weekly raffle, following which he called Chair for the day, Peter Davis to the podium to introduce our guest speaker.
Charlie’s Thomas’s address articulated a strong case for rethinking how Victorians understand agriculture. He began by noting that many Melburnians see farming through a romantic or boutique lens: premium cheeses, Wagyu beef, and farmers’ market produce feeding Melbourne’s celebrated food culture. While that image is partly true, he said it misses the scale and strategic importance of Victorian agriculture.
Victoria, despite having only about 3% of Australia’s agricultural land, produces around a quarter of the nation’s agricultural output. It exports roughly $20 billion in produce to 172 countries and is the only State with five commodity sectors each generating more than $2 billion a year. It also supports one in every two food manufacturing jobs in Australia and produces more than half the country’s agriculture graduates. In his view, this makes Victoria not just a quality producer, but an agricultural and food manufacturing powerhouse built on productive land, value-adding capacity, and research capability.
He compared Victoria to the Netherlands — a small but exceptionally productive agricultural nation that combines science, logistics, and export strength. Victoria, he argued, has similar potential: the Port of Melbourne, strong research institutions, a sophisticated food sector, and proximity to Asia’s growing middle class. With global population growth heading toward 10 billion by 2050, this creates enormous opportunity for Victoria to become an even more important supplier of trusted, high-quality food.
Against that optimistic backdrop, Charlie highlighted three major challenges.
The first is stagnating productivity. Farmers are being squeezed by a harsh economic reality: farmgate prices are not keeping pace with inflation, while input costs such as fuel, fertiliser, machinery, labour, land, and water are rising sharply. For decades, farming remained viable because of productivity gains — from the Green Revolution through to improved genetics and modern cropping systems — offset those pressures. But that rate of improvement has slowed. The industry is no longer making transformational leaps, but incremental improvements. As a result, many family farms are surviving only by getting bigger, taking on more debt, and buying neighbouring properties, with serious consequences for local communities.
The second challenge is pressure on agricultural land. Victoria’s prime farmland is under increasing competition from housing, renewable energy, mining, and carbon projects. Charlie was clear that these developments can all have merit, but argued that the planning system fails to properly value agricultural land or assess cumulative impacts. Too often, farmland is treated as vacant space waiting for development, rather than as a strategic national asset essential to food production and regional manufacturing.
The third challenge is input insecurity. Australian agriculture is heavily dependent on imported fuel, fertiliser, crop protection products, and machinery. Charlie warned that recent supply disruptions have exposed just how vulnerable this makes the sector. Reliance on overseas suppliers — especially for fertiliser and chemical inputs — creates real food security risks in an uncertain world.
In closing, he argued that Victoria has extraordinary strengths but cannot rely on luck or momentum alone. The State needs deliberate policy and stronger public understanding. His central message was that agriculture should be seen not as a nostalgic rural backdrop, but as one of Victoria’s great strategic assets: vital to the economy, essential to food security, and full of future opportunity if productivity, land protection, and supply-chain resilience are addressed well.
Chair Peter Davis thanked Charlie for his compelling address, and closed reminding members of next weeks meeting on 22 Apri where our guest speaker, Don Farrands KC will speak on the story of a Western Front Stretcher Bearer in World War 1.
The full video of this meeting can be viewed here
Charlie Thomas’s Address can be viewed here
