I’ve been chair of the Young Producers Council for around 10 months now. Since then, the council’s main focus has been addressing the issue of financial literacy – especially among young producers across Queensland.
The main thought process behind that reflects a lot of our general conversations with other young farmers on the ground – particularly when it comes to lending.
There’s a lot of terminology out there that people just don’t come across on a day to day basis.
Not unless you’re in professions such as accounting and lawyers and the like.
So with that in mind, we set ourselves a goal of creating an “agri-wealth document” as a way to address this.
The whole idea is it’s a first point of contact for people aged between 18 and 35 to help out when they come across confusing terminology and want to know where different professions fit in with one another.
It gives tips on how they can work as a team with the main areas – in particular accountants, lawyers, and financial planners.
It also addresses some of the financial products out there, both in the private sector and some of the grants that are available through public funds.
There’s a lot of ins and outs, particularly with things such as EBPC act coming in, that is putting more financial strain on producers.
The ability to be able to wrap your head around a balance sheet has never been more evident in our opinion.
We’re not trying to tell everyone exactly what to do.
All we’re doing is giving people the information as a starting point, and introducing them to some professionals who know what they’re doing – starting relationships by connecting people.
In my own personal experience and the experience of other professionals I know in this area who are quite successful, the first point of contact is to get educated, take on a bit of risk and go from there.
So that’s been our main focus for the last little bit, just trying to get that up and running.
Another area we’re looking into as well, particularly with the new AgForce chief executive officer Niki coming on board, is re-evaluating our sponsors who we work with.
As part of that we’re doing a little bit of outreach, putting the feelers out to different people we might be interested in working with and seeing where that fits in well.
We’re very fortunate that at a very base level, a lot of people are looking to work with young producers.
We’re trying to see what options are out there because it certainly hasn’t been something that’s been done in the past.
We’re always looking at different relationships with new people moving forward, particularly oriented around companies and products that we as young producers use on a day-to-day or monthly basis.
That way it makes a lot of sense for both us and our members as well.
