FAMILY farming advocate Emma Robinson is a step closing to seeing a beef cooperative become a reality in northern-central Queensland after winning the Queensland Rural Women’s Award for 2016.
The mother-of-three was taken by surprise when the announcement was made at a gala dinner in Brisbane but is looking forward to taking her concept to the industry this year.
Mrs Robinson will use the $10,000 bursary to progress her producer co-operative model to help family farms achieve greater scale, efficiency and market advantage through co-operation.
She wants to make her project a “shopfront” for producers and industries interested in connecting with the cooperative idea, with a forum earmarked for later in the year.
“I want to promote cooperative agriculture through social media,” Mrs Robinson said. “There’s lot of research being done and I would like to pull that together so its in a useful form for producers.
“There’s experts that I would like to contact and work with to nut out some of the details. And I’d like to connect with producers interested in the cooperative model.”
Mrs Robinson, who helps run a breeding and finishing operation across 130,000 acres and three properties at Charters Towers and Clermont, has been toiling away at the idea, prompted several years ago after calls were made to end “ma and pa farms” if Australia was to position itself as the food bowl for Asia.
In 2015, she used a Churchill Fellowship to travel overseas looking at beef supply chain innovation.
