Former WAFarmers president John Hassell reflects on farming advocacy and providing voice for industry

East Pingelly farmer John Hassell continues to advocate for the Australian farming community despite stepping down as president of WAFarmers earlier this year.

A fifth-generation farmer descending from pioneer Captain John Hassell, Mr Hassell has farming in his blood.

He crops a combination of wheat, barley, canola, oats and lupus across 1400ha and has a self-replacing flock of 3500 Merino ewes.

Since stepping down from the helm of WAFarmers at the end of his four-year term earlier this year, Mr Hassell has had more opportunity to spend time and focus on his farm.

Kojonup farmer Steve McGuire took the reins from Mr Hassell as WAFarmers president.

“There’s no shortage of things to do, so I haven’t been bored; we’ve been straight into seeding,” Mr Hassell said.

“My son and I did the entire program between the two of us. I think we did pretty well — got in and even got the long weekend off in June.”

Living on farm with Mr Hassell is his wife Michelle, son George, daughter Chelsea and three grandchildren.

Mr Hassell’s latest venture is installing tile drains to address waterlogging in paddocks, improving yields, suppressing weeds and disease, enhancing soil structure, and allowing for optimal seeding, spraying and spreading.

“It’s a contracting job that I’m looking forward to, and I enjoy getting out and talking to people,” he said.

Mr Hassell is still actively against the Federal Government’s ban on live sheep exports and remains a firm supporter of the sheep industry despite dropping prices, and remains the vice-president of the National Farmers’ Federation.

He said farmers were turning away from sheep to cropping as a result of the ban and “massive downward pressure” on the price of wool.

“It’s not so economic to run wool, and the price of sheep meat and the productivity of sheep is not growing as fast as cropping,” he said.

“It’s an economic reality that you do more cropping.”

In the lead up to the Federal election, Mr Hassell spent time as a campaigner and spokesman for Keep the Sheep — lending his voice to the communities that would be impacted as a result of the ban and not simply because he was a farmer.

“It’s been a major change that, unfortunately, has had an impact on the schools, the footy teams, and the local IGA — all these things that the Keep the Sheep campaign was about,” Mr Hassell said.

“If I don’t have live sheep to sell, or if I can’t sell live sheep, the price goes down — I’ll change my enterprise mix and I’ll survive, but my community won’t.

“It was only ever about community, about the truck drivers, about the shearing contractors, about all the people who you know actually make up a part of our town.”

He said the “worst thing” about the announcement of the ban was there was no set date for it to come into effect.

“There was no incentive for anybody to put any incentive, any money, or any investment into any part of the supply chain because it could have been banned the following week,” Mr Hassell said.

“No one knew.

“I think that huge amount of uncertainty just absolutely knocked the confidence out of everybody.”

Mr Hassell said the ban announcement led to an almost immediate oversupply of sheep, causing the price of sheep to crash “almost instantly”.

“I think the Federal Government made a massive mistake in doing that, and in doing that I don’t think they realised just how much damage they did to our communities and to our businesses,” he said.

As NFF vice-president, Mr Hassell is focused on ensuring farmers across the country receive representation, as is the case with South Australian farmers experiencing the drought.

“We’re trying to find ways around getting fodder from WA through to SA, which has got some restricted biosecurity there,” he said.

“They put a kind of blanket ban on WA . . . they need to probably have a closer look at where their biosecurity issues are, because WA is pretty good in terms of no serious disease issues.

“They’ve got one little pest that they’re worried about — the green snail — and we’ve got to try and find a way of making sure they don’t take it across the border when they take hay and fodder.”