Trust in the farm sector can help overcome non-compliance, says VFF president

Speaking at the Fair Farms Fair and Ethical Sourcing conference, Ms Germano said demonstrating and maintaining high trust levels, demonstrated in a recent survey, was the key to successful advocacy.

Recent National Farmers Federation surveys found 75 per cent of consumers trusted farmers, she said.

"If you compare them to politicians they are down about 40 pc and the media is alongside them, so farmers are trusted," she said.

She questioned why it was that farmers were trusted, yet had to constantly demonstrate they were.

"It doesn't matter if 99pc of the industry is compliant, when the 1pc ends up in the newspapers, we are all tarred with the same brush," Ms Germano said.

"We can all go to the effort of doing compliance, but one person doesn't do it, and we are all in trouble

"We are all bad and we have all locked workers in shipping containers, we underpay them, and only pay them piece rates."

While the Fair Farms program excellent, it was the prerogative of farmers to make sure consumers continued to trust them, she said.

"We just have to make sure we don't go so far as to undermine trust," she said.

Ensuring the right policy settings for issues like compliance relied on "trying to convince the government we are pretty good people," she said.

Fair Farms, implemented by peak Australian horticulture body Growcom, is the country's only Training and Certification Program for fair and ethical employment practices on farms.

Ms Germano said the last thing she wanted was more compliance.

"That comes down to trust, I gave up on horticulture precisely because compliance is so very difficult," she said.

'The risk we take in horticulture is sometimes disproportionate to the other agricultural industries, because compliance is so very difficult," she said.

"There are really high input costs, really huge challenges affecting labour, if you can find people, then you have to work out how much to pay them through a convoluted industrial relations scheme.

Growers did not get paid "too much" for their produce.

"I think we have to a conversation about making sure the entire supply chain, the workers, the farmers, the processors, the transporters, everyone along the way are all getting their fair share," she said.

"I would question whether or not we are creating systems where the poor old grower, stuck in the middle, is the one who is challenged the most and often has the the least amount of resources available to him or her when they are not receiving a fair price for their produce."

Horticulture growers also needed to ensure they stayed viable and profitable, she said.

"If they are not profitable, it undermines everything we are trying to do, in terms of the ethical supply chain," she said.

"It comes down to trust, this is what it's all about, this is about us, as an industry, trying to demonstrate we can be trusted with our workers."

She said there was also a small group of people who seemed to have disproportionate influence in setting policies.

"I think its because we don't capitalise on telling people we are trusted," she said.

"How do we create that political influence when we have those activists going against us?"

It must also be viewed through the framework of food security, something she said had been dismissed as "nonsense" by some people

"Right now, one in three Australians has had to change how they do their shopping, because they can't afford the food that is in the supermarket," she said.

"At the same time we have supermarkets that are posting record profits and growers who are saying they are not getting a fair price, are going out of business and pulling out orchards because it has all got too hard."