Long-serving Gardiner Dairy Foundation board member Mike Carroll is stepping down after six years.
Mr Carroll, who had also been chair of the finance, investment and audit committee, said prior to joining Gardiner, he had been a company director at Warrnambool Cheese & Butter. As such, the departure from the Gardiner board marked the end of a long official association with the dairy industry.
Mr Carroll said his achievements at the Gardiner Dairy Foundation included making the account and auditing processes more robust and improving the organisation’s bank balance.
“When I joined, just after the Global Financial Crisis, the investment corpus was well short of maintaining the value of the original investment,” Mr Carroll said.
“The constitution requires us to maintain the real value and today, it’s up around $100 million, from an original investment of $63 million when the Gardiner Foundation was established in 2000.”
He said he was also proud they’d reduced the cost base by reducing staff numbers and focusing on a smaller number of more significant projects that would have a bigger impact on the industry.
Mr Carroll said some projects stood out during his tenure on the board; including the foundation’s investment in the Monash Industry Team Initiative (MITI), which sees Monash University engineering students placed with a dairy manufacturer to solve a specific company challenge over a 12 week period, during the university summer break.
He is also proud of the Gardiner Foundation’s investment into research projects into cattle genetics and more productive feed bases.
These projects all aim to improve efficiency and ultimately lower the cost of production, which Mr Carroll said was vital for the Australian dairy industry to compete in the global market.
“Dairy farming one of the most complex businesses there is; from my experience in the food and agribusiness sectors, it is more than other food production or processing.” He said the difficulty laid in juggling climate, biological systems that incorporated animals and plants, and a volatile market.
That volatility has characterised Mr Carroll’s final year on the Gardiner Dairy Foundation board. He said the dramatic fall in dairy prices in April forced the team to review projects. Gardiner Dairy Foundation was the first organisation to react to the unfolding crisis, by contributing $1.4m to the state-wide, collaborative industry response package that ultimately reached $11.4m. Its funding has helped programs including Taking Stock and Feeding Pasture for Profit accessible to all Victorian dairy farmers, and facilitated the roll-out of Dairy Australia’s Tactics for Tight Times program.
“The Gardiner Foundation led that work and proved to be nimble, resourceful and responsive,” Mr Carroll said.
He anticipates milk prices will improve in the longer-term, when the increased production in Europe is absorbed by the global markets.
He said for Australian dairy and other agricultural commodities to flourish, the industries had to work to maintain the reputation for very high quality products, while striving to have low-cost production. Mr Carroll said agricultural businesses also had to be flexible enough to take advantage of high prices and be able to wind back costs in low price regimes.
Mr Carroll has more than 25 years’ experience in the food and agribusiness sectors and currently serves as chair of the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation and director for Tassal, Select Harvests, Sunny Queen, Paraway Pastoral Company and Rural Funds Management and is a committee member of the Marcus Oldham Foundation. He previously held board positions with Warrnambool Cheese and Butter, Queensland Sugar, Rural Finance, the Australian Farm Institute and Meat & Livestock Australia. A new board appointment will be announced early this year.
