Ashley James left a short meeting with Agriculture Minister Murray Watt last week frustrated at not hearing the bad news of when his industry would be shut down.
The WA Livestock Exporters Association vice chairman was also downcast after hearing face-to-face that the live sheep by sea trade could not be saved.
"It's interesting in a sad way. We finished the meeting, and I went home and watched 4 Corners and the poor farmer pushing his cherry trees over," he said.
"We have got farmers in WA doing that with their fence lines now, where they are saying they are out of sheep. Selling what animals they have if they can and knocking the fences down and just growing grain."
The Orange-based cherry farmers' poignant margin squeeze story set fire to a simmering public anger over supermarket pricing that even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese bought in to.
On the other side of the country, however, Labor's phase-out of the live sheep by sea trade comes at a brutal time for an industry getting back on its feet and opening, renewing or expanding markets.
This includes three new sheep and cattle markets currently being negotiated between the Federal Government and Iran, Iraq and Morocco.
The latter is the most likely to be granted a new health certificate protocol given political issues that will stand in the way of deals with Iran and Iraq.
Meanwhile, Mr James said he told Mr Watt last week in Perth that the industry would like to see the ban reversed - only to be told that it "would not happen" and the phaseout was "just a matter of time."
"I also wanted to know when the report was going to be released but he wouldn't give us anything on that," he said.
"We asked are we talking one month, two months, three months, and he just said: 'I cannot tell you'.
"We were given an opportunity to meet with the Minister, but that is all it was, when we walked out those doors we were no better off than we were last December. I thought we would've gotten something."
The government has held fast to its 2018 policy pledge to ban the trade and was handed a report four months ago authored by an Independent Panel formed to advise it on how and when to best phaseout the industry.
Labor has repeatedly said it will take its time to get the transition right and decision-making is still to reach Cabinet or go through the government's finance committee where questions around compensation for farmers will be discussed.
"The hard thing for us is we are not talking corporates or the top end of town, as I made quite clear to the Minister, we are talking family businesses here whether they be truck drivers, farmers, exporters. But it will affect so many, nurses, school teachers," he said.
"It will have a big impact across rural WA, businesses are going to shut down and that will hurt small towns."
The industry veteran said the pain was already being felt with processors not buying lambs, exporters having stopped making business decisions, like replacing vessels, quarantine facilties and feed lots in holding patterns and jobs - and opportunities for young people to enter agriculture - being lost.
"It is all up in the air," he said.
It is believed however that Mr Watt agreed to meet with WA live sheep exporters again at a later date.
Mr James still holds out hope that the panel report may save the industry, saying that WALEA met with representatives three times and were impressed by how shocked they were when hearing the potential fallout.
"Maybe they thought it was just a few exporters that would lose business. A transport operator living in a small community met the panel and told them he would have to sell two of his three trucks the day the industry is closed," he said.
"So, the town mechanic would be out of work, along with the two drivers, and they have five kids out of a school with 10 children in it. Does that school then close?
"We can only hope the panel represented what the farmers, exporters and country towns were saying to them. And the Minister sits down and has a real good look at the report and what this will do to regional WA."
