Despite industrial action and factional disputes sugar cane's future looks sweet 🍬 | ABC Australia

It's cane harvesting season. Russell Hall is a third generation farmer. His grandfather started on this farm with tobacco in the 40s. Around 20 years later, the family switched to sugar cane. He's seen some changes over the years. It's been a very lucrative industry over the years, but probably in the last decade or two, it's starting to decline. Why has it been starting to decline? Wasn't a great deal of money in it. Regulations then came in. They're trying to cut back our production through nitrogen and phosphorus budgets. So we're coming out on the other side of that with some really good prices coming at us. Here in the Burdekin, they still burn cane. There's a lot of water in the area, making the sugar cane leafy. When you cut it, there's a lot of leaf litter, making it hard to irrigate. Plus, green cane is pretty difficult to cut on the machines. A cane burn runs deep into the image of white Australia. But Russell says this harvest is running later than he'd like. And according to him, it's not due to the weather, rather the sugar mills. We were sort of planning on the 4th of June and between, they're blaming union activity, but we had about three or four days of strikes. But we were probably a good 10 days or two weeks behind the eight ball right from the start. When you say they, who do you mean? Wilmar. What do you think it was then that stopped it if it wasn't union? I don't know, Helena. It's just getting to the point where every year seems to be later. They have 30 weeks to do maintenance on their mills. And I don't understand why it takes so long to do a factory up. Wilmar Sugar is Australia's largest manufacturer and marketer of raw and refined sugar products. It operates four mills in the Burdekin region and another four elsewhere in Queensland, servicing 1500 cane growers. That's a lot of mill maintenance, which we will get back to. The optics of sugar between farmer and mill to the untrained eye often seems really fraught. What's the reality? The reality is we need to work together. We need to work harmoniously with a common goal. And that common goal is to be able to process the cane in a timely manner and maximise the profitability of our industry. Industrial action halted milling in the Burdekin region since May. After 18 months of enterprise agreement negotiations, both parties accepted a Fair Work Commission offer in July to help try and end their dispute. At the moment, we are working through a union negotiation process, and I won't go into the detail about that. But what we are here to do is to be able to offer our employees a fair and reasonable outcome. But we've got to make sure that the industry remains sustainable in the long term. He says that reasons for milling delays haven't been obvious to growers. I think the division comes from miscommunication at times. And probably a misunderstanding of the critical role that we all play. Everyone's got a key part in the chain, and we all rely on one another to do that part. And I think at times we don't understand each other well enough and how our actions and behaviours can influence the whole industry as a whole. Jim Wilson from the Australian Workers Union and Liam Sharkey from the Electrical Trades Union say the issue with Wilmar is the low wages paid compared to mills operated by other companies. And the mass exodus of skilled workers we've seen as a result of that. And what do you think the main result will be if they don't come to the party? If they don't come to the party, we're just going to see people continue to leave. I mean, the real risk that the mills are facing is experienced staff, experienced staff that have been there for long periods of time. We've got members that are working in the Wilmar mills that have been there for a long period of time, that are getting paid between $10 and $15 an hour below industry standard rates. At time of broadcast, there still hasn't been a resolution. This week, Wilmar has put a new offer out to vote for their workers, and unions are speaking with their members to see if they will accept. Our members were really clear with us. They wanted to see this resolved before the crush starts. Once there's disruption to the crush, that causes issues for the community. Our members live in the sugar communities. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get that resolution. And the only avenue for our members is to continue with the industrial action, along with this assisted bargaining, and hopefully we can get something resolved. The troubles aren't regional or company specific. Right through the industry, growers have issues with mill operations. Three and a half hours drive south, near Mackay, Brooke Roebuck is learning the ropes of cane growing from her dad, as he did before her. This cane, Brooke, on this part of the farm looks spectacular. It must be ripe for harvesting, right? Yeah, so this is actually a really good paddock to show the comparison of when the cane was crushed and cut at the same time. So this cane here was cut at the right time last year, hence the significant height and ripeness. So it's ready to be cut now. But down here, you can see the obvious difference. This cane down here in this paddock was cut at a later date and practically too late for the season. So you can really see how it's affected the growth of the cane. So that'll just be a big effect on next year's yield and profitability for us. And why was it cut so late compared to this field here? So I think it's just a mixture of things between the poor milling supply and machinery at the mills and just wet weather as well. So a mix of both. But yeah, so this is the result, what you get when things just don't really work perfectly. And is that a common occurrence? In the last few years, yes. But hopefully looking forward, we can get away from that. But currently, this is what we are left with every a little bit every year. Brooke, as a young woman in a mainly male dominated industry, is an unfamiliar face in sugarcane farming. I was, yeah, a little bit embarrassed. But, you know, like I've done this for a long time. I'm not no, you know, stranger to a farm. And I don't know, I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome when I first started being a woman in the industry. But I think the longer that I've done this, the thicker my skin's got. And I don't really care what people have to say anymore. She says to be a decent cane farmer, there's one trait you need more than most. Patience, a lot of patience. You get a few kicks in the guts every now and then. But, you know, we've just got to try and soldier on and keep our head up and hope for the best. But Russell Hall's patience is wearing thin. He and a small group of other growers dissatisfied with harvest delays due to issues at the mill and labour shortages on farm have split from the peak representative body, Cane Growers. They've created a new industry group called Q-Car, or Queensland Cane Agricultural and Renewables. You're with Agforce, which is aligned with this new body, Q-Car, but Cane Growers is the main industry body. Why are there so many different industry bodies? I think it's human nature to think that someone can do a better job, whether you do or you don't. A lot of people previous to me have beat their head up against a brick wall for a long time. So I've just started that journey in the last four years. So but we always think that we can do better than the next person beside us. So how does it work with all these different bodies? Very difficult. The government doesn't really know who to go to. They go to Cane Growers, their other peak body at the present time. We're trying to sort of break down barriers and and bring a different approach to the sugar industry. Last month, Q-Car held a rally which saw politicians, union bosses and industry members turn up to see what they were about. Where do we begin? CEO of Cane Growers Association, Dan Galligan, acknowledges there are factions within the cane farming community. It can sometimes seem like a lot of tension between particularly farmers and mills, and there's sometimes different districts and different relationships on growers. There's no doubt about that. But all the work we've done with all our members are saying, look, let's resolve these issues as an industry. Let's come together with the milling and the growing sector and our marketers and our exporters and our traders and our customers. So the solutions are absolutely about working together as a supply chain. And there'll be differences. There'll be some tensions, and often it's around the seasonality of the crush and the tensions around those. John Bord is a cane farmer and harvest contractor. He's less concerned about factions and more worried about the effect the milling factory's performances was having on communities. The whole towns are suffering due to mill performance, whether it be we're starting too late in June and we're dragging on way too late into December. And the headlines that you read in the media are not not relaying this to the public. Wilmar's James Wallace says factories are having issues across the country and maintenance is an expensive part of the running costs. Operating a mill is an expensive task. This year alone, Wilmar Sugar and Renewables is going to invest over two hundred and fifty million dollars back into our factories. And that's only capital and maintenance costs. Operating the factories is on top of that. In the last since 2010, Wilmar's invested two billion dollars into our factories to be able to keep them to operate and to maximise our factory performance. On a world scale, then, how competitive are you with all of these costs? Wilmar Sugar and Renewables, one of our biggest challenges is to remain competitive on the global scale. And today we are still remaining competitive. And that's really around our sugar quality and the product we can produce, which keeps our, it allows us to get a premium in the market because of our consistent product and what we do. Despite the issue between mill owners, industry groups, farmers and workers, everyone's still optimistic about the future and potential of sugar cane. Obviously, in the sugar industry, in the last 20 years, we've seen eight sugar factories close, and that's that's something no one wants to see in terms of how we remain sustainable is we got to look at our operating models and how do we effectively operate. A part of that is diversification and looking at other options and other products for what we can do. Far from the fire of the cane fields in head offices in Brisbane, the suits have big plans for sugar cane. Mark Greenwood is the general manager for Wilmar's commercial sugar and renewables arm. A lot of people probably think of us as a sugar company, and that's where a lot of our revenue comes from. But we have many other products. So we also produce renewable electricity. So we export electricity to the grid. We produce bioethanol and we have been doing so for nearly 100 years now. We also produce renewable fertiliser and stock feed. So there are products we sell. The company produces 60 million litres of E10 bioethanol a year from its Serena distillery in central Queensland. But it's sustainable aviation fuel, or SAFs, that the company is focusing on beyond 2030. Currently, Brazil is making it from tallow from cattle or used cooking oil. And that is the cheapest source of supply, but also produces it from sugar sourced ethanol. Those projects are probably going to be complete within the next five years. And then after that, 2030 and beyond, they'll be looking for the next most affordable source of sustainable aviation fuel. And that's likely to be SAF or sustainable aviation fuel that's produced from ethanol, as we can do at our sugar mills. So rather than producing sugar, there is a potential, like they do in Brazil, to produce ethanol from that sugar juice. Cane growers Dan Galligan believes children are the future of a multifaceted sugar cane industry. Oh, we're doing some great stuff in education. That story of the circular economy has been a real, I guess, hidden secret of the industry. So we're investing quite heavily now at cane growers. We're almost entirely funded by grower levies here. But the industry has really said, let's get into schools. We're working with the Primary Industries Education Foundation. We've just launched a new education strategy to to build curriculum focused education material. So that's now almost it's available in primary schools, now available in secondary schools. Really key that in agriculture, we can't sort of wait for schools to come to us. So I think we're really positive about what we can get done there, too. A couple of years as a cane grower, Brooke has an optimistic view on the future of the industry and her role in it. I think you just have to see what everyone else is doing and decide, you know, you don't have to be a follower and do what everyone else is doing, but choose what you want to do, see what's out there.