Terje, The way I see it, you are a selfish, self-centred person who really doesn't give a s**t about the rest of Australia or the real Aussie farmer. You said you grew up on the land. If that were the case, then you should appreciate the hard slog these farmers put in day after day only to be ripped off at the farm gate.

Your most recent comments are unbelievable. For an ex-farmer you should be truly ashamed of yourself. How big is your backyard - the one you plan to feed the whole of Sydney with? hmmm and how long would
you be able to keep it up? Get real. You are not the only person living in Sydney or Australia for that matter.

To quote you:- "The price would be fairer for a potential backyard farmer like me if councils prohibited imports from the country areas outside Sydney."

To feed the population of Sydney, day after day, week after week - where are you going to grow the spuds, Terje? On the roof tops of all the high-rise buildings and rip up all of the parkland in metropolitan and suburban Sydney? You should know you need an awful lot of land to grow the amount of spuds to feed that many people on a daily basis YEAR ROUND.

Tell me Terje. How many crops of spuds would you grow in a year? Considering there are 52 weeks in a year. Would you be able to keep up with consumer demand? That's what is expected nowadays. Continuous supply.

It seems most people don't understand, how markets work with respect to the price the farmer gets. We gave up growing spuds some years back because it was like playing a game of Russian Roulette.
Some years, extremely few, you may hit it lucky and get $50 a 50kg bag. However, more often than not, you were likely to end up with $8 or $5 per bag. In those days, it cost approx $13 a bag to grow and harvest (depending of course on yield).

Rarely did we hit the $50 per bag, because even if we predicted the price right, and booked the harvester contractor for that specific time, because the harvester contractor also had his own crop (due several weeks later), he harvested his crop early at the high price making us wait (although our crop was mature and his immature). We weren't the only farmers affected. It happens all the time and not just with potatoes.

We always maintained that it would be fairer if a genuine price could be fixed that represented the true costs and a decent return e.g. $25-35 (max)/bag. However, it would have to be stipulated that poor quality product would not be included in that price, otherwise the system would fail. This would also help to keep the merchants in line. The merchants are supposed to be the farmer's representative at the market. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. A lot of them (not all), are money hungry leeches out to suck as much from the farmer as they can. When the price is down and they want to buy up big, even if the farmer tries to hold on to product in the hope the price will go up, the merchants use blackmail tactics against the farmers. "If you don't sell to me at this price now, I won't buy from you next week or next month or next year..."

A few comments
Modern agriculture is heavily based on oil. Farm machinery uses oil, fertilisers and pesticides are largely oil based, transport is based on oil. There is no longer any food that is out of season as we source food from all over the globe. The amount of energy we get from food is tiny compared to the energy used to grow, process and transport our food. The green house gases caused by all of this oil consumption is not costed into our food! if it was included in the price of our food then buying local tassie spuds would be cheaper than any imported spud!!. Oil is also not a renewable resource and it is widely believed we have now used half of this resource with the remainder more costly to extract, at a time when demand (india and china) is booming. Look at oil prices now! they will likely continue to climb!!. Why is George in Iraq?? For the oil!!. I have heard that sydney has only 3 days supply of food on the shelves. if oil were too become too expensive food prices would definitely rise!!

i dont think terje is too unrealistic to talk of producing food in his sydney backyard. A family can be fed on a small amount of land using permaculture principles. A sustainable future will require food is grown as close as possible to where it is consumed.

john

You guys get real! How are you going to feed 5,000,000 people from back yard vege patches in Sydney? Most people who live in Sydney have no back yard, no fishing spots, no grazing paddocks, no dairy cattle, no canola / sunflower field. Just try making margarine from your back yard canola or olive crop. Three days supply alright! What do you do for the other 362 days? A very limited diet.

Australia could produce enough bioethanol and vegetable oil to drive every tractor and truck in Australia, and solar and nuclear energy to run every factory processing the food for the next 20,000 years. We just need to manage it properly.

Well, I understand the urge to protect Australian farmers, as a natural response when our "in group" is "attacked" by an "out group", but I do have to agree with Greg that Tasmanian farmers only want protectionism for themselves. I might be mistaken (correct me if I am please), but I think I heard that many Australian farmers complain of EU Subsidies, claiming that they are "unfair". Isn't that slightly hypocritical? I mean, if you're going to protect your own farmers, you shouldn't cry foul when others do so.

Actually, now that I think about it, it isn't so bad to want to protect our farmers. It's the natural thing to do, of course, and everyone does it, including all our major trade partners.

And you can't expect companies and CEO's to take pity on the farmers. I'm afraid that requires a human heart, not a mechanical one which pumps dollars instead of blood.

In regards to my earlier comments, all I was trying to say was that it's okay for us to protect our farmers, but it's also okay for the EU to protect it's farmers