Marcus Oldham AgTalk

Kate Burke founded Think Agri after identifying a need for corporate and institutional investors to have access to astute experience based advice when considering key agri-investment decisions. Knowing the right questions to ask is fundamental to sound decision making. Kate’s 26 years of experience forms a library of critical questions to ask about any agricultural investment. Kate also recognised...

Founder of Agripath, Simon has over 20 years experience in agriculture with his client base encompassing irrigation, dry land farming and grazing operations. He has Southern, Central, and Northern NSW farming systems experience. Simon’s particular strengths have been in financial analysis and planning to deliver profitable outcomes for client businesses. Simon has worked as an irrigation agronomis...

Join us this week as we discuss meat and wool commodity markets with Robert Herrmann. Robert is the Managing Director of Mecardo, a specialist in agricultural advisory with a focus firmly on the financial enhancement of primary production and price risk management. The company was established by Robert in Adelaide in 1996 under the Ag Concepts Advisory brand. With a longstanding background in agri...

Kevin M. Folta is a Professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida.  His research program examines how light signals are sensed in plants and how different parts of the spectrum can change shelf life and high-value fruit and vegetable traits. His group also uses novel genomics approaches to identify genes related to flavor and disease resistance. An innovative...

My guest today Matt Ough who grew up in Edenhope in the West Wimmera region of Victoria. He worked on the family’s sheep farm in his teens learning about animal husbandry and pasture management. When he finished his VCE at Edenhope College, Matt took a gap year working as a teller at a local bank branch. During his gap year, Matt decided to combine his love for farming and business by enrolling in...

One of the biggest lesson I leant when working as a banker was that I can learn hell of a lot about my own farm performance by looking outside the industry I grew up in. I was very fortunate as a young bank manager to be exposed to the dairy industry when I was stationed at Warrnambool in South-West Victoria. The lessons I learnt about grazing management and running a profitable farm I still teach...

ROBERT SAIK has had forty years of experience as a Professional Agrologist, entrepreneur and an international consultant who's worked with a wide variety of agriculturalists from Nigeria's Minister of Agriculture to Bill Gates on implementation of ag tech to help developing economies. Over his life he has founded over 15 companies in the areas of Farming, Agri-Retail, Distribution, Media and Ag Te...

Join us this week as we check in with the Founder and Managing Director of Market Check, Brett Stevenson, for a grain market update. Brett Stevenson, comes from a pioneer farming family in the Central West of NSW, founded AgRisk Management Pty to provide a range of grain marketing and risk management services to Australian grain growers. Brett brought a team of expert analysts and advisers togethe...

My guest this week is someone who I probably first bumped into at the back bar of the Tatts Hotel in Armidale over 30 years ago. At that stage we where both on a road to completing a Bachelor of Ag Economics from the University of New England Andrew Bouffler hails from Lockhart in Southern NSW, 70kms West of the town Wagga Wagga in the State of NSW. Andrew is the Managing Director of Valera Pastor...

Nearly six months ago to the day,  David Cornish sat down with NAB Agribusiness Economist,  Phin Ziebell, to discuss what current world events meant for farmers and how it may impact them for our first episode of AgTalk. With the recent release of the Australian budget, the first recession in close to three decades and the worldwide pandemic still causing havoc, Dave caught up with Phin...

Professor Reeves is a distinguished international leader in agricultural research, development and extension. He was a pioneer of no-till and sustainable agriculture at the Rutherglen Research Institute in north-eastern Victoria and has held a high number of senior international roles including as Director General of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico from 1995...

Kate Burke is a highly experienced independent farm consultant with a PhD in agronomy. Kate has also spent time in the corporate sector as commercial manager of one of the largest grain producers in Australia and knows what it takes to run a profitable farm business. She has over thirty years’ experience in the farming sector. This includes Research, teaching, technical and business consulting, an...

In 2015 Fiona Simson became the first female president of the Australia’s peak farmer group. Fiona hails from a farming operation near Gunnedah on NSW’s Liverpool Plains, running a farming enterprise with her husband Ed and family including broad acre farming as well as breeding commercial poll Hereford cattle. 2019 was not an easy year for farmers is that part of the world, in fact probably one o...

It was, I think, 2007 when on a typically cold Ballarat day I had the pleasure of sitting down with John Gladigau for a coffee and chat about corporate investing in agriculture. John was in the process of completing his Nuffield scholarship looking into the concept of collaborative farming. It wasn’t long till John and his good mate, Robin Schaefer from the South Australian Northern Mallee put the...

This week I had the pleasure of Robbie Sefton joining me on AgTalk. Robbie is the founder and managing director of Seftons , a communication agency providing services in corporate affairs, government and media relations, strategic communications and marketing, digital and social media, event management, facilitation and community consultation programs. Robbie specialises in facilitating groups thr...

Today we are joined by Ian Robinson, director and co-founder of Robinson and Sewell partners.   Ian grew up on a 28,000 acre sheep station near Hay running 15,000 merino sheep and 1,000 acres of irrigated cereal and oil-seed cropping. Ian has had over 15 years of banking experience across a broad range of disciplines including business banking at a regional and corporate level in Austral...

In this weeks episode we speak with Dr Frank Mitloehner Dr. Frank Mitloehner is a professor and air quality specialist in cooperative extension in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis. As such, he shares his knowledge and research, both domestically and abroad, with students, scientists, farmers and ranchers, policy makers, and the public at large. He is passiona...

It is my pleasure today to introduce to you Jason Trompf. Jason is the inaugural winner of the Marcus Oldham Flock Leader award, part of the Lambition awards that were kick of this year Jason grew up on sheep properties and developed from an early age a passion of the Sheep Industry. I first ran into Jason many years ago when he was completing his PhD. What stuck out for me about that PhD and I be...

My guest speaker this week has had a very long and illustrious career in agriculture. Mike's ag management journey started out in Narrabri NSW where for thirty years He managed a cotton operation. In that time he was instrumental in the development of the Cotton industry Best management Practice guide. The Cotton Industry Best Management practice program is recognised as world leader in industry w...

One of the main themes running through this podcast series is the concept around good decision making. In this podcast episode, I want to explore decision making in a little bit more depth. To help me with this I am joined by Zoe Creelman Zoe's a freelancing agriculturalist based in south west Victoria. She cut her teeth with Southern Farming Systems, working on the Grain and Graze project that lo...

The issue of leadership is an ever-increasing topic of discussion around the world especially in these times of covid. You often here someone say ‘All we need is better leadership and we wouldn’t be in this situation’. But what is leadership? It’s a question that has interested me for a long time. Many years ago I was fortunate enough to be a participant in the Australian Rural Leadership Course....

Welcome to the Marcus Oldham AgTalk podcast. My guest this week is Dr Harm Van Rees. In the early 1990s Harm began consulting to growers across the Victorian Wimmera and Mallee. He became well known and highly regarded throughout the farming industry for his instrumental roles in the MEYCheck (Maximum Economic Yield) and Top Crop programs which were transformative in the 1990s in terms of driving...

Join us this week as we discuss meat and wool commodity markets with Robert Herrmann . Robert is the Managing Director of Mecardo, a specialist in agricultural advisory with a focus firmly on the financial enhancement of primary production and price risk management.

 Join us this week as we discuss meat and wool commodity markets with Robert Herrmann . Robert is the Managing Director of Mecardo, a specialist in agricultural advisory with a focus firmly on the financial enhancement of primary production and price risk management. The company was established by Robert in Adelaide in 1996 under the Ag Concepts Advisory brand. With a longstanding background...

Join us this week as we discuss commodity price grain and oil seed forecasting with the Founder and Managing Director of Market Check, Brett Stevenson. Brett Stevenson, comes from a pioneer farming family in the Central West of NSW, founded AgRisk Management Pty to provide a range of grain marketing and risk management services to Australian grain growers. The discussions on this podcast are for g...