Two of the most reliably misreported stories in Australian agriculture, back to back. First, foreign ownership of farmland — which gets trotted out every election cycle with a side dish of xenophobia and almost never with the actual numbers. Then the question every consumer asks and every producer resents: if beef costs that much at the checkout, why isn’t it showing up at my farm gate?
Episode 9 Is Foreign Investment Threatening Aussie Farms? Plus, Why Are Supermarket Meat Prices So High? – Agsolutely Fabulous
The foreign ownership panic, by the numbers
When I was a kid it was the Japanese buying up everything. Then it was the Chinese. Now it’s Canadian super funds. The cast rotates, the script doesn’t, and it always turns up somewhere near an election.
Katja pulled the register, and statistics are funny things — the same data presented two ways will either have you calm or have you writing to your member. The version we read on air showed the total area of agricultural land with a level of foreign ownership sitting around 53 million hectares and, at that point, slightly falling. Meanwhile the media coverage read like an invasion.
Since we recorded, the trend has turned. The most recent register puts agricultural land with some level of foreign ownership at 50.262 million hectares as at 30 June 2025, up from 49.120 million a year earlier — 13.0 per cent of Australia’s agricultural land, against 12.7 per cent the year before. So it’s rising, modestly. The Northern Territory carries the highest share at 27.8 per cent and Tasmania is next at 24.1 per cent, while New South Wales sits under 5 per cent. Livestock country dominates the total at 43.742 million hectares, with cropping a comparatively tiny 3.398 million.
Two things worth holding onto. “A level of foreign ownership” is not the same as foreign-owned — a great deal of that land is partly Australian-held, and a large share is leasehold rather than freehold anyway. And the scary headline stat, that 85 per cent of foreign-held agricultural land is used for livestock, is not the same claim as “85 per cent of the industry is foreign-owned.” It’s 85 per cent of a slice, not 85 per cent of the pie. That distinction gets lost every single time.
“Corporate bad, family farm good” is not an analysis
Here’s my genuinely unpopular opinion: if a business is employing Australians, producing Australian goods, paying Australian tax and operating under Australian law, I struggle to get worked up about the postcode the capital came from. We are extremely proud of not subsidising our agriculture, and then a lot of us turn around and ask for protectionism, which is subsidy wearing a hat.
It’s also worth noticing that the most successful family farms in this country almost all run inside a corporatised structure, because it’s an efficient way to run a business. The line between “family farm” and “corporate” is far blurrier than the debate allows.
What I do have real sympathy for is being priced out. You’ve watched the neighbouring block for fifteen years, you’re ready, and something backed by a super fund lands on it. That’s brutal, and it’s the same story as every young person trying to buy a house. But that’s a competition-and-capital problem, not a nationality problem, and dressing it up as the latter gets us nowhere. We’re a trading nation. If our trading partners read us as sneering at their money, they will take it somewhere else.
And underneath most of it, as ever, is succession. If you get your succession planning right, a lot of the foreign investment panic simply doesn’t touch you.
Why the shelf price and the farm gate price don’t move together
The old narrative was greedy farmers. That’s shifting, slowly, as people get their heads around how long and how complicated the chain actually is.
Start with the obvious thing that isn’t obvious to anyone outside the industry: I don’t sell meat. I sell animals. The cattle that leave here today aren’t food for another two or three months, because mine go on to be backgrounded or finished in a feedlot in New South Wales or Queensland before they’re anywhere near a carcase weight. Katja’s cattle come off in better condition and travel less far, so her timeline is shorter. From calf to sale is generally twelve to eighteen months either way. There is lag baked into a biological system, and no amount of consumer outrage speeds up a cow.
Then there’s the structural bit. I’m a commodity supplier. I produce bulk and I take the price on the day — the only people who control the final price are the ones who control the supply chain, and that’s a completely different business model involving accreditation, farmers’ markets and a lot more of your own labour. Everyone in the middle has a profit margin to protect, and when their costs rise, their price rises, because they hold the power in that relationship and we do not.
The bit that isn’t a conspiracy theory
I used to work in a saleyards office. Agents from competing agencies would gather around our free coffee before a store sale and discuss, out loud, what orders they had to fill and the maximum they were prepared to go to. It was an open secret. Everyone saw it.
That’s not just a grudge from behind a weighbridge computer. The ACCC’s cattle and beef market study found shortcomings in price reporting and carcase grading transparency, and raised explicit concerns about conduct affecting the competitiveness of saleyard auctions — including collusion among buyers. It noted that commission buyers frequently act for multiple purchasers with overlapping orders, which quietly removes competition from the ring, and that agents acting for buyer and seller simultaneously creates a conflict of interest. Its recommendations were objective carcase grading, better market reporting, and measures to reduce the risk of collusive conduct at auction.
Worth being precise: those are findings and recommendations about market structure and risk, not a set of proven cartel convictions. There are plenty of agents doing an honest, transparent job and getting a fair result for both sides. But when the national competition regulator writes down that auction collusion is a live risk, we can probably stop calling it paranoia.
What makes it bite is that livestock are alive. They have to go when they have to go — you’re out of water, out of feed, or the next mob is coming through — and everybody on the other side of the transaction knows it. We’re not asking to be protected from the market. We’re asking for a market that behaves like one from both ends.
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