Stephen Sheridan installed as Australian Dairy Farmer chief

Record dairy prices may look good, Stephen Sheridan says, but input costs are closing the milk profit gap.

Rising input costs are squeezing primary producers and processors, the new chief executive of Australian Dairy Farmers says.

Stephen Sheridan recently took over the reins as ADF’s top administrator, succeeding David Inall in the top job.

Mr Inall now serves as chief executive of the Master Grocers Australia group.

Ongoing flooding across northern Victoria and the Riverina would compound Australian dairy’s input-cost challenges, Mr Sheridan said.

Australian Dairy Farmers chief executive Stephen Sheridan

The new chief executive will tour flood-hit regions in coming weeks, talking with farmers about government and industry assistance.

“The cost of inputs, whether it be workforce shortages, energy prices, fertiliser, electricity, gas for the processors,” Mr Sheridan said.

“Feed costs, which have been affected by the floods. All of that is impacting input costs and in turn impacting your profitability.

“So inflation and interest rates are a problem across agriculture, but particularly dairy, being so energy intensive.

“While we’ve got higher prices domestically and higher world prices as well as increased demand, that’s the positive side of the coin, you’ve got to take a wholistic approach that these input costs are really eating into profit margins.”

Prior to taking over the ADF top job, Mr Sheridan served as chief executive of the Victorian Farmers Federation.

He is also a current director of Rural Financial Counselling Service Victoria and a former manager with the Australian Wheat Board.

Mr Sheridan told The Weekly Times that rising house prices in Sydney and Melbourne had given many jobseekers pause for thought.

He said a generational shift towards regional areas would help to counter-balance the rural-to-urban population drift of the 1990s and 2000s.

“You’re seeing young people seeing the value of agriculture. In the past few years, with better connectiveness, better technology, is making a shift to regional areas more attractive,” Mr Sheridan said.

“During the pandemic, many people saw the benefits of regional living. That’s a positive sign for agriculture but that’s not to say there aren’t labour shortages, there are, but we’re better placed in terms of population movement than we were only a few years ago.”

Mr Sheridan grew up on a mixed cropping and livestock property near Dubbo before completing a Bachelor of Agricultural Economics at the University of New England.

“I’ve worked in everything from quality assurance to supply chain management, acquisition, trading — it’s given me a good appreciation of the commercial drivers of agriculture.”