Ashley Wiese

Lifting up an industry: enabling export regions to be price setters

Over the past 20 years Ashley Wiese and his wife Jo have grown their land holding at Narrogin, Western Australia. They produce around 12,000 tonnes of cereals, legumes, oilseeds and oaten hay annually, as well as processing quinoa for Coles and producing gluten-free oats for Coles and markets in the USA. The Wiese family also run 10,000 sheep.

Ashley's 2024 scholarship, supported by CBH Group, will see him travel the globe to research models for how export-dominated farming regions can move from being price takers to price makers.

The study will take him to NZ, Ireland and Italy to investigate domestic value adding and the ways in which various industries have built a global reputation based on traceability, sustainability, ethical production or grower connections.

"The grains industry in Australia, especially in Western Australia, is vulnerable to global supply and demand forces, with no relevance to local growing conditions," Ashley says.

"This creates opportunities but also instances where the prices that producers receive do not reflect domestic challenges.”

"I hope to study examples of where producers and industries have built models that allow price influence, and where this has been expanded to benefit the broader industry."

Ashley chairs the Grains Australia's Oat Council and the Grain Industry Association of Western Australia's Oat Council. He has previously chaired the GIWA and CBH Group's Growers Advisory Council.