Time to Make a FUSS: New Nuffield Report Says Australian Grain Should Stop Selling Commodity and Start Selling Food
“As a farmer I had always focused on selling our grain. Now I was thinking about solving someone's problem.”
When you sit down to breakfast, you don't choose between Australian oats and Canadian oats. You choose between oats, toast, congee and eggs. That's the reframe at the heart of a new Nuffield Australia report from 2024 Scholar Ashley Wiese, who argues the Australian grains industry has been selling the wrong thing: grain, instead of food.
Ashley Wiese, 2024 Nuffield Scholar, farms sheep, grain and hay with his wife Jo at Narrogin in WA's Great Southern. Supported by CBH, Ashley visited close to 100 businesses across Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Kenya and the United Kingdom to find out how other industries have broken away from commodity pricing and created real value for producers.
“As a farmer I had always focused on selling our grain,” Ashley says. “Now I was thinking about solving someone's problem.”
Ashley's report argues that consumers don't connect to agricultural commodities, they connect to food, and industries that create real value tell food stories, not farming stories. Certified Angus Beef built a global brand by talking about steak dinners instead of carcase traits. Ireland's Bord Bia lifted the value of Irish dairy and beef exports by packaging sustainability data and provenance stories that supermarkets could use, without ever taking title to the product.
Ashley knows the model works because he's built it himself. His family's Three Farmers quinoa and Red Tractor wheat-free oats, grown on the same WA property, have replaced imported products on Coles and Woolworths shelves, with the oats now the best-selling product in Woolworths' health food aisle two years running.
His report recommends the grain industry fund a dedicated, pre-competitive body to collect data and tell consumer-facing food stories, filling the gap left since the Australian Wheat Board's single desk was dismantled in 2008.
Ashley's full report is available on the Nuffield Australia website. He presented his findings at the 2025 Nuffield National Conference in Adelaide.
