James Jackson, of the Guyra branch, says he believes in “evolution, not revolution” within the organisation and has had a hand in developing NSW Farmers policy during the past two decades.

The fifth generation if his family to call “Banchory Park” home, the New England grazier and veterinarian believes it is time for NSW Farmers to sit comfortably and assert itself in territory that is obviously its own.

He said in many areas of agriculture, for instance disease management, NSW Farmers had to place itself as the obvious choice for representation

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“There’s an element of identity crisis for state agricultural bodies across the country at the moment, particularly with the restructuring going on at the National Farmers Federation,” he said.

“That’s essentially why I’m running, to help place us where we should be.”

He said while he considered himself a policy formulator at heart, “I have learned skills over my journey that I believe will be very useful”.

He said to capitalise on strong policy, good governance was needed to communicate to members properly the ground work that had been put in to form those policies.

“We need to reaffirm our relevance to agriculture in NSW,” he said.

“For instance on the live sheep export issue, we stayed silent, we should have been heavily involved,” he said, “and the elephant in the room is drought response”.

Mr Jackson said communicating with government and acting as agriculture’s spokesperson to iterate principles by which the industry operated was a crucial role that needed to be filled.

In areas such as animal welfare he said, research really needed to be communicated adequately and science and fact could help moderate the emotive language of animal liberationists.

“For instance in animal welfare, the fact when it comes to disease control and nutrition, that the caged egg industry is far ahead of free range is often lost in the debate,” he said.

“These things should be assessed in a purely objective way,” he said, and there is a lot of exciting work going on with CSIRO at the moment to introduce metrics to objectively assess industries.

As a veterinarian Mr Jackson has worked in South Australia with Central North Merino studs in the area of reproduction.

“I have also done a lot of work on various disease strategies and worked within the footrot steering committee to help bring the footrot rate down.”

Mr Jackson said he was very keen on the “many champions model” in that expert comment was needed in many specialty areas and members should be empowered to help drive policy.

“All issues are essentially local and the consequences are at the farm gate,” he said.