Originally published by Meleva Thorn of WAMN News
29.05.2026
WA’s top farmer invites city slickers in Perth to visit as seeding season is underway following fuel supply crisis.
WAMN News recently spoke to local farmer and WA Pastoralists and Graziers Association Ex-President Tony Seabrook about the challenges facing local growers.
Changes to live sheep export laws, the subsequent closing of agricultural infrastructure, and the ongoing mouse plague and fuel crisis, are only adding to an already difficult – but critical – career choice.
Fuel in York, where Mr Seabrook farms, is 183.7 cents a litre according to Fuel Watch, compared to 169.9 in North Perth.
“Our last load of diesel cost us $3.38 a litre, the penalty is the doubling of the price of urea as a fertilizer, [this] compounds the margin, and the profit we’re supposed to make isn’t that great,” he said.
“And when you lose that to the extreme increase in prices, there might be a lot of farmers this year that end up working for all year for not very much, or maybe even a loss.
“And that’s where we go back to, we need a ripping good season. If we have a bad season and bad yields with high costs, there will be an enormous penalty paid.”
Mr Seabrook explained that farming was a very “capital intensive” business.
“But we only ever get to use the gear for such a very short period of the year,” he said.
“And the big tractor that we’re going out to have a look at now, that will work for maybe six weeks in the entire year, and then there’s nothing else we can do with it, nothing, so it just goes back in the shed.”
With the farming community currently going through the seeding period, good machinery – and good weather – are vital.
Despite the challenges of the agricultural industry, Mr Seabrook “wouldn’t have it any other way”.
“I wake up in the morning, and I think to myself, ‘How lucky are you to be out here’’,” he said.
“This is one of the greatest places in the world to be alive.”
Mr Seabrook likes the country due to the isolation from the bustling crowds and neighbours of the city, and the satisfaction he gets from managing his own piece of land.
“There’s an enormous sense of satisfaction in managing a piece of land with great care, and this farm is being managed with great care, and I really enjoy looking at what I’m now going to call the fruits of my time as a custodian of this piece of land,” he said.
“…So, I think when to answer the question, I like the solitude of it…The freedom, the autonomy, and the satisfaction, I think, of seeing a crop that you planted grow, and it requires fertilizing, it requires a great deal of the management and care, but there’s a huge satisfaction in doing it well, and seeing the crop turn out well.
Unfortunately, Mr Seabrook believes that those living in the city do not understand the farming life
“It’s getting tougher and tougher and tougher, and the frustrating part about it is that the people that we need to talk to about the issues around health and education and distance aren’t even faintly interested,” he said.
“There’s no votes in it. They’re not even faintly interested, and it’s causing massive harm to rural people all over Australia.”
Furthermore, Mr Seabrook says this influences the decision of young people to move to the city.
“They want more out of life than rising to a challenge, and so city life, look at the end of the day, you can go to a bar, you can go to a restaurant, you can go to the beach, you can go to any form of entertainment,” he said.
“The city has so much more to offer, and you need to tune yourself to enjoying things that aren’t like that, and it’s difficult. Young people don’t want to do that.”
The agricultural industry does not have “a grand future” according to Mr Seabrook.
“Our costs here, and largely coming out of government, are just going up all the time, and the margin just gets finer and finer and finer, and we’ve had a run of very good seasons now for the last four or five years,” he said.
“It doesn’t last forever. There’s always a bad one just around the corner.
“This might be one of them, and it’ll really and truly bring it home to everybody if this turns out to be a drought year, because we need good years to survive and bad years will be brutal.”
