Rick Gladigau re-elected as president of ADF

South Australian dairy farmer Rick Gladigau has been re-elected as a director and President of national policy and advocacy organisation Australian Dairy Farmers (ADF), following ADF’s AGM last week.

The ADF Board remains unchanged with Rick Gladigau from South Australia (President), Brian Tessmann from Queensland, Ben Bennett from Victoria, Heath Cook from New South Wales, and Andreas Clark from South Australia as an independent director.

Victorian dairy farmers Glenn Britnell and Ian Morris were also candidates in a three-way contest for the one seat on the Board open at this year’s AGM but were both unsuccessful.

Voting in the election was well down on last year with under half as many farmers voting. This may indicate support for the status quo and re-electing Rick as a director and president. Alternatively, this may indicate apathy from dairy farmers towards ADF with under 3% of all dairy farmers in Australia voting.

eastAUSmilk looks forward to working with ADF during the next year. It is imperative that ADF leads the dairy industry throughout Australia. Farmers have cried out for transformational change in industry structures during the failed dairy plan process. To date, nothing has happened on this front bar the merger of QDO and Dairy Connect to form eastAUSmilk. It is time for ADF to show leadership and deliver on this absolutely, fundamental requirement for dairy farmers and ADF.

In addition, eastAUSmilk looks forward to working with ADF to increase membership by dairy farmers in ADF to ensure that ADF is more representative of dairy farmers. We look forward to ADF finally admitting eastAUSmilk members in NSW as ADF members. Our members in NSW who have been blocked by ADF to becoming members of ADF are rightfully extremely confused and disillusioned. We would like to increase ADF dairy farmer membership in NSW since the number of ADF members in NSW is currently extremely low.

Eric Danzi, eastAUSmilk Co-CEO