Dr Philip Holmes receives OAM for service to livestock industry

Staying in business always comes down to making decisions based on science and economics.

After 50 years of working side-by-side with livestock producers, first as a country veterinarian and then as a consultant, that is the one thing Dr Philip Holmes is certain of.

For the role he has played in helping to guide many beef and sheep farms across the nation to a sustainable and viable future, Dr Holmes today is awarded an Order of Australia medal in the general division for service to the livestock industry.

"It's Dr Science and Dr Economics that is receiving this award, not me," he said.

"They have never once let anyone down."

Dr Holmes, who today is based at Huskisson on shores of Jervis Bay on the NSW South Coast, ran a rural vet practice based out of Wellington for seven years after graduating from Sydney University.

"But vets are just another farm expense and I wanted to help farmers make money instead," he said.

So he went back to studying to learn farm financial management and animal production and then started the job of building up a consultancy practice working with clients looking to improve the performance of their flocks and herds.

"Forty years ago the appetite for evidence-based agriculture was almost zero," he said.

"To be honest, it's not that much better today.

"There has, for example, been no big uptake of genetics in either sheep or cattle - what comes from EBVs (estimated breeding values) is ignored by the majority despite its proven potential."

Dr Holmes met up with fellow consultant David Sackett and Holmes Sackett - one of the biggest names in the ag consulting space - was formed in Wagga Wagga in the early 1990s.

That partnership goes down in history as developing the process of farm benchmarking and the widely-utilised Business Edge Training Packages with Meat & Livestock Australia.

Holmes Sackett was sold around 2007 to the next crop of up-and-coming consultants and Dr Holmes continued to consult under his own name, greatly expanding his beef work in particular to all over Australia.

In recent years, his work on the Australian Beef Report with Ian McLean of Bush Agribusiness has been highly regarded.

He's known as a straight shooter who doesn't mind upsetting the apple cart and he happily admits to people 'rushing out of talks I've given to let my tyres down'.

"I've been a pariah to many fads - cell grazing, regenerative ag, flat boned cattle, soft rolling skin in sheep," he says.

"The problem is they distract people from the path they should be on, which is evidence-based decision making.

"That has never been an appealing message because it's the hard path."

Even today, he rather controversially says the biggest problem with beef production is that the only barrier to entry is financial capital.

"If you have bucks you can become a big beef producer and you may know nothing," he said.

"By comparison, a brain surgeon can't buy his way in."

The other problem he sees is that producer attitude is so dreadfully difficult to shift.

"Technology and science moves ahead in leaps and bounds but adoption rates on-farm are terrible," he said.

"So much potential is wasted.

"But there are always one or two on the same wavelength - using science and economics to make change in the right direction - and they keep me going."