MATTHEW MADDEN ELECTED AS GPA CHAIR AS BARRY LARGE STEPS DOWN AFTER LANDMARK TENURE

Grain Producers Australia (GPA) has elected Northern Region Director Matthew Madden as its new Chair following the organisation’s Annual General Meeting today. 

Mr Madden, a New South Wales grain producer from Moree who has served as GPA Deputy Chair since 2023, succeeds Barry Large, who steps down after five years as Chair and sixteen years of service on the GPA Board, including as one of the organisation’s founding directors. 

Southern Region Director Mark Schilling has been elected as Deputy Chair. 

The AGM also marked the departure of Independent Director Mitch Hooke AM, one of the most influential figures in Australian agricultural policy of the past four decades, who retires from the GPA Board after eleven years of service. 

GPA Western Region Director and outgoing Chair Barry Large, GPA Northern Region Director and Chair Matthew Madden and GPA Southern Region Director and Deputy Chair Mark Schilling.

A new Chair: Matthew Madden 

Matthew Madden is an experienced dryland grain grower from Fairfield, east of Moree in northern NSW, producing wheat, barley, chickpeas and sorghum. 

A graduate of Orange Agricultural College with an Associate Diploma in Farm Management, Mr Madden has spent 37 years working in and managing his own farming business.  

He has also worked in local agribusiness supplying specialty grains into both the domestic and export markets - experience that has given him a practical understanding of the grain supply chain from paddock to port. 

Mr Madden has been a member of the NSW Farmers Association Grains Committee since 2016 and its Biosecurity Committee since 2018, chairing that committee from 2018 to 2021 before his election to the GPA Board.  

He completed the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ Company Directors Course in 2019. 

In his GPA board roles he has represented grain producers on Grain Trade Australia’s Trading Standards Committee and Wheat Quality Australia’s Classification Council, and chaired the Industry and

Government Working Group on Grains Workforce Solutions. 

Farming location: Fairfield, Moree, NSW. 

A new Deputy Chair: Mark Schilling 

Mark Schilling is a fifth-generation farmer from Cunliffe on South Australia’s northern Yorke Peninsula, on a property owned by his family since 1925. He took over management of the family business in 1995 at the age of 28. 

Under his management, the AG Schilling & Co partnership has substantially expanded its land ownership and production acreage and diversified into a machinery import company, a seed cleaning and export business, and a mouse bait manufacturing and retail operation. He is a significant lentil producer, and a partner and manager of a vertically integrated grain and fodder supply chain agribusiness. 

Mr Schilling has an extensive record of building grower-owned and grower-focused enterprises, including as a founding member of the YP Buyers Group (1994–2000), founding Director of Direct Fertilisers and Direct Fertilisers International (1998–2003), founding Director of Northern Yorke Processing (2001–2010), founding Director of Grains Innovations Australia (2003), a Director of Balco Australia (2011–2014), and founding Director of AG Culture Pty Ltd, Yorke Premium Pty Ltd and Their Last Supper Pty Ltd. 

Critically for the national body he now helps lead, Mr Schilling was a founding Director of Grain Producers SA (2011–2016) and has served on its RD&E Committee since 2019. 

Farming location: Cunliffe, Yorke Peninsula, SA. 

Thank you: Barry Large 

Barry Large has farmed at Moorlands, Miling, in the northern WA wheatbelt for more than 30 years, growing hay, cereals, lupins and oilseeds. 

Mr Large’s contribution to GPA begins with the organisation itself. He was one of GPA’s founding Board members, helping build a new national advocacy body for grain producers out of the industry roundtables that followed the winding down of the Grains Council of Australia - and helping establish the direct, grower-funded membership model that underpins GPA today. 

He served eight years as Deputy Chair to Andrew Weidemann AM before being elected Chair in 2021 and has specialised throughout in biosecurity policy and market access. He chaired the Grains Industry Market Access Forum during its transition to Grain Australia and is a Director of the Council of Grain Grower Organisations, a founding member of GPA. As Chair of GPA’s Biosecurity Committee, he has been GPA’s delegate to Plant Health Australia, the Emergency Plant Pest Response Deed, the Consultative Committee on Emergency Plant Pests and the National Management Group. He is a former Chair of the WA Grains, Seeds & Hay Biosecurity Management Committee and former Vice Chair of the PGA Western Grain Growers Committee. 

Key achievements of GPA during Mr Large’s term as Chair, GPA include the Scrap the Tax campaign against the Biosecurity Protection Levy, the Australian Grains Industry Biosecurity Plan, the Farmer Mates Mental Health Initiative, and the autonomous machinery code of practice. 

Thank you: Mitch Hooke AM 

Mitch Hooke AM retires from the GPA Board after 11 years as an Independent Director, contributing to GPA’s Nominations & Remuneration and Strategic Planning work. 

Raised on a sheep property in Victoria’s Western District, Mr Hooke completed a Bachelor of Rural Science at the University of New England and began his career as an agronomist on the Darling Downs, where he was an early adopter and advocate of zero and reduced tillage farming systems. 

He went on to serve consecutively as Chief Executive of the Grains Council of Australia, the Australian Food and Grocery Council and the Minerals Council of Australia, across more than 35 years of national and international industry leadership. 

His imprint on the grains industry is structural and permanent. As Executive Director/CEO of the Grains Council of Australia he helped lay the foundations for market-oriented grain marketing and handling arrangements through the deregulation debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s and was a key architect of the establishment of the Grains Research and Development Corporation — personally credited with delineating GRDC’s agronomic zones across State borders, and with establishing the ad valorem levy that still funds grains RD&E today. He was also a key player in the agricultural negotiations of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. 

Mr Hooke was named University of New England Distinguished Alumni in 2010, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) on Australia Day 2016 for significant service to business, particularly to the mining and minerals sector, to policy development, research and trade opportunities, and to the Indigenous community. 

Quotes 

Matthew Madden, incoming GPA Chair 

“It’s a real privilege to be asked by my fellow directors to lead this organisation. GPA exists for one reason - to make sure the people who actually grow the grain have a strong, independent voice when decisions are made about our industry. 

“I’ve farmed at Moree for 37 years and I know what matters to growers is pretty consistent across the country: getting a fair return, keeping our markets open, keeping exotic pests out, having access to the tools and technology we need, and making sure our levy dollars come back to us as value in the paddock.

Those are the things GPA will keep pushing on. 

“I want to acknowledge Barry Large. Barry helped build this organisation from nothing and then led it with a great deal of skill and a lot of hard work. Following him is a serious responsibility. I also want to thank Mitch Hooke, whose counsel around the board table has made all of us sharper. 

“I’m looking forward to working with Mark Schilling as Deputy Chair. Mark brings a commercial, supply-chain view of the industry that complements the policy work we do, and the whole board is looking forward to getting on with it.” 

Mark Schilling, incoming GPA Deputy Chair 

“I’m honoured to take on the Deputy Chair role and to support Matthew in it. 

“I’ve spent my working life looking for ways to add value for growers - through the farm, through the supply chain and through grower-owned businesses. That’s the same instinct that took me into Grain Producers SA as a founding director, and it’s what I want to bring to GPA nationally. 

“Australian grain producers are among the most efficient in the world, but we operate in a policy environment that can either sharpen that advantage or blunt it. GPA’s job is to make sure it sharpens it. 

“Barry Large leaves very big shoes to fill, and Mitch Hooke leaves a legacy most of us have benefited from without necessarily knowing it. On behalf of growers, thank you both.” 

Barry Large, outgoing GPA Chair 

“Standing down as Chair is not an easy decision, but it is the right time - and it’s a lot easier when you’re handing over to people you trust. 

“I was there at the very start, when a group of us sat down and asked whether Australian grain producers could build a genuinely independent national voice, funded by growers themselves. Plenty of people told us it couldn’t be done. Today GPA has a strong membership, a seat at every table that matters, and the credibility to be listened to on biosecurity, on trade, on RD&E and on levies. That’s the thing I’m proudest of. 

“Biosecurity has been my particular focus, and I’d say this to every grower: the work we do to keep exotic pests and diseases out of this country is the cheapest insurance our industry will ever buy. 

“Matthew Madden has been an outstanding Deputy Chair and he’ll be an outstanding Chair. Mark Schilling is exactly the right person alongside him. To the GPA members, the staff and my fellow directors - thank you. It has been the honour of my working life.” 

Mitch Hooke AM, retiring GPA Independent Director 

“My career started in the grains industry and it’s fitting that it finishes there too. 

“The Grains Council years were formative for me - the deregulation debates, standing up the GRDC, the Uruguay Round. What I learned then was that this industry is at its best when growers organise themselves properly and argue their case on the evidence. GPA is the modern expression of that. 

“Serving on this board has been a genuine pleasure. Grain producers are pragmatic, commercially minded people who will back a good argument, and Barry Large has led them with distinction. Matthew and Mark inherit an organisation in good order. 

“My advice, for what it’s worth, is to stay independent, stay evidence-based, and never underestimate how much ground can be lost when an industry stops making its own case.” 

ENDS

Further information:

GPA Chair Matthew Madden: 0457 731 210

GPA Deputy Chair Mark Schilling: 0408 859 308

GPA Executive Officer Rachael Oxborrow: 0416 705 193