23 July 2026
For four very different Queensland agribusinesses, the crisis arrived on an ordinary day.
For a Townsville turf farm, it was a drought that turned neighbours into critics. For a Toowoomba fodder supplier, it’s a biosecurity risk that never really goes away. For a Darling Downs feedlot family, it was 100 activists stepping through the front fence on a quiet Saturday afternoon. And for the strawberry industry, it was a handful of sewing needles that became a national news story within days.
Four businesses, four very different crises - but the same lesson each time: how you communicate in the moment can matter as much as the crisis itself.
These stories were central to QFF’s Managing Communications During a Crisis Program, which was developed in partnership with the Queensland Government and delivered by Blue Hill Agency to help farmers and agribusinesses across the state’s food, fibre and foliage sectors prepare for the unexpected.
Four crises, one throughline
At Paragon Gardens Turf Farm, three years of drought brought daily criticism from strangers online, accusing the Moncrieff family of wasting water. There was no big media strategy - just a decision to stop absorbing the criticism in silence and start telling their own story, on their own terms.
At Feed Central, the crisis hasn’t happened yet - and that’s the point. Based near active fire ant control zones, the Toowoomba hay and fodder business has built its entire communications approach around a threat it hopes never eventuates. When a real incident did test the plan - an accident involving a contractor on site - the business had already worked out who talks to media, what gets said, and what doesn’t.
At Lemontree Feedlot, the crisis was immediate and confronting. When around 100 animal activists breached the boundary fence on a Saturday afternoon, the McNamee family’s instinct to stay calm rather than confront protected both their safety and their case. Police were called, footage was gathered, and industry bodies stepped in to carry the media load - lessons that later helped shape stronger trespass penalties under Queensland law.
And in the 2018 strawberry tampering crisis, an incident involving fewer than eight punnets of fruit escalated into a national scare that shut down markets. The industry’s recovery hinged on a single, coordinated voice - and a simple shift in language, from “food contamination crisis” to “food tampering incident,” that took the panic out of the headlines.
What ties them together
Read side by side, these four stories point to the same handful of lessons, regardless of the industry or the size of the business:
- Have a plan before you need one. The businesses that coped best weren’t improvising - they’d already worked out who speaks, what they say, and when.
- Take a breath before responding. Every business in these stories talks about resisting the urge to react immediately and using that pause to check facts and agree on a message.
- Speak with one voice. Confused or contradictory messaging did more damage than the original incident, in more than one of these stories.
- Know your facts. From water usage to production costs to biosecurity protocols, the businesses that could respond with facts rather than defensiveness came out the other side with their reputation intact.
- You can’t always stop a crisis - but you can decide how you respond to it.
Resources built from real experience
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. They’re drawn directly from the experiences of Queensland farmers and agribusinesses who’ve lived through a crisis and come out the other side with hard-won knowledge to share.
The Managing Communications During a Crisis Toolkit brings that experience together into practical, farmer-tested resources, including:
- Communication plan templates that can be adapted for crisis preparation on your own property or business.
- Real scenarios and exercises, tested in workshops with farmers and industry across Queensland.
- A plain-language guide to managing media enquiries for farm owners and managers.
Whether the risk on your radar is biosecurity, extreme weather, an accident on farm, or public scrutiny of your operation, the earlier you start thinking it through, the better placed you’ll be if it ever lands on your doorstep.
Learn more about the Crisis Communications Project via the webpage here.