“We are looking through the issues, but without knowing the full deal, Australia has been selling off its agricultural assets for some time and I don’t know if we want all of our major agribusinesses in foreign hands.

“GrainCorp said in their press release they needed to acquire AWB to get the scale to become a truly global competitor.

“It saddens me a little that Australia doesn’t seem to be able to hang onto its agribusinesses.

“However, having said that, growers will be serviced one way or another and we respect the fact that it is a commercial decision that must be made by AWB shareholders.”

Mr Mailler said the issue of potential negative connotations of dealing with a foreign owned company had to be weighed up against issues of diminished competition in some sectors of the supply chain in farmers minds.

“There is potentially good and bad in each proposal.”

He said that Agrium’s position of strongly backing its local representatives to run the business was a positive for Australian growers, but said he was not sure what the company’s direction for the company would be.

“We’ve seen that they are mainly involved with retailing of farm inputs and grain marketing is new to them, so we will closely watch their trading capacity should the deal go through.”