There is only one piece of business advice I ever learned. It was in an advertisement in an American magazine for some huge investment fund. ‘Don’t compete; be different’.For some reason those words have stayed with me and I thought of them again yesterday when I was talking to my neighbours. Both of them are serious cattle farmers. By that I mean they graze with purpose and are definitely not rank amateur farmers like I am.

Both of them shoot kangaroos and one of them in particular has been very busy the last few weeks, peppering the peaceful dusks with his gunfire.

The other neighbour, to my east, informed me yesterday he has now decided to cease his shooting program. It is just not worth the grief for him from his neighbours on smaller properties who oppose the noise and culling.

It is also, both men acknowledge, a terrible waste because of the rules around such shooting.

The animals must be shot, tagged and let lie to rot on paddocks, attract vermin and send neighbouring farm dogs nuts. Wasting tonnes of protein in a world where poor people are rioting for food is an obscene insanity.

Even worse the culling in its current form achieves nothing but a psychological salve.

Even though my eastern neighbour shot around 70 roos last year it is not enough to make a dent in the local population. To rid the landscape around here of the man-sized marsupials would require a drag line of shooters working across the paddocks killing hundreds over a period of weeks.

And it is just not practical for my neighbours to do that – a bit like cutting a paddock with a pair of nail clippers.

The guy on my western side is only able to shoot two or three each evening – not much gain for missing out on night after night with his family, television and a warm fire.

Both men are being squeezed on two fronts. On the first is evolution: an eastern grey kangaroo is sublimely and magnificently adapted to the rural landscapes created by European farming. And on the other front is Woolworths.

No matter what happens on agricultural land in the eastern seaboard, kangaroos thrive. They are as close to perfect for Australian conditions as any herbivore can get. Drought: no problem. Flood: no problem. And all the while graziers feel like Elmer Fudd in the face of not one Bugs Bunny but a trillion.

Woolworths is a bit the same. No matter what is happening with agricultural prices they continue to screw the farmers.

The economics of my neighbours and I running cattle is now so dubious that it is hard to justify doing it.

Which brings me back to my original point: it is time to stop competing with the northern hemisphere agricultural paradigm of turning the countryside into a Sussex or New Hampshire theme park and create something genuinely Australian.

As the guest viewpoint writer this week, Fiona Grubb, points out in her piece, Australians respond to the idea of eating kangaroo as if we are proposing to cannibalise Dawn Fraser.

It is nuts and we need to do whatever is necessary to end this protein confusion – an exorcism of our bovine-loving genetic heritage, a mass smoking ceremony, a national conversation on agriculture, whatever.

The current agricultural system is destroying our landscape and is unsustainable in a climate change future.

All the while a very efficient herbivore with low fat, high quality meat is being shot in their millions and used to feed blow flies, foxes and ravens. What a joke! We must be different as Australian farmers.