He is more than 15,000 kilometres from home, but US dairy farmer Stephen Maddox can still feel an uneasy tension in the air in Australia and New Zealand as the American presidential race comes down to the wire.
The Californian is as surprised as almost everybody Down Under and in the US about maverick millionaire Donald Trump’s extraordinary rise to within a whisker of potentially winning the US Presidential election later this week.
He believed Trump’s emergence reflected public frustration with too much politicking and insufficient tangible achievement or policy implementation in Washington in recent decades.
However, Mr Maddox is also relatively philosophical about the intense international scrutiny the election has generated and its outcome – regardless of who wins.
“The sense of unease in markets and political circles in the US and outside is significant because nobody knows what to expect,” he said.
“Nobody believed Trump would get this far and now there’s uncertainty about what will come next.”
Mr Maddox, a third generation Holstein breeder with a 9000-strong herd, felt if Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton won “it will be business as usual”, while a Trump win would probably be much less threatening and chaotic than many people feared.
“At the end of the day the checks and balances in our constitution and our rules of government would keep a Trump Republican administration on a fairly conventional course,” he said while visiting Australia and NZ last week as part of Rabobank’s Global Farmers Master Class tour.
He felt Trump had more “visionary” appeal to voters, and his economic policies had more stimulus potential for the US economy than Clinton’s Democratic Party agenda.
“It’s nice to get away from all the advertising and saturation media coverage, but I’m still hearing a lot of talk about the election down here, and I’m being swamped with questions,” he said.
“I certainly didn’t believe Trump would get this far, but he’s there because people have lost patience with Washington polices.
“Politicians have been refusing to fix things when they can because they want to hold back and use them as election issues for the presidential campaign – which means good policies can take forever to get done.”
US agriculture, in particular, was feeling jaded by increasingly costly and frustrating levels of environmental checks which constantly filtered through to make good farming harder.
“I believe in feeding the world and sustainably, but many of the current administration’s initiatives have not been good for us,” Mr Maddox said.
“I came of age in the 1970s when much was happening in science and with agricultural productivity gains, making it possible to feed the planet safely.
“However, today our consumers want to take away many of the tools we need to stay sustainable – GMO’s and different management techniques which make good farming possible.”
For the past week Mr Maddox has been visiting Australia and NZ farms with 35 other leading producers from North and South America, Europe, Australia and NZ.
Their Master Class agenda included the big Farm2Fork forum on the future of agricultural productivity and innovation held in Sydney and opened by Dutch King, Willem-Alexander.
The Maddox dairy operation near Riverdale in central California milks about 4000 cows housed in free stall conditions.
The family switched from cropping, including cotton, not long after Mr Maddox grandfather almost made the move to Australia to join numerous Californian pioneers of modern cotton production in NSW at Wee Waa in the 1970s.
The Maddox dairy business, which employs 65 staff, also breeds about 2200 Holstein bulls a year, with some of its Ruann Holstein stud genetics exported to Australian herds.
Mr Maddox is a Holstein Association USA legislative committee member and a director of the California Dairies co-operative, which processes 46pc of the state’s milk.
The co-op forms part of the bigger Dairy America co-operative group which produces milk powder and other exports for Asian markets.
“We’ve had some fun years with our exports and good milk prices, particularly 2011 and 2014,” he said
“Lately it’s been tough as far as prices paid to farmers are concerned, but it’s getting better.”
Farmgate returns were now about US14.8 cents a pound compared to US13c in May.
“And feed prices are lower than they have been for a while.”