Grove Juice general manager Greg Quinn joins the Australian Ag podcast
The general manager of citrus giant Grove Juice has detailed how a “massive” shortage of workers and minimum wage changes are affecting business.
The nation’s largest valencia orange grower says Australia’s labour schemes are not addressing the “massive” shortage of workers, particularly in the horticultural sector.
Grove Juice general manager Greg Quinn told the Australian Ag Podcast there needed to be more focus around increasing skilled labour.
“Certainly the Pacific Island scheme is good and it’s working very well for us, but it’s also how we can unlock a lot of that Asian skilled labour, particularly in engineering and manufacturing, not just for farms but for businesses,” Mr Quinn said.
Mr Quinn also said the industry was also reassessing its reliance on backpacker workers, especially after recent ‘same job, same pay’ minimum wage changes.
“But I think we’re probably a bit too exposed to the backpackers particularly in horticulture and across the workforce,” he said.
“Since the minimum wage has come in, it’s probably making us less productive on farms, because effectively, you’re doing top up of those payments because the backpackers aren’t efficient or skilled to work properly.
“Some of them are good, but largely, there is exposure there. It increases your supervisory costs and it increases work, health and safety issues as well.”
Mr Quinn, a former agribusiness adviser at PwC, has partnered with the Esten family, turning hundreds of hectares of cotton and other cropping farms into orange orchards.
“It probably came down to one of the droughts where we lost a significant amount of money (with cotton) and we sat down and thought, well, we got to get smarter about this,” he said.
“We were generating about $300 per megalitre, gross margin return and in citrus we’re getting at least $800 per megalitre, gross margin return so that’s six times the return on probably half the water usage.”
Grove Juice currently has 500 hectares planted with about 300 hectares of that bearing fruit. They have enough water and land to move out to about 1200 to 1400 hectares to plant 750,000 to 800,000 trees.
It is expected these trees will generate about 55,000 to 60,000 tons, which is the equivalent of about 28 to 30 million or more litres of juice.
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