Mortlock Hydroponics growing strong with next generation in control
A hydroponic enterprise in Carisbrook take tomato growing to new levels.
TYSON Mortlock grew up on a mixed sheep and cropping farm at Alma, west of Maryborough, dreaming that he, too, one day would farm in the great outdoors as his father, Ian, had before him.
Today Tyson, 28, his siblings Ashley, 22, and Shane, 31, along with Ian, grow tomatoes in glasshouses at Carisbrook in central Victoria, supplying supermarkets mostly along the eastern seaboard from Townsville to Tasmania.
Not for them, fluctuating seasons and the vicissitudes of weather and ill-balanced soils.
Instead, they’re steeped in a sort of farming in which everything from temperature to sunlight to growing mediums is tightly controlled.
They run 3ha of highly automated glasshouses, with computer-controlled shading, fogging and ventilation systems, alongside a 620 sqm packing shed with a 240 sqm coolstore inside, all of it set on 40ha about 1km from the Pyrenees Highway.
MORTLOCK HYDROPONICS
CARISBROOK
RUN by the Mortlock family
GROWS glasshouse tomatoes supplying supermarkets on the eastern seaboard
HAVE about 3ha of fruit planted with a 620 sqm packing shed
GLASSHOUSES use state-of-the-art technology
When the days are long and hot, shade screens roll across the glasshouse roof.
Shane, who studied business and accounting at university, is the overall manager, Tyson manages staffing and growing and Ashley runs the packing shed, supervising the last steps before the tomatoes are trucked out daily to distribution centres and forwarded to supermarkets within 48 hours.
The siblings grew into the business that their parents, Ian and Wendy, began almost 20 years ago.
Ian still works there, mentoring his children, and Wendy runs a small sauce business, with orders by phone.
“Mum and Dad love tomatoes and Mum makes sauces and relishes but I don’t eat tomatoes at all,” said Ashley, a health sciences graduate who half way through her degree realised her future was in the family business.
“One summer between second and third years I came home to work here and something just clicked in my mind and I knew this was what I wanted to do,” she said.
BEARING FRUIT
LIKE her brothers, Ashley grew up surrounded by tomatoes.
“I was three years old when Mum and Dad started growing tomatoes in plastic greenhouses,” she said.
“Dad had been a sheep and crop farmer like his brothers and then he decided to change.
“He did all this training, got a consultant in to help him out.”
For his part, Shane loves being able to apply his business skills in the family venture.
“Working in a family business has its challenges, but we all get along really well and are always working on this aspect of the business,” he said.
“Keeping our roles separate and backing each other’s judgment is key.”
Six years ago, drawn by the surety of piped natural gas at Carisbrook to the east of Maryborough the family upped stumps and moved there, investing to build state-of-the-art glasshouses on the new site.
The move was just 15km, but the natural gas, tapped offshore in Gippsland and piped from Longford to Carisbrook (and ultimately to Horsham), was a game changer.
It gave them a fuel to burn to generate carbon dioxide to make their tomatoes grow.
In the glasshouses, rows of planting slabs set on raised platforms, with tomatoes set in them, are fed carefully meted doses of carbon dioxide, a hydroponic mix of nutrients and water.
The rows are 90m long, a distance efficiently covered by pruners, preeners and pickers on automated scissor lifts that run, like trains on train lines, along dual pipe lines between the rows. The pipes also carry gas-heated hot water, which helps maintain peek humidity.
DIVERSIFICATION TO TAME WILD WEST
WET APPETITE
SOURCED from an on-site bore 20m below the surface, water is cleaned of salts via reverse osmosis before being fed via fine-point drippers into the tomato plants.
Any liquid from the plants is then collected drained back to a tank and sterilised with an ultraviolet steriliser, before being mixed with fresh more bore water and fed back to the plants.
The system uses about 40 megalitres of water a year.
“We are constantly recycling and adding water,” Tyson said.
“We have to constantly flush the slabs to prevent salts from building up.”
Planting usually happens in July, about a month after plants that grew the previous year are pulled out and burnt and the slabs in which they grew are cleared and all feeding lines are disinfected.
The almost year-round oasis of growth and humidity turns dry, an important step in disease control.
Seeds imported from the Netherlands are grown out to seedlings before they are set in place for the season.
As the plants grow, they are clipped to wires, ultimately reaching from 3m to 4m.
They’re also pruned regularly to keep from spreading out.
At flowering, workers move through the crop waving vibrating wands and tapping wires on which the plants grow to stir pollen and pollinate the flowers.
It takes eight workers about two hours three times a week.
“Once a week for an hour I talk to our consultant in Holland via Skype,” Tyson said.
“I’ll report on a whole lot of things, the numbers of flowers, size of the leaves, size of the plant, and how much it has grown in the week,” he said.
“I also take a video of the crop in every one of the four compartments, which I share with him, and we’ll discuss in detail any changes that we can make to steer the crop in the direction we want it to go.
“A lot of the expertise in this industry comes from Holland so having a consultant based from over there is really beneficial.”
CRATE EXPECTATIONS
IN THE packing shed, Ashley oversees 10-12 packers, mostly locals and some backpackers.
They feed tomatoes into an automated flow-wrapper that weighs, packs and labels, starting usually at 6am daily to get the day’s orders out just after noon.
Mortlock Hydroponics employs up to 50 workers a year, depending on the seasons.
Wages at $2 million-plus and gas, at $400,000 annually, are the biggest costs.
Despite having room to expand, — potentially up to seven times its current size — with the Australian dollar value so low against the Euro, the family is biding its time. (All glasshouse infrastructure is usually imported from the Netherlands).
Instead, it is focusing on polishing production systems and labour hire and training. Labour, said Tyson, was one of the business’s biggest challenges. Not getting people to work, but the time it took to train and retrain staff when there was a high turnover.
“Thankfully this year, there’s been no turnover,” he said.
“We’ve got to get jobs done correctly so we get a better crop and if you’re turning staff over all the time you have to train people all the time.”
Tyson has worked alongside his father for six years now.
His “farm” is much smaller than he ever envisaged as a boy, but he’s happy.
“Now that we have this it’s really good,” he said. “I’m a big part of the managing team and I’m moving more into the growing side of it as well. “We’ll be taking over from Dad in the next few years.
“He’ll always be poking around, but he took five weeks off this year and we didn’t need him too much.”
Ian and Wendy are delighted to hear this.
“It was a big move to leave the family farm 20 years ago and do something completely different,” Ian said.
“We knew nothing about growing tomatoes, so we did a lot or research and went to a lot of courses.
“The move has paid off financially and has meant we have been able to spend a lot more time working closer with our family.
“We have two grandkids now who already love coming out to the farm.”
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