Mulgowie Farming focus on putting health first
A COMMITMENT to quality has effects all the way down the line for one of Australia’s biggest vegetable growers, writes JAMES WAGSTAFF.
A HEALTHY attitude from source to main course is what stands one of Australia’s biggest vegetable growers out from the crowd.
“It’s about creating a healthy soil to grow healthy plants to grow healthy products to make healthy people,” Mulgowie Farming Company chief executive Fabian Carniel points out.
It is a mantra that has served the business, headquartered at Mulgowie in southeast Queensland’s fertile Lockyer Valley, well against the test of time, through droughts and flooding rain.
Mulgowie Farming Company is now Australia’s biggest grower of sweet corn and beans with 4047ha of vegetables under production across five districts in three states.
It also grows broccoli, capsicums and pumpkins and uses state-of-the-art farming practices while keeping more than a close eye on the environment — and maintaining its commitment to the consumer.
For the business, assurance of supply is paramount. Mulgowie works with more than 50 partner growers in Queensland and Victoria, and has made strategic land purchases to help minimise risks associated with extreme weather.
“Ensuring you’ve got supply continually throughout the year is vitally important,” Fabian said.
“There’s quite a bit of thinking behind building a farming strategy that helps mitigate and helps build greater assurance of supply.”
RICH HISTORY
MULGOWIE Farming’s history is as rich as it is fascinating. It dates back to 1949 when John Emerick first began farming in the Lockyer Valley. He and wife Dell purchased a farm at Thornton in 1962 and three years later switched from dairy farming to growing cabbages, cauliflowers and tomatoes.
They began supplying produce to markets in 1973 and purchased the home farm at Mulgowie 1977. In 1981, they started growing new varieties of super sweet corn and began exporting broccoli to South East Asia. Exports of Chinese cabbage and wombuk followed two years later with the move into green beans occurring in 1987.
The Mulgowie brand was officially launched in 1989 when the Emericks teamed up with the first of their contract growers. In an effort to supply sweet corn and green beans year round farming and packing operations were established in northern Queensland at Bowen in 1998 and at Home Hill five years later.
In 2004, the company started growing baby corn and launched Australia’s first baby corn prepackaged product. It expanded into Victoria in 2006 with farm and packaging operations established at Boisdale in Gippsland. It now operates in five districts — Mulgowie, Home Hill and Bowen in Queensland, Glen Innes in NSW, and Boisdale.
SPREAD THE RISK
FABIAN said the company worked hard on spreading out their farming operations within each region.
“To have a diversity of farming land over 100km is smart … if you have got an adverse weather effect in one area, hopefully that pattern won’t affect you at the other end of town,” he said.
All vegetables are grown on irrigation country using a range of disciplines from centre pivots to travelling irrigators and from hand shift to trickle tape. What irrigation type is used depends on the size and shape of the farm, water supply and infrastructure.
Fabian added that the company had also worked “very hard strategically” at incorporating a good range of soil types in their farming strategy.
“You need to have a mix of light soils, to be in place when things are wet, and you need some heavier soils when things are dry,” he said. “An ideal scenario is actually having a mixture of soils to be able to be able to cope with what Mother Nature throws at you.”
The Mulgowie farm was subject to flooding in 2011 and 2013, which took the business months to recover from. The business has since formulated an integrated long-term plan of initiatives and measures with farming practices and infrastructure to help mitigate damage from future floods.
“You are not going to be able to stop floods, you’re not going to be able to stop the damage of floods but you can try and minimise the amount of damage they do,” Fabian said.
Mulgowie works with Queensland’s Healthy Waterways on creek rehabilitation while “roughness structures”, designed to help slow rising water, were constructed across the floodplain.
The structures comprise a row of timber posts, spaced a metre apart and driven a metre into the ground, with the non-self-seeding grass grown between in an almost hedge-like pattern.
NO REST
MULGOWIE operates 52 weeks of the year with winter production at Bowen and Home Hill before the season follows the coastline south to southeast Queensland and northern NSW during spring. Production gets underway at Victoria and Glen Innes around Christmas and runs through until April with the home farm at Mulgowie also reaching peak production in autumn.
Corn takes 65-90 days to grow, broccoli is ready to harvest when it is about 10-25cm wide with a dark green to purple colour flower head while pumpkins take 90-120 days to mature.
Crops are harvested in the early morning and it is quite common for product to be on retail shelves within 24-48 hours. Sweet corn and fresh beans are machine harvested with broccoli still cut by hand.
Fabian said sourcing labour in regional Australia with an ability “to move with the seasons” was one challenge while rising costs were another.
“We all know that energy costs are increasing, we know that farm inputs are continually increasing, cost of labour is increasing, packaging, transport, fuel … and we’re not seeing that value increasing in our returns,” he said.
Most produce is sold through wholesale markets in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. The business also has strong relationships with supermarkets — most notably Woolworths — and exports about 10 per cent of its output by air and sea to New Zealand and Asia. Secondary produce tends become livestock feed or is composted
Fabian said each region had its own packing infrastructure.
Looking to the future, Fabian said the company had “strategic business plans that factor in growth”.
“We are, however, very focused on having a reputation for having the best quality and supply in our product lines so ... doing the job right the first time is actually our key focus,” he said. “Growth is something that is the product of doing the job right ... having the right to grow.”
AG INNOVATION A SOLUTION TO LABOUR PAINS
Marmon Hill tops the chops
Few know the secret to successfully breeding prized first-cross ewes better than South Australia’s Ian Farley. And here he shares what he knows and how he got there.
Fruits of family labour pay off
The bank was set to foreclose when Helen Aggeletos took over her family’s citrus business in South Australia’s Riverland. Read how she turned it all around.