Inside Schild family’s Grange Garlic business at Hamilton

The Schild family from Hamilton are aiming to grow their Grange Garlic enterprise into a $80 million dollar operation. See how.

Grange Garlic Director Wayne Schild and son Daniel Schild on their Hamilton property. Picture: Karla Northcott.

Carving out a new intensive horticulture industry which can use rich soils and good rainfall in a region synonymous with dryland cropping and grazing, is no mean feat.

What’s more, the new crop had never been grown locally at commercial, broadacre scale, and nobody knew for sure if it could even be done.

But it is happening, and the tenacious force behind the venture is the husband and wife team Wayne and Tracey Schild, founders of Grange Garlic.

The pair — with son Daniel, who also works full-time in the family business, and Ballarat-based ICU nurse daughter Tara — faced numerous setbacks, with still some tricky hurdles ahead, to develop what they say is potentially a dynamic new industry for fellow farmers throughout Victoria’s Western District.

Wayne grew up in Hamilton, and while he and his family were always interested in farming, he took an entrepreneurial path into the garlic industry.

Initially he worked as a shearer, then a paramedic for 15 years, before starting a sawmill recovering otherwise waste material, but “my heart was always wanted to be a farmer and our son Daniel also loves the land”.

The “authenticity” of farming – growing plants or animals – and being engaged in nature as it produced life-giving food, was the draw for Wayne.

“To be involved with something so natural and wonderful, from the start – it’s like it’s the beginning of all authenticity,” he said.

Tracey, meanwhile, aside from the family businesses has worked in retail part-time, which she said had been a reprieve from the all-encompassing nature of farming.

The farm the Schilds ended up buying was bought jointly with the neighbour – a close friend – and the two-title property split.

Wayne said he had “always been an ideas man” but the path to garlic started with some in-depth investigations of other enterprises – meat-direct and pastured poultry.

“But garlic was emerging – we started as home growers,” he said.

Wayne and Tracey – who originally hails from Bundaberg in Queensland – searched for an enterprise they could make a living through a value-adding enterprise on their relatively small acreage of 48ha.

They saw garlic as a huge opportunity and the potential market for a locally grown product, high in quality and supplied in fresh, wet minced form.

Australia grows very little of its own garlic, importing most of it from countries such as China.

In six years, the Schilds have developed the three aspects of the business – the horticulture (broadacre garlic growing); storage and handling and a hi-tech processing facility.

The lack of garlic seedstock was the first barrier to entry, Wayne said, due to the infantile nature of the Australian industry. As an annual, garlic was a slow multiplier and growers cannot import seed.

A portion of the crop also needs to be reserved as seed, which also slows production.

Seed also must be acclimatised.

“There is a growing artisan arena of garlic growers, but at the end of the day there is absolutely no scale,” he said.

“In fresh whole bulbs we import more than 80 per cent of what we consume because our industry can only supply for a few months of the year.

“There are only three or four other commercial scale growers in Australia.”

When it comes to processed, dehydrated garlic, Wayne said 100 per cent was imported, with China controlling 97 per cent of that world market.

Thirty years ago, Australia had 300 growers in the Riverina supplying fresh garlic before China “decimated the price point”. “The question is not why is our food so dear, but why is their food so cheap,” he said.

Instead of competing purely on price, Wayne and Tracey decided to target the fresh, wet minced market, initially focused on the food service sector, producing an Australian, high-quality product.

“We want to be commercial, not artisan, and that means we will be mechanised, not hand sown, harvested and processed,” he said.

Garlic was also “scale-able”, which matched the investment required for mechanisation.

The first year they sowed 5000 plants – now they have 350,000 plants per ha, with 11ha sown this year, trailing 11 different varieties. Daniel is operations manager, and Tara the administration manager.

Wayne said garlic also attracted them as the best option on their small farm, because they “loved garlic, and its health-giving” attributes.

“You start to realise the contaminated (imported) sources; and that if we follow the authentic pathway, instead of chasing corporate profits, the exciting aspect for us is the health-giving properties,” he said.

“If you are careful with the way you handle garlic, you can protect those properties, but if you don’t you destroy them,” he said. “There is no other alternative; the market desire for it is strong. Somehow the world has fallen asleep to the health-giving properties of garlic; it is the No. 1 immune-boosting product in the paddock.”

Wayne and Tracey saw the imported product as no competition in the high-quality category.

Whole fresh markets were difficult to supply year-round and with garlic sold visually, at least 30 per cent of what is produced is unsaleable, which opened the door to opportunities for minced garlic.

“There is a huge space in this market,” he said.

“We are able to provide 12 month supply, and we’ve achieved product stability – 12 month shelf life, unrefrigerated and untreated – that’s what we have achieved.

“It has proven the health-giving attributes of the product – our process doesn’t destroy those health-giving attribute, but protects them.”

The returns per hectare of garlic production are “infinitely better than broadacre grazing”, Wayne claims.

The winter crop is dry sown into raised bed is in April-May and harvest is in November-December.

Soils are deep, heavy clay with high organic matter, tending to be acidic, with a consistent annual rainfall of 650mm. Ground preparation is crucial.

While the Schilds are growing the crop dryland now, they are seeking a water licence.

“Irrigation is what we are embarking on to be supportive to avoid failed autumns and early shut offs to spring – watering is sometimes required to lift the crop out of the ground for harvest,” he said.

The local Southern Grampians Shire council has been supportive, Wayne said. It actively encouraged new enterprises in the region, such as horticulture.

“For six years we’ve been building our IP and capital equipment and now we are at market and generating revenue, not to mention adding jobs to the area, so we are what they want,” he said.

However, the path into an irrigation license has been “incredibly difficult and frustrating” for the family, due to a disconnect between the stated development aims of the local council and the entity that controls the water.

“We are dryland, we have a groundwater licence but it could be a very long way down, yet we have such an abundance of winter water that we can harvest and store.

“Garlic is an incredibly low water user; we have all this winter water and want to be able to have it to secure both ends of our crop – ensure germination and adequate soil moisture content to ensure harvesting.

The Schilds had to look to Europe for much of the machinery they imported, and companies have custom-designed harvest equipment for them, suited to scaled, Australian conditions.

Much of the machinery was adapted from onions and potato industries that had a local support industry and the horsepower suited to Australian-size farms.

They are now developing a minimum till, whole-bed harvesting system.

On quantities, Wayne said the yields were “doubling as we expand our knowledge of the crop”.

“This year our yields will be just shy of where other commercial growers are at, but they are fully irrigated, so that proves how good this area is,” he said.

“That why we need irrigation; to get the crop (safely) out of the ground.”

For the region, with the processing capacity built, with support of partners, the Grange Garlic’s current seedstock could, within five years, create an “$80 million industry and employ in excess of 75 people”, Wayne said.

“It’s huge. We are already in full rotation here, so for the second year we are using neighbouring properties, so there is an opportunity for landholders to have a rotational crop that starts at triple the income of broadacre cropping,” he said. Garlic could not be grown year-on-year.

“Input costs are high but annual returns are high; the neighbours can smell the profit.

“We created the commercialisation home of the product, now it is about building a horticultural supply chain.”

Wayne said they now needed to partner with more growers and local governments to build scale, capacity and infrastructure to build a supply chain.

The crop is harvested green, making proper storage and controlled curing crucial.

“We’re pulled in international best practice system experts to design controlled climate storage systems,” he said.

Grange Garlic also invested in a lot of research investigating how to preserve allicin, the key health-giving, immune-boosting component that was formed when garlic was crushed.

“Allicin is very unstable and very easily lost; so we are now working on the concept of customer awareness,” Wayne said.

Allicin was lost in dehydrated garlic forms, leaving not a lot more than some flavour and aroma but none of the health benefits, he said.

“We’ve searched the world to comprehend where international knowledge is on allicin and the journey has been problematic, as the chemistry is so multi-levelled, it is a pretty wild tiger to tame.

“We’ve been able to stabilise the product under the lid, and because of its health-giving properties, none of the food pathogens can survive in it.”

The process Grange Garlic has developed respects the active elements of the allicin when garlic was crushed, preserving the compound.

“We have a recipe for how we’ve achieved that, and it is in a vault,” Wayne said.

The food processing is to HACCP and Fresh Care standard to guarantee product safety.

In relation to allicin, “we are currently doing the science to validate and then to be able to make those claims on the product; it will be a manuka honey story – we would have validated the health-giving properties”, Wayne said.

The product has recently been launched, and while interrupted by Covid, the focus was now on broadly marketing the full-flavoured product.

“We were seven days out from launch when Covid hit,” Wayne said.

“The marketing part now is really a joy because our product is so potently-normal, all Australian grown and natural, opposed to being watered down and trashed, you only have to use about a quarter of others,” he said.

The garlic will be sold to Victorian retail stockists, via e-commerce and building relationships with food services and food processing producers.

The goal was to become nationally available, and potentially exports.

They also see opportunities at the pharmaceutical level.

For the region’s farmers, Wayne compared the size of the opportunity to the introduction of Merino sheep.

“It is an expensive crop to grow, and it is new, but we are confident that, given the work we have put in developing the processing and food stability to hold to the natural abilities of the product, others will also see the potential.”