Evolve farming techniques to keep family business alive
What do you do when you've invested millions into growing, packing and marketing but it's no longer profitable? For one pair of fifth generation farming brothers, the pressure was on to make the right decision to not only honour previous generations, but also ensuring the sixth had a bright future.
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00:00 The Moon family farm near St George, 500 kilometres west of Brisbane.
00:14 Back in 2000, worries over the uncertainty of irrigation water prompted a move out of
00:21 cotton into rockmelons.
00:23 In the beginning, the Moons had a small shed producing up to 2000 boxes per day.
00:29 Since then, a $2 million state-of-the-art packing shed has increased production to 7,000
00:35 boxes per day.
00:37 That equates to seven semi-trailer loads.
00:40 Now they've switched again.
00:43 Rockmelons were good to them, but the weather wasn't.
00:45 We were always under the pump because of the weather.
00:49 If we had a lot of sunshine one week, then we picked a whole lot of melons and we had
00:53 to sell them that week.
00:55 Now they're growing onions and garlic, which unlike melons, can be stored for months.
01:02 Fifth generation farmers' brothers, Andrew and David, complement each other.
01:07 Andrew does the marketing, David's boss in the paddock.
01:11 Andrew is the pessimist, David the optimist.
01:15 If I'm not happy with something David's doing, I'll tell him, and vice versa.
01:20 But we don't carry on, you know.
01:22 We have a job to do.
01:23 We're busy.
01:24 We don't have time to argue.
01:25 The Moon brothers didn't want to talk hectares or tonnage, but they grow enough onions, red,
01:32 brown and white, to keep this packing shed running all year round.
01:37 The harvest lasts four months for onions, and at its peak, the shed's running seven
01:42 days a week.
01:48 Garlic is a higher value crop, but it's expensive to grow.
01:52 So when a major customer asked them to grow it...
01:56 We sort of basically said no, don't be stupid at the start, because we'd already trialled
02:03 it and we were pretty confident it wouldn't grow here, and then we stumbled on a variety
02:10 that worked for this area.
02:12 It's just a bastard to grow, basically.
02:16 It is not easy to grow.
02:17 It is our hardest crop that we've ever grown by a long shot, to get it through to a marketable
02:23 place.
02:24 I reckon learning to grow garlic, we've lost way more than we've earned so far.
02:30 The expense is due to hand weeding and hand harvesting.
02:34 Andrew estimates garlic is handled up to 20 times before it makes it to a retail shelf.
02:41 The biggest deterrent to growing at scale is the seed.
02:46 If we want to grow 400 tonnes of garlic, we need roughly 40 tonnes of seed.
02:52 Seed is a clove.
02:53 The seed is a clove.
02:54 So it's a clove from last year's crop.
02:57 We have to look after that between last year's crop and this year's crop.
03:03 It comes down to how much seed you can keep, how good of a year you've had.
03:08 It's our most expensive seed, because we have to value it per kilo, the same as we would
03:15 get if we sold it.
03:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]