PROFILE: HORTITECH
Hortitech Celebrates Forty Years in the Industry By Ashley O’Hara This year, Hortitech are celebrating forty years in the industry. That’s forty years of providing quality cover and crop protection solutions to the Australian horticulture industry; using Aussie smarts and technologies to combat our unique Aussie growing conditions. But far from slowing down, we’re aiming to open sites in every State in a bid to supply Australia’s horticulture industry with all their cover and crop protection needs. Michael Arnott established Hortitech [Pty. Ltd.] in 1982, following a move back to Victoria from the ACT where he had been working for 20 years. Returning to the state he was born and raised in, he settled with his family on a property in Monbulk; the heart of Victoria’s green-life industry. “At that time, I didn’t know what direction to take, so to get an idea of business opportunities in the area, I took jobs working locally on flower farms and nurseries and it soon became pretty apparent to me that one thing that was needed was growing houses. At that stage, they had very poor crop protection.”
And after he spent some time getting a better feel for the industry, Michael says he began to see the enormous potential in the market and the improvements that could be made to greenhouse design. Since then, Hortitech has grown and flourished, seeing a few changes along the way including our new owner James, and most recently our name; we’ve always been Hortitech [Pty. Ltd.] trading as Monbulk Rural, so it’s not entirely a name change, it is more a case of going back to our roots. With increasing demand for our products Australia-wide, we have begun to phase-out the name Monbulk Rural, a title tied to our Victorian location, and have replaced it with the portmanteau Hortitech; Horticultural Technologies.
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Dekker’s Flowers, VIC
GROUNDSWELL JUNE 2022
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