LAST WORD
Big farms, big opportunity AN INCREASING INVESTMENT IN LARGER FARMS IS PROVIDING FERTILE GROUND FOR THE ORGANICS INDUSTRY, SAYS MATT GENEVER, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AT SUSTAINABILITY VICTORIA.
Sustainability Victoria is investing across the organics value chain.
T
he number of agricultural businesses in Australia reduced by some 34 per cent between 2010 and 2019. Over the same period, the total area of agricultural holdings went up by more than 6 per cent, pointing to a trend of farm aggregation across the country. This is in large part good planning, with opportunistic farmers leveraging equity from the rapid growth in property prices and record low interest rates to expand into adjacent areas.
It is unclear whether this aggregation will continue and for how long (other countries such as Canada and New Zealand are experiencing similar trends, moving toward fewer, larger farms), but for the time being it appears that larger farms with fewer owners presents a significant opportunity for the use of processed organic material. That opportunity exists on two fronts. Firstly, there is an opportunity that is purely a product of economies of scale. As the size and complexity of farms increase,
so too does the need for data-driven land management, ensuring that each hectare is maximised for short- and long-term production. This has become even more important with the increase in strategic crop rotation optimised with relay cropping, where use of multiple crops seeks to maximise the outputs from each growing season. It’s no longer a game of feet but a game of inches. Secondly, it’s important to look at who owns our farms, both now and into the future. In 2018, a House of
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