BUSINESS vegnet

Industry collaboration
provides great insights and
major networking access for
Perth-region growers.

Words Katrina Hill, vegetablesWA VegNET RDO

AS part of our West Australian VegNET program, we facilitated a summer field afternoon and farm walk at Grown Smart Produce in Carabooda. Through this event we shared how this progressive cucumber grower adopted a ‘one percenter’ philosophy across its farm production systems.

While radical change is sometimes necessary to impact business growth, the consistent pursuit of small, continuous and incremental improvements – the ‘one-percenters’ across a business – can reinforce the core of a business and establish new groundwork for long-term profitability and innovation.

Grown Smart Produce hosted this popular event with a grower-led farm walk, specialist presentations and a mini-field afternoon, which offered 50 attendees interactive exhibits from manufacturers of irrigation, soil, water and crop monitoring hardware, software, new technologies and a networking sundowner.

VegNET, Irrigation Australia and vegetablesWA collaborated to co-ordinate the event and highlight tangible resource opportunities available for both vegetable and cross-commodity horticultural businesses in the North Metropolitan Region of Perth. Water efficiency and soil health initiatives, including the Gnangara Water efficiency grant and voucher program, were put under the spotlight.

The host growers led an informative farm tour with unique insights from a plumber’s standpoint on their whole-farm metering study, which they are currently undertaking within their protected cropping production system, and their future visions for retrofit and redevelopment of their system.

The business is actively enhancing its production systems by capturing baseline data on water and nutrient usage. It’s also also mapping present and future energy requirements. This is paving the way for future innovation and funding opportunities.

This comprehensive approach serves as the foundation for informing the design of a closed-loop water and nutrient recycling system. It also informs the installation of solar PV and electric heat pump technology for energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, including root zone heating, to save on space heating costs. By leveraging new irrigation and climate control technologies to boost water- and energy-use efficiency, collected data will simultaneously enable fine-tuning of the systems’ capacities to elevate product quality, increase yields and broaden market access.

“ VegNET has secured innovation funds to support ... new and emerging protected cropping growers ”

Presentations included: certified irrigation designer Paul Wilmott, who detailed aspects of the funded consultation available through the Gnangara water efficiency voucher scheme. He also provided a fresh review of current irrigation design and practice to gain an improvement on water-use efficiency; and Soil Wealth ICP Dr Doris Blessing and Carl Larsen who focused on the affiliation of water- and nutrient-use efficiency and its connection with plant health.

The event concluded with a networking. Thank you to the exhibiting manufacturers: Swan Systems, Wildeye, Toro, CropX, Sentek, WASP and HR Products. Sparked by the success of the event, the VegNET program has secured innovation funds to support training, workshops and consultations for new and emerging protected cropping growers.