Growing more from the same orchards

A horticulture producer ran thousands of hectares across multiple locations around Australia. With crop prices under pressure, it wanted to lift horticulture productivity to protect profitability through the low points of the price cycle, and needed a clear three-to-five-year strategy the board and management could get behind.

Each farm had very different soil, water, yield and cost outcomes, but there was no clear, farm-level view of what was driving them. A large share of the premium crop was being downgraded because of damage, and the business needed to know which of many possible productivity initiatives were genuinely worth pursuing, and which were not.

Over a twelve-week engagement, we built a farm-level P&L and benchmarking model across all locations, using five years of cost, yield and quality data, to pinpoint the real drivers of performance farm by farm.

We then developed a view of global best practice through literature and interviews with leading Australian and overseas growers, industry bodies and researchers, and built internal best-practice league tables across the farms. From this we developed and prioritised a long list of yield, quality and cost initiatives by value, time to deliver and confidence, and were deliberately clear about which initiatives were not worth pursuing.

The priority initiatives were worked up in detail, from farm-specific fertiliser and water plans to a leaner labour and management model, and we handed over a yield forecast and sensitivity tool so the business could keep making the trade-offs itself in future seasons.