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 Full Transcript - Landline 15/6/2003 Reporter: Tim Lee Australia's olive oil industry may have only a minute share of the world market, but its reputation for producing premium quality olive oil is growing rapidly. So rapidly, Italian oil buyers are currently scouring the country seeking thousands of litres of our freshest and best. The fledgling Australian industry has learnt from the mistakes of other olive growing countries. However, one age-old and crucial problem remains. No one has yet perfected a mechanical olive harvester. Australia's olive industry is booming. In the past five years, predominantly across Southern Australia, around eight million trees have taken root. As the last of this season's olive crop is harvested the industry's day of reckoning is fast approaching. "This is the testing year, this is the year when it says how do the economics stack up based on the technology that we've got at the moment and one of the key items of course, is getting them off the trees, efficiently," Paul Miller said. A few short years ago some olive growing schemes lured investors with promises of phenomenal financial returns. But some in Victoria's Agriculture Department deemed the fledgling industry, so risky, it coined the phrase "emus on trees." Other critics agreed. They said Australia could never compete with highly subsidised imported olive oil derived from fruit picked by peasants. Naturally, the olive industry has always vigorously disputed that. It argues premium quality olive oil will always find a good world market. But there is widespread agreement that the future of Australia's industry hinges on efficient mechanical harvesting. "Absolutely essential because we have to produce our oil efficiently, at low cost so that we can compare to the rest of the world and without mechanical assistance or mechanical harvesting it's just not going to be economic," John Guransky said. "I think it's just essential, we can't afford to hand pick olives other than for exceptionally boutique oils in to specialised markets, other than that it has to be mechanically harvested and it's exactly the same story as wine grapes, you can't afford to hand pick wine grapes except for very specialised types of wine, everything else is done with a machine," Paul Miller said. "There's really not a machine that's been perfected to harvest olives," Ken Dugan said. In Europe and South America it is still common to beat the fruit off with sticks. So from central coast New South Wales and even reminiscent of the space race, comes the Hawke Harvester. "It's the first in the world, it's patented throughout the world, currently olive harvesters are predominantly shakers or over the row type machines and this is something out of left field, it's totally new and we're going well with it," Adam Booker said. The olive harvest has finished in the North, so the prototype machine and its crew has come to Cobram Estate, nestled on the Victorian side of the Murray River. Here, tackling the smaller fruit on dense, productive trees, they're gleaning useful data to refine their creation. "It's doing a good job, there are still some improvements to be done, but basically it's going back to the basic system of removal of fruit, which we used to do by hand by beating them off with sticks. This is just a machine that has many sticks and catches the fruit as it falls and it has a few teething problems, but yes, it has a lot of promise," John Gursansky said. "It's an entirely different principle which makes it difficult to compare with other machines. The trunk shaking machines can be hard on trees, may not remove the percentage of fruit required and we're looking at a 90 per cent removal and this machine is capable of doing that, not on all of our trees unfortunately, on some of them". Tony Hawke's invention sprang from manually beating olive trees with a fishing rod. He believes it will harvest other crops such as macadamia, pistachio nuts, almonds, even citrus. "Well we pinched the motor and the hydrostatics out a cotton harvester and transplanted them into a chassis which is this machine, then it all went from there, but in the future we'd be putting new motors and new transmissions in the machine," Tony Hawke said. Hawke jokes that he sold a farm and now has a machine, which owes him three quarters of a million dollars. This may be a prototype and the improved version already on the drawing board, but an inventor's lot is not easy. "The rewards potentially are absolutely huge not just for us, obviously for us but not just for us, but for the whole industry," Adam Booker said. The quest to develop the best mechanical harvester has other contenders. In north-west Victoria also close to the Murray River, Boundary Bend Estate's olive harvest is all but complete. The tree shaker is the most commonly used mechanical harvester. This form of harvesting began in the United States 40 years ago. These machines can harvest up to 150 trees per hour, but not all the fruit shakes free. It's an argument of speed versus yield. "Some will argue that by using a shaker or a vibrator you can harvest the larger tree, but it'll simply be weighing up if I have a bigger tree but have slower harvesting, what's the cost benefit in getting that extra cropping. Either way, it's turning out to be quite economic," Paul Miller said. Most of Australia's olive groves are on flat ground in big paddocks, which makes mechanical harvesting easier, but also even more essential. "Because in the Mediterranean the situation is different, they don't have to harvest five hundred or 1,000 hectares all at once or in a few weeks," Leandro Ravetti said. There are half a dozen varieties here ensuring the crop doesn't ripen all at once, but harvesting 100,000 trees is a mammoth task. Over the next few years the yields from these young tree will escalate markedly. It is music to the ears of Paul Riordan. In past weeks he has had Italian olive oil buyers beating a path to his door. "You know they're seeing the Australian market as an up and coming supplier of high quality, constant supply of oil, so they're in the game of buying oil and trading oil, so they're here sniffing about," Paul Riordan said. "They would take as much oil as we could supply. We could be 10, 20 times as big". Helping oversee Boundary Bend's expansion is Argentinean horticulturalist, Leandro Ravetti. He believes Argentina till recent years had been leading the world in developing a mechanical olive harvester. "However the economic and financial problems in the country made the manual labour in strong competition for the development of the mechanisation of a harvester," Leandro Ravetti said. So work on this prototype has virtually stopped. By contrast, at Shepparton in North East Victoria another Australian invention is making good progress. "It's a UR Harvester but it's an over the row grape harvester and we've modified it with picking heads, which will be further modified once we've had an opportunity to look at this. See the damage or non damage it's doing to trees, the way in which it's harvesting fruit at the moment, its speed, its efficiencies and then we'll further improve it in the course of the next twelve months with some technology that's coming out of the United States, picking heads there which have been specially designed and fitted to a similar unit to this and are up in New South Wales at the moment," Rob Catherell said. "The machine will need to be made a little wider, a little bit longer and a little bit higher to accommodate that, but that will also mean we'll be able to harvest trees up until 'round about six years of age," Ken McDougall said. The Liverno group believes it has the blueprint to in time be the world's dominant harvester, especially here and in other new olive growing nations like South Africa, New Zealand, possibly even South America. It is estimated that the 8,000-10,000 tonnes of olive being pressed Australia-wide will yield some 2,000 tonnes of oil. Nationally the drought has curbed this year's olive harvest, but next year, as more of Australia's eight million olive trees come into production, the need for an effective and cost efficient mechanical harvester will be even more paramount. "I think we're going to see threefold the amount of fruit taken off trees next year to this year and probably the same again in another two year's time, so the amount of fruit will increase dramatically from this year onwards, which means we're going to need machines to remove it, but we're also going to need processing facilities that are going to be able to handle that amount of fruit," Ken McDougall said. The industry is confident that increasing domestic and especially export demand will find markets for that oil. In the highly competitive world market Australian producers are aiming for the top shelf. "Freshness of oil, certainly a clear recognition on our anecdotal understanding that there is almost a unique flavour in the premium extra virgin olive oil that's been produced in the Southern part of Australia and by definition here in the of the Goulburn Valley and the other issue is that we can be counter-cyclical and for the real olive oil aficionados in Europe the first thing they love is to get the very very freshest of oil," Rob Catherall said. "Despite the fact that there might be two and a half thousand tonnes of olive oil around the world in any given year, for sale, ten to fifteen, maybe 20 per cent of that is high quality, probably less," Paul Miller said. The local industry argues that most of what arrives on our shores is sub-standard, made price competitive by heavy European subsidies and sometimes even blended with impurities. "Obviously we're looking to produce the best. The fruit is picked and processed within 24 hours, so the processing plant is on site," John Gursanksy said. The premium quality extra virgin olive oil produced at Cobram Estate, has all the qualities desired by the Europeans. Freshness, flavour and very low acid. After nine years, Ken Dugan's investment and commitment to producing the best oil possible, is paying off. It has a growing reputation abroad and the brand has just been accepted into several major Australian supermarket chains. "You go into an Australian supermarket and there's only Cobram Estate and the Viva Brand that are the Australian product, so Ken's a real pioneer and doing very very well," Adam Booker said. Olive oil producers argue that like the wine industry it has taken time for Australian consumers to appreciate the qualities of the home-grown product. "Especially when the trees start to take on the Australian countryside characteristics which will be quite exciting to see whether we can capitalise on those characteristics on the world market," Ken McDougall said. "Coming of age? This is a good season to get under the belt, this sort of sets some benchmarks that lead us to understand the economics, we know it can be done profitably, we know that there's a demand, what we need to now do is build on the Australian image of authenticity and quality, build on the results of this year, make sure that people recognise that it is Australian product, distinct from other products, distinct from example the Italian product, which is the main one you see around the world. And that it is counter-seasonal, that it is high quality and that they've been some good results," Paul Miller said. With producers selling oil for six dollars a litre, the olive industry is buoyant. But every emerging industry has a percentage of failures. As always, most at risk are small investors or hobbyist growers. "There are millions of trees been planted, most of them have been driven by investment companies. Many of them have been planted in areas that are not likely to be economically fruitful," John Gursansky said. "It cost us about forty dollars to put in each tree here and at the end of the day if we get a ten percent return on our investment we'll be very happy. Now if you've got some of these schemes at 100 or 200 dollars a tree you can't see how the infrastructure can operate and have that work out," Ken Dugan said. "They'll be a lot of heartache for a lot of people in the industry over the next few years that maybe have gone in it the wrong way, but, it's like any industry, some will survive and some won't," Paul Riordan said. Others aren't so pessimistic. "That parallels my observations of the wine industry in its early days, a lot of those early vineyards were started by semi-retired or professional people who thought it was a good idea to grow a few grapes and spent probably ten years if you looked at the serious economic analysis of it, not making money, but they were enjoying what they were doing and they knew there was a future for the product and they stuck at it, well I can seen that happening at the small end of the olive industry too," Paul Miller said. "Cobram Estate is a really good model and there are a few others around like Orios Australis in Western Australia with Dandarraga Estate, Victorian Olive Groves in Central Victoria, there are a number of brands around Australia that have done their homework are prepared to export, are prepared to do the marketing exercise professionally and make sure that what's doing into their product is very high quality," Paul Miller said. The local industry plans to introduce national quality standards for locally grown oil. As a new olive growing nation Australia's industry has the luxury of observing and adapting the best aspects of other olive producing countries. It's too early to say which mechanical olive harvester may become the industry standard. As a nation we have an extraordinary record of agricultural innovation. It's fair to say that inventors will play a vital role in the future of our olive industry. "The only ways we can hope to possibly compete in making our oil product competitive either domestically or in an export sense, is to get efficiencies in management and one of those clear efficiencies is using this type of machinery here," Rob Catherall said.  |
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