Rocky Lamattina & Sons - Syngenta Grower of the Year winner 2024

Vegalogue is a podcast from Australian vegetable peak industry body AUSVEG. Each episode we take a look at issues affecting the Australian vegetable, potato and onion sectors, unpacking levy-funded research and meeting some of the incredible people who make up the vegetable industry.

At Hort Connections in Melbourne in early June, 10 of the horticulture industry’s leading lights were recognised with the presentation of the Horticulture Awards for Excellence for 2024.

The winners of these awards have fascinating stories to tell about overcoming challenges to build some of the most successful businesses in the industry, groundbreaking research, or personal stories of lives and careers in the dynamic world of horticulture.

This episode we have a chat with Angelo Lamattina of Victorian carrot grower Rocky Lamattina & Sons, the winner of this year’s Syngenta Grower of the Year award.

Vegalogue is the podcast from AUSVEG, the peak body for Australia’s vegetable, potato, and onion industries, where we examine the pressing issues and latest developments in our sector.

Thanks for listening! You can find out more about AUSVEG and the Australian vegetable industry at ausveg.com.au. Subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or Tik Tok.

Transcript

We know that we plant the carrot, we're going to harvest it in 22 weeks' time, where before we were sort of hoping that we're going to harvest it.

And unfortunately, business today is too tight to be able to plant something, and then maybe you're going to harvest it.

Welcome back to the Vegalogue Podcast, a dialogue about the Australian vegetable industry from Ausveg.

I'm Tom Bicknell.

At Hort Connections in Melbourne in early June, 10 of the horticulture industry's leading lights were recognized with the presentation of the Horticulture Awards for Excellence for 2024.

The winner of these awards have some fascinating stories to tell about overcoming challenges to build the most successful businesses in the industry, groundbreaking research, or personal stories of lives and careers in the dynamic world of horticulture.

We'll be speaking to a number of our award winners in future episodes of the podcast, and in today's episode I'll be having a chat with Angelo Lamattina, a Victorian carrot grower, Rocky Lamattina & Sons, the winner of this year's Syngenta Grower of the Year award.

Thanks for joining me, Angelo, and congratulations to you and the business on the recent Syngenta Grower of the Year award win.

Beautiful.

Thanks very much, Tom.

So a business that wins awards like that isn't built overnight.

So perhaps let's start at the beginning.

Your father established the business back in 1991, is that right?

Could you maybe tell me a bit about those early days?

Had your father been a farmer before that point?

Yes.
Well, my father was working originally with his father and two brothers down in Melbourne and that started in the 60s.

And what my dad felt that he could see happening was that he was trying to look for an opportunity to go to a place where he felt there was a future with regards to, and I know he's probably ahead of his time when we talk about sustainability, but finding somewhere where there was water availability and the land was economically priced because in the Melbourne areas, a lot of the housing areas become quite expensive and it makes it very difficult to purchase the land that we need to do what he's dream was.

And the main one originally was to grow carrots and potatoes.

But over the years, we felt that the potatoes was probably something that the guys over in South Australia were more, was probably more the customer base were heading more towards a South Australian grown potato rather than the Victorian grown potatoes.

So that's where we then decided that we would concentrate on just growing carrots.

So since those early days, you now run the business with your two brothers, Phillip and John.

When did you all get involved in the business?

Well, myself and my brother Phillip were actually, we come on board pretty well straight away in 1991.

And then my brother John, he joined the company a few years later after he finished school.

So it was a bit of an age gap between us.

So that was the finished school first and then come across.

So where's the business growing to now?

You must be one of the largest carrot growers in Australia, I'd imagine.

We're up the top there somewhere.

The thing that we obviously look at is being the most consistent, is really what we want to really look at.

And the other one, which is very important, is to have a process in place that my children and their children can continue utilizing.

That's probably the main one.

I mean, when we first originally started the business in 1991, we felt that we could grow carrots in this particular region, where we are in Wemen, our home base, all year round.

But as we had the droughts come along, that changed our focus a little bit.

So that's when we decided, in around 2005, midway through the drought, that we needed to do something to survive.

And that's where we ended up purchasing land south of here, originally in Naracoorte, which was in South Australia.

And then we found another property near Kaniva, which was more suitable for what we were looking at doing.

And so we done that, we purchased the land there in 2005.

And then in 2017, we actually then, we sort of felt that we had most of the pieces put together, but on the growing side of things with regards to quality and risk management.

But there was a small window, which is sort of a little bit of September, October and a bit of November.

That we then decided that in 2017 to purchase a farm in Queensland.

When we found a small property there in St. George,

that ticked all the boxes for us.

And we set that up and we've been growing carrots there for a 10 week window every year since then.

That's been working really well for us.

How large are the three properties?

Okay, so here at Wemen we've got 5,500 acres and at Kaniva it's about 6,000 and then up in St.

George it's 800 acres.

And between the three, what kind of tonnage are you putting through a year?

Between 55 and 60 odd thousand tons a year.

And so you mentioned the focus on carrots rather than carrots and potatoes.

Since that point, have you ever considered diversifying into other crops?

Not in vegetable crops, we're actually currently diversifying at the moment into pistachios.

So we've got about 600 odd acres planted at the moment.

We're planting another 150 acres this year and that's something that we're looking towards planting around about, I think we're trying to get to around about 1100 acres of that particular product.

So that'll give us something else to keep ourselves off the street for a little bit down the track.

They do take about 10 years to produce, so it's a bit of a long-term project, but with the next generation coming along and looking for something to do, we felt that it was a good idea to get ourselves ready for that.

Why pistachios in particular?

Well, the thing that we looked at it is that it wasn't many people felt that pistachios was ticking the boxes for them mainly because of the amount of time it takes to get the return.

So with us, that suited us because we've got our current income and business and we felt that the risk of doing something that less people were doing and also that pistachios are becoming quite popular as well in the Australian market with regards to people consuming them.

I guess that ability to look ahead and invest in something long term means that there's less competition as well.

Let's hope so.

Now look, with competition, it's...

Look, competition is always definitely healthy.

There's no doubt about that.

I mean, it really tests you out as a business and we try not to look at too much over the fence about what other people may or may not be doing.

We think if we concentrate on what we're doing, make sure that what we're doing is doing it the right way, doing it in a way that's sustainable, then we really can't go wrong, really, when you look at it that way.

We'll talk about not necessarily copying what the neighbours are doing and doing things the right way.

You've added a few interesting components to the business over the years and now you're quite vertically integrated in many respects, aren't you?

You've got your own transport operation, you've got a plastic packaging business.

Yes, we're with the transport side of things and the actual packaging side of things, we actually sold that business last year.

Yeah, and the main reason we've done that for is we felt that was more to head towards in the idea of the pistachios going forward, where we can stay in our expertise of farming.

The plastic industry was fantastic and great and all that while we were in it, but we found a very good company to purchase the business and we still purchase bags off them for our business and it's been good.

With, going back to the trucking side of things, it's sort of probably something that's been a little bit traditional, I suppose, more than the point with regards to when we were in Melbourne, my dad and his brothers had their own trucks and delivering directly to the customers was something that we used to do all the time.

And then when we come up here in 91, we bought a truck and we continued doing the same thing.

And we sort of never really thought about it, whether it was worth it or not.

But, and then every now and then we have had an opportunity to just do the calculations.

And we find that having the versatility of being able to deliver directly to our customers exactly at the time we want seems to work pretty good for us.

And the other thing too is it gives us the opportunity to experiment with some of the different types of vehicles that we can now using some of what they call PBS.

And that if you can prove that a vehicle can perform just as well as another vehicle that's already on the road.

That's what PBS stands for, Performance Based Scheme.

So it's what happens is you get a vehicle and you engineer it to compare it to a vehicle that's already standard on the road.

And if it meets all the same specifications, then they'll let you put it on the road.

And that gives us the opportunity to become a little bit more efficient with the way we carry our goods.

So maybe following the engineering thought, looking at your pack house, you have some fairly high tech equipment in your pack house.

How did that all come about?

And what was your approach to building, I guess, a new pack line?

And what happened was we originally felt that the growing side of things, we put all the pieces together and we had Wemen, we ended up with Kaniva and then St. George

and all the pieces come together very well.

And then we felt that the packing shed that we had originally was, not that it was letting us down, but it wasn't where we needed to be to give us the flexibility to be able to do exactly anything we wanted to.

And sometimes, when the product was, you needed to be able to go faster or go slower.

You know, you could go slower, but you couldn't go faster.

And there was a lot of things that caused us some issues.

So what we did, we've been looking at some particular pieces of equipment for probably the last 10 or maybe even 20 odd years.

And one of the pieces of equipment we were looking at was the NewTek electronic grading system.

What I call electronic was, so the grading was done by cameras.

And the machines that they had originally and the technique they were using to singulate the carrots for viewing for the camera was quite slow, I'll use the word.

And so we would have had to put in probably close to 10 machines to give us our volume that we're looking for.

And then at some stage, the NewTek company come up with the idea to be able to singulate the carrots in a different way.

And that's really what then was able to give us the opportunity to really look at that piece of equipment that would make it work for us.

So that was the basis of the actual upgrade.

And then all the other equipment sort of then fitted in with the grading systems.

Another thing that we were sort of sometimes, you know, having an issue with is that when you had a hot day and carrots were coming in at, you know, 27-degree core temperature and everything was struggling and, you know, the core temperature was coming out of the machines at the time, at probably, you know, six or seven degrees, which is not acceptable.

So we put a new fridge plan in.

We went away from the Freon gases.

So that was, you know, for environmental purposes that took quite a number of boxes.

The amount of power we used to cool the product down, tick a box there too, because the efficiencies of the ammonia system is absolutely fantastic.

And so then we built hydro coolers that could do what we really needed to do.

And so we done that.

And we originally had some brush washers that we built with Wyma going back a few years earlier.

And we were able to capitalize on that and put another couple of machines in.

So all the equipment was something that was sort of built over the years of we knew what we needed to do, but it was just making sure that the equipment came in in line with what we were expecting it to do.

I mean, you know, no goodbye to a machine that was not going to do the job.

So that was an opportunity to be able to tick that box and then really I use the old words where they say, you know, the rest is history.

So all the pieces really come together quite well.

The farming side of things come into its fruition that we're able to grow what we call, what I call, what we call, our family calls, growing low risk is really what we're looking at.

We know that we plant the carrot, we're going to harvest it in 22 weeks time, where before, we were hoping that we're going to harvest it.

That's unfortunately, business today is too tight to be able to plant something and then maybe you're going to harvest it.

So everything's really coming into play there.

Now with the packing shed, we can do, we do our 200 tonnes in a day, or the packing facility can handle 300 tonnes a day if we wanted to, but so we do everything comfortably.

So talking about grading, carrots are often given as an example of food waste because the buyers don't want bent or broken carrots.

How do you handle those carrots that don't find a home on the supermarket shelf?

With the actual electronic grading system, that really made a big difference to our business, being able to give our customers exactly what they wanted.

So the customer that does want a particular size or a particular type of carrot, we're able to give that to them and then continue on going down, down, down to, as you said, split, broken, bent.

The supermarkets have now introduced their, in our case, we supply coals.

So they've got a brand called Imperfect.

And that's really helped to be able to have a home for and selling product that maybe accidentally got broken or have a small chip or split or it's got a bend in it.

Nothing wrong with the carrot.

The carrot's quite sound.

Not an issue, but and it's good too because there's people out there that are looking for something a little bit more economically priced and that ticks the box for them.

Am I right in thinking that at one point you also had a juicing operation?

We did.

We were dealing with a company in Japan and then they decided they wanted to do their own juicing in Australia themselves.

So, we ended up selling the premises to another company that repurposed the facility for something else.

With regards to now having the electronic grading system, we actually supply a number of companies that do juice for the domestic and the overseas market.

And we find that for us, it works out better to be able to sell the carrot to them in the raw state and let them do what they do every day.

And it works out better for us.

So it sounds like a bit of a sustainability drive to use every carrot that's grown in a productive way.

Do you have the same kind of philosophy in the field with sustainability?

Do you have a big focus on soil health, for example?

Oh, well, that's probably the backbone of the success of our business.

The soil, what we do is we plant the carrots and everything we do up to that point is always for the carrots.

So we don't do anything that's going to jeopardize that.

We don't plant anything that's going to be jeopardizing anything to do with the carrots.

So, okay, the carrots are grown, and then the next year we'll end up putting something like a cereal crop in, which generally we do harvest.

So we call it a cash crop to a point.

And then straight after that, we'll end up putting in a crop to manage our weeds and soil fumigation and organic matter in the soil.

So that's also a very important part of what we do.

And then after that's been chopped in the ground and built up the organic matter, then we then plant the carrots.

So we work on, depends on, it's actually a funny thing.

You sort of don't realize sometimes how things go, and it just depends where you finish harvesting.

And sometimes you end up in the winter, and sometimes you end up in the summer and in the spring, and it just depends on where you harvest.

So some particular patches end up that we do actually a three year rotation, and some, there is actually a four year rotation.

So with the biofumigant cover crop, is the goal there, the primary goal, the biofumigant effect, or is it a bit of a mix with soil carbon and so on as well?

A mix.

So it's probably one more important than the other, actually.

It is important that we do get that stuff, get that right.

Yeah, very important.

It's actually, we probably underestimate the importance of what we do.

Why I say it's important, because we can see the success of it.

It makes a big difference.

It's just enormous difference.

Since you started doing that kind of rotation with cover cropping, has it reduced the number of inputs you need?

What we found more with regards to some of the spraying that we do while the carrots are in, definitely 100% regarding, because if we can manage our weed load in the cover crop, it definitely puts a lot less pressure on once you plant the carrots that you're not trying to fight amongst the weeds.

The soil being healthy obviously makes a big difference to the actual carrot themselves.

And then with the organic matter, it gives you a better usage of the water that you put in.

So your water consumption is a lot more economical.

Being your root crop, is there anything unique to carrots or other similar root crops that you need to think of when it comes to your soil?

Not that we have to think about anything over and above, but because we're probably harvesting probably one of the most fussiest root crops, carrots, with regards to if your soil isn't healthy, the issues that you can have with carrots can be detriment to the business because you've got cavity spots one for a start and many other diseases as well that can be nematodes, stuff like that.

So we don't use any chemicals at all for nematode control because of the natural fumigation we get out of our cover crops.

So it gives us that, it gives us organic matter and it gives us other things that we call weed control.

So there's many, many things that, but the problem is it's a little bit more expensive.

It's hard to sort of do the costing.

We don't look at it to say whether it costs more or less to do that particular way of operating, but we find that it's the way that we know that, as I said, my children and their children can continue doing what we're doing, will continue working.

And I think that that's sometimes some of the issues with other businesses that think that, unfortunately, you just can't afford to do shortcuts anymore.

It just doesn't pay.

It just cannot work.

So is looking ahead to the farm that you hand on to your next generation a big focus?

That's practically what we're doing what we're doing for.

I mean, my dad, he was working for each kids, and I work for my kids, and my kids will work for their kids.

It's just a standard thing that all families do.

So it's a lot.

It's a massive focus.

And if you, you know, you got to be confident that you can hand over the reins in a way that you know that it's going to work.

It's not like you just say, oh, we've done the best we could.

It's not really working.

Here's the reins and see what you can do.

And hopefully it works.

That's not really what we can do.

But it's more about being able to pass on our current information that we already got in our, our minds, our experience, I suppose the word, and move that on to pass that on to the next generation.

And are they coming through the business at the moment?

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.

Well, my brother still, he's got two boys in the business already.

And then he's got another son that will come into the business a little bit later on as he gets older.

And same as myself and my brother, John has also got another son as well.

So they're all heading in that direction.

But we just need to give us, give it another year.

They're only, what are they, 13 at the moment.

So 12 and 13.

So a few years to go.

A couple of years before you need to change the name to Rocky Lamattina & Sons & Grandsons.

Wow, that's possible.

Hopefully, that's the plan.

Angelo, thanks very much for joining me and having a chat through the history of the business.

Not a problem at all, Tom.

Thanks very much for this.

And we hope that we can continue doing what we do.

And we love it.

So the next generation, hopefully, they love it as well and keep on growing carrots.

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Vegalogue is produced by Ausveg, the peak industry body for Australian vegetable growers.

You can find more news and information from Ausveg at ausveg.com.au on our social media channels or in Australian Grower magazine.

Instead of the usual terrible dad joke, I'm going to sign off this episode with a fun bit of trivia instead.

Did you know that the link between eating carrots and good night vision is actually the product of World War II propaganda?

During the war, the number of German bombers being shot down by Britain's Royal Air Force at night suddenly soared.

The British press began to be filled with stories that attributed the success to RAF pilots with exceptional night vision due to a diet packed with vitamin A-filled carrots, such as night fighter ace, flight lieutenant John "Catseyes" Cunningham.

But the stories were in fact the creation of the British Ministry of Information, and were designed to distract the Germans from the real cause of the RAF's sudden ability to spot bombers at night, a new invention called Airborne Interception Radar.

Whether the deception worked on the Germans or not is uncertain, but it did have one obvious effect.

Carrot consumption in Britain boomed as the myth took root.

Thanks for listening to Vegalogue.

See you next time.