Vegalogue
A dialogue on research, advocacy and people in the Australian vegetable industry from AUSVEG, Australia's peak industry body for the vegetable, potato and onion sectors.
Vegalogue
Onions Australia merger, pre-harvest sanitation, snacking vegetables, Gatton AgTech
Vegalogue is a podcast from Australian vegetable peak industry body AUSVEG. Each month we'll be taking 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.
This month, we discuss:
- The Onions Australia merger with AUSVEG
- Pre-harvest sanitation of leafy green vegetables
- The opportunities and hurdles for vegetables as snack foods
- The Gatton AgTech Showcase
Guests:
- Michael Coote, CEO, AUSVEG
- Adjunct Professor Tom Ross and Senior Research Fellow Dr Alieta Eyles, University of Tasmania
- Martin Kneebone, Managing Director, Freshlogic
- Ian Layden, Director for Vegetables, Systems and Supply Chains, Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries
Thanks for listening to Vegalogue! 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, Instagram, Tik Tok, or Twitter/X.
Martin Kneebone: 0:00
and nobody wants packaging until you look what's in their bag and you find that there is packaging. It's convenient. It's also a very efficient way of managing that product through the supply chain.
Tom Bicknell: 0:19
Welcome back to Vegalogue podcast, a dialogue about the Australian vegetable industry from AUSVEG, your peak industry body. I'm your host, Tom Bicknell. We're kicking things off this year with a packed episode. First up, we'll be taking a look at the merger between AUSVEG and onions Australia AUSVEG's CEO, Michael Coote. Next, we'll be speaking to adjunct professor Tom Ross and Dr Alieta Eyles of the University of Tasmania about pre-harvest sanitation of leafy green vegetables. We're also catching up on the opportunities and challenges for vegetables as a snack food with Kneebone of market researcher Freshlogic, and topping things off with a look at the recent Gatton AgTech Showcase. So let's get into it. In July 2023, the Executive Committee of Onions Australia, the former peak industry body for onions, announced it would merge with AUSVEG, the peak industry body for vegetables and potatoes. The merger was the result of a vote from Onions Australia members following a long period of industry consultation. The development opens up a new era for representation for the Australian onion industry and I'm joined today by AUSVEG CEO, Michael Coote, to talk about what that means for growers. Thanks for joining me, Michael. Thanks, Tom. Michael, Onions Australia has been representing onion growers for decades. What are the key drivers behind the vote by onion growers and the benefits of a merger with AUSVEG.
Michael Coote: 1:39
I guess the key outcome of the vote of onion members was to merge AUSVEG rather rather than continue with the standalone peak industry body Onions Australia, acknowledging all of the good work that the Onions Australia Committee and organisation has delivered over the years. But, moving into 2023 and beyond, there's real need for consolidated advocacy and representation for the broader vegetable industry, which AUSVEG was already delivering for vegetable and potato growers, and adding onion growers and the onion industry into the mix was a logical synergy and that was reflected in the vote that the Onions Australia Committee ran in July. Some of the key benefits that onion growers in the wider industry can receive from this new consolidated representation includes expanded advocacy capacity, given AUSVEG is able to resource itself to have heavy political and media engagement, heavy engagement with bureaucrats and policymakers in Canberra to ensure that vegetable, potato and now onion issues and policies can have strong, regular and ongoing input from their peak industry body to ensure that any policy settings or changes to policy adequately take into account the industry's needs.
Tom Bicknell: 2:56
And what are some of the big issues that onion growers are facing AUSVEG will be working to address with that advocacy side.
Michael Coote: 3:03
At the current time, one of the major issues that's facing growers of all types of vegetables, including onions, is ensuring that growers get a fair price for an affair return for their product. Grows incur a lot of risk and invest heavily to produce a product, and they need to get paid a viable price for that product to ensure that they can run sustainable businesses into the future. Some other key priorities and key issues for the onion sector are around biosecurity protection and preparedness, ongoing input cost increases. There's obviously ongoing supply chain impacts, logistics challenges and the like, and also similar to the broader vegetable industry need to find some creative solutions to increase demand and consumption of fresh Australian vegetables in the current cost of living crisis.
Tom Bicknell: 3:55
AUSVEG has been involved with the onion industry for some time already, hasn't it?
Michael Coote: 3:59
Look, certainly, and a number of onion growers also grow other crops such as carrots or potatoes and other crops from time to time. So a number of onion growers are already engaged in different programs and services AUSVEG provides and specifically at the moment AUSVEG is also delivering the levy funded programs for communications and extension. The export development is part of the onions, vegetables and melons export program through Hort Innovation and we're delivering just starting up delivery again of onion industry grower tours and hopefully the onion industry conference program which will roll out over the next few years. So in addition AUSVEG's delivery of services and programs to vegetable and potato growers, we've got a reasonable footprint now to deliver a whole range of R&D levy funded activities to hopefully benefit onion growers and the broader industry moving forward as part of AUSVEG's service delivery across the sector.
Tom Bicknell: 5:01
And from a legislative perspective, how does a merger like this work?
Michael Coote: 5:04
There's a lot of bureaucratic red tape at the back end to make some make changes to the way that the legislation and the prescribed status of the onion industry representative body. There is a process that the Department of Agriculture has underway at the moment to update and modernize the primary industry's levy's legislation. So as part of those updates over the course of this year we'll also be seeking to change the prescribed body listed in the legislation from Onions Australia to AUSVEG. So, following the vote that the Onions Australia committee undertook of their members in July last year, that I guess sets the platform to demonstrate to the government that the onion industry supports the merger AUSVEG representing onion growers. There's just some practical steps at the back end that AUSVEG will be working with the Federal Department of Agriculture to enact to, I guess, tick off some of those procedural and legislative elements of a merger such as this. And I guess the final thing I'll say, Tom, on this merger is that it is a really exciting time from an AUSVEG perspective, but also for the onion industry to, I guess, be part of a new phase of representation across the broader vegetable industries. As part of that, AUSVEG really recognises the work and the history that Onions Australia has put in to represent the onion sector. So we'll be doing a range of different activities to ensure that history is recognised. An element of that will be certainly standing up some web content as part of the AUSVEG website on Onions Australia and its history and the onion industry, but also, importantly, continuing to recognise the onion industries lifetime achievement award, the Reg Miller Award. So we'll have a dedicated page on the AUSVEG website that obviously identifies and recognises all of the previous recipients and that award will continue to be supported by AUSVEG. This isn't about the onion industry losing its presence or anything like that as part of AUSVEG. It's about how we can ensure that that's enhanced and protected and recognised for the future.
Tom Bicknell: 7:14
Michael, thanks very much for walking us through that. Thanks, Tom. You're listening to the Vegalogue podcast brought to you by AUSVEG. Postharvest sanitation can't be relied on to fully remove the risk of pathogenic microorganisms like salmonella or listeria, making pre-harvest a critical link in the chain to reduce microbial contamination. This is a relatively new area of research, however, and a recent levy funded literature review by the University of Tasmania cast out the net to see what research has been done in this area globally. I spoke with Adjunct Professor Tom Ross and Dr Alieta Eyles of the University of Tasmania about what the review uncovered. There's quite a bit of work going on in microbial contamination in leafy vegetables at the moment. Just recently on the podcast, we covered a project being run by DPI New South Wales aiming to identify and manage risk areas for contamination in current industry practice, which is a bit of a stepping stone to the introduction of the new FSANZ standard for leafy veg coming into force in 2025. Does your project have a similar driver?
Adjunct Professor Tom Ross: 8:26
No, not specifically. So there's a strategic advisory panel for the vegetable industry as part of Hort Innovation and part of their purview is just to keep an eye on what's happening around the place so that there's continuous development within the industry. So certainly it has a focus, but we're not doing any lab work, which is seeing what's happening in the rest of the world in that space around pre-harvest sanitation but as well as looking at irrigation water sanitation as well. So we've done a literature review, but we've also consulted with Australian industry. We'll also get international reviewers to have a look at it and provide feedback as well. So it should be a fairly up to date review of what the potential is, or what the potential and problems are for pre-harvest irrigation and then disinfection of water as well for irrigation and there's a few other bits to it as well. Just putting all of that into the context of how do we normally manage food safety and the fresh produce industry and particularly in this case leafy green vegetables.
Tom Bicknell: 9:25
You're looking at research in this area from across the globe. What's the current standard of research in this area internationally?
Adjunct Professor Tom Ross: 9:34
Well as far as we could see, we can only find three publications that talk specifically about pre-harvest sanitation, and two of those are Australian, and two of them are actually work that was done through the University of Tasmania so we should declare that, but there's not a lot published on it.
Tom Bicknell: 9:50
Are there other countries who have particularly good industry practice around managing pre-harvest contamination?
Dr Alieta Eyles: 9:56
Well, it's really hard for us to actually access that information because it's not published. So that's what we're struggling at the moment, and finding those papers is hard. What we can find papers on is sanitising the actual irrigation water itself. So that provides us some information and we can extrapolate from that.
Tom Bicknell: 10:17
Do you see pre-harvest being a bigger contamination risk factor than post-harvest?
Adjunct Professor Tom Ross: 10:24
Contamination mostly happens in the field, and that's why post-harvest there's a lot of work done to try and clean product as best we can. But again, fresh produce is difficult because it doesn't get cooked and you can't treat it with too many chemicals or heat, and so getting the cleanest product off I think that the paddock is really important. So that's why pre-harvest sanitation is of interest. Whether it's practical and feasible in terms of cost-versus benefit and so on. That's part of what we were trying to look at as well. But realistically there's not a lot of evidence to say how would you actually do it in terms of what we know about sanitation in other situations where you're using chemical treatments? So again, it comes down to the amount or the concentration, the time of contact and then perhaps temperatures. Well, that's probably less of an issue. But so getting all of those things combined is also studies done on different sanitizers and some of them are better than others, and so that was part of it. But gee, there's very, very little information in terms of pre-harvest, much of all post-harvest in terms of disinfection of water.
Tom Bicknell: 11:30
So, looking at irrigation water, what kind of chemistry can people maybe look at using there?
Dr Alieta Eyles: 11:35
Well, we've got those quite a common fertiliser sanitizers, sorry, and they're normally like your chlorine. That's a number one post-harvest sanitiser. Then we have electrolyzed water. There's another new one that's coming up and very popular, and PAA is another one peroxy acetic acid. And the fourth one is ozone, yep. So there's a number of options out there.
Adjunct Professor Tom Ross: 12:03
And they're all chemical oxidants. As well as that, you can physically treat water with filters and all sorts of other things and probably you have sterilisation, but also considered to be not that effective in the longer term, very expensive to do and difficult. So chemicals in the water is considered to be a better option.
Tom Bicknell: 12:21
So an area for further research?
Adjunct Professor Tom Ross: 12:25
Yep. And there's much more in the international literature about that, than as I said again how efficacious pre-harvest would be, so that's sort of the dilemma at the moment. Let's try and see if we can extrapolate a little bit from what we know about treating the bubble quarter as to seeing what it might do in the field.
Tom Bicknell: 12:42
And where do you think future research should focus?
Dr Alieta Eyles: 12:48
There's a lot. It's a huge area. As I said, there's not much research done in it, so our team would be really excited to do some more work in this area to show that these potentially post-harvest sanitisation could have some efficacy in pre-harvest situation. But it's a matter of whether it's worth going down that road.
Adjunct Professor Tom Ross: 13:09
And I guess that's what this sort of desktop review is meant to try and identify Is it worth investing more research into that area or not, and so be able to see how we go. There's a fair degree of scepticism, I think, from the people that we spoke to. They're just saying how would you make that work? And so partly that'll be the discussion we'll have as well. So how would you make it work? So I'm not wanting to write off the idea, but just say let's be serious about it. If we're going to invest more, we'd better know what we're doing.
Tom Bicknell: 13:40
This project is funded by Hort Innovation using the vegetable levy and contributions from the Australian government under project code VG22008. In the ongoing drive to increase vegetable consumption, it's important to explore opportunities in every meal and even between meals. Snacking is a huge but sometimes overlooked consumption occasion and it offers significant potential for vegetables. But it also comes with significant challenges. Nine years ago, food market analyst Freshlogic undertook a levy funded project that dug into just how big the potential was, where the opportunities lay and what the big hurdles were. I caught up with Freshlogic CEO Kneebone to hear what, if any, headway vegetables had made in the snacking category since then. Martin, thanks very much for joining me today. Good to see you, Tom. So back in 2015 or 2016, Freshlogic undertook a set of levy funded projects to quantify the size of the vegetable snacking market and identify opportunities to create more vegetable snacking options. Now full disclosure, I was involved in those projects when I worked with you here at Freshlogic and I remember at the time that the research found that consumers said they wanted vegetable snacks, but catering to that demand was often challenging. Looking back at the original research, what were the major findings of those projects?
Martin Kneebone: 15:11
That's a good summary. All consumers are saying we would like more nutritious snacks. Eventually it ends up as a trade-off with convenience and where they can source the product they want when they're hungry. And the challenges of a perishable product, trying to manage it through the supply chain, make it hard for vegetables more snacking, particularly if that product involves a level of preparation. So we saw as the whole snacking market was about 10% of total food and grocery and that included everything and then set that right back down to specifically what some of the vegetables were achieving. Again we're finding that the convenience of delivery and the product form were overarching sort of positive considerations. It invited looking at vending to try and get that fresh, nutritious snacking offer closer to where the need might be, but more difficult. People seem to have a lot more capacity to buy a packet of chips rather than a sliced carrot in that sort of environment, let alone how to get it there and service it. And I think we found that the sweet spot was a whole vegetable product that stayed whole and was able to travel through the supply chain and that for, and at that stage it was pretty clear that a small snacking tomato was successful in that sense and it's sort of the optimum product for.
Tom Bicknell: 16:34
And in the years since that research, what's changed with the Australian vegetable snacking market?
Martin Kneebone: 16:39
I think we've seen the successes replicated with more products. Tomatoes were definitely right up there. I think cucumbers have left it off the learnings and gotten there a lot quicker. That's been a successful product and so that those products in that form, that whole form that are able to travel through going well. We've also seen the smaller households warm to the smaller sized product. So whilst in the supply chain we talk of the snacking category, not all of those products are consumed as snack. Many of them are actually really convenient product forms for small or busy households. So that meeting that demand has put some demand and volume weight around what we probably loosely call snacking product form.
Tom Bicknell: 17:31
So bringing new products to market, obviously over the years we've only seen a few that have really been successful, like the snacking cucumbers. What are the big challenges? Getting a vegetable snacking product on the retail shelf to begin with, and second, to convince consumers to buy it.
Martin Kneebone: 17:49
They both arrive at the same time and you've got a perishable product. So the disciplines around performance are absolute. If you take a product to a retailer and between yourself and the retailer you're able to convince them, there's an opportunity. You've probably got a month and it doesn't perform in that month you're out. Your performance needs to be better than the lowest performing product or like product around. You've probably got to see another product taken off the shelf to put yours on. There isn't an infinite amount of shelf space out there and what you've got is expansion and higher demand for fresh chilled areas. So anything in a vegetable form that might be cut or trimmed, that needs refrigeration, is now under more pressure, particularly with the expansion of the likes of berries. So it's harder Get the sheer performance of the product think of fruit vegetables as being a perfect research situation. There's no one behind the counter. There's no one other than the consumer assessing the value and selecting the product. So they look at a range of tomatoes which include 18 to 20 different products, and they go in there and they select this one or that one and that product sells at a level that is beyond its deterioration or marked out on the shelf and it's successful. If it doesn't, it'll be taken out of the range.
Tom Bicknell: 19:11
What about the logistics of fresh cut snacking products?
Martin Kneebone: 19:15
Challenging, particularly when you, when you go away from the whole product form, and that's why those products have succeeded very well. They are more robust, they travel through the supply chain and I think from our interactions with the leading breeders, it's that robustness and shelf life and maintenance of eating quality that are really valuable attributes. We don't ever really want to be breeding a vegetable for a long shelf life, or what we want to know is that it's not deteriorating within the normal convenience cycle. And let's be realistic, people are shopping two to three times a week, so they're not buying once a fortnight for this sort of stuff.
Tom Bicknell: 19:59
In many cases, these products are packaged, and consumers have a strong preference for things that aren't packaged these days.
Martin Kneebone: 20:07
They do and nobody wants packaging until you look what's in their bag and you find it they're as packaging. It's convenient. It's also a very efficient way of managing that product through the supply chain. With the various barcoding options and the increase in the amount of self-serve checkouts, the comfort, the overarching comfort from consumers that I'd like to be able to shop quickly. If it's a barcode, it's easy. If it's a lookup item, it's more complicated.
Tom Bicknell: 20:38
And it makes it portable, which is important in snacking.
Martin Kneebone: 20:40
Yes, it does, and those portion sizes can get down and typically where those portion sizes have been reduced, incremental value has been captured in the category. So that's been probably the prime catalyst for for the snacking vegetable products generating more value.
Tom Bicknell: 21:00
Looking through the COVID pandemic. Has that had much of an impact on consumer behavior around veg snacks?
Martin Kneebone: 21:05
A little bit. When COVID came along, there was less shopping trips going on. There was fewer trips, higher volume with fewer trips, that were less in pulse sales, so slightly all of that. Check out confectionary type lines. They all eased back because there was less shopping going on and there was more food purchased, more food prepared at home. Lunches weren't at work, that were at home, so that took the demand off for some of the snacking products. As soon as it came back, we saw it lift and carry on and as soon as the restaurants opened we swung back into that almost in the get-even mode. Don't lock me up anymore, I'm gonna go out. I'm gonna go out a couple times extra just to catch up to 18 months when I couldn't. You know what I mean. And they did and and that's hard-wired.
Tom Bicknell: 22:04
So consumer behaviors more or less sprung back 100% now?
Martin Kneebone: 22:10
I mean that's a lifestyle trend now and that that flows on to frame the future for this sort of stuff. Because we read Australian households now are spending 39% of their food dollar on food-consumed kind of home. Now that's pretty substantial. That's grown by 50% as a proportion of this, but that's just food over some 15, 20 years. That's a big increment and that's not a whim and that's had the pressure of cost of living adverse sort of impacts the last 80 months but it's still held up.
Tom Bicknell: 22:48
And looking at veg snacking, are there specific trends that we should be watching out for in the next couple of years?
Martin Kneebone: 22:54
You know, most of the products that we've succeeded with here have. We've seen some successes with them overseas, and so we can look to where those things I think most of what's working out of Australia has had an opportunity to work in this marketplace. And again you come back to that whole product that can travel through the supply chain that is not exposed to being cut and therefore giving up water and perishability. It succumbs to that sort of thing. I think the grazing tendency which is underlies it all just continues. I think that schools and the influence that they have will strengthen the fresh component and will put pressure on the packaging component, because they want to see all those things and the children are being introduced to that. It's a bit like my children now instinctively recycle the rubbish. Now I didn't teach them that. I'm pleased to see it happen, but they got taught that at school. So I think that the younger ones at school now are going to evolve into a different consumer which will probably warm to these sorts of things. But the practical, pragmatic sides of cutting and trimming and moving and getting it where you want to be via the overarching considerations and we shop two or three times a week and a very high proportion of our households are now only one person it's over 20% and so they they don't want to buy big quantities, so they're buying. They welcome smaller packs of tomatoes and cucumbers because they don't want to put half a tomato back in the fridge.
Tom Bicknell: 24:38
Martin, thanks very much for walking us through that. Thank you, good to see you, Tom. Thank you. This research was funded by Hort Innovation using the vegetable levy and contributions from the Australian Government under project codes VG14024 and VG15060. The promise of AgTech to improve farm operations has been around for many years, with many growers adopting changes to improve input usage and harvest techniques. The Gatton AgTech Showcase in November 2023 showed that the next step is here and commercially viable. AUSVEG's Debra Hill attended the event and had a chat with event organiser Ian Layden, Director of Vegetables Systems and Supply Chains with Queensland's Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
Deborah Hill: 25:33
The Gatton AgTech Showcase in November 2023 aimed to bring together growers, agribusinesses, technology companies, consultants, researchers and students for a festival of technology and innovative ideas. Held at the Gatton Smart Farm in the Lockyer Valley, the event attracted 1,000 registrations from across the country and overseas, with 50 exhibitors as well as live demonstrations of innovative ag equipment. Launched in 2021, the Gatton Smart Farm aims to accelerate the adoption of AgTech, providing a location and facilities for agricultural R&D, for infield protected cropping and supply chain systems for turf, tree orchards and vegetable growers. Working with industry, the VEGNET Regional Development Offices of Far North Queensland, Wide Bay Burnett and Gippsland, and the Lockyer Valley Growers Group, the Gatton Smart Farm team recognise that such an event as this showcase would give horticulture a much needed boost after the devastating floods in the region in 2022. Ian Layden, Director for Vegetable Systems and Supply Chains with Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries said that the involvement of groups such as the VEGNET team and the Lockyer Valley Growers Group gave the event a higher level of success.
Ian Layden: 26:48
We did get a great turn out of growers, local but also nationally. So I think those sorts of relationships that set up these things for success and you hope to sort of well, we've done that and maybe we can do things bigger and better and different, whether it be with the Lockyer Valley Growers or indeed any other grow group in the future, I think if we sort of work in those solar partnerships, there's a lot to be gained. There's a whole range of Ag Tech exhibitors. We have 40, 45, 50 exhibitors. The feedback from that group has been absolutely phenomenal. Our official number was 217 growers. That's a lot, and they came from all around Australia. We must have got the recipe right in terms of field demonstration and the way we had set that up.
Deborah Hill: 27:33
On display the Gatton Ag Tech showcase. Live demonstrations included precision weed management systems that used computer vision to identify and spray or mechanically remove weeds, autonomous vehicles to carry tools, weeds or plant seeds, and much more. In addition, researchers brought visitors up to date on the latest research findings on full army worm serpentine leaf miner and the use of cover crops for soil health.
Ian Layden: 27:59
The idea was to put a number of different things out there, particularly with the machinery. Again, here's the landscape of what Ag Tech is, and we didn't show everything, of course, but we showed stuff, what we thought would make the most difference to growers and be probably the most adoptable one of a better word for growers to see machines actually operating autonomously and to see other growers who have purchased autonomous machines. Again, very first time, very new. I think there was a little bit of a sense of excitement, probably the one of a better word there to say, actually this is more than a YouTube clip now, it's more than sort of a glossy magazine article or something like that.
Deborah Hill: 28:39
From an exhibitor perspective. The opportunity to show machinery in action was challenging but proved invaluable in terms of connecting with growers and developing relationships. For some, it was the first time that the machinery had been demonstrated in Australia, indicating that overseas suppliers are taking note that the Australian market is ready to take the next step in Ag Tech.
Tom Bicknell: 29:33
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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.
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