7 January 2009
DAFF09/69T

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Foresty - Tony Burke
Vegetable grower - Pennie Patane

Myalup, WA

Tony Burke: G’day, it’s Tony. I’m out in the Myalup area in south-west WA at the moment. And I’m here with Pennie Patane and this is a—I think we’ve got carrots all around us.

Pennie Patane: Carrots, yes. Yes, carrots here.

Tony: Okay, what’s the different areas of produce that you’re involved in growing out here?

Pennie: We grow potatoes, carrots, onions and broccoli (inaudible)

Tony: And the market—what you’ve grown here—what are the points of sale that you’ve been able to access?

Pennie: About sixty per cent of our carrots go interstate. A lot of them go to Sydney—fifty per cent into Sydney. Some to South Australia and Melbourne and about twenty-five per cent get exported to various places overseas—Middle East, Asia—and then about fifteen per cent (inaudible)

Tony: Okay—I mean not many people would know that we export carrots, so what are the countries that pick that up?

Pennie:  In the Middle East we’re going into Dubai and Oman and Bahrain, and Asia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand occasionally into Taiwan (inaudible)

Tony: That’s terrific. Now a lot of people have—I mean, one of the constant complaints I get from growers is that they see the difference between the farm gate price and what it ends up being out at the check out.

Pennie: Yes.

Tony: So. I mean we’ve got the review of the horticulture code of conduct at the moment—what are the sorts of issues that growers are hoping to see out of that? Is there any areas of—like is transparency the issue? What are the sorts of things…?

Pennie: I think transparency is a big issue but there’s also—as I think we were talking about before—we don’t experience the peaks and troughs as much when there is short supply because we have—there are our overseas imports affecting our supply chain. When we are in short supply we are not getting the higher dollar value—higher prices, but when there’s a high supply—an over-supply—straight away our prices will be cut down. But I don’t think that’s always reflected in the prices in the supermarket they don’t seem to have the low troughs but they certainly seem to see the highs but we don’t actually get those. So, I think a bit of transparency might help that.

Tony: Yeah, okay and a just across here—what’s the total output of what you have here and how many people do you employ? What’s the size of the operation?

Pennie: Yeah, so we grow about 500 acres of carrots and a couple hundred acres of potatoes, a hundred acres of onions, similar in broccoli. We have other growers grow carrots for us that we then package up and on-sell. I can’t remember the rest of the question.

Tony: How many people do you employ?

Pennie: Oh, we employ about twenty-five to thirty people. We use overseas labour—backpackers—quite a bit. Depends, about ten to fifteen of them at a time and the rest of them are locals but it’s only sort of a small population area.

Tony: Yeah. How many people do you reckon you feed?

Pennie: Good question – a bloody lot of carrots.

Tony: Okay. Well, thanks very much for having me out here Pennie – appreciate it.

Pennie: Thank you.