WA growers investing in avocados for their farming future

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Australian's eat a lot of avocados - about 5 kilograms per-person every year, and if Western Australian farmers have their way that's only to grow.   Landline's Halina Baczkowski went to pemberton in w-a to learn more.

Transcript

00:00Australians. We love avocados. And with diverse growing regions, we're lucky to enjoy them

00:10for most of the year. The eastern states, mostly Queensland, provide avocados for six

00:18months of that year. The rest of the time, they come from Western Australian farms like

00:23Shane Blakers.

00:24It's quite different how they grow over here compared to Queensland. We've got a lot longer

00:29time on the tree, generally got two crops on the tree most of the time. We sort of generally

00:34start June, July in WA, in the South West region, and run through to anywhere up to June the

00:40following year potentially, which is unique, I guess. And they hang fairly well on the

00:48tree over here.

00:50The Blaker family has farmed here for more than 110 years, growing fruit and veg, even

00:55wine grapes. But for the past 15 years, they've focused on avocados and a few cattle.

01:00There was only sort of a few people dabbling in them and obviously being a tropical plant,

01:05growing them down in the South West of WA where it's freezing cold and raining quite a lot.

01:10No one sort of really knew what they were going to be like. So yeah, when we got through the

01:15vineyard days and that sort of thing, in the late 2000s, Dad worked on getting some water

01:20secured and plant some abos and yeah.

01:25In this region, it's been the last couple of generations who have embraced avocados as

01:29their farming future. 25 minutes down the road, the Delroy family was one of the pioneering

01:35avocado farms. Susie De Campo's parents, Russell and Jenny Delroy, planted their original orchard

01:42in 1987 after seeing how well the fruit was doing in New Zealand.

01:47Which makes our oldest trees, about 38 years old now. It started out with 5 hectares of

01:52avos and it's now grown into almost 400 hectares, which is almost, it's just under 200,000 trees.

02:00The industry has boomed since then, but Susie reckons the growth potential hasn't peaked

02:05yet. When Dad started, I think the consumption rate for avocados in Australia was about 0.8 kilos,

02:12per capita and that's grown to 5 kilos per capita, which makes Australia's consumption rate one

02:18of the highest in the world outside of a Latino population. I think for context, Mexico's

02:23consumption rate is about 12 kilos per capita.

02:27That's a lot of toast. Maybe we need more guacamole. Chief Executive Officer of Avocados Australia

02:34John Tice has a plan to make light avo buyers become heavy buyers.

02:39Well, there's a lot of marketing and promotion work that we're doing, targeting very much

02:44at those light buyers, getting people to understand different ways to use them, the awesome health

02:49benefits of the product and changing behaviours over time.

02:53that's a lot of marketing.

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