BUSINESS value forward multiples in the food and agriculture sector may have decreased in the first half of 2016, according to mergers and acquisitions specialists InterFinancial, but they are still ahead of comparable ASX200 values.

Across the food and agribusiness spectrum, forward price earnings (PE) multiples at June 30 were at 17.9-times earnings, well clear of the ASX200 on 15.6x. Values for various parts of the sector show interesting variations.

Enterprise value earnings before interest and taxation (EV/EBIT) for the 2017 financial year for the food processing subsector are at 17.5x, distiller and vintners at 25.9x, agricultural products at 18.5x and food wholesale/retail businesses at 14.2x.

According to InterFinancial research the relatively strong values in the food and agribusiness sector is prompting steady new activity in mergers and acquisitions.

For example, Rural Funds Management has exercised an option to acquire a cattle property located in central Queensland as part of its plan to expand its portfolio of agricultural assets into the northern Australian cattle industry. An additional two properties situated in northern Queensland have been contracted.

The three properties form an integrated cattle breeding and finishing operation. The properties – which were acquired for $42 million including stamp duty – and livestock acquired for $8 million will be leased for 10 years to Cattle JV, a wholly owned subsidiary of RFM.

Bellamy’s Australia has appointed advisors for a strategic review of the business. The role may become defensive should buyers emerge for the business. 

According to InterFinancial director David Hassum, Danone’s US$10.4 billion bid for US-based WhiteWave Foods, representing a 35x forecast on FY16 profit, highlights the potential for activity in the organic food space in Australia. 

Interestingly, APAC Coal has entered into a share purchase agreement to acquire Goyes Agri-Food Investment for Sharp Year Ventures. The purchase consideration will be $136 million, funded by the issue of new equity.

TFS Corporation has executed contracts with a new institutional investor in the company’s Beyond Carbon product, InterFinancial said. The new investor is a US based global investment management firm with more than US$100 billion under management and an established track record of investing in Australian and New Zealand agriculture.

Bindaree Beef Group, the Australian beef processor, has failed to settle the sale of a 45 percent stake in the business to Shandong Delisi Foods for $140 million by the agreed date of June 30. The deadline had been extended to July 31, however reduced profitability associated with high cattle prices seems to have become a sticking point.

Australian Agribusiness Group has acquired Lactanz, the Australian dairy farms business, for $30 million. The purchase includes four farms located in West Australia and 4000 cows.

LaManna Group and Premier Fruits Group have merged as a natural extension of their 10-year joint venture relationship. The merged entity has announced plans to pursue acquisitions to fuel growth, with combined annual turnover of $500 million. The combined group would enhance its export strategy and could target acquisitions in the US.

Kapiris Bros, a family owned Australian producer of tomatoes and capsicums, is in talks with potential financial investors, according to its sales and marketing director Steve Tsakoumakis. He said Kapiris Bros aim was to accelerate growth, enter offshore markets, expand product offerings and gain additional expertise.

Lion has received notification of the termination of licensed and imported beer products in Australia. AB InBev will take back distribution of those brands, which include Budweiser, Stella Artois, Corona and Becks, as a result of its acquisition of SABMiller. Lion expected to receive payments in the range of $250-$300 million late in the 2016 financial year.

Macquarie Group has lodged an unsolicited offer for the South Australian Produce Market. The indicative and nonbinding expression of interest did not put a price on the target and did not address the group’s constitution, which includes a 15 percent ownership cap of shares and a 49 percent cap on shares held on the unclassified share class. Perth’s Market City was recently acquired by The Chamber of Fruit and Vegetable Industries for $135.5 million, while Brisbane Markets recently rejected a $140m hostile takeover offer from VGI Partners.

Burrabogie Pastoral Company, the Australian agricultural land business, may be divested by Australian investor Colin Bell for between $400m and $500m.

Nature’s Care, the Australia-based vitamin and supplement company, has launched its sales process and is expected to sell for $1billion. Potential buyers are likely to include Hony Capital and Shanghai Pharma.

Bain Capital may be planning to list Retail Zoo, the Australia-based food business, early next year. Bain acquired 70 percent of Retail Zoo in 2014 in a deal valued at around $185 million.

Shanghai Maling Aquarius, a unit of China’s Bright Foods is thought to have walked away from a deal to buy New Zealand’s Silver Fern Farms. Bright agreed to buy 50 percent of Silver Fern last year for NZ$261m but the deal has not yet received clearance from New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office.

China Merchants Group, a state-owned conglomerate active in transportation, financial services and real estate, is seeking to acquire a frozen food or dairy target in Australia or New Zealand. The company is interested in acquiring a majority or controlling stake in a frozen food producer with product lines consisting of frozen beef and lamb meat, or a dairy products company producing pasteurized milk, yogurt and ice cream.

New Zealand King Salmon, the New Zealand-based salmon producer, is conducting a review of its capital options. NZ King Salmon, which was acquired by Direct Capital in 2008, could be valued at NZ$200m.

www.interfinancial.com.au

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In the previous edition of Business Acumen, we presented a brief overview of the Etheridge Integrated Agriculture Project (EIAP). This innovative agribusiness and power generation development is a sentinel for what is possible in Northern Australia by integrating agribusiness savvy, sustainability, new technologies and vital infrastructure to realise the potential of the region. In this edition, we present a more detailed report on the EIAP – and the intelligent drive behind it.

By Mike Sullivan >>

THE Etheridge Integrated Agriculture Project (EIAP) can potentially lead the way for a range of future sustainable agribusiness developments across Northern Australia – because it astutely plays to the strengths of the region and overcomes the significant challenges.

First, it makes the most of abundant water, using the Einasleigh and Etheridge River systems to integrate deep lake water storage with cattle pastures, sugar, guar bean and stock feed production, electricity generation from bagasse, and aquaculture.

The project is steeped in the experience – and passion for North Queensland – of three well-known business leaders. Stewart Peters is a chemical engineer and manufacturing and resources specialist; John Grabbe is a water harvesting specialist who was joint managing director of Australia’s largest private irrigator Cubbie Group Ltd; David Hassum is an infrastructure finance specialist and InterFinancial director; and Keith De Lacy is a former Queensland Treasurer and chairman of Macarthur Coal .

Their company, Integrated Food and Energy Developments (IFED), is raising funds to commence work in 2017.

EIAP is founded on 65,000 hectares of irrigated cropping in the Etheridge Shire, in Queensland’s southern Gulf country, with cattle on a further 200,000ha and aquaculture incorporated. It develops a series of gravity flow deep water lakes which store water away from the river system itself. In total, there will be 18,000ha devoted to deep water storage, minimising evaporation.

“There is a fairly natural water storage area quite close, so it’s just gravity diversion,” Mr De Lacy said. “The first storage is 1.6 million megalitres, which is about the size of (Brisbane Valley’s) Wivenhoe and has an average depth of 14 metres which makes it highly efficient. We will gravity feed it down to a smaller one in the cropping area which has got 400,000 megalitres. So that is about 2 million megalitres we would store.”

Research by IFED on 100-plus years of records show that, had the lake system been in place, it would not have gone dry at any stage, supporting full production despite extensive drought periods. Mr De Lacy said about 90 million megalitres of water flows into the Gulf each year – that is about three times the volume of the Murray-Darling river system – and the Gilbert River system is 5.5 million megalitres of that flow.

“We are looking for an allocation of 550,000 megalitres per annum, which is 10 percent of the flow,” Mr De Lacy said. “There is a rule of thumb in Australia – two-thirds for the environment, one third for harvesting. We are only looking for 10 percent, so that leaves plenty for the environment and for other users.”

An innovative approach is off-river storage, not dams on rivers.

“We call it partial flow diversion, which means we take some of the flood flows and it is much more ecologically sustainable,” Mr De Lacy said. “The first flows go down the river and we only take a percentage of the big flows. 

“All of those rivers are heavily monsoonal, they flood in the monsoon season and are then dry for most of the year.

“On 100 years of river flow data, we would have got a full crop every year. So it is 100 percent sustainable. That’s because we are storing about four times what we need.”

The products of the EIAP are also an innovative mix of sugar, guar gum (from the guar bean legume), meat and electricity from the sugar bagasse.

The project generates its own power and exports electricity to the grid.

There is also a supply of sugar for possible ethanol production.

Mr De Lacy said guar is used as a food thickener and also has a special use in the shale fracking process.

“That sort of underwrites its price and volume,” he said.

The EIAP will also produce about 400,000 tonnes of stock feed a year.

“Which then means we can run a meat processing plant because we can feed the stock in the off-season,” Mr De Lacy said. “There is a million cattle in that region, but they all lose weight in the off season, so they stop going to abattoirs, and because abattoirs only work eight months of the year they are never viable. With our stock food we can get 12 months supply.

“We produce all of our own electricity and some – it’s all bagasse, it’s all coking. We justify the capital spend on the co-gen (power co-generation) by what we can sell into the grid. The rest of it we use ourselves – it is effectively free to us.”

WASTE-NOT WANT-NOT

Another EIAP innovation is the utilisation of lake-fed ponds for the production of redclaw, a crayfish native to the region.

“But we also found that the wastewater from our processing plants, the sugar mill and the abattoir and so forth, we feed in to an anaerobic digester, which creates methane, which is energy, but what is left in the water is a sort of a carbohydrate enzyme which is food for redclaw,” Mr De Lacy said.

“So we effectively feed them for free. We are only using the water one more time and, when they are finished with the water, we use it for irrigation and they actually add nutrient to the water which helps the irrigation as well.

“We did a quick exercise on that and we would produce 7500 tonnes of redclaw, which is worth $100 million. And that is just an add-on. As is the abattoir.”

Mr De Lacy said even though the region has been used for beef cattle for more than 100 years, meat processing was not originally a focus of the project.

“We did not start off with beef, but because we have got the electricity and the stock feed, it’s another add-on,” he said.

Because of the backgrounds of the IFED founders, the plan to integrate processes, as they flowed from having a sound water supply, drove the decisions on the eventual production mix.

“The reason our project works so well is its scale to start off with,” Mr De Lacy said. “You have got to be big enough to do your own processing, in those isolated regions.

“Our project is a billion dollars of production each year and 1000 employees.”

CAPITAL RAISING

IFED has secured agreements with the four required properties in the region and is concurrently conducting both environmental impact studies and fund raising.

“The environmental assessment process is the main part, to ensure sustainability,” Mr De Lacy said.

“We are confident, as we are only proposing to use only 10 percent of the river flow. We will be subject to the most rigorous environmental assessment program that any project has ever been subjected to. But we are confident about it. We have done a lot of work and a lot of science on it.”

Mr De Lacy said Cubbie Station in Western Queensland was where off-river water storage was successfully pioneered in Australia – and John Grabbe was the driving force behind that development. Now his experience and the unique advantages of applying that system North Queensland, were setting a new paradigm in agricultural development.

Ironically, the sustainable agribusiness approach by IFED should also help in the regeneration of native plant and wildlife in the region.

“All this savannah country in Cape York Peninsula is very lightly timbered, it has had cattle running over it for more than 100 years,” Mr De Lacy said. “It is infested with plant and animal feral species – rubber vine and wild pigs and all sorts of things.

“So it is not pristine country, not at all. Dogs are not as bad there as they are further south, but they are there too. Pigs are the worst. We would have to have a regime that is controlling them, which would help everybody a bit, too.

“And it (the project) is 100 percent carbon sustainable.”

Mr De Lacy said while the capacity was there to produce and utilise ethanol, it was so far undecided.

“I am reluctant to get involved in a crop that depends on a government subsidy,” he said. “And they keep changing the excise regime.

“We have done an exercise that produces 100 megalitres of ethanol. Plus we have all of our own electricity and we sell electricity into the grid – so that’s all renewable. We could produce 100 megalitres of ethanol on our numbers, that is nine times the amount of liquid fuel that we would consume. Excess would go into the refinery market – E10.

“We have just got to decide whether we proceed with that. Otherwise it all just goes into sugar. So it is really just an economic decision.”

VALUE IN SCALE

As a showcase for what might be achieved in terms of sustainable development in Northern Australia, the project has attracted initial support from both the Federal Government and the Queensland Government.

“In round terms, the value of our production is around $1 billion (a year), and our profit each year is around $350 million, so there’s $600 million in consumables – labour, consumables, services, what-have-you – in Northern Australia,” Mr De Lacy said. “So everybody benefits.

“The Commonwealth Government has always been strongly supportive. And it is consistent with their white paper. The State Government is supporting it now,” he said, pointing out that a memorandum of understanding on satisfying environmental requirements, before the water allocations would be made, had to be re-negotiated when the new Labor Government came to office in January 2015, setting the project on hold for several months.

“We have now got a memorandum of understanding with the Queensland Government that effectively guarantees the same thing.”

Mr De Lacy said the major advantage needed for successful agriculture in Northern Australia is “scale”.

“You can produce so much biomass in the tropics – you have got masses of water, sunshine, soil – which is really stored energy,” he said. “That overcomes a major economic disadvantage of being out there, when you have got all of your own electricity.”

He said it was also to the project’s advantage to utilise – and help to improve and extend – local existing infrastructure. 

“We would have an accommodation village, a bit like some of the resource projects have, but we would hope that a town like Georgetown would grow to accommodate a permanent workforce,” he said.

“It is the Etheridge Shire capital. And it was a much bigger town 100 years ago than it is now. That was all mining country – gold and copper and so forth. They had their days, Croydon, Georgetown, and Kidston of course.”

The challenges EIAP faces are different to, say, establishing a mining operation in the region – and more long-term.

“Big mining projects are a more well-trodden path,” Mr De Lacy said, from his experience as chairman of Macarthur Coal. “This is new. What we say is that if we can provide this pathway, there are quite a number of others in Northern Australia. And that includes the Northern Territory.

“Just putting dams here, there and everywhere, you don’t get real economic development out of that,” Mr De Lacy said. “Governments should be measuring the value of production and jobs created per megalitre, to allocate water. We have got a rule of thumb that we can produce $2000 worth of production per megalitre – and we absolutely will exceed that over time – but that is what governments should look at.

“So, (at the moment) some water gets allocated … everybody wants a bit of water, but what do they do with it? Irrigate a pasture? There is not much real economic activity coming out of it.”

Where the major challenge rests right now is in getting financial supporters to agree to the vision – and recognise the financial upside presented in the projections. IFED believes most of its support will come from the private sector.

“I wouldn’t think governments, unless we access the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund, which is concessional loans,” Mr De Lacy said. “No, we would be looking to raise our money in the private market. The returns are there. We have got an IRR – internal rate of return – of 16-20 percent. Which makes it fundable.

“We would be 18 months from bankable to get to construction. It would be three years before you were in full production after that.”

INFRASTRUCTURE BACKBONE

While the EIAP is self-sustainable and profitable from a very early stage, the main challenge and advantage in such a development in the southern gulf is in developing the infrastructure than leads to it. This is where governments come in to play.

“It is a $2 billion project,” Mr De Lacy said. “There is a road right to the Port of Townsville. We have to use the Port of Townsville – you couldn’t go through Cairns because the road system and the port system is not good enough. In a few places (the road) needs some work. But we do not need a lot of further infrastructure. The beauty of scale, again – the small infrastructure we do it ourselves.

“There is a small railway line that goes through Georgetown to Cairns, but it needs that much work on it now. It’s a very old system. It is just kept there for heritage reasons now.
“We would probably put a light plane strip there. We may even look at more as time goes on. With beef, maybe, or redclaw (to move it by air) you never know, it depends on where it is going.”

What Mr De Lacy and the IFED team hope is that their Northern Australia project will be a catalyst for other intelligent sustainable developments that will help the region realise its true potential.

“There is a mature beef industry (in the region) that generates a lot of revenue, but does not generate a lot of jobs,” Mr De Lacy said.

“In the coastal regions there are viable communities – Darwin, Cairns, Townsville – and they are growing viable communities. But if you are going to transform the large part of Northern Australia, I believe that we have unlocked the mechanism, as it were, or found the model.
“We have looked at all of these major projects that have been tried over the years and worked out why they did not work, including the Ord. You know, it has been quite problematical over the years.”

Failed or underwhelming projects IFED looked at included Lakeland Downs at Cooktown, Tipperary Land Corporations and Territory Rice Ltd in Darwin, Northern Agricultural Development Corporation in Katherine and the Ord River Project in Kununurra.

Mr De Lacy said the old ways of developing the North were ripe for failure.

“The old system was government did the water infrastructure, then they had farmers, a whole range of farmers, usually supervised by government, resuming land and cutting it up. And then you had separate processing,” Mr De Lacy said.

“So you really just did not have that integration that we believe is necessary. For example, in the Ord, the price of sugar went down and the farmers started growing something else. So how does the mill carry on? Whereas what we are talking about is one owner of the water, the farming and all the infrastructure.

“There are two lots of integration – water, farming and infrastructure – and then within the infrastructure what I said before: the waste of one becoming the feed stock of the other. And you can do that if you own it all.

“I grew up in the sugar industry where the farmers and millers have been fighting each other for 100 years … it’s madness.”

TECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE

Perhaps the biggest catalyst for success, Mr De Lacy believes, is that IFED can integrate the latest, most economical technologies from day one. 

“That’s another advantage we have in starting from scratch with those things, instead of bolting them on,” he said. “Important to us is that everything we are doing has been done … except that we will do the latest and greatest of it.

“For instance, in beef processing they have almost got it automated to that extent that it’s incredibly efficient. While we will be looking to employ a lot more people than what’s employed now, we would be looking to automate and utilise robotics and the modern technologies.”

In that respect, Mr De Lacy said the versatility of the operation meant the EIAP had looked at diversification in advance. For example, a dairy operation using the right technologies would also be possible and profitable because of the scale.

“We had a look at a diary option, which works,” he said. EIAP modelled 89,000 milking cows in evaporative air-conditioned barns, using the latest milking robotics of what is known as the ‘California system’. 

“They have got one in Saudi Arabia with 67,000 head or something,” Mr De Lacy said. “It delivers 800 million litres of fresh milk a year. The air conditioning is really just a really fine water spray and a fan … The cattle just live in there, you do not have to shut the door. They can walk out if they like – but they don’t. Why would they go out into 35 degrees when it is 23 inside and all the food’s in there?”

But that option is on the backburner while the foundation product mix of EIAP proves itself.

The most secure of these is sugar.

“We picked sugar … Indonesia is the fastest-growing sugar market in the world at the moment,” Mr De Lacy said. “And they are very close. It is one of those middle class crops that are going to continue to grow. But the three things about it are the biomass, we know how to do it in Queensland, and it is a mature market – there are forward markets and so forth for sugar cane. You can manage the price of it a lot better than some other crops.

“And you would always export the power (from the co-generation plant).” Currently the area’s power is drawn from Rockhampton, with all the liabilities and losses of that long distance power transmission.

EIAP could also become a sentinel for successful beef production in Northern Australia. Mr De Lacy said the current big problem for the industry was its cyclical nature – cattle lose significant weight in the dry season so the industry struggles to supply abattoirs and live trade at certain times of the year.

“Why would you send it in for processing today when it was 10kg heavier a month ago? You would have sent it in then. To balance it out you need stockfeed somehow.”

The stockfeed is EIAP’s advantage, and it offers flexibility.

“We may not even run the cattle, we may just do a feedlot arrangement for the last bit – or we may just do a deal with them (regional cattle farmers) and give it to them, so long as we get it back as it goes through the abattoir,” Mr De Lacy said.

“From the livestock point of view, in the region and in those three or four shires, there would be animal welfare benefits in the sense that stock would not be losing their weight and they would be processed on site instead of going 1000km in the back of a truck or something.”

He said animal welfare benefits over what exists today were a clear positive.

“We look at all those issues, environmental/sustainability issues we’ve looked hard at them and we believe we have got them covered,” Mr De Lacy said.

“With trickle tapering irrigation, which we would use, you have got the precision application of nutrient and water. So you don’t have the problem of run-off which has been the issue on the east coast over the years for the Great Barrier Reef.

“We have got the big advantage that we are not (flowing) in to the Great Barrier Reef, I‘ve got to say that. But nevertheless we won’t have nutrient run-off at all. Why would you have it running off if you can organise it properly, which we can?"

PLUGGING IN AGBOTS

Mr De Lacy said the EIAP was planning to take advantage of the latest technologies from day one – including keeping an eye on agricultural robot systems being developed in Queensland by QUT and Swarm Farm.

“(Agricultural robots) that go along and zap a feral plant with insecticide, or microwave or whatever, and just get the one that is growing, that’s all. We would be looking at those,” Mr De Lacy said.

“And drones … they are using those now in the cattle industry. They fly around the fence and just photograph if the fence is good … but we would have other uses for those too. And all automation as well.

“Starting from scratch, you’ve got a great opportunity. I keep saying to our mob, you have got one chance to make this really efficient. It’s the first one. 

“I reckon we will grow sugar cheaper than anywhere in the world, simply because of technology and our production systems. I think our production will be just extraordinary. We have the sunshine and the water.”

He believes the systems in place for sugar production at the EIAP will out-perform the Burdekin area.

“We believe we have taken the weather out of the equation, which is pretty rare in agriculture,” Mr De Lacy said. “We have drought proofed it, and we are 300km from the coast, where the cyclones are too. A rain depression is all it is when it gets there. I’ve grown up on the coast with those cyclones and they can have a major impact.”

And he is delighted at the opportunities EIAP hopes to provide for regional Indigenous people.

“It is a great opportunity for Indigenous people,” Mr De Lacy said. “And we have committed, actually, to 10 percent of the workforce being Indigenous.”

He said the IFED team hoped the project could create far more Indigenous opportunities.

“We would like a lot of our people to be contractors. Individual contractors to own the tucks and run their own businesses – one would hope you could get Indigenous involvement in that,” Mr De Lacy said.

“It’s a big challenge, it’s not easy. We have an Indigenous fellow with us based in Cairns and he will access Federal money for training and work ready programs. The secret is, if you get enough there, it will work.”

At age 75 and making many of his presentations to prospective investors on his latest iPad, Keith De Lacy nominates the Northern Australia development as “the most exciting project I’ve been involved with”.

That’s quite a statement coming from the former chairman of Macarthur Coal, Queensland Sugar Ltd and Cubbie Group, who remains on the national board of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and who was Queensland Treasurer and Minister for Regional Development from 1989-1996.

“The only problem is getting people to believe in it.”

www.i-fed.com.au

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EXCLUSIVE Honey Gold mango grower, Piñata Farms, is counting the 2015-2016 season among its best since commercial production of the specialty fruit began in 2009. That is in spite of the southern Queensland yield, from Rockhampton to the south-east corner, being  down about 30 percent on previous years.

Managing director, Gavin Scurr, said he was pleased with the outcome, despite seasonal factors including poor flowering and hail storms which affected the southern Queensland crop - a small percentage of the total crop. Honey Gold mangoes are produced in five states of Australia from November to March. 

“As we projected, it was a solid season with a good volume of fruit produced in the main growing regions of the Northern Territory and Far North Queensland,” Mr Scurr said.

Mr Scurr, who is also the Australian Mango Industry Association (AMIA) chairman, said Honey Gold season was in line with Australian mango season in general, which experienced an increase in marketable fruit, strong demand from consumers and consistent grower returns.

“The Honey Gold brand now has an established presence in the Australian mango category. Brand recognition continues to build due to a consistency of flavour and volume. Consumer demand is the best it has ever been. The future for Honey Gold mangoes is pretty exciting.”

Mr Scurr said while the overall volume of fruit sent to market during 2015-2016 was slightly down on the previous record season, Honey Gold mangoes retained an eight to nine percent share of the mango market and continued to grow.

A mid-season variety, Honey Gold mangoes are among the top four mangoes sold in Australia behind Kensington Pride, Calypso and R2E2.

Mr Scurr said the southern Queensland yield from Rockhampton to the south-east corner was down about 30 percent on previous years.

"Trees in this region flowered poorly and those which did flower were affected by hail storms, wind and rain. While trees in the Rockhampton region have bounced back well after Cyclone Marcia in early 2015, it hasn’t been long enough for them to recover fully from stress. Also, many trees in this area are yet to come into full production.”

He said the affected crop accounted for about 15 percent of the total Honey Gold crop, too little to impact on overall results.

About 60 percent of the crop is produced in Bowen and Mareeba in Far North Queensland with close to 40 percent produced at Katherine and Mataranka in the Northern Territory.

HONEY GOLD ADDS 50,000 TREES

In the next year, Piñata Farms and three third-party growers will plant an additional 50,000 trees for production in October 2020, and that will bring the season forward by a month. 

Plantings include 3,000 trees at Piñata Farms’ orchards at Katherine, and 17,000 at Humpty Doo, near Darwin, this May. Another 20,000 trees will be planted at Darwin in 2017. Contracted growers at Mareeba and Bowen will expand plantings by about 9,000 in spring. This will result in a projected 30 percent increase in yield by 2025.

“Our mangoes will never be the first to hit the shelves in mango season, but by planting in the Darwin region for the first time, we'll be able to harvest a month earlier," Mr Scurr said.

“Future growth for Honey Gold mangoes lies in the tropics. It’s a tropical fruit best suited to tropical conditions. Although we can produce them in sub-tropical regions, it’s more challenging.”

Piñata Farms and about 35 third-party growers produce Honey Gold mangoes on some 700 hectares in the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. The growers are supported by liaison officer, Reannan Schultz, who was appointed during the season.

Piñata Farms supplies Honey Gold mangoes directly to leading supermarkets nationally. They are also available for sale to independent retail outlets via wholesale agents at the central markets.

Mr Scurr said about three per cent of the 2015-2016 crop was exported, including to the United States for the first time since a mango protocol allowing importation of Australian fruit came into effect.

Piñata Farms is a proud Queensland family business with origins dating back to the 1960s in the state's south-east. Founded by pineapple farmer Geoff Scurr at Wamuran, Piñata Farms is now operated by Geoff's sons, Gavin and Stephen Scurr. Piñata Farms is the largest pineapple producer in Australia, one of the largest strawberry producers and holds the breeding rights to grow specialty Honey Gold mangoes, produced in every mainland state except South Australia.

www.pinata.com.au

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