Valley Pack Cold Storage has notched up 50 years in business.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
Valley Pack Cold Storage may have recently notched up 50 years in business, but there are some big issues it sees the region having to deal with lying ahead.
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The multi-generational family-owned and Ardmona-based company started out growing pears on an orchard where the company is still located.
“The site here has been growing fruit for over 100 years. Some of the trees we just recently pushed out, the last of the orchard. That was 100 years,” operations manager Taylor Hall said.
Taylor is the third generation of his family to work with the company, the grandson of Ian and son of Mark.
He’s helped drive, if you’ll excuse the pun, the company further into the logistics sector after father Mark helped it expand from growing into packing, export and cold storage.
“The (logistics) expansion came from more market access for Australian produce,” Taylor said.
“Then, through that, we increased our third party logistics work so we also provide container logistics services to abattoirs, cheese factories, hay export plants, wheat, grains, exporters, and things like that so general commodities, even imports.
Valley Pack operations manager Taylor Hall wants water buybacks under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan stopped, saying they are unsustainable if food production is to be increased in coming years.
Photo by
Max Stainkamph
“One of the significant imports at the minute for the Goulburn Valley is solar panels.
“So our trucks are working between Valley Pack and the Port of Melbourne 24 hours a day, five-and-a-half days a week, and we're able to piggyback off the back of that to provide the same service, but to other facilities.”
Taylor sees a bright future for the business, and horticulture in general, but says there’s an issue he’s particularly passionate about, which remains unresolved — water availability for growers.
“It’ll take a couple of years, but water will come back to the forefront and I guess there’s been no area hit harder for water buybacks than Greater Goulburn and so the Goulburn system was probably unnecessarily, or unfairly, targeted in the buyback process that happened at the start of the (Murray-Darling) basin plan,” he said.
“So the water situation is probably the biggest issue.”
He said at Valley Pack alone, irrigation water helps sustain almost 50 jobs.
“If you look out the window, it doesn't matter whether it's a container of fruit or cheese or hay or whatever it is that goes on our trucks, every single piece of produce or whatever it might be, has some irrigation water in it,” he said.
“One hundred per cent no more buybacks. Absolutely. To the extent I’d like to see water purchased for the environment offered back to the market to be used for agriculture.”
There’s another major Goulburn Valley issue that Taylor would also like to see resolved in the near future, and that’s the construction of a bypass around Shepparton.
“Find me a town the size of Shepparton that’s on a significant freight route between Melbourne and western NSW all the way to Brisbane that doesn't have a bypass. Find me one. You will struggle.”
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