“That mission is there – to produce every damn day of the year … ”
Joe Vizzarri is faced with a range of head-spinning, complex challenges in supplying his company’s two key lines – asparagus and broccolini – to supermarkets 363 days per year. But he’d rather focus instead on perfecting his craft, and making sure Vizzarri Farms continues to go from strength to strength as RUSSELL BENNETT discovers.
JOE Vizzarri has two keywords hanging in picture frames inside his office at Vizzari Farms on Healesville-Kooweerup Road; ‘Opportunity’ and ‘Innovation’.
Clearly using them as keywords to guide how he operates the business, it’s little wonder he was recently named The Weekly Times’ 2014 Horticulture Farmer of the Year at a special ceremony in Melbourne last month.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews attended the event, as did Agriculture Minister Jaala Pulford and TV personality Giaan Rooney as farmers of the year were named across six separate categories – cropping, beef, sheep, dairy, horticulture, and FARM Magazine – as well as The Weekly Times Coles 2014 Farmer of the Year, won by Brad and Becc Couch from Brucknell in south-west Victoria.
Joe’s parents, Mario and Gina, were originally dairyfarmers in South Gippsland and moved to the Kooweerup area in 1971.
The family started packing locally grown broccoli in 1981 when they began to phase dairying out of their business, and also moved into asparagus in the late ’80s when they began to acquire more farmland and as demand grew from the Asian market. Now the Kooweerup area has almost become synonymous with asparagus.
“I’ve been here for 35 years,” Joe told the Gazette.
“We now grow two lines, asparagus and broccolini, and we’re the biggest suppliers in Australia of both lines. We import, we export, we wholesale, and we do pretty well everything that’s required.”
Over the years, Vizzarri has expanded to include 36 farms in and around Kooweerup.
“The wet year decimated the crops a little bit down here, with the asparagus being underground, and I’d started doing a bit in Catani at that stage,” Joe explained.
“It’s been a major move now – we’ve doubled our land-holdings down there. They’re bigger blocks and bigger farms, with more water and more versatility.
“We see opportunity out there all the time – that’s the reality – and we like to push ourselves pretty hard.”
Opportunity – there’s that keyword once more.
“We’ve since diversified again,” Joe said.
“We’re at Red Cliffs (just south of Mildura) at the moment looking at tying up some more ground there.
“I’ve found that demand has really grown over the past 10 years with asparagus.
“It used to be a very exclusive vegetable and it was all geared towards export anyway in the early years. I’m the sort of guy that when things are going well, that’s when I get worried because they can only go one way from there.
“So, we started putting a lot of work into developing the domestic market
“Then with imports and one thing after another, you roll into the supermarkets and they want the product on the shelf 12 months of the year.”
Joe says part of the incentive to do so is that he can grow asparagus for seven months of the year in Australia.
“We’re importing, and every man and his dog imports – it gets very competitive – but to grow it in Australia we’ve got it on our own,” he said.
“I can actually grow it for seven months of the year down here and I can stretch it another month to six weeks in the Red Cliffs area.
“That gets us right up until the middle of April, instead of being a three-month season any more.”
“The great thing with the supermarkets is that once you’re there, they do challenge you.
“But we had to lift our game. Once upon a time only our second-ground stuff used to get put into the Australia market. Now it’s a premium market and the demand is there and the consumers want it on the shelf 12 months of the year.”
Joe is the president of the Australian Asparagus Council and has been for a number of years. While self-promotion hardly sits comfortably with him, he’s willing to get the Vizzarri name out there as much as it takes for the benefit of the product.
“We like to be low-key, and traditionally farmers are that way, but the reality of it is that we’re competing for the consumer dollar just like any other producer. It’s dog-eat-dog out there,” he said.
“The consumer has become very discerning and price really affects things. I’ve noticed the past couple of years that people are chasing specials more – that sort of thing. There’s a lot of competition out there. We supply all the majors – Aldi, Coles and Woolworths. Normally you only supply one of those, so you’ve got to have a lot of produce to be able to supply all three and God help you if you don’t have it. That mission is there – to produce every damn day of the year. If we’re not growing asparagus, then we’re importing it. Broccolini – that is every day.”
Vizzarri Farms deliver all over Australia for 363 days of the year – Good Friday and Christmas Day being the only two days when the supermarkets don’t receive their products.
Persistence is part of Joe’s innovative way of thinking.
“Traditionally asparagus hasn’t been irrigated but because of the other line I grow – broccolini – we’re forever chasing new ground with that because brassicas tend to get diseases,” he said.
“I don’t want to go the chemical scenario of fumigating the ground and virtually killing everything so we just keep rolling. We do a couple of years of broccolini and then we’re into asparagus.”
Vizzarri Farms “started from scratch” when it comes to broccolini, straight from when it was first introduced to Australia.
“It’s crossed between kai-lan – which is a Chinese vegetable – and broccoli,” Joe explained.
“I had a relationship with Perfection Fresh, which actually bought the rights to it, and I virtually started from day one. That’s now become quite a heavy business for us.
“For me, broccolini is my bread and butter line for 12 months of the year and that just continues to tick along.”
As with most businesses in most industries, the rising costs facing Vizzarri Farms present one of their biggest issues.
“But of course everybody is feeling the pinch there; with power, fuel, all sorts of things,” Joe said.
“My power bill alone is about $350,000 per year and five years ago we didn’t even look at that but now it’s become a pretty heavy part of the scenario. The power companies are running amok at the moment, but that’s all part of it.”
Overall, Joe said rising costs, how to best manage his workforce, and the increasingly erratic weather were three of his most constant concerns.
“I don’t know whether I’m a believer in climate change but things are going on that just aren’t the same and I believe it’s getting more erratic and more intense,” he said.
“A lot of industries are going indoors these days. With mine – you can’t grow asparagus indoors.
“Growing asparagus is like having an orchard underground. What comes up and how it comes up is just in the lap of the gods.
“Asparagus grows with the weather so you prepare it in May or June but it shoots when the weather’s right. The soil temperature has to hit 14 or 15 degrees. If you get a 20-degree night it needs cutting twice a day, so you have to be geared from doing nothing today to doing 150 tonnes tomorrow.
“I don’t need to punt on horses or anything like that because I think this is the biggest gamble you can make.”
Joe revealed that he often feels like he goes “from one stuff-up to another”, but added that “the reality is when it all gets going, it’s great – it’s very satisfying”.
On the flip side of the coin, he said Vizzarri Farms’ tireless workforce was what made the company tick.
“I’ve got people here who’ve been working with us for 15, 18, 20 years and they’re almost like family and I’ve been able to provide full-time employment for them,” he said, proudly.
“This isn’t just Joe Vizzarri.
“That’s what it’s known as for a lot of people, but there are so many people involved here that make this all work. Without them, I would definitely not be here. Not at all.
“The reality is that there are 45 full-timers here from office staff, sales and logistics to managers, maintenance people, and technicians. We employ up to another 300 each season. About 100-120 work 12 months of the year on broccolini and that’s expanding again.”
One of the things Joe is most proud of is his involvement in the Pacific Islander scheme – through which he employs a large number of people from recently cyclone-ravaged Vanuatu.
“Today, everybody needs good, reasonably-paid full-time jobs but the situation is that not a lot of locals like doing some of the back-breaking work that’s involved here,” Joe said.
“Over the past five years we’ve been building and renovating houses on the properties to bring them up to government specifications for a boarding house scenario and we can now house nearly 200 people, which we supply two meals a day to, as well as transport, shopping, all of that sort of thing.
“That’s virtually another business on its own. In providing two meals a day, there’re probably nine to 10 people employed involved in the house maintenance, cooking, cleaning, delivering and driving them around.
“We put a fair bit of money back into the Vanuatu-an economy, which is quite handy.”
Joe said Vizzarri farms was currently looking at getting a container together to send aid over to the region.
“With these guys, they really love the work and they leave here at the end of six or seven months – and we do charge them a little bit for board and food, and things like that – but they go home with $10-15,000. To them that’s massive and they’re really rapt for the opportunity.”
