Australian peach growers selling ‘directly’ through Aussie Farmers Direct
Australian food box delivery company Aussie Farmers Direct has called on Australians to support peach farmers in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley who are having to let this year’s bumper crop of clingstone peaches go to waste due to a lack of sufficient market demand.
Aussie Farmers Direct says it plans to ‘rescue’ tonnes of peaches by creating a new consumer market for the surplus fruit.
“This year’s near perfect growing season for clingstone peaches has produced a high quality crop of canning peaches in the Goulburn valley, but unfortunately for peach farmers and Aussie manufacturers, the high Australian dollar and cheaper imported products, both fresh and canned, have forced many local canneries to slash their estimated intake of fruit, leaving Aussie farmers with no market for their produce,” said Baeden Lord, Aussie Farmers Direct CEO.
This situation also has broader implications for the entire Australian food and manufacturing sector, according to Aussie Farmers Direct. The Company pointed to the recent closure of Australia’s only wholly Australian-owned cannery, Windsor Farm Foods Group Ltd, as another example of an industry in trouble.
The Company plans to include the peaches in their seasonal boxes in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, priced at 17 cents a peach. But it also suggests that consumers should buy the clingstone peaches wherever they can, to make this an ‘industry wide initiative’.
“If each Australian household bought Aussie clingstone peaches for the next few weeks, we could save up to 15 to 20 tonnes of fruit, maybe even more, and at least help some of these Goulburn Valley farming families from a truly dire situation, which is completely beyond their control,” said Mr Lord.
Australian Food News recently reported the closure of Windsor Farm Foods cannery in Cowra and calls from vegetable and potato growers’ representative body AusVeg for the Australian Federal Government to better support Australian growers.
If by chance, imported peaches could be removed from the supermarket shelves along with the o/s parent companies could a growers co-op of Goulburn Valley farmers produce a product of a similar price ?