Flavorite Hydroponic Tomatoes -

Warragul & Drouin Gazette

 

Australia’s first nationally accredited training course focussing on hydroponic agriculture has been developed at Warragul to provide a critical component of future expansion plans at Warragul hydroponic tomato grower Flavorite.

 

Education provider ECG’s McMillan campus has inducted its first students into a course custom designed to meet Flavorite’s needs for skilled people necessary for its business growth.

 

More than 20 employees at the company have started a Certificate III level course in production horticulture at McMillan, including some international rural exchange students the company has recruited from Europe.

 

Director of the national production systems at Flavorite, Horst Sjostedt, put the company’s needs in simple terms.

            “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you can’t grow tomatoes unless you grow people too,” he said.

 

Mr Sjostedt said hydroponics was a highly technological biological process dependant on the people that were educated and skilled in the industry.

 

Finding and attracting them to move to Warragul, be it form other parts of Australia or overseas, has been an ongoing issue for Flavorite especially without a formal course in hydroponics at any educational institution in Australia despite the efforts to achieve that by the industry’s national body over the past four years.

 

Flavorite decided to look a bit closer to home – to ECG McMillan and its manager horticulture programs Babis Lagos – for a solution.

 

The purpose built course he has developed for Flavorite had been given formal national accreditation by the Australian Qualification & Training Format and, he says, provides a pathway for progress to Certificate IV and diploma qualifications in production horticulture.

 

Last week’s intake of students is the first of what will become and ongoing part of specialised skills development for Flavorite’s present and future employees.

 

Mr Lagos said the students would attend the McMillan campus for four hours twice a week and graduate in mid-December this year.

 

The program accommodates classroom, industry and one-on-one training supported by industry excursions and forums.

 

Mr Lagos said there would be 30-minute teleconference sessions twice a month involving professors from two leading universities in Europe with half of the time set aside for two-way discussion with the students.

 

Emphasis in the course will be on the crop, the growing environment and growing systems, management of crops and resources, and support systems such as pest and weed monitoring and control.

 

Mr Lagos said the now formalise long term association with Flavorite and the first accredited purpose-built course for people in the hydroponics industry was an exciting time for ECG.

 

Compared to many other parts of the world, especially the more populated countries, Australia has plenty of land and has traditionally relied on land based production, he said, but now believes the trend is moving towards a greater application of hydroponics.

 

Unreliable rainfall and water resources are major environmental challenges and Mr Lagos said there is growing community acceptance of “highly water efficient” hydroponic production methods.

 

Mr Lagos and Mr Sjostedt are like-minded on the future of hydroponics.

 

Mr Sjostedt agrees about water efficiency and also points to recycling of fertilisers as another important environmental plus for the industry.

 

And he sees hydroponics as part of the response to a global food shortage.

 

But the end point and the key to Flavorite’s expansion plans is “having educated people with the specialled skills needed to run the industry,” Mr Sjostedt said.

 

The students that began their courses at ECG McMillan may well be pioneering the next stage in not only Flavorite’s development but also that of Australian hydroponics agriculture