With another growing season making way for a mild winter and the approaching winter solstice marking the start of the next, the Operations teams are focused on refining budgets, fertiliser programs and labour plans for the new growing season ahead. Farm teams are following through with cleaning up weeds, fixing infrastructure and getting set up for spring.
This season, the team once again pulled together to strengthen our focus on supplying high-quality hops to our customers. We applied insights from irrigation sensors, refined harvest timing and made practical improvements across operations. Overall yield numbers exceeded expectations, with good year-on-year incremental improvement once again repeated in most varieties. Some varietal yields were slightly below forecast from our Tasmanian gardens, reflecting a challenging growth year of slow Growing Degree Day accumulation. We also saw the changing of the guard, so to speak, at BPE during this period, and the team are already hard at work putting new ideas to effect.
The season also brought challenges to our Victorian gardens, with several heat waves occurring through critical periods. While much of the growing season supported a favourable growing window, it also highlighted the risks around irrigation water availability. In response, we utilised our storage dam capacity to strengthen drought risk mitigation and support local waterway management authorities’ strategic approach to river levels.
This coming season, we will continue to prioritise sustainability, efficiency, and recovery with a strong focus on soil health through increased cover cropping and soil remediation. We also have another opportunity to idle and rejuvenate some of our older blocks, and at the same time expand the work done on our new trial varieties, with a number of gardens being planted this spring.
