Achieving productivity gains in agribusiness isn’t just about technology or scale—it’s about empowering a well-structured workforce to drive improvement. This blog explores how aligning workforce roles and empowering team members at every level not only boosts productivity but secures a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Running two large-scale berry enterprises in different regions year-round is challenging. Even the most capable leaders can face burnout without the right support. That’s exactly what a family-owned client was experiencing. We stepped in with targeted strategies and hands-on support, transforming their operations and restoring balance.

Beyond Scale, Mechanisation, Automation & AgTech Lean is the strategy and source of sustainable competitive advantage. 

Conventional thinking for improving agribusiness productivity focuses on scale, mechanisation, automation, and technology. However, these strategies alone are not enough to ensure long-term success.

Read the success story of a family-owned onion exporter. Faced with market changes, rising costs, and tightening margins, they turned to us for guidance. By adopting a LEAN approach, we helped them transform their operations, resulting in a stronger, more stable business with significantly improved profits.

In the ever-evolving landscape of Australian agribusiness, the marketplace is becoming increasingly tough and shows no signs of easing.  

The domestic market for fresh food is fiercely competitive, with consumers demanding high quality at low prices. Export markets, while vast, present their own challenges, remaining difficult to access and highly competitive.  

Agribusiness supply chains are always complex and dynamic. The chaotic operating environment faced by agribusiness globally in the past two and a half years has challenged many like never before. Regardless of size, market dominance or sophistication all agribusiness supply chains have been impacted.

The economics of overproduction or producing quality that customers won’t pay for has always been flawed in the agriculture business. In today’s challenging trading environment, these practices can be terminal. Agribusinesses must use human, capital, and natural resources efficiently to produce only the volume and quality customers want when they want it, if they are to protect their profitability.

Australia’s food and grocery marketplace is evolving rapidly, with competition intensifying far beyond the familiar faces of Woolworths and Coles. New power players like Amazon and ALDI are reshaping the landscape with their innovative strategies and cost leadership, challenging the traditional retail hierarchy and pushing Coles and Woolworths to adapt or risk losing their market share. This article delves into the real forces driving these changes and their implications for the future of Australian agribusiness.

Rising input costs are eroding the margins and profitability of virtually every Australian agribusinesses. Factors including the pandemic, geopolitical shifts, legislative changes, and a dramatic change in the composition of the seasonal workforce, are affecting everything from energy and transport to packaging and labour costs.

In today’s high cost, low margin environment, your agribusiness must be producing high quality, raw material that customers are prepared to pay top dollar for.

Those in the industry know all too well that an agribusiness will make money from Class 1, break even on Class 2 and lose money on every kilo of all other grades. To put it simply, no primary production operation can afford to devote land, water, production inputs, labour, machine hours and brain power to producing raw material that isn’t making a positive contribution to the bottom line.