Brothers explain the art of growing broccolini, shallots and silverbeet
Mastering shallot, silverbeet and broccolini production in the Lockyer
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If you can go to the supermarket and buy a whole heap of broccoli cheap, then why would you pay premium price for a broccolini?
— Justin Vanstone
FOURTH-generation vegetable growers Justin and Zac Vanstone grow shallots, silverbeet and broccolini in the Lockyer Valley.
Justin said his great-grandfather started farming in the Rochedale area, south of Brisbane, back in 1912.
“In 2004, Dad moved up here to The Valley. We started vegie production here in 2008,” Justin said.
“We’ve been directly supplying Woolies for 58 years this year.
“And also broccolini, which is through Perfection.
“Just small crop vegetables, that’s been the trend of the business since forever basically.”
The Vanstones grow about 49 hectares of shallots, 12 hectares of silverbeet and 49 hectares of broccolini.
“The shallots are 52 weeks of the year, there’s no real season to them,” Justin said.
“The silverbeet, arguably, is about 40 weeks, but it gets a bit hard on the fringes. They take a bit of water and it’s hard to keep the bugs out because of the leaf.
“The broccolini is basically just a block of 30 weeks. We started planting about two weeks ago. We’ve been buggered around a bit by the rain.
“We’ll start harvesting broccolini around Anzac Day and it’ll go all the way through until about October.”
Justin said for all three crops at the moment they are planting every week.
“For broccolini it’s a little more variable but when we’re harvesting there’s probably a load leaving every day,” he said.
“We deliver into Woolies basically 365 days a year for shallots. We’re not harvesting every day but every week definitely, with shallots.
“Shallots we pick five days a week, broccolini gets picked five to six days a week and silverbeet will get picked three to four days a week.”
All three crops at the Vanstones’ farm are grown from transplants.
“They arrive here at about six weeks old,” Justin said.
“The shallots only have about eight weeks grow time in the ground before harvesting. Broccolini is about the same.
“Silverbeet is a bit longer, about an 18-week-old plant is when you start harvesting it, 12 weeks after transplant.”
Everything on the Vanestones’ farm is hand-harvested.
“Shallots are pretty labour intensive. It’s cut out or pulled out in the paddock and there’s pickers that peel them and bunch them in the paddock. Then they come up and get washed and trimmed and then packed straight into the crate in the shed,” Justin said.
“Broccolini is harvested similar to broccoli. There’s no knives or anything though. They just walk along and break it off, the stems and the florets. They’re put into bins and pre-cooled and then they’re packed on a bunching line.
“The silverbeet is cut and bunched in the paddock. We cool it as well, and it gets washed and packed. ”
Justin said the farm grew only what it was confident it could sell.
“We only plant and grow to orders, or what we’re confident we can get rid of. We don’t just fill our farm with a crop and put it on the open market,” he said.
“Broccolini is all through a contract and we have a long-term relationship with Woolworths.
“When we bought the farm back in 2015 we started putting wheels in motion. Until my brother and I got on the farm we didn’t supply anyone except Woolworths. They were taking everything we could grow.
“But we’ve tried to risk-mitigate and have a few extra markets. The first time we’d supplied to anybody in more than 50 years that wasn’t Woolworths, was through Perfection.
“But of course a lot of our stuff still goes to Woolworths.”
Justin said their vegetables were valued by the crate or by the bunch, but couldn’t disclose exact prices. He said they didn’t have to worry “too much” about the market prices.
“If broccoli prices are very low then broccolini doesn’t move. If you can go to the supermarket and buy a whole heap of broccoli cheap, then why would you pay premium price for a broccolini? Which a lot of people would view as trade-off,” he said.
“But if the broccoli prices are high, and the farmers are getting a lot of money, then the broccolini seems to get on quite good.
“A lot of people didn’t get good prices last year; the trend is that the year after, everybody cuts back a bit.
“But a few of our seed reps have said they’re selling more broccoli and cauliflower than ever before.
“The market is only so big and unless they’re exporting it then you end up with this glut.
“To be honest, with the broccolini we never look at the market price because it’s a contract price.
“Dealing directly with Woolworths, shallots are a pretty steady thing. It’s not something that has huge market variation.”