From berry beginning
Building a blueberry empire
THIS week in Rural Weekly we take a look inside the Mountain Blue blueberry operation.
Ridley Bell introduced blueberries to Australia and started his own blueberry operation in 1978.
Working at a research institute, he brought in some exotic fruit plants including blueberries from North America. He took them to some local markets and people were very interested, and it grew from there.
Now his son Andrew Bell is the managing director at Mountain Blue, a blueberry growing and processing operation, which remains 100 per cent family owned and operated.
“We have three farms in New South Wales and we have one farm in Atherton in north Queensland,” Andrew Bell said.
“We supplement that product with third party growers around Australia.
“On our main farm in Tabulam in New South Wales we have 333,000 plants.”
Mr Bell said they produced about 1500 tonnes of blueberries every year.
Mountain Blue is also branching out into raspberries which he hopes will be available by early 2019.
“On the whole across our network it’s been a good season,” Mr Bell said.
“But where our Tabulam farm is we’ve had a really cold winter and a lot of frost which has slowed the season down.”
Mountain Blue has frost fans installed in the orchard which help the plants cope with the cold conditions.
“Where we are at Tabulam is fairly cold. So basically what they do is as the cold air settles, they blow all that cold air and stop the frost from settling,” Mr Bell said.
For this and more, get the Rural Weekly in tomorrow’s The Chronicle.