Craig Dell’Agostino, Farm Manager – Southern Vineyards
I’m Craig Dell’Agostino, I’ve been with Fruitico five years now. My job title is Farm Manager for the southern vineyards. The vineyards down here Hamel and Coolup combined are 230 hectares with seven grape varieties that Fruitico grow; our main one being Autumn crisp which is a very common grape. It’s the one that everyone wants, it’s the biggest exporter.
With [ABCspray], the beauty of this product is it allows us to create a spray sheet for the staff, tailor-made for our conditions. And the beauty about it is that it stipulates what they actually need to do prior to mixing that tank, their bar pressure, and it’s very, very clear the chemical that we’re using, the tank rate that we’ve got, our litres per hectare. They can actually tick off that a tank’s been mixed, and they can work down towards finishing the actual sheet.
Personally, ourselves, we order our chemicals based on this, and we’re pretty much nearly bang on every time. So, it helps us order our chemicals and make sure what we’re putting out is actually going out at the correct rate. We need compliant-ready records in case we’re get an audit. If we get a pest management guy come through, and say he’s found some pests out there, and what have we done about it? We can go back into ABC, and we can pull up those dates, and we can show that we’ve actually implemented a spray program to suit.
Kevin Dell’Agostino, Farm Labour and Harvest Manager
My name is Kevin Dell’Agostino, I’m involved with the labour management side of Fruitico here in Waroona.
Through our harvest period we’ll be anywhere up to about 500 staff. We do find ABCgrower easy to use. It allows us to get an overview of data and statistics within the business, where our staff are, how long the staff are in each block, [number of] units, and basically to be able to pay our staff correctly.
It was a really big benefit that we could go offline with it and come into a space at a later date and shift that information on that scanner – upload it.
On its way through to the paying system it has a verification. Not only do we have a check or an overview on that, but the system is running it in the background as well. It’s all about reporting and getting that data through so you can make better decisions.
There’s a support team there all the time. If you have any technical issues they can jump in the background and help you through them.
With it being online, I can be anywhere and log on and access the data, or help a staff member through a situation, so that’s perfect for us.
The data coming out of ABC gives us more clarity. We can definitely see where we can improve with our labour side, as labour for us is about 75% – 80% of our business [costs]. For the horticultural industry, we definitely recommend ABCgrower.
Jane Hebiton, Payroll and Data Analyst
My name is Jane Hebbiton. I work for Fruitico. We’re a table grape farm down in Waroona in Western Australia.
My work here at Fruitico involves organising the pays etc. and going through the data that we get from ABC, pulling out worker efficiencies and massaging it to get information that will help our farm managers better manage the labour force here. So, being able to pull that out into Excel and then manipulate it and do some data analysis on it, that is what I think is really powerful about ABC.
It’s one thing to be able to see something on screen, but to be able to pull it out and then save that data, track it, and graph it, so you can actually get more than just a snapshot in a particular time, you can actually start reading the trends. That’s really important for us.
It’s really easy to understand. The data that we get out is really great, and it’s about how you think about slicing and dicing it, and comparing apples and apples, and pears and pears, or grapes and grapes.
Kevin: I would be very unsure on how we are to track all this information, in the time frames that we do, without ABCgrower. They care about what they’re doing, and they want to improve it.
