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To say the last four years have been challenging for southern NSW tomato grower, Ross Cardillo, is an understatement. When Ross, and his wife, Debbie, decided to buy his father out of their partnership in 2001, he took on a sizeable debt; shortly after he lost his entire crop of canning tomatoes grown on the land he leases at Jerilderie in a freak hailstorm resulting in a $1.4 million harvest disappearing overnight. The following year he was back at the bank asking for more money when water allocations dried up in the drought and he needed $240,000 to buy 1000 megalitres. "Most people would have packed up, but I’d made a big commitment to the bank and I wanted to keep going. If you can prove you can deliver, the banks always seem to look after you," Ross said. One of his first goals was to streamline the operation and make labour and input efficiencies where possible, not only to meet his repayments but to compensate for the fact prices for tomatoes had not changed in more than a decade. In an enterprise highly dependent on machinery, traditionally he and his father had invested in good harvesting equipment and owned a PTO driven tomato harvester and one of the only self propelled harvesters in the country. Unlike the glasshouse grown tomatoes seen in the supermarket, tomatoes for canning are grown under furrow irrigation in paddocks. Ross sows three different varieties of whole peeled tomatoes on landformed beds between September and November, which have been prepared and undersown with DAP banded down two inches. Urea is applied as a top dressing at the eight leaf stage and when green fruit appear it is applied again in liquid form through the furrow irrigation using a urea paddle. The abundance of nitrogen then goes on to benefit irrigated wheat and canola grown as winter crops following tomato harvest, which runs from late January to April. Budgeting for a yield of 35 tonnes/acre (this year it was 38), Ross believes results come from good bed preparation and an efficient watering program which usually sees the paddocks irrigated every seven days during the growing season. Ross has always started paddock preparation with a sidewinder – a five metre rotary hoe – and when he bought a new model sidewinder, his old tractor found it a struggle. "If the ground was dry it used to powder it up. If it was wet it would get sticky. There was no consistency and then when it would come to bed forming and seeding it took that much longer as a result," he said. It all changed when he invested in a Challenger MT665 with 225 pto hp – the largest wheeled tractor made by the company. He also added an MT545 with 135hp as a utility tractor. "The efficiencies I’ve made with the Challenger MT665 tractor are tremendous. If this tractor could talk to you, it would. It knows when to go slow or when to speed up depending on the soil and how it’s going. "To use the sidewinder on a 50 acre block used to take me 14 hours, now it’s eight. Two of the biggest costs in this operation are labour and fuel and there are two savings immediately. "I reckon I use about a third less fuel just by having that extra horsepower. It snowballs, when you have your big machines running efficiently, everything else follows. "The other thing is with buying the Challenger machines they are virtually maintenance free. I haven’t had a breakdown yet." "My only regret is I didn’t do it years ago." After using the sidewinder, Ross then goes over the country with a renovator which forms the beds and prepares the soil a month before sowing. "By having good bed preparation, it becomes easier on the rest of your gear. The consistency through good pulling power means the soil is nicely fluffed up. "The softer the beds the easier the penetration for sowing and then the water gets straight into the soil, rather than running straight down the drain." With the crop grown under contract with SPC Ardmona, the Coca-Cola Amatil owned processing operation at Shepparton in Victoria, the pressure is on during harvest to deliver as much during receiving hours as possible. Employing 15 workers during harvest, Ross runs five tractors and bin trailers to keep up the 500 bins harvested a day, which are loaded on to 10 semi trailers for delivery straight to Shepparton. The bigger tractor then takes its turn again pulling the pto harvester, which is operated by five employees. "Now they only receive on weekdays and are closed for public holidays as well as weekends so you have to do as much as you can when everything is going," Ross said Water use efficiency has also been high on Ross’s priority list, with prices only just coming down in the last two years. "We’d never had to pay much for water but it started the day I bought Dad out. It was $290,000 the first year, $180,000 the next. Then it was only $25,000 or $30,000. This year it was about $60 a megalitre. "At the same time the price for tomatoes hasn’t changed. When I started with Dad 16 years ago the price went up to $118 a tonne. We’ve never seen that again – it’s been at the $106 or $107 (a tonne) ever since. "The only way to make money is to try and increase yields and use inputs as efficiently as possible."
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