Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, on Friday and Saturday, I had the pleasure of a visit from Senator Anne Ruston, the assistant minister for agriculture, to my home town of Kimba. We visited two businesses. In particular today, I want to talk about one—this is a new business—Eyre Premium Hay. The Eyre Peninsula has never had a hay export industry because it has simply been too far away from a container port; there is not one on the peninsula. Fourteen years ago the Vandeleur family came to Kimba from the Clare Valley with expertise in growing export hay and wanted to establish that business in Kimba. The Vandeleur family recognised that Kimba had a drier climate and so it was a premium quality hay that could extract a premium from the market, and that Kimba in particular was ideally placed as the closest centre to Port Adelaide, in this case, as it is where the containers go out from.

With the advent of the super-high-density bales, we are now able to overload a drop-deck semitrailer—something that we would have always had to underload before. So there are fully loaded trucks. They built a shed 166 metres by 30 metres by eight metres high and installed weighbridges. This shed can store over 10,000 tons of hay on site. It is a $1.7 million investment. It is linked with Balco, the biggest hay exporter in South Australia, which brings to the business its reputation and goodwill and the ability to pay farmers on time.

It is a fantastic operation. I congratulate them all.