Hussey Group backs tech, scale and sustainability

Investment in innovation and sustainability has become essential to the future of Australian farming, and few businesses illustrate this better than the Hussey Group. What began as a small family farming operation more than 50 years ago has evolved into a major national producer and exporter of baby salad leaves, not by chance but through a deliberate embrace of agricultural technology to scale efficiently, sustainably and profitably.

The business traces its roots back to founder Brian Hussey, who travelled to France to learn how to grow baby salad mix and pioneer the product on a 16-hectare farm on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. From the outset, innovation was central to the company’s approach. Today, the Hussey Group farms more than 890ha across its Victorian and West Australian sites, employs about 400 people, supplies all three major supermarket groups and food service providers, and exports internationally.

Jeremy Haw, who bought the business in 2007, said a major turning point came in 2013, when it won a supply contract to a major national retailer. As demand for salad mix grew and the retailer continued to expand around the country, the Hussey Group had to supply more and more product.

Meeting national demand in a high-cost, high-pressure environment required more than incremental change. It demanded a step change in processing capability, food safety and efficiency, challenges increasingly common across Australian agriculture. “In order to deliver, I looked at the best technology I could find,” Haw says.

The Hussey Group installed Australia’s first air-drying tunnels, which dry out the salad leaves after washing to prevent spoiling and bruising, and was the first to introduce optical sorting on its production line. This machine spots foreign objects in the salad mix, such as insects, and shoots it off the production line with a shot of air. “We automated the factory as much as we could,” Haw says. The factory can now clean, wash and pack eight tonnes of salad leaves in two hours; prior to automation, it took the same number of staff a full week to pack the same volume.

Behind those investments sat a less visible, but equally critical, factor: access to capital and a banking partner willing to grow with the business. “One of the biggest challenges in scaling a business like this is capital,” Haw says. “I’m the sole owner – there’s no private equity, no external partners. And so really, my partner in finance has been CommBank, and they have literally funded the entire process, they have been fundamental in backing our growth journey.”

That long-term financial support has enabled Hussey Group to invest not just in processing technology, but in land, sustainability initiatives and a vertically integrated operating model – growing, processing and packing its product before supplying customers directly. By moving away from the traditional grower processor distributor model, Hussey Group has taken control of its value chain, improving margins, quality outcomes and service reliability.

When you grow it, process it and deliver it yourself, you remove layers of cost and complexity, Haw says. It makes you more competitive, and it allows you to truly own your product, he says. “It makes you sustainable as a business.”

In fact, sustainability is a key to the Hussey Group’s ongoing success. “To be sustainable is taking care of your soil and your farms, because if you don’t get your farms right, you’re not going
to get anything right. And so, we invest heavily in our soil constantly,” Haw says. “We’re not just taking from the ground – we’re constantly giving back to it.” If the soil structure isn’t what it
should be, then growers need to use more fertiliser to support production. The company composts its waste, reuses wastewater and recently installed a 750kw solar panel array.

But Haw says sustainability is about more than environmental measures. “If you look at your business holistically, every component in your business needs to be sustainable,” he says. “If you fall over with your people, you’re going to have a problem. If you fall over with your profit, you won’t be sustainable. You’ll start cutting corners.” Profitability is an important part of sustainability, because it is the means for more investment in the business and technology to ensure it can continue to thrive.

Haw says they see themselves more as manufacturers than as farmers and keep a tight control over costs. The business is highly measured, and he can see what each day’s net profit is. “There are so many moving pieces all the time you’ve got to make sure you’re on top of them,” he says.

Haw continues to invest in the business. The company’s latest major expenditure is a laser weeder from Carbon Robotics in the US. The weeder travels over three beds at a time and detects weeds using cameras and AI and then kills the weed by shooting the crown of the plant with a laser so hot that it can turn soil into glass. It has taken over the work of 20-25 people weeding every week and in the first eight weeks of operation killed 100 million weeds – a figure impossible for manual weeders to match. Along with saving on costs, it’s a highly sustainable technology, not requiring any herbicides to remove weeds.

Hussey Group’s experience offers a clear lesson for Australian agriculture: technology-enabled farming is no longer a future ambition, but a present necessity. As labour becomes scarcer,
environmental expectations rise and global competition intensifies, growers who invest in agtech, vertical integration and sustainable practices will be best placed to thrive. For Haw, the goal is not simply to grow salad leaves, but to build a resilient manufacturing-style farming business, one that proves agriculture can be innovative and sustainable at scale.

For Hussey Group, the journey from small family farm to national supplier has been defined by smart risk-taking, deep industry knowledge and a banking relationship built on understanding the realities of agribusiness. “It’s about having a partner who understands your cycles, your capital needs and your long term vision,” Haw says. “That support has given us the confidence to keep investing – and to keep growing.”