Trade Talk with PB Agrifood/
The Australian pulses market and empowering the youth in agriculture

Madaline Dunn talked to Director Andrea Brodie and General Manager Ben McIntyre to learn more about their outlook on the pulse market and the importance of encouraging the next generation to join the agribusiness.

Could you tell me a bit about yourselves and the business?

Andrea: I'm one of the company's directors and I look after the export part of the business. My father Peter founded the company and is still involved in the business, too. My sister, Catherine, is a director and is also heavily involved in the company's management and Ben is the general manager. 

As a company, the pulses we deal with include chickpeas, mung beans and fava beans. We also sell planting seeds to farmers and then buy back the crops. We have a couple of mills, too, where we produce soy flour, soy kibble and chana dal, and a stock feed company called Hyfeed.

We export a lot of mung beans and chana dal. Much of the chana dal gets exported to the UK, Canada, Mauritius, and Singapore, while our mung beans go mostly to Asia. We also supply domestically, as more and more people in Australia are adopting the vegetarian or vegan diet and eating less meat.

Ben: Ultimately, our goal as a company is to add value to everything - it's part of our philosophy. So, we get the farmers to grow the seed, buy it back and then process it as much as possible. 

What developments are you seeing in regards to value-addition in Australia?

Ben: The interesting thing we've discovered is that, while value-addition is exploding, it's coming from a low baseline, so the volumes still aren't large. 

Can you share some production numbers for chickpeas and mung beans following the recent harvest?

Ben: Mung beans last year were around 85,000 tonnes. This year, the prediction is there will be around 125,000 tonnes. Of course, volumes can change drastically depending on the seasons, and in drought years, it gets as low as 20,000 tonnes. 

With chickpeas, the biggest crop was 1.8-9 million tonnes a few years ago. This year, I've heard it'll be around 650,000 tonnes. This year's quality has not been that good, though, and there have been some downgrades due to the wet weather.

Aside from quality, what's it looking like for chickpeas in light of the skyrocketing container prices?

Andrea: Usually, there are a lot of chickpeas sent out in bulk containers, but this year there have been much fewer. Some are going out in bags and, also, the shipping lines are reluctant to ship containers to India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, which are the main places to which they're typically exported. The containerized chickpea business is definitely down on previous years, and that's all down to freight.

Ben: It's pretty much stalled the trading of chickpeas because no one is willing to take a punt on the freight being available. It's also a real problem if you can't ship to India and Pakistan because they typically take lower-quality products. If you're a farmer, forget about taking a low price - it's hard to sell them full stop. 

We don't know how that will translate into next year's crop yet. There are two schools of thought: one is that, because farmers will have a lot of chickpeas on hand from the previous crop that they can't sell, they'll be unlikely to grow more. The other is that, because nitrogen costs worldwide have tripled, farmers may want to get chickpeas in, as they're nitrogen-fixing. We don't know which way they're going to jump. Farmers will be looking for price signals and marketing advice for their chickpeas. 

What about fava beans?

Ben: A lot of fava beans are grown in Southern Australia and they’re gaining even more favor because they can be planted and harvested earlier than cereals. 

Andrea: We don't deal with many fava beans, but we supply some into the local market, which goes predominantly into stock feed.

PB Agrifood prides itself on its ethical business practices. Can you share with me some examples of this approach in action?

Ben: So, the whole business is based on using everything we get in and not dumping anything into the environment. Take soybeans, for example - which is the biggest volume we handle - those not good enough for tofu, milk, flour or kibble get sent to our Hyfeed crushing plant.

Andrea: It's the same for the beans and chickpeas that go out to our milling company; any bi-products come back into our stock feed company - so there's no waste.

Ben: We've also been looking into some alternative usages for our waste products. We've got a few projects on the go but it's difficult to get them off the ground because a lot of the people trying to make use of these waste products are startups who are still finding their way and haven't found a market for what they're making yet. Without government subsidies, it can be challenging.

Andrea: We also send a lot of the waste products that our stock feed company can't use to another company who takes it away and uses it for bio-energy. 

Also, all of the chemicals our growers use are recorded so we know exactly what's being used. A lot of the export markets we serve are very particular about the chemicals they let into the country so traceability is very important. 

The theme for the UN FAO’s World Pulses Day 2022 is “Pulses to empower youth in achieving sustainable agrifood systems. Last year, you were involved in the Moo Baa Munch, an event organized by the Agrifood School to Industry Partnership Program (SIPP), which focuses on educating young people about health and diet and raising the profile of the agribusiness. Can you tell me about that? How is the landscape changing?

Ben: The Moo Baa Munch was a good opportunity to talk to school students and show them that there's more to agriculture than just farming and agribusiness bank management. There's a big space in between. We need good people coming into the industry to keep it going. Our founder's approach to the business focuses on long-term goals and outcomes.

One of the snags we're seeing is that there are lots of brilliant agricultural science graduates, but they're ending up in banking, commerce, and government. We're not getting the flow through that we used to, where these students became agronomists or buyers of grain etc.

Andrea: Yes, in Australia, there used to be lots of agricultural colleges where you could obtain more practical certifications. However, many of them were closed down, and now more people are doing university degrees. Many graduates, especially in our area, are also entering different professions. Locally, for example, a lot of graduates go into mining.

What do you think the pandemic revealed about the Australian farm labor model?

Andrea: In the last few years, we've really struggled to find laborers to come into our factories and farms. There's been a real shortage. We used to have a lot of backpackers and individuals who went through the Pacific Island scheme - which allows Australian businesses to hire workers from Pacific islands - but, obviously, that's all been halted and there are also no migrants coming in at the moment. Some of the government subsidies early in 2020 probably didn't help the labor situation either. So we've had some real problems. The last month has probably been the worst part of the pandemic for us. 

Ultimately, skilled labor is in high demand and labor shortages are an issue across all industries.  We will have to continue to adapt to the changing environment, and farms are constantly looking to introduce further agtech into their operations to help them do this. 

PB Agrifood does a lot of work in the local community. Can you tell me a bit about that and why it's important to you as a company?

Andrea: We like to give back to the community where our customers and growers live. We're very locally focused. Lifelight, for example, is a helicopter rescue service that we sponsored. We helped to get it up and running about 15 years ago. 

We like to give to local charities, too, to support our farming communities. We've always had very good relationships with those people, and we've worked with some of the local farmers for 40 years and now deal with the third generation of those families. We've built our business on honesty and trust.

What's on the horizon for the company?

Ben: Looking ahead, we'd like to get our products closer to the final customer. We don't want to put packages on the supermarket shelf but we'd like to be supplying the protein isolates plants. We're not quite there yet, though.

Andrea: We always take whatever opportunities come our way, and we often get approached because we've earned a good reputation in the industry and like to diversify. 

Ben: One of the good things about the company is that the farm size in Australia is growing. There are fewer farmers, but the farmers that are left are expanding their farms, and these are the farmers that the company has been dealing with for decades. So, that's driving our growth. Now, instead of farmers having 100 tonnes of mung beans to sell us, they have 300 tonnes, so we have to market more of them.

We're also currently going through a process of upgrading and increasing the size of our grading equipment.

Andrea: The technology in our plants is always evolving. We have color sorters, for example, that we updated last year. We have to continue to invest in new equipment all the time because, within three or four years, the technology advances so much, and customers are asking for more, too.

Ben: Yes, that's the key thing: customers are becoming more fastidious about the product they want. More and more of the products we sell are color-sorted, whereas no one was asking for that ten years ago. So, we're expected to sell higher quality products, and that expectation is growing every day.