Hort Connections is Australia and New Zealand’s premier horticulture conference and trade show. This year it was held in Brisbane and it was a fantastic opportunity to soak up so much amazing insight in this sector while catching up with clients including Freshmark and Hort Innovation.
Some things we learned:
- Australians eat an alarmingly small amount of fruit and veggies compared to what the nutrition guidelines recommend, at just over one serve per person per day on average. Industry’s Plus One Serve campaign will aim to double that amount for the sake of our health and wellbeing and the future of industry.
- Hort Connections is a good place to surround yourself with beautiful flowers
- Aussie produce is unbeatable. Celebrity chef Justine Schofield included blueberries and beets in her cooking demo.
- Australian farm tech is amazing, including fully and partially automated greenhouses that (among other things) bring the plant to the worker, not the other way around, and green house roofs that can open or close in the space of a minute. This pic was taken at the Gatton Smart Farm, a Queensland Government and Hort Innovation initiative to drive AgTech adoption across supply chains.
Were you there? What did you learn, and what did you love?
Kendi Burness-Cowan