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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHillwood Berries’ farm now sits at about 50 hectares, but the growth has been as much about method as scale. Starting with 2 ha of strawberries, the business then added raspberries and blackberries, and more recently blueberries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We initially started with strawberries, and from there we’ve expanded business where opportunity arose,” he says. “Over those years we grew in soil and then moved to protected cropping and then moved to hydroponic growing in substrate under our protected cropping structures. We also converted all strawberry area to a tabletop growing system. We’re now fully hydroponic across our farm.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That shift has paid off in reduced waste. Where the farm once treated 10% waste as its benchmark, it now runs closer to 5%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “That’s coming from reducing plant densities, allowing a more open canopy for the harvest and pickers to see,” Dornauf says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A stable, skilled workforce is part of the same picture. Hillwood is predominantly staffed through the PALM scheme, with workers from the Pacific Islands and East Timor, some returning for their 10th season this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’ve got a very dialled-in, skilled workforce, which plays to the lower waste and efficiencies of a returning workforce too,” he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the next strawberry season five to six weeks away, Dornauf is hoping for an earlier start than last year, which was the latest he has known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We planted all our plants back in June,” he says. “We’re seeing the first trusses emerging from the crown of the strawberries. When you see that, that tells us we’re some 40 days from the first pick.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n An earlier start could bring a bonus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’ll probably start two weeks earlier this year,” he says. “When you’re two weeks earlier, we’re talking about a four-week swing on last year; there’s a chance for another flush of flowers for us this season. You might get 10- 15% more yield.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even with those efficiency gains, labour remains the single largest cost in the business, at around 40%. That is what led Dornauf to investigate use cases for autonomous vehicles, and specifically to Burro robots, over the past two or three years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I’ve been investigating where we can utilise autonomous vehicles to cut labour costs and fuel costs, to essentially take over some of those simple tasks like transporting fruit from the field to the cool room,” he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Burros carry picked fruit from collection points around the farm back to the central cool room. Each unit runs without a driver, through electric motors on each wheel via GPS navigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “They’re a bit bigger than a quad bike, probably like a side-by-side, but there’s no seat on them, so no operator can drive them,” Dornauf says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The farm has laid out its own network of mapped routes, with the warehouse as the hub and the picker drop-off points as the spokes. A Burro tows an empty trailer out to a collection point, where it is unhitched and then hitched up to a full trailer, then returns to the cool room hub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movements are driven by the farm’s own scanning and traceability system, which shows the warehouse where fruit is banking up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We run a screen, or a large television essentially, that displays all the live pickup locations with the number of trays that accumulate at that station,” Dornauf says. “That means the guys in the warehouse can see where the next likely place that trays will be required to be collected by the burro.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Dornauf, the biggest surprise has been how easily the system is operated, even by staff who are not especially technical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.freshplaza.com\/remote\/https\/agfstorage.blob.core.windows.net\/misc\/FP_com\/2026\/09\/15\/1O7A3135-Edit.jpg?preset=ContentFullSmall\")
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