GROWING up with farming parents who immigrated from Italy in the late ’60s, Louis Curtis (pictured) was born and bred to become the farmer and agricultural businessman he is today.

With his parents making their way in the region as broad-acre vegetable farmers, Louis grew up and went to school in Renmark.

“I did year 12, graduated, and did all the right things – I even did some after-school courses, but my interests were always in farming and growing the family business,” he said.

In the early 1970s, Louis’ father bought a Lyrup property with 400h of land, including 40h of wine grapes.

“Prior to the wine grape boom in the early ’90s we expanded our property into wine grapes,” Louis said.

“Our main focus was on the wine industry and we currently grow about 200 hectares of wine grapes for CCW.

“We snagged a few good years in the ’90s, then the wine industry just sort of collapsed, and my dad became unwell and passed away about 10 years ago.

So, I had a bit of a strategic plan for myself and my family, and thought ‘I’m not going to be on the bones of my arse with the wine industry for the rest of my life’.

“A long-time employee who worked with me, and a couple of other staff members, planted the seed of growing almonds here.

“I thought about growing almonds for about 10 years, and you always think about the reasons why not to do something, instead of the reasons to do it.”

The decision to take the plunge into almonds came in 2015, when Louis and his family began the major works.

Now known as Jalanderee Almonds Pty Ltd, the first almond tree was planted at the property in 2016 and the varieties grown are independence, shasta and pyrenees.

“My thoughts were to have the vineyard as a cashflow, to develop the almond property, and to now have both crops, we hope they’ll both support each other,” he said.

“Sure, we’ll have bad years in almonds, and good years with the wine industry… but the reason to grow almonds was mainly to be diverse, and to grow our business by value adding and moving forward.”

Harvest this year was successful, considering the Jalanderee orchard is still young, and growing.

“We harvested and shook about 80h this year, and our trees are young so we probably average about three tonne a hectare of return,” Louis explained.

“That is not bad – that’s above average for young trees. It’s onwards and upwards from here because our area is growing and our production is increasing.

“We want to achieve anywhere between 600 to 700 tonnes of kernel.

It’s a good industry to be in.”

When Louis first started seriously thinking about growing almonds at his Lyrup property, he also had to think about how he would market and sell the nuts.

“I started having primary meetings with Brenton Woolston, managing director of Almondco, and we became grower members,” Louis said.

“We’re fully exclusive to Almondco. They process our nuts, here at the Lyrup site, and from there they get graded into Renmark and marketed.”

Louis’ connection with Almondco became stronger recently, when he was nominated and successful in his interviews to join the board of directors.

“I still love the wine industry, and I’m passionate about it,” he said.

“But I’m super passionate about the almond industry.

“Purely because the Almondco brand is known worldwide and the members really have control of the whole process from primary processing, through to marketing with the Almondco team.

“And they market it worldwide.”

Since the first tree was planted in 2016, Jalanderee Almonds has expanded to 120h of self-fertile trees, with a final expansion stage on the cards for this winter.

“We’re planting another 70 hectares on our last stage out the back,” Louis said.

We’re starting works now, putting in infrastructure – pipes and mainlines, services, driplines and everything else – and our aim is to have around 200 hectares of almonds planted.

“This month we’ll spray the trees with a foliation spray and shut them down for the winter period and get them ready to fire up in July.

“They’ll sit dormant for a couple of months and in the meantime we’ll plant stage four and prune our vineyard and await the springtime growing season.

“My personal belief is if your business is not growing, it’s going backwards.”