With regards to this operation here. With the bananas predominately because it's seasonal they pick and pack the bananas. They wash them, and they distribute it to large wholesalers typically, Woolworths and Coles, in the sun state, especially Victoria.

All I put on this Serra farm here there's 300 kilowatts getting installed. We're right in the midst of it now. We've done 80 kilowatts in the main packing shed. There's 100 kilowatts here as we speak. LG panel solar system made up of LG neon two 335 watt panels and they got two other sites and two other for avocados which are 40 kilowatts each.

So all up 300 kilowatts.

As a grower we're price receivers in this industry so quite often we're under very, very strong the inward price pressures from the big players and the only way we can really control that is by reining in our costs, being efficient and at the end of the day, choosing a system, a solar system which is going to give us a good quality, good back up service and a longevity was paramount to our decision.

Costs come from the packing operations over here and also come from the pumping irrigation system. So the irrigation system runs 24 hours a day probably 320 days of the year. And so as you can imagine that's quite a large energy user. At the end, our business energy costs per year are about $220,000 a year so expecting to reduce our energy usage by about 120,000 kilowatt hours a year which in dollar figures, it could represent up to $140,000 a year of savings.

So it's quite large and has a five year pay back so yeah to us it was a no brainer.
They wanted a non-invasive ground mount system with it so that requires Surefoot design from Victoria, it's an Australian invention. Where there's no concrete required.

Ground mount is all about the aluminum and that's not cheap and the costs of shipping it around from, bringing it from the supplier to us. We used Clinergy ground mount we minimize the amount of legs on the ground mount by using LG products. By getting a 340 watt panel in the space where typically you might only get a 270 to 300 watt panel.

Yeah the solar is a good decision to lower the environmental footprint and also to rein in our costs.

So get a hold of our energy costs and move forward.

Make positive changes.