Necessity was the mother of innovation for Stoney Creek Oil Products.
Fred Davies is the fourth generation to farm on the land south of Talbot in Central Victoria, but he is the first to grow oilseeds and value add to them by producing oils, meals and flours.
Economic and environmental factors pushed the Davies family to try producing plant oils.
The recession of the early 1990s hit the Davies family hard. Demand dried up for the steel shops and factories Mr Davies was building and the wool market bottomed out, forcing he and wife Coral to give away half of their ewes because they could not afford to feed them.
They did have a silo full of safflower seed, which they decided not to sell when its price plummeting from $360 a tonne to 160/t.
“We had started growing safflower because, in an all too familiar story, our autumn breaks were failing. We would get a false break early and crops such as oats and triticale got going but without follow up rain, they would fail,” Mr Davies said.
The Department of Agriculture staff said safflower fit that bill, but doubted it would grow at Stoney* Creek.
“We got some seed and it was growing successfully but then its price dropped and we decided to look into value-adding.”
Mr and Mrs Davies researched oil extraction and did a New Enterprise Incentive Scheme business course.
They were able to buy an expeller at a bargain when the biofuel craze went “belly up” and in 1992, they produced their first safflower oil.
Their growing client base kept asking for high quality flaxseed, also known as linseed, oil.
Through trial and error, the Davies refined their process and made flaxseed oil of such high quality that they were able to tap into networks of health providers (including naturopaths, doctors and oncologists), health food and organic stores, independent grocers and select pharmacies.
Stoney Creek now produces pure certified organic oilseed products. The range also includes seed meals, grapeseed and jojoba oils.
Stoney Creek cold-presses oil to maintain the quality of the oil in the parent seed, and doing them in small batches ensures the freshest oil possible. They are free of chemical additives and preservatives.
Demand for their products grew exponentially, with the Davies doubling the size of the factory in 1996 and again in 1997.
But in first years of the new millennium, imports swamped the market and Stoney Creek Oil Products could not compete with them on price. Instead, they started to export to Malaysia but when the Australian dollar’s value skyrocketed, the export market stopped.
Through this time, Mr Davies realised the importance of clear country of origin labelling.
Now the Australian dollar has cooled down, the family is looking into exporting again with Mr Davies seeing “huge opportunities” in Asia.
The family has an online shop and is having a new website developed. They sell nationally through their distribution network and also sell at the monthly Talbot Farmers Market.
Their biggest challenge now is securing local seed supply, which Mr Davies said had been dwindling because of unpredictable seasons pushing their suppliers to graze on their land instead of producing oilseeds.
On the Davies’ 121 hectares, they both graze their daughter Lisa’s 2000 fine wool Merinos (which also spend time on leased land) and produce green manure crops, cereals and oilseeds, in rotations that help the soil’s organic health. The team modifies old and develop new farming machinery and uses minimum till techniques.
Mr Davies said the family was looking to expand the farming operation into irrigation to mitigate variable seasons.
The family also does specialty processing contracts and Mr Davies said continuing to innovate in the factory was also important, including using new equipment from across the globe (such as an repurposed Italian wine press to strain the oils) and developing new products.
Mr Davies said hemp oil and meal – despite current Federal laws making to illegal to promote hemp products as a food product – was a driver of growth.
“We are involved in developing high quality Australians products for when the laws change,” he said.
