SA Organic Strawberries
Lobethal, SA
Cooling technology to boost organic strawberry quality
Organic farmers Plamen Paraskevov and Sonja Bognarova run a 10 hectare strawberry farm in Lobethal, South Australia. They applied for the Woolworths Organic Growth Fund to enable them to provide more strawberries to Woolworths by field expansion and better quality by improving their storage and handling facility.
The $230,000 grant from the Woolworths Organic Growth Fund will assist in upgrading their storage and handling facility to be temperature-controlled with quick-cool technology to cool the strawberries quickly, extracting heat and cooling the strawberries which will boost quality and shelf-life.
Plamen and Sonja supply Woolworths between October and April each year. During these six months, organic strawberries are harvested by their team twice a week.
Plamen studied agronomy in Bulgaria followed by post graduate studies in organic farming in the Netherlands. His passion for organic farming led him to work on a number of organic farming projects in Western Europe before moving to Australia in 2001. Sonja followed in 2008. They converted their current property to organic in 2017.
“We are grateful recipients of this substantial grant from the Woolworths Organic Growth Fund as it will enable us to move forward in our organic strawberry production and continue to provide quality produce, which is our passion,” he concluded.