Andrew Forrest's agricultural food product business Harvest Road had been tight-lipped about its intentions in the early stages of its trial with the plant, which has possible uses from ethanol production to fodder.

But it has now set the record straight about what it hopes to produce at Brickhouse Station. 

Business development general manager Richard Kohne said the long-term vision was to eventually have the entire supply chain for an agave spirit.

"We think there's a great opportunity for a local tequila-type spirit that's grown here at Brickhouse and processed by our beverages division and hopefully we'll market this great region and what's unique about it," he said.

While many know the plant as the base ingredient of tequila, that name is trademarked for agave liquor made in the Mexican town of Tequila and surrounding areas in Jalisco state.

Protecting the tequila name is similar to France's appellation d'origine contrôlée, which provides exclusive naming rights for sparkling wine made in Champagne or cheese produced in Roquefort.

Brickhouse Station, near Carnarvon on the Gascoyne River, is just one of the properties which form part of Harvest Road's portfolio.

The Forrest family business, which in recent years has been expanding from predominantly beef operations, has been running horticultural trials at Brickhouse since 2020.

Horticulture manager Saxon Boston said there were enough similarities with the climate in Mexico for 5,000 agave seedlings to be planted out as a trial.

"They're just over two years old and they're going well; the growth rates are showing that Carnarvon, the climate here, the soils is really good for the production of agave we believe, and there's very few pests and diseases," he said.

"The first hectare was a pilot scalable planting which we've now scaled out to three hectares, and next year it will be five or six [hectares]."

The seedlings originated from tissue culture brought in from Mexico and grown out in Queensland.

They have put out enough suckers to sustain the expanding crop.

Mr Boston said agave's flexibility around harvest time was also a positive.

"It's also handy for keeping employment too because you can choose your harvest time it's not like it goes ripe ready to harvest, you can say, we're in between pruning and harvesting mangoes and got all this labour."

A boutique distillery?

The plants need a few more years to mature, but that would still put Harvest Road among the frontrunners of the sector which is in its infancy in Australia, with the first agave spirit from a commercial-scale farm in the country expected to be bottled next year. 

"The normal life cycle for agave is five to seven years," Mr Kohne said.

"We kind of think from where we are today, it's probably four to five years away.

"Coming up in this calendar year, we plan to start doing trials on the plants, to see what the sugar levels are, and start to play around a bit with our beverages team to get an understanding of what the flavour is going to be like."

Harvest Roads is also hoping the harvest can be streamlined, given it is typically a labour-intensive process.

"What's critical is understanding what the mechanisation opportunities are, or automation, in terms of harvesting agave," Mr Kohne said.

"We've started to talk to some universities around Western Australia and around the rest of the country to understand who might be able to help us take on that challenge."

Sweet potatoes a go:

Meanwhile, a sweet potato nursery near the agave crop has been refined from six to three varieties after a trial which also began in 2020 wrapped up.

Most sweet potatoes on WA shelves are imported from eastern Australia.

Mr Boston said a 10-hectare trial was run to explore the market opportunity.

"We also see it as a crop that with its required rotation, for sustainability, it fits really well with our beef enterprise here on the station because the ideal rotation for sweet potato in the summer would be a sorghum crop and through winter would be an oat crop and that's ideal for yard hay for our livestock," he said.

"We were looking for marketability, the cropability, how it handles with machine harvesting, repeatability all year round and its acceptance on the market."

Gold skin varieties the Bellevue and New Orleans as well red skin, white flesh variety Murasaki were chosen to be grown commercially over 25 hectares in the coming months.

"Since the trial, we started replanting for a continuous year-round supply … so we'll start harvest for a continuous harvest year-in, year-out in early March," Mr Boston said.

Original Story By | Samantha Goerling