Australian Horticulture Statistics Handbook 2024/25 Webinar Launch

Regional Precision in a Growing Sector

The Australian horticulture industry—encompassing fruit, vegetables, nuts, nursery, turf, and cut flowers—has shown resilience and expansion in recent years. Production value reached around A$18 billion in recent financial years, with forecasts pointing to a new peak of A$19.2 billion for 2025–26 according to ABARES projections. Exports, a key growth driver, are expected to rise to A$4.7 billion in the same period, reflecting stronger volumes and prices amid sustained international appetite for Australian produce.

What sets the 2024/25 handbook apart is its inclusion of regional-level data, the result of a three-year project funded by Hort Innovation and delivered by Kynetec (following the integration of Freshlogic). Until now, the annual handbook has provided national and state-level aggregates across more than 75 categories. The shift to finer-grained regional insights addresses a long-standing gap, allowing growers and stakeholders to better understand localised production patterns, supply chain dynamics, and market opportunities.

This matters because the industry faces uneven challenges across regions: some areas benefit from favourable conditions and export access, while others contend with water constraints, extreme weather, or labour access issues. Better data could inform targeted investments, risk management, and policy responses. Yet it also highlights trade-offs—national averages can mask regional disparities, and greater granularity may expose vulnerabilities that broader figures obscure.

The handbook's release comes against ambitious sector goals, including pushing total value toward A$21 billion by 2030 through productivity gains, consumption boosts, and export market expansion. Recent years have seen record export reach to dozens of countries, but headwinds remain: input cost inflation, biosecurity threats, and climate impacts that do not affect all regions equally.

In short, the new regional lens arrives at a pivotal moment when the industry is scaling up but must do so sustainably and equitably.