Hamilton's Waltanna Farms to realise century-long aspirations

Waltanna Farms near Hamilton this week announced a $12 million expansion creating 133 jobs that will set it up as an export business.

Director Michael Nagorcka is behind the move and is following in his father's and grandfather's innovative footsteps.

The farm, which has been in the family for five generations, has seen vast changes and more than a century of aspirations are about to be realised.

Waltanna Farms had its humble beginnings in the 1870s growing oats, potato and wheat when Mr Nagorcka's ancestors settled in the region from Prussia.

His forefathers then shifted to grazing cattle and sheep into the early 20^th century.

In the 1930s, the farm was given a name - Noonamah - after the Northern Territory base Mr Nagorcka's grandfather Percy was stationed during the Second World War.

It was changed to Waltanna Farms in 1969 - the name taken from the property title.

According to Mr Nagorcka, this was when the farm began to lead in the agricultural field.

"My grandfather was an innovator in his time as far as growing oil seeds, and cereals, and to a degree, value- adding his own grain," he said.

"That was all delivered to Geelong and then processed for oil for paints.

"Waltanna was the first to grow flax in Victoria, and the first to grow sunflower in Victoria."

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After some time working on the farm, which developed into a mix of crops and wool, a need for new technology spurred Mr Nagorcka's father James to pivot into agricultural machinery manufacturing.

"He couldn't buy what he wanted, so James went and made a tractor for his own farm," he said.

"Then that developed into a more or less a business developing tractors and machinery.

"That started in 1976, and went right through to 2016."

In that time, Mr Nagorcka's father advanced farming machinery for companies in Australia and around the world, including Europe and North America, and decreased the farm's cropping capacity.

"He was the brains of the rubber track," he said.

"He sold a lot of his ideas and know-how to John Deere, Case, New Holland, Goodyear, Firestone, Bridgestone, Camoplast, all those sorts of people."

Mr Nagorcka was subsequently trained in his father's manufacturing business.

"I did my apprenticeship there... and worked for many years as a structural steel fabricator and engineer," he said.

Mr Nagorcka worked on both the manufacturing and farming sides of the business but realised in the 1990s there were parts of the cropping land that had not been used to its full capacity.

"We weren't really utilising the asset we had, so I took on my own accord to start farming and growing some produce," he said.

"With the manufacturing mindset, I decided to try and get into health foods. Our opening was through flaxseed."

As his father approached retirement and tractor manufacturing slowed in Australia, Mr Nagorcka decided to return the farm to its old cropping days, expanding his flax product value-adding and growing other commodities including wheat, oats, barley and other oil seeds.

"I had to make the call. I said to dad 'it's either manufacturing or farming now'," he said.

"We could see through the value-add program, that my future moving forward, we didn't think there was a need to have a huge (machinery) manufacturing plant based in Hamilton.

"We decided to value add to what we grew, and then took full control of our own product and the pricing."

Mr Nagorcka said the restructure was ultimately a boon for his business.

"It was a big change. I was basically going from a boiler maker or a grease monkey to a guy with a hairnet," he said.

"But we had such a diverse number of staff, all very multi-talented. They could just lend themselves to anything, and whatever we didn't have, we made.

"Given the returns of it, we started to very quickly become involved further up the value-add part of the food chain."

Waltanna is now Australia's largest producer of organic flax and certified organic oats for human consumption.

Mr Nagorcka said he owed much of his innovative drive to his forebears.

Waltanna's innovation has seen them collaborate with the likes of Warrnambool aged-care facility Lyndoch Living, creating 'Waltanna Living' food products which have sought to change perceptions around the taste of fortified foods for their clients.

Lyndoch Living innovation and research manager Peter McLauchlan said their best selling product, Le Grain, owed its success to Waltanna's flaxseeds and the way Lyndoch Living worked with Mr Nagorcka's business to create a "very palatable product that aids the digestion process in the human body".

"One of the key components of that is the flaxseed itself," he said.

"We created something that really informs the gut (micro)biome, the gut health, with a lot of residents benefiting from the nutritional value that provides them.

"It's something that they will choose to eat rather than having a clinically manufactured and fortified supplement in the form of a milk or juice."

Mr McLauchlan had a lot of praise for Waltanna's modernism.

"There is a science behind what they do, delivering nutritional value to the consumer," he said.

"It's their technology forward minds, and how they think things through, that create world-class and world-leading processing methods."

Mr Nagorcka said the Waltanna Living venture laid the groundwork for the innovative work he would look to do in the coming years.

"There's been a fair bit of technology has been developed out of that," he said.

"That is going to be another leg of the innovation side moving forward."

Mr Nagorcka is now focussed on the work he will leave for the future which he says is not just limited to his farm and immediate family.

"It's been a dream of mine to set something up in the Western District showcasing some of the valuable produce that's grown in this region," he said.

Waltanna Farms received a government contribution for a $12 million expansion of its food manufacturing capacity on Thursday.

The farm has partnered with food-innovation marketing group TUI Foods and will look to expand it export overseas while boosting job opportunities for the south-west region in the next half decade.

Mr Nagorcka said he also had plans to develop a research and development facility and a centre of excellence with the Southern Grampians Shire in Hamilton to "build on" his family's legacy.

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