1. Quality
As a farmer you spend all your time making sure the crop you are growing comes out at the highest quality possible so that you can make the most of all your efforts. Once you’ve done your job and the nuts are ready for harvest do you still put that same effort into maintaining quality or do you just do what everyone else is doing because that’s the way it’s done? A purpose-built factory ensures that the nuts you’ve worked so hard on stays at the highest possible quality. A correctly designed system should make sure that the bad nuts, the ones that are most prone to damage are taken care of so that you can still sell them and not throw them away or be paid lower rates for that product. This can be done by using the correct machinery, the correct processes and the correct control.
2. Insurance
A macadamia factory should serve as a vault for your macadamias making sure that they are protected from seasonal changes and from the threat of loss from theft, mould, rodents and insects and from heat in some cases. A correctly designed system makes sure that nuts are always safe including curing nuts using the coldest possible temperatures in the curing room and then after curing storing them in cool store that is temperature and humidity controlled. Losing one 8-ton bin of nuts could have paid for a whole factory upgrade.
3. Management ease
A macadamia factory doesn’t have to be labour intensive. There are farms in Australia run by families that don’t require more than 4 people to do a 40-hectare crop. A correctly designed system makes sure that time and resources aren’t wasted on managing an incorrectly designed system. Labour is no longer as cheap as it used to be which means we must use labour more effectively.
4. Running Costs
Some of the main concerns regarding running a factory are running costs and by having a correctly designed factory running costs can be kept to a minimum by using energy saving hardware and software in the curing and cool storage rooms. Costs can be saved by using labour reducing machines and purchasing machines that don’t require intensive maintenance. Examples of this would be using the heat from cool store airconditioners in the curing room and saving on heating costs or using a dehusker that is easy to maintain and doesn’t breakdown or stop frequently.
5. Capital outlay
By planning a factory correctly you can ensure that you use your capital correctly and as efficiently as possible. There have been cases of farmers using incorrect drying methods that take up to 3 weeks to dry nuts which means that they have to build more bins to accommodate their increasing crop whereas correcting the curing system could reduce drying times to 5-7 days meaning less bins are needed.