Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Sounds to me that VicRoads don't want to fork out the public money to build public infrastructure. They're expecting 'businesses' (small or large) to pick up that tab.

Seriously flawed policy. I could understand it if it was for a property redevelopment or a subdivision, but this sounds like a blanket policy which screws the little fella.

Bummer, hope you can get them to see 'the light'. (though I doubt it)

Damn Stuart....

By the time you guys get your DPI licences, food certification and HACCP approvals... processing and cold room facilties...

And all the rest of the infra-structure CAPEX...

You must be forking out some serious mullah....

The scale must be such that you're going to have to wholesale your vegetable production.... and employ labour...

Are you sure that the economics are there....

Yes we are trying to fork out serious dollars and obviously we think the economics stack up but no we won't be big enough to wholesale at first.

The money is in directly marketing our products and their value adding.

We do plan to expand so that we can produce for the wholesale market, at least we were. If the small system of 2000m2 cant get approval because it will generate too much traffic how will we get approval for bigger production facilities in order to have the scale to compete on the wholesale market?

It is not a case of us being expected to upgrade public inf rd astructure if we were massive and were generating traffic that was a significant increase on the road relative to other operations in the area then fair enough. The potatoe farmer on the same property generates in excess of 90 semi movements per annum. During harvest and planting they have about 15 employees coming in and out. We have said that we will have 4 employees and need 3 van loads a fortnight to deliver our produce and about one light truck every 3 months to deliver supplies. The potatoe operation is similar to about 3 dozen other farming operations feeding into the same stretch of road less than 10km. The amount of traffic we will add compared to these other operations is insignificant even the expanded wholesale operation pales in scale compared to just one of these other operations.

I wish you luck Stuart. I love that your out there having a red hot go

Sounds to me like you're the last one to show up at the bar, and they're trying to stick you with the tab. I hope you catch a break somewhere.

Might be worth it to have a chat with a few of your neighbors (like the potato farmer). They might know of a solution (or a person that could provide one) that worked out for them.

I don't know how many times my neighbors have bailed me out of a jam.

The particular problem we are facing results from victoria adopting the austroad standard in 2010/2011. The good thing is we are not alone. I now know of 4 other business es that are in the same boat within a couple of km. If we don't get any traction out of a meeting with council on thursday then I'm planing on going to the abc and get on the radio to make a call to find out how many other businesses are effected by the same problem. If there are a bunch (I'm expecting hundreds if I can find 4within a couple of km) of us then we will have some weight to go to the transport and planning ministers with.

Besides being told that we have to make left and right turning lanes into our site it is not because of any thing special about our site. A big part of the problem is that we would almost have to do this for any site. In fact the only site we would not have to do this would be a site where we were on a C (council road that feeds into another council road) or B road (council road that feeds into a vicroads road) that fed into an A (any vic roads road) road where the intersection had been already up graded.

Since these conditions are new almost every intersection does not have the upgrade so essentially there is almost no where in the shire or surrounding shires where you would not have to build the left and right turning lanes. We are looking to build in a site where it is not easy too construct the turning lanes (hence 200k)but even on sites or intersections where it is simple (good soil and flat) you would still be up for $70-80k.

Further more just say that people had the money to construct all these turning lanes can you imagine driving through the country and every road intersection has left and right turning lanes along with every farm entrance. I don't know about you but I one of the reasons I like living in the country is because it is less built up. The thought of the road essentiall being widened to lanes at every farm entrance appalls me.

Doesn't any driveway.. have left and right turning provisions.... you turn in, you turn out....

I know where you're coming from Stuart... it's insane... every driveway needs a dedicated left/right turn lane... FFS...

Stuart, have you invested into your EPA reports yet or are you taking it one hurdle at a time?

Epa doesn't seem to want any thing from us. I'm not going to ask either. I don't want to spend any time or money on a report that says what environmental protections we need when we need none.

The water authority has a bunch of questions ans they may have referred us to the epa but fortunately they were happy with the answers we gave them.

Hopefully you've dodged another expensive planning condition then.

Council planner mentioned in our preliminary discussions if we were using tanks for fish then the EPA would require (amongst many things) a bunded facility for the tanks, waste water handling protocols including a dirty water recovery and treatment system and that would all require appropriate engineering and need to be explained in an EIS.

Indeed... I'm surprised that fisheries and council haven't made an EPA mandatory.... incorporating all of the above...

Are you not required to have an aquaculture licence??

How are you intending to sell the fish Stuart???

Surely you've also had to do a HACCP analysis and obtain food safety licences??

All things we planned for and have included in the budget and warned our investor about.

What we didn't anticipate was $200k of driveway.

We had a meeting with the State planning office yesterday and they were not able to be very helpful.

Basically they said that now that the permit has been issued our only recourse is to go to VCAT. Over 6 month wait to be heard and we have been informed that since VicRoads is bound by the Austroads standard they would quote the standard, even say it was unfair but that there was nothing they could do. At which point VCAT would rule that the conditions stand. We pointed this out and they agreed but asked what else we could do? So we asked why we would do that and we were told that we could then use it as evidence that there really was a problem and that once that there was a bunch of other businesses that had faced the same problem and gone through the same process we could then use that to get the ministers attention.

When we started talking about how long that would take and couldn't officials such as herself be a little proactive since she could obviously predict the outcome of the VCAT case and she agreed that many other businesses either are or are about to be in the same position we were told that no these things take time. How long? "Well when I first started in planning 18 years ago there was a very obvious issue and we have just managed to fix that now."

Like I said not very helpful.

We did receive a slight ray of hope yesterday from the Department of Business Development and Innovation. Turns out they have a special unit for this sort of thing which makes sense but every other business development person has said "oh dear" and not much else. She has given us some homework and requested that we supply her with details on our land requirements so that she can start helping us to find alternative sites since that seems to be necessary.

Which of course puts us months and months away from turning sod.

And this is part of the reason Australian businesses are having trouble competing with imports. Red tape is destroying us in every part of our life's.