By Megan Frankel-Vaughan
GROWING up on an irrigation farm in central Victoria, growing grapes wasn’t something Ivan Shaw thought of until he met his future wife Jude, whose family owned a block.
He’d got into steel construction and decided to “do something sensible”, so went to teachers’ college in Adelaide, where he taught ceramics.
When the pair moved to the region where Jude’s father Norm Preisig was a dried-fruit grower, Mr Shaw got his first real taste of the industry.
It was around this time that trellis drying was introduced through the CSIRO and Mr Shaw worked with Norm to create a harvester, which went on to win a prize at the Irymple Gadget and Machinery Field Days in 1977.
As it turned out, that little harvester was just the beginning of Mr Shaw’s innovations in the dried grape industry.
He and Jude decided to stay in Sunraysia and to buy some of her dad’s property.
“We built some of these little harvesters to sell to other growers to help pay for the place,” Mr Shaw said.
“I think we made about 35 harvesters over five or six years. It was a lot of work.”
During that time, he developed a different way of dehydrating the fruit too, which replaced the Hudson dryer, which Mr Shaw said had been a great innovation in the 1960s.
It ran on kerosene and involved manually shovelling fruit in and out.
“Having shovelled a couple of loads of that, I thought ‘I’m not sure about this’, so we made these individual bins that you could tip out and tip the fruit in and that did speed it up.” The burner used gas, and was designed to recycle some of the hot air.
He made many of those in the early 1980s, before the workload became too much and a local engineering firm took on the work.
“But I could never totally leave it alone, so I kept developing other stuff as well,” Mr Shaw said.
“I’ve worked myself to death making things to save work.”
At a time when most vines were old plantings, and almost all were grown on T-trellis, CSIRO held a field day looking at hanging canes instead of T trellis. This included a basic swingarm-type principle.
“It had lots going for it, but it sometimes fell over, as it wasn’t structurally stable and hence the industry dismissed it,” Mr Shaw said.
“It was deemed impractical and assumed no one would ever take it up, but I thought that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Mr Shaw then developed the Christmas-tree trellis, with the aim of being able to cut mechanically in summer.
“That was great for two to three years, but because canes hung down it created a tent-type microclimate, and became a bit unproductive after a while,” he said.
Mr Shaw then went back to looking at the principles of swingarm, determined to make it practical and functional.
The first swingarm was made in about 1991 and is still functioning in Mr Shaw’s former vineyard, which now neighbours his Merbein South home.
“It allowed mechanical cutting to be much easier, it allowed the microclimate of the vine to work, it allowed better spray penetration,” Mr Shaw said.
“We could remove leaves to make the dip mixture work better, and it distributed the fruit a lot better. It took into account the physiology of the vine and the need to get canes up into the sunlight in order to produce fruitful buds.
“So it’s stuck.”
Mr Shaw is realistic, but humble, about the contribution he made to the dried-grape industry. He said his swingarm trellis design was an evolution of different principles, including from the CSIRO.
“It’s important to recognise that – nothing ever comes from nothing,” he said.
“So it’s really a matter in life of recognising what can potentially work and putting it into practice and having faith in it until you get it right, rather than saying you’re going to get it right from absolute scratch.
“Sometimes you can do that, but generally speaking, things evolve, they don’t just happen, this was an evolution of that principle.”
His background in the arts, as well as a willingness to try new things was part of Mr Shaw’s motivation.
“I think everybody has things like that they think about – you’ve just got to do them sometimes,” he said.
“Sometimes you can think about things but not actually do it, so you never know if they’re going to work. Sometimes you’ve got to have a fairly big scrap pile of things that didn’t work before achieving your goal.
“I was always driven by the notion that we could mechanise the industry a lot more than it is.”
The successful development and uptake of the Shaw swingarm trellis paved the way for progress in mechanising the industry and allowing grapes to be grown and dried on a large scale.
The new trellis system meant a new, wider harvester – specific to dried grapes – was needed.
Mr Shaw got to work again.
“When we put in swingarm, we couldn’t fit a general wine-grape harvester over it,” he said.
“There wasn’t the scope to harvest swingarm at scale – there was a bottleneck, so the industry did fund me a little bit to build a prototype harvester to do that.”
That was a self-propelled, one-man unit with the first radial head to be used on dried grapes.
The tractor-towed Shaw radial head harvester was later developed. About six machines were built, designed to harvest single rows, delivering fruit over the row.
It’s this harvester, with some modifications, that new machines entering the industry are based on. While the Shaw swingarm trellis has become industry best practice, it’s not the only solution to operating a profitable dried-grape business.
“You’ve got to be able to manage the vines – swingarm is a piece of the puzzle,” Mr Shaw said. “You’ve got to know how to grow vines with proper nutrition and understand how to dry fruit.”
While Mr Shaw’s handiwork is evident in equipment like trellis designs and harvesters across the growing region, one of his proudest achievements is one he says many might not know about.
He said he was proud to have received an Medal of the Order of Australia for his efforts, but that designing and building the dried-grape processing and packing plant at Wargan was among his greatest projects.
“I was shown a shed and asked, ‘Can you fit something in here?’,” Mr Shaw said.
He worked from research into processing undertaken by John Fielke from Uni SA.
“That was a major project. It grew as we went on and I realised what I’d taken on,” he said.
“We put in a lot of late nights. That was a huge undertaking.
“I was very relieved when I saw fruit come out the other end because we made every individual component of that on site, except for a laser scanner and a filter. It was pretty gratifying to see fruit come out the other end.”
With this, Mr Shaw added another achievement to a long list of industry contributions.
“If you took fruit from a property, it was grown under our techniques, with our machines, harvested and dried with our machines, and put through the processor through our machines.”
Reflecting on his time in the industry, Mr Shaw said it had been a steady one, despite its reputation as the “poor cousin” of horticulture.
“But in fact, if you’ve adopted proven technology, done it properly and been serious about it, it’s been a very good earner and a very interesting industry, so I’ve really enjoyed my time in the dried fruit industry,” he said.
Looking ahead, Mr Shaw said it was important the industry – from smaller growers to those managing larger plantings – embraced the technology and knowledge that already existed.
“People have planted up a lot of acreage in recent years, but there hasn’t been a match in expertise or machinery to go with it, and that needs to happen,” he said.
“I emphasise the point that it’s got to be done properly and there’s a skill attached to it.
“It’s so much more than growing wine grapes or table grapes. It’s a specialised industry. Good growers who do it successfully really need to be mentors to others. The industry can’t go forward without that expertise.”
Mr Shaw said that with the right knowledge, and a quality product grown efficiently and consistently, the industry can reach its great potential.
– with Dried Fruits Australia
