AUGUST 2025
Cover Story
. 16
Dick Estens in his citrus orchard near Moree in northwest NSW and (inset) Grove Juice managing director Greg Quinn. Picture: Sascha Estens
IN THE GROVE For this pioneering family operation in northwest NSW, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze, writes CONOR FOWLER
B ALANCING the economics and agronomics of farming in an often-unforgiving climate is never easy. But for pioneering northwest NSW farmer Dick Estens, a mix of waterwise thinking, bold investment and patience is bearing fruit – thousands of tonnes of it, in fact. Two decades ago, Estens began searching for a better return on his water. Cotton had long been the backbone of his operation on the sunlit plains near Moree, but years of drought and market volatility had the commercial pilot- turned-farmer scanning the horizon for alternatives. “At the end of the day, because Moree has good summer rainfall as well as winter rainfall, it had to be a commodity that had a hard skin,” Estens says. Almonds were trialled for a decade, but the venture was eventually shelved due to splitting in the nonpareil variety, higher water demands and a harvest that often clashed with February rain. In 2000, Estens joined a NSW Department of Agriculture-led trial into juice production. A large group of growers from Moree, Bourke, Forbes and Gunnedah even floated the idea of a juice supply co-operative, but it never materialised. So Estens “went his own way”, and in 2008 purchased a 50 per cent stake in Grove Juice – a Brisbane-based company that began in 1969 delivering fresh juice door-to-door. “I then came home and ordered trees, and started planting them in 2009,” he says. At the time, most of the Australian juice market still relied on concentrate imported from Brazil, blended with sugar and water. Grove itself was trucking 6000 tonnes of oranges from Leeton in southern NSW to Brisbane — a 12-hour haul — for
processing. It wasn’t sustainable, Estens says. One of his first moves was to build a processing facility at Warwick in Queensland, just over three hours from Moree. It proved a turning point, setting Grove on the path to becoming a vertically integrated operation – growing, processing and bottling its own fruit – and one of Australia’s leading freshly squeezed juice brands. “Generally when you go into a new business, you get a bit worried whether you’re doing the right thing,” Estens says.
“(But) every year I was in it looked better.” In 2016, Estens bought the remaining half of the Grove business. Today, it grows 500,000 citrus trees across 825 hectares at Moree and Forbes, in the NSW Central West, the latter orchard acquired in 2024 from Dutch investment firm Optifarm. Turning over more than $100 million in annual juice sales, Grove runs three processing plants – in Brisbane and Warwick in Queensland, and at Leeton at a site purchased last year from food and beverage giant Bega. The business employs 230 full-time staff plus seasonal workers, and works with a network of third-party growers nationwide. Its sourcing footprint now stretches from mandarins in Mundubbera, limes in the Atherton Tablelands and citrus in the Riverina to apples from Stanthorpe and Shepparton. And the growth continues. Grove is in the process of almost doubling its business, with
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