This is a YouTube video titled "The Colours of Your Land - Matt Hood" featuring Matt Hood, a vegetable farmer from a family business in Gatton, Queensland. The content is a monologue where Matt shares the history of his family's farming business, their daily operations growing and delivering vegetables across Australia, the challenges they face, and his hopes for future generations. The video highlights the importance of sustainable farming, family legacy, and agricultural technology.
Certainly a privilege to have an office to be able to work out in this every single day and be out there in the dirt. As they say, mud is in the blood. My name's Matt Hood from Rugby Farm. We're a family business and we've been farming in the area of Gatton in Queensland for over 100 years now. This is well known as the salad bowl of Australia and well promoted for its vegetable product, especially through the winter. We have very proud history and we love the land, obviously. So my great grandfather and grandfather started farming here and my dad then worked extremely hard and now my brother Dan and myself are running the family business. We're very proud of our dad and I feel very fortunate that I've been able to work side by side with him and my brother Dan for the last 20 years. And that's not an opportunity many people get and I feel very fortunate to have been able to do that. The business has changed quite a lot. We've had to continue to adapt and try and stay commercially viable and sustainable. So we now grow 12 different veggies and we're effectively planting and harvesting all of those every single day. So now we're required to deliver them on a daily basis into every capital city. So whether it's a beautiful day like today with the sun shining, whether it's pouring rain, you name it, we still have to be out here every playing in the mud, trying to harvest those vegetable crops to ensure they end up on the retailer's shelf. That puts a lot of pressure on us as a business and we have a great team of people working around us that support our family in being able to deliver those fresh veggies in a good quality every single day. We take the responsibility of providing good quality, healthy veggies to generally a large percentage of Australians. You know, that's a fair weight on our shoulders and we want to do that job well and continue to do that in a positive way into the future. The business has become very vertically integrated, effectively controlling from seed right through to delivery to our key customer, Coles Supermarket. Our key suppliers like John Deere, play a very important role in that. So the pressure for us to be out working ground, planting, harvesting our crops is absolutely critical. So we need to have good, reliable equipment and obviously John Deere and the great technology today play a key part in our business. Fortunate to have four beautiful children and my brother as well has four also. So we're looking forward to the opportunity for the next generation. I'm now trying to mentor my two boys. I certainly look forward to having the opportunity. Opportunity. Like I've been able to work with my dad and hopefully I'll be able to work with my boys as well into the future and give them the same opportunity to be out here and have the passion and the love for what we do each day. I'm Matt. I'm a proud vegetable farmer and these are the colours of our Sam.
