By Callum Ludwig
A stalwart of agriculture in the Upper Yarra has been recognised in the 2024 Apple and Pear Australia Limited (APAL) Awards for Excellence.
Kevin Sanders from Sanders Apples was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award, and described by APAL CEO Phil Turnbull as ‘a true pioneer in the advancement of
apples and pears’.
Mr Sanders said as anyone would be, he was humbled to receive the award.
“Our family has been apple farmers or horticulturists and orchardists for I think 99 years this year, so next year’s our centenary since we started fruit growing in Doncaster East,” he said.
“When I grew up, that was all that was there was fruit growing, there were no bare paddocks or anything like that and there was certainly no housing.”
The Sanders family was based in Doncaster East until selling the farm in 1976 and moved to Three Bridges where they’ve remained ever since.
Mr Sanders said initially had had no interest at all in joining the family business.
“I’m not sure at the time that I started working on the farm that my parents thought it was a really good idea either because early on it appeared as though I was not at all interested butat about the age of 22 or 23, a light went on and suddenly I became passionate about it and that passion remains with me today,” he said.
Kevin and his brothers Bob and Peter are the third generation of apple growers in the Sanders family, having started with their English immigrant grandfather Arthur William Sanders, who had little knowledge of the industry and was carried on by their father Hugh who spent his teenage years working on local orchards to learn the tricks of the trade.
They moved from Donvale to Doncaster East in 1968 but quickly had to relocate again to Three Bridges as the urban creep started to set into the area.
Nowadays, even a fourth generations of the Sanders family are involved in running the orchard.
Mr Sanders said while the award was dedicated to him and the 22 years he spent on the board of the national body, it wouldn’t have been possible without the support of his brothers and their partners.
“My brother Peter and I travelled to Europe in ‘99 and Bob travelled there in 2000 on study tours and that was a seminal moment for the whole of our farm, we literally saw how other people do it and we brought back a lot of the thought patterns and technology,” he said.
“We’ve been innovators for a long time as a family and we won an award for innovation in agriculture and while it wasn’t a crowning achievement, it was an acknowledgement of the fact that we were innovators in our space, because it was the only time that awards ever been given to horticulture as it usually goes to dairies or grains.”
The award was the 2010 Victorian Department of Primary Industries (DPI) Hugh McKay Future Farming Award.
Mr Sanders said one thing that remains important to him is the connection between farmers and the consumers.
“I think it’s highly important for people to understand where their food comes from, certainly when I grew up nearly everyone we knew somewhere in their family had someone on a farm or in agriculture of some description, but that’s well and truly removed now,” he said.
“I did a little bit of lecturing at Melbourne Uni during my time and met a number of people and had them on the farm or visited their many other institutions around the world and for me personally, I’ve enormously enjoyed the science side of it all, much more than a lot of people would imagine you could,” he said.
“We have a lot of local visitors who every day still come out and buy apples out of the shed, and it’s lovely to see people and families that have been buying apples from us for 30 or 40 years and some of them are still here.”
