Statistics Success: industry benefits from the data project
By Kobie Keenan
This week, GIA, Down to Earth Research and ACIL Allen officially conclude the hugely successful NY17008 Nursery Statistics and Research Project.
Commencing in 2018 the project has collected and twice validated industry value, volume and sentiment data from greenlife producers across for the financial years 2017/18, 2018/19 and 2019/20; and produced an industry business benchmarking tool for greenlife producers each year.
The primary outcome sought by the project was to enable nursery industry stakeholders to make more strategic and informed decisions through the availability of accurate and verified baseline industry data. This project has also supported the GIA Strategic Plan 2020-2023 for advocacy and promotion to ensure that credible data informs strategy and policy planning and helps to raise awareness of the importance of the industry. Some recent examples of the data being used include:
- Inclusion of the survey results in Hort Innovation’s Horticulture Statistics Handbook for 2017/2018, 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 editions.
- Supporting the successful application between GIA with the Australia Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) for $546,000 in National Product Stewardship Investment Funding to establish a national recycling program for horticultural plant packaging.
- Communicating the importance of the industry as an ‘essential service’ directly to the Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment and the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources during COVID-19 lockdowns in April 2020.
Importantly, media has also used the data this year when highlighting Australian’s bought more plants than ever in 2020 and only last week, Anita Campbell CEO of Association Member NGINA was able to use it to talk about a boom in indoor plant sales.
Importantly, greenlife production businesses have access to an informative, interactive and valuable benchmarking tool which contains multiple years of consecutive, comparable data enabling growers to measure their performance against businesses across different data sets including sales value, employment, wages, productivity, and cost metrics. The benchmarking tool is available to all nursery levy payers on request here.
For the first time in over a decade, the project also delivered a Greenlife Market Report covering key industry impacting the industry including: demand trends, productive workforce, plant biosecurity and water/climate. The ABS has reported they found the report valuable in improving their understanding of the sector.
As planning for a new collection project is underway, the Project Team of Peter Vaughan and Kobie Keenan of GIA, Daniel Watson of DTER and Jan Paul van Moort and Rebecca Moriarty of ACIL Allen would like to thank the many greenlife producers, independent retailers and landscape businesses who contributed data to the project over the last three years. Without their willingness to share data this project would not have been possible.
The Project Team gratefully acknowledges the support of the PRG and particularly, the nursery industry representatives of David Jakobs, Josh Kyne, Hamish Mitchell and Emily White who informed the project and provided a real-world view of the greenlife production businesses in relation to data collection.
We also acknowledge the great volume of industry market intelligence provided by the Delphi group participants which supported the Greenlife Market Report including Karen Connaughton, Colin Groom, Brett Sargeant, Mark Jackson, Alex Newman, Brendan O’Keefe, Michael Rogers, Craig Taberner and Peter Vaughan.
GIA would like to acknowledge and thank the project partners of DTER and ACIL Allen for providing their expertise and advice which were instrumental in overcoming the challenges of past projects of this nature.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge the persistence of the Strategic Investment Advisory Panel and Hort Innovation in working to rectify the gaps in greenlife industry data and recognise their continued support and input into this project.
