Happy new year everyone and welcome to the first Ag Inform for 2024! We hope you had a great Christmas and were able to spend some quality time with family and friends.

Ag Feedback Survey Results & Winners

As many of you will recall, last month we conducted our annual ag survey, and we thought it would be good to share one of the results with you. When asked how you feel about the upcoming 2024 season 21% of you were somewhat concerned, while 49% of you were somewhat optimistic, so it’s good to see there’s a fairly positive outlook in the community as we move into the new year.

As part of the annual ag survey, you may remember that we also had not one but two Milwaukee ½ inch M18 Rattle Gun prizes up for grabs, so it’s a big AUSPAN congratulations to the winners, Conrad Waters from Yerecoin and Nathan Ditchburn from North Kukerin.

AUSPAN Shed Guide 2024

The beginning of the year is also when we launch the 2024 Shed Guide, which this year sees the publication expanded to 20 pages. There’s plenty of great info in there to assist with your new shed project from shed design trends & ideas, different shed types and accessories, to information about the AUSPAN team and the increasing number of activities we’re performing in the local community. The digital version of the guide will be distributed next week, and the physical versions can be found as an insert in the February 1 edition of the Farm Weekly, so make sure you keep a look out!

Gold Coin BBQ Updates

Speaking of community activities, one of the new initiatives we launched in 2023 was our monthly Gold Coin Donation events, where we now have BBQs and other lunch events across our six different office locations every month. At each of these events we invite our team to make a gold coin donation, which is then matched by AUSPAN. We launched this in April and since then we have donated $7,538 to eight different causes that our team have voted as being causes that have specific meaning to them. In our recent ag survey, we asked which charities are important to you, so in 2024 it’s good to know that our community objectives are aligned with yours, and that the money raised will be going to those charities that are near and dear to WA farmers.

32 x 18 x 5.75m Chemical Shed in Merredin

And now it’s time for the final featured sheds for 2023 and we’re kicking things off about 3 hours east of Perth at Merredin and this 32x 18 x 5.75m chemical shed built for Charl Wille from Merredin Farms.

48 x 24 x 6.8m Machinery Shed in Narraloggan

An hour and a half’s drive back towards Perth and this is a project we recently completed for Peter Keeble from Sunshine Pastoral in Narraloggan. It’s a 48x 24 x 6.8m machinery shed.

48 x 16 x 5.6m Multipurpose Shed in Hester

And lastly, we’re heading south to Hester, just outside of Bridgetown and this 48m x 16 x 5.6m multipurpose shed we constructed for Brendon Gardiner from Timber Treaters. A big thanks to Charl, Peter and Brendon for allowing us to feature their new sheds!

So that’s it for this month’s Inform. All the best for the year of 2024 and we look forward to getting back in touch in February.