Australia's blueberry capital, by the numbers: Coffs Harbour anchors a $505 million crop that grew more than a third in a single year

If you want to understand the Coffs coast's economy in a single number, the blueberry is a good place to start. The most recent national industry figures, published in the Australian Horticulture Statistics Handbook for 2023/24 and covering the year ending June 2024, put the Australian blueberry crop at 27,540 tonnes and a farm-gate value of $505.1 million. New South Wales grew 23,575 tonnes of that, which is about 86% of the national total, and the handbook states plainly where in the state it sits: Blueberry production is centered in the northern New South Wales region of Coffs Harbour. We keep the handbook's spelling inside the quote; in our own prose the industry is centred here, on this coast.

Read together rather than one at a time, the figures show three things happening at once: a crop of real scale concentrated on one region, a single-year surge in how much of it is being grown, and a quiet reversal in how the country trades it. Take them in turn.

The scale, and where it sits

Blueberries are not a minor line in Australian horticulture. At $505.1 million the crop was worth 20% more than the year before, and almost all of it is sold fresh: about 9% of production goes to be processed, so roughly 91% reaches the shops as fruit. Households buy it in numbers, with 47% of Australian households purchasing blueberries across the year and per-capita supply at 0.93 kilograms a head.

What sets this crop apart is not just its size but its geography. New South Wales grew 23,575 tonnes of the 27,540-tonne national total, about 86%. The next-largest states are a long way back: Tasmania on 1,653 tonnes, Queensland on 1,033, Western Australia on 592, Victoria on 551, South Australia on 138 and the Northern Territory on none. That is a national industry that lives, overwhelmingly, in one state, and the handbook locates the heart of it in one region: Coffs Harbour. We do not have a published tonnage for the Coffs region alone, and we are not going to invent one, but the direction is unambiguous. When the country talks about where its blueberries come from, it is talking about this coast.

The one-year surge

The second thing the figures show is speed. National production rose 36% in a single year, from 20,211 tonnes to 27,540 tonnes. A jump of that size in twelve months is not the weather: a crop can swing a little year to year on a good or a bad season, but a third more fruit points to new growing capacity coming online. The handbook's split of production systems is the supporting detail. Nationally, 42.7% of production now comes from polyhouses and tunnels, with the remaining 57.3% grown conventionally, and in New South Wales the two systems are close to even, at 10,071 tonnes under cover against 13,504 tonnes conventional. Protected cropping, the polyhouses and tunnels that extend the season and lift yields per hectare, is now nearly half of how Australia grows its blueberries, and it is the kind of capacity that turns up in the numbers as a step change rather than a drift.

From importer to exporter

The third shift is in how the country trades the crop. The handbook notes that Australia has traditionally been a net importer of fresh blueberries, typically importing 700-1,700 tonnes per year, with the majority of this volume coming from New Zealand. For the year ending June 2024 it imported 1,309 tonnes, squarely inside that historical band. What changed is the other side of the ledger: fresh exports rose to 1,085 tonnes, worth $26.4 million, up more than 100% in volume on the year before. Exports still sit a little under imports, so the country has not flipped to a net exporter on these figures, but a doubling of outbound volume in one year is the clearest sign yet that the extra fruit coming out of the protected-cropping expansion is looking for markets beyond the domestic shelf.

Our read: the upside and the exposure of anchoring a national crop

What follows is our read, offered as opinion and built only on the figures above. Put the three shifts together and the picture is a genuinely good one for the Coffs coast, with a catch worth naming. The good part is plain: this region anchors about 86% of a national crop that is worth half a billion dollars and that just grew by more than a third in a year, with a new export line more than doubling on top. An industry growing at that rate, concentrated here, is jobs, packing, freight, cold chain and supporting trade concentrated here too. On the stated numbers, the blueberry is doing more for this coast's economy each year, not less.

The catch is the flip side of the same fact. When roughly 86% of a national industry sits in one state and is centred on one region, that region carries the concentration risk for the whole crop. A bad season, a disease incursion, a water-supply squeeze or a market swing does not average out across a spread of growing regions the way it would for a more dispersed crop: it lands hardest exactly where the production is, which is here. That is not a prediction of trouble, and we are making no claim about any particular grower or season. It is simply the arithmetic of concentration, and it is the reason the shift to polyhouses and tunnels is worth reading as more than a yield story. Growing under cover is, among other things, a hedge against precisely that volatility: it buys some insulation from the weather that open-field fruit cannot get. A region that grows most of the nation's blueberries has every reason to want that insulation, and the figures suggest it is building it.

We will keep reading the annual handbook and the peak-body data as each year's figures land, and report this industry against these numbers: the value, the tonnage, the state share, the systems split and the trade balance, as they move.