Running a business through the Adelaide Hills and Barossa squeeze

Grape growing in the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa has been under sustained commercial pressure, and for a lot of families it isn't an abstract market story. It's a fruit price that didn't cover the cost of growing it, a block that's been in the family for 3 generations, and a decision about the next 12 months that has to be made whether or not anybody feels ready to make it.

This post doesn't predict what prices will do. Nobody can, and a page that tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does is set out the operating decisions actually sitting in front of an owner in that position, and where the pressure tends to show up first. The state of small business in South Australia covers the broader picture these businesses sit inside.

For context on scale: the ABS counted 16,287 Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing businesses in South Australia (ABS, Counts of Australian Businesses, June 2025). That's a large share of the state's business base, and in the Hills, the Barossa, Light and Alexandrina it's the base the rest of the local economy is built on.

To be straight about what this page is: ADL Business Coach doesn't deliver coaching. It matches owners to separate, independent Adelaide coaching businesses. This is a description of the problem, not a pitch about timing.

The pressure isn't only the price

When a season goes badly the price gets the blame, and it's usually the visible part rather than the whole of it.

What owners in the region describe is several pressures arriving together: input and insurance costs that moved and didn't move back, labour that's harder to secure at the moment it's needed, a cash cycle that offers no second chance inside a year, and a market position where the price is set somewhere else. Any single one of those is manageable. The 4 at once is what makes a run of poor seasons feel different from a bad year.

The cost side of that is a state-wide story, not just a regional one. Rising costs for SA small businesses goes through the components in more detail.

A vineyard business gets 1 revenue event a year. Every mistake in the other 11 months has to wait 12 months for a chance to be corrected.

A single harvest is a single cash event

This is the structural fact that makes the sector different from almost every other small business, and it's where the practical work starts.

Most businesses can trade their way through a soft month. A grower can't, because there isn't a month to trade through. The money arrives in a narrow window and then the business lives on it, often with payment terms that push part of it further out again.

What that means operationally:

• The forecast has to run a full 12 months, not a quarter. A 13-week view is standard advice in most industries and it isn't long enough here. The forecast needs to reach the next harvest and the payment terms attached to it.
• The trough has to be dated, not sensed. Most growers know roughly when the account gets tight. There's a difference between knowing roughly and having the week circled, because the week circled is the thing you can act on 4 months early.
• Fixed commitments need to be listed against that calendar. Not to cut them, necessarily, but so that a decision about them happens in advance rather than in the week it bites.
• The cost of production per tonne needs to be a number you actually hold, not an estimate. It's the number that makes every other decision in this post answerable.

None of that changes the price. It changes how much room you have to respond to it, and how early.

Price-taking, and the part you do control

In a price-taking position the temptation is to treat every decision as futile, because the number that matters most is set somewhere else.

It isn't quite that. The price is out of your hands. Which blocks you carry, what you spend per hectare, which varieties you're committed to, who you sell to and on what terms, whether you're exposed to 1 buyer or several, and how much of your cost base is fixed against how much flexes: all of that is inside the business.

The uncomfortable version of the same point is that some of those decisions are about stopping rather than starting. Deciding not to spend on a block that won't return the spend is a decision, and it's often the highest-value one available in a poor run. It's also the hardest to make about ground somebody's grandfather planted, which is exactly why it tends to get deferred past the point where deferring is cheap.

Diversifying, and the arithmetic nobody enjoys

Diversification gets recommended a lot and specified almost never. Cellar door, tourism, events, contract services, alternative varieties, other crops, off-farm income: all of it is real, and all of it takes capital, time and a skill set the existing business may not have.

The honest way to look at a diversification idea is with 4 questions, answered on paper before anything is committed:

1. What does it cost to get to the first dollar of revenue, including the owner hours nobody costs?
2. How long until it's cash positive, and can the business fund the gap from where it actually is now?
3. Whose hours does it consume, and what stops happening while those hours are consumed?
4. If it doesn't work, what does it cost to stop?

A cellar door or a tourism offering isn't a smaller version of growing. It's a hospitality business with its own staffing, seasonality and margin structure, attached to a farm. That can be exactly the right move. It just needs to be entered as a new business with its own numbers, rather than as a hopeful extension of the old one.

Succession arrives early in a bad run

Pressure brings the succession conversation forward, usually before anybody has prepared for it. A generation that expected to hand over in 5 years finds itself deciding now, and the next generation is being asked to take on a business at its hardest point, sometimes while holding an off-farm job.

That conversation is worth having deliberately rather than by drift. Does the next generation actually want it, said plainly? What happens to the siblings who don't? What does the older generation live on, and what do they still decide? Those questions have an answered state and an unanswered state, and unanswered is what turns a hard season into a family dispute.

The operational side of that work is the same everywhere, on the land or not: owner dependency, legible numbers, documented work. Succession planning in a South Australian family business sets it out in full.

The businesses around the vines

The pressure doesn't stop at the fence. A region built on agriculture and wine carries a whole layer of businesses that ride the same cycle at 1 remove: contractors and machinery services, transport, packaging and supply, the cafes and accommodation in Hahndorf, Tanunda and Angaston, and the trades and retailers whose customers are all growers.

Those owners are often the last to see it coming, because their own year looks normal until the season lands. If your customer base is concentrated in a single sector that's under pressure, that's a customer concentration problem wearing a regional disguise, and it deserves the same treatment as any other: know what share of revenue depends on it, and know what you'd do if that share halved.

The way the region's business mix fits into greater Adelaide is worth understanding on its own, and Adelaide's business precincts maps how the 4 precincts differ. If you want the local view specifically, business coaching in the Adelaide Hills and Barossa describes the kind of work coaches in the network do with owners in the region.

Where the rest of this belongs

Everything above is operational: cash timing, cost per tonne, customer concentration, hours, and the decisions an owner can make inside their own business.

The parts that aren't operational aren't for a website. Anything to do with debt arrangements, what a restructure would mean for you, what's in a grower agreement, government support that may be available and what any of it does to your position belongs with your accountant, your lawyer and a licensed adviser. For sector-specific support in South Australia, go to the state government's primary industries department directly rather than to a summary written by somebody else, because the terms change.

The reason to do the operational work anyway is simple. Whatever happens to prices, an owner who knows their cost of production, has the next 12 months of cash dated, and has had the family conversation is making choices. An owner without those is reacting to whatever arrives, in the week it arrives.