Top End mango grower builds thriving business over three decades

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Saramat ‘Tou’ Ruchkaew is the unofficial mango queen of the northern territory. Tou - as she's better known - started with a handful of trees, but now has more than 70,000, after three decades of toil.

Transcript

00:00She might be tiny, but as one of the territory's biggest mango growers, Saramat Rakao, known

00:08by all as Two, picks well above her weight.

00:11It's just commitment and focus, and don't be afraid of hard work.

00:16Loyalty to the people that help you.

00:20But Two wasn't always a farmer.

00:23Once a career woman working in marketing in Thailand, she fell in love and moved to Australia.

00:28But as a migrant, job prospects were limited, and she needed to fund an MBA she was completing.

00:34So I have a passion and looking for money to pay school fees and found a niche.

00:41She quickly realised these were untapped fruits of opportunity, and they knocked on doors

00:46of run-down mango farms offering to manage and split profits.

00:51Two and her husband Ian could see that managing farms would leave them beholden to unpredictable

00:56landowners, and that if they wanted to have a proper crack at a commercial industry, they

01:01needed to invest in their own land and processing facility.

01:05They eventually bought a run-down place in Bury Springs.

01:08The epitome of start small, grow big.

01:10I came here with not a lot, and now a very big farming operation.

01:15Her journey hasn't been free of pain.

01:17A very raw and recent tragedy has been the loss of her husband 12 months ago, the man

01:23on which she'd shared a dream and passion for building up this business.

01:27Ian and I always have the pact that if one of us go, the other can keep this place going.

01:35She's a very strong woman that I have seen in my life because she's a really hard worker

01:40and she's very easy to control all this big farm.

01:45It might be hard, but she's a long way from putting up her boots.

01:49As long as you have that passion, I guess, to drive and stay focused, don't lose it.

01:56Plans for putting another 20,000 trees, giving back to the top end, which she says has given

02:02her so much.

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