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TL Tracey Lefroy On Agtech - So What?

“If a workers' camp is coming into my local town, it's about developing the design of the trunk works and the camp such that when the workers are gone, that infrastructure has use in a different way. We've looked at can that be an aged care facility down the track? We have one corporate who gets the Woolies truck to drive up from Perth to deliver their groceries. I find that really disappointing because it's a really easy win for the community.”

Agtech - So What? · Alternative Proteins · November 2026

“If a workers' camp is coming into my local town, it's about developing the design of the trunk works and the camp such that when the workers are gone, that infrastructure has use in a different way. We've looked at can that be an aged care facility down the track? We have one corporate who gets the Woolies truck to drive up from Perth to deliver their groceries. I find that really disappointing because it's a really easy win for the community.” — Tracey Lefroy, Agtech - So What?

Context

Asked about community dynamics when construction crews arrive in small towns, she gives concrete ways for projects to leave something behind, from reusable camp infrastructure to buying groceries locally.

Transcript

Agtech - So What? Around 28:15 into the episode
Tracey Lefroy

…basically. It is a passive income and it's fantastic. And I think it's a really wonderful way of perhaps increasing the resilience of our farming businesses, particularly at the minute when input costs are just so enormous. It's a bit of a buffer against those, but it needs to be managed wisely.

Sarah Nolet

…putting the local mechanic out of business or just talk a little bit about those kind of community dynamics. And maybe that applies less in WA just given the kind of like size and scale of towns. Like I imagine it's more like per community, but not town because of how you guys are set up.

Tracey Lefroy

Oh, I could go on about this for hours. So it's really complex. So obviously during the construction phase, there are a lot more staff or workers needed than during the operational phase. So it's kind of this get in your community for a couple of years and then a release. And it's about making sure that during that hit period, that whatever housing or we call them trunk works. So your water, your sewage, your power, those sorts of infrastructure. It's about if we've got a workers' camp, I'll give an example. If a workers' camp is coming in to my local town of Mora and they need to then have the trunkworks in place, it's about developing the design of those trunkworks and the design of that workers camp such that when the workers are gone, that infrastructure has use in a different way. So for us, we've looked at can that be an aged care facility down the track? So aged care or aging in place in regional areas is absolutely what people are chasing, but we don't necessarily have the capacity for that. Guess it's about making sure that when renewable energy proponents are doing those construction projects, how do we leverage what they're already going to be doing so that it has a legacy impact for the regional community…

Sarah Nolet

Those are really tangible examples, like the aged care facility and the upskilling. And I like that it's both, there's some quantitative stuff there, like the income increases, but there's some qualitative stuff there too, like the training and that kind of piece. It seems like we've been through…

Tracey Lefroy

Sometimes I feel really optimistic. They're going to nail this. And then other times I feel less optimistic. But for me, it's about the governance systems. Have we specifically designed these governance systems to allow for good? Have we designed them such that we can capture this opportunity? An…

Sarah Nolet

Governance is one of those terms where I do feel like people think it's boring and yet it's so important. I keep going back to this question, I guess, of the frustration I hear from landowners and from regional communities about some of these projects and how they've gone and how the communities…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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