AN Adelaide Plains farmer has been rewarded for giving struggling farmers a voice by being named South Australia’s Young Grower of the Year.

Daniel Hoffmann has been advocating for the past three years for farmers in the area to have access to the Virginia Pipeline Scheme (VPS), which would drastically lower costs for farmers hit by the current drought.

According to Mr Hoffmann, not being connected to the VPS is causing Penfield farmers, like himself, to haemorrhage money as they attempt to run their farms off mains water.

For his efforts, AUSVEG SA named him their Young Grower of the Year at the William Buck Vegetable Industry Awards for Excellence this past week.

Mr Hoffmann said farmers in the area were doing it tough and having to downsize their operations due to dry weather.

“There’s a lot of Vietnamese and Cambodian farms that don’t really have the means to stick up for themselves, so I thought I would do it myself,” he said.

“They have it probably worse  than anyone else in the state, there’s about 50 farms in that area who have been trying to run their business on mains water.

“They’re paying $3.60 a kilolitre for water when everyone else (who is connected to the VPS) is getting it for around 18 cents.

“To have that kind of uneven playing field is unfair; there’s some farmers with a $30,000 water bill a quarter, I’ve got neighbours who are sitting on $50,000 water bills who have to go on payment plans and they can’t pay it before the next bill comes.

“None of those farmers knew what to do, so I took it upon myself to grab them all together and go to SA Water and argue on their behalf.”

Mr Hoffmann said the VPS would only need to be extended by “a few hundred metres” for Penfield farmers to connect to it and receive cheaper irrigated water.

On top of his work advocating for local farmers, Mr Hoffmann has also helped develop new pest management techniques, which have eliminated pesticides on his farm.

He also started a South Australian ‘young growers’ group, which he is looking to get formally recognised by the state’s official farming bodies.

Mr Hoffmann will be nominated for the Young Grower of the Year award at the AUSVEG National Awards for Excellence, to be held in Melbourne in June.