Great to see you at AusMac26!
Learn more about a NEW insurance product for Macadamia tree growers
Standing timber cover for growers.
It didn’t exist. Until now.
Standing Timber is a new cover built for Australian macadamia growers, and it's available only through Regional. It protects your seedlings, your mature trees, and the nuts still growing on them. When something goes wrong, it pays on the loss you've actually suffered, settled per hectare, and it's backed by A+ rated Security including Lloyds of London.
Your policy covers the shed. It doesn't cover the orchard.
A macadamia tree takes seven to twelve years to bear commercially and decades to reach full production. It is the single largest asset on the farm, and the one thing a season’s work can’t replace. Yet almost every policy written for macadamia growers stops short of the trees. Farm packs, business packs and ISR policies cover the sheds, the machinery and the liability. The trees themselves, and the crop growing on them, sit outside.
Until now, a grower who wanted to protect them had two options.
Parametric cover - Pays out when a weather index reaches a set threshold, not when your orchard is damaged. The index can trip when you’ve lost nothing. Your trees can burn and the index may never trip at all. Limits are large, but so is the price, and the gap between what happened to you and what the policy pays is yours to carry.
No cover at all - Which is what most growers chose. Not through carelessness, but because nothing else existed.
Cover built for the orchard
Standing Timber was negotiated specifically for the macadamia sector by Cohen Read, a broker who kept meeting growers carrying their most valuable asset entirely uninsured. It's new, it's available only through Regional, and it can be written on its own rather than bolted onto a policy you already hold. As your broker, we'll work out what your trees and crop are actually worth before we put a figure on cover.
- Fire, lightning, windstorm and flood damage to your standing trees
- Your seedlings, from the day they go in the ground
- The nuts still growing on the trees
- Re-establishment costs, so the orchard can be replanted
- Firefighting costs and debris removal
- Claims preparation costs
- Malicious damage
- Limits to $30 million, layered, backed by A+ rated Security including Lloyds of London
On your actual loss, assessed and settled per hectare. Not on an index, not on a trigger — on what actually happened to your orchard. Claims are managed and adjusted locally, by people who can stand in it with you.
Exclusions may apply. Please reach out to Cohen Read for full details.
Find out what your trees are worth, and what it costs to cover them
No obligation. A short conversation about your orchard, your current cover, and the gap between them.
How your options compare
The same orchard. The same fire, storm or flood. Three very different outcomes.
The difference isn't really about price. It's about what triggers a payout.
Parametric cover pays when a weather index crosses a line someone drew in advance. Standing Timber pays when your orchard is damaged.
Most of the time those two things look similar enough. In a bad year, they don't.
Cover that understands what a storm actually does to an orchard
Most insurance policies are built around the idea of total loss. A building either stands or it doesn't, and the claim is settled accordingly. Orchards don't behave that way, and a policy written on building logic struggles with what a grower actually walks out to find the morning after a storm.
This cover is written around that reality. It responds to trees that are snapped, to trees that are uprooted, and to trees left leaning so far from vertical that, in the view of the loss assessor and by accepted forestry management principles, it's no longer practical to continue growing them. Those trees are treated as lost, because for the purposes of running an orchard they are.
And where a leaning tree can be saved, the policy covers the work to straighten it. That matters more than it first sounds. A tree that can be brought back upright is years of growing preserved rather than replaced, and the cost of that remedial work is real — but it is a fraction of what it costs to start again.
That's the difference between a policy written for trees and a policy written for buildings.
We're just down the road
Regional has branches through the Wide Bay and across Central Queensland — Bundaberg, Hervey Bay, Maryborough, Biloela, Rockhampton and Mackay, with more through the southeast. We are not a brokerage trying to reach macadamia country from a capital city. We have been in these towns for years, insuring the farms, the trucks, the sheds and the businesses around them.
Cohen Read is your macadamia specialist, working out of Bundaberg and Hervey Bay. He is the one who went looking for this cover when he realised growers had no real option, and he is the one who negotiated it. He will be the person who writes your policy, the person you call when you have a question about it, and the person who turns up when something has gone wrong in your orchard.
And because we also write farm property, liability, crop, stock throughput and professional indemnity across the macadamia sector, the trees do not have to sit in a separate conversation from the rest of your insurance. One broker, one relationship, and someone who already understands how your season works.
Where to find us
Cohen is at macadamia industry events across Queensland and northern NSW throughout the year. Come and say hi.
AusMac2026 — 20–22 October, Brisbane Showgrounds. Booth 12.
MacGroup, Bundaberg — February 2027, date to be confirmed.
Cohen Read | Account Manager & Team Leader, Wide Bay