Tag Archives: Coffs Coast

advocate, Coffs Coast, Corporate control of food, Global hunger

Food insecurity amidst abundance

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Food Insecurity on the Coffs Coast

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 9.7.11

Last time I wrote about the link between global malnutrition and agri-business profiteering, on the eve of Ugandan farmer Polly Apio’s visit to Bellingen. Now we learn of a looming famine that may affect 10 million people or more in the Horn of Africa. The immediate cause is failed harvests due to prolonged droughts, but the situation is made far worse by soaring commodity prices.

Food insecurity though isn’t only an issue for Africa and other regions in the Global South.

As at 2008, at least 2 million Australians fell into the category of being food insecure, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Those numbers have surely increased in the last three years, taking into account cost of living pressures.

A week ago, power bills in NSW rose by 18%. Between 2008 and 2013, average household electricity bills in this state will double, even without factoring in additional rises that will flow from the introduction of a carbon tax; and they are tipped to rise another 50% from 2013-2016.

For most of us, rising power bills, like rising fuel costs, mortgage payments, rents, and food prices, are something we can deal with. We don’t like it, but we can make adjustments in our household budgets, and at least some of the increased costs are offset by wage rises, or new jobs with better pay.

On the other hand, if you’re among the 2 million plus who are food insecure, these cost of living pressures are a matter of very serious concern.

Being food insecure means that sometimes or quite regularly you struggle to put good food on the table for you and your family. Australians on fixed and low incomes, such as recipients of Centrelink payments and part-time or casual workers in low paying jobs, are those who most likely fall into this category. Others at risk include individuals and families facing crisis situations, such as a job loss or a separation.

There are a number of charitable and government agencies on the Coffs Coast who provide emergency assistance to people in these situations. The Salvation Army, St Vincent’s Paul, Lifehouse Church, the Uniting Church, various Neighbourhood Centres and others are all staffed by teams of dedicated, committed and selfless individuals. They are doing everything in their power to alleviate the hardships of families and individuals facing hardship.

Most of these organisations depend on limited emergency voucher relief systems from the Federal and State Government. In addition, they mobilise their own resources through donations, of both money and food, and sales. Yet they are struggling to keep pace with the growing demand for their services.

This reflects the national trends. Research published in March this year by the Australian Council of Social Services revealed that charitable service providers nationwide have seen a 47% increase in the numbers of eligible people they have had to turn away, compared to the same survey conducted in 2008/9.

The tragic irony of rising food insecurity in a rich country that exports two-thirds of its agricultural products mirrors the bigger scandal of massive global malnutrition in a world of food abundance.

What makes it so much worse is that as much as 50% of all edible food in Australia – 7.5 million tonnes – is actually wasted. It ends up in landfill. Earlier this year Melbourne-based food rescue group SecondBite published research which showed that this food would provide three good meals a day, every day of the year, for over 13 million people.

Coffs Harbour is fortunate to count amongst its residents an inspirational lady by the name of Narelle Milton, who for the past 13 years has been running the Uniting Church soup kitchen in the city centre every week day. Her kitchen, and the food parcels offered by other providers, are now being supported through Food Bank initiatives operated by several supermarkets. This is a start towards redressing the scandals of food insecurity and food waste, but so much more needs to be done.

Next time an interview with Narelle, who received the Order of Australia in 2009 in recognition of her work, will be published in this column.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Self-sustaining systems for the backyard gardener

Sustainability in Korora

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 11.6.11

Meet Steve McGrane. He’s the newly appointed Coordinator of the soon-to-be-inaugurated first-ever Coffs Regional Community Garden, to be constructed on 5000m2 at the Combine Street reserve.

Steve McGrane in his backyard garden in Korora
Steve McGrane in his backyard garden in Korora

Steve brings a wealth of horticultural experience and knowledge to this position, as well as a fierce passion for the principles of organic gardening and sustainable living. And not just the principles: Steve is a man who ‘walks the talk’, as anyone fortunate enough to visit his small (600m2) suburban property in Korora can attest.

He moved to the Coffs area in 2007, after working as a horticulturalist in Sydney and being involved at the community level with groups such as Permaculture North. His first intention was to set up a demonstration broadacre farm, but then it occurred to him that ‘actually it’s the domestic situation which is creating a lot of the waste [in our food system], and which is not really effective and sustainable in the way that we manage our resources.’

That realisation was the germ of inspiration for a seven-year project to demonstrate just what can be achieved, right here and now, in a 300m2 backyard, in terms of sustainable food production and biodiversity. And what Steve has achieved, largely with his own time, effort, skills and resources, plus some help from his neighbours, is quite remarkable.

When Steve talks about ‘sustainable food production’, what he means is a system that, after a period of time, doesn’t depend on purchased external inputs, i.e. it can sustain itself. His project isn’t about achieving self-sufficiency, which he sees as unrealistic and even undesirable. Rather, the aim is that after seven years, ‘the inputs which are producing the food here [will] be totally self-sustainable’, including ‘the water, the fertilisers, the mulch, and everything else’.

So how has he gone about achieving this goal? By applying permaculture and biodynamic methods ‘to prepare what was basically clay and shale soil’; and by researching what could be grown, with the aim of getting a ‘broad range of species’, especially those that would largely take care of themselves.

The starting point was to plant a lot of pioneer and support species, like acacias (Sally Wattles) and bamboo, alongside a large number of fruit trees. At first the ratio of support species to fruit trees was 90%-10%, and Steve’s aim is ‘through evolutional successioning’ to reverse that entirely over a fifteen-year period. Currently, after four years, the ratio is 60-40, support-fruit trees.

The pioneer plants have two main purposes: to fix nitrogen and improve the soil; and also as ‘sacrificial plants’ to produce mulch, via the ‘chop and drop’ method. Both purposes complement each other:

When you cut acacias and you trim the canopy, you also trim the roots, and that releases the nitrogen…Otherwise nitrogen’s not released until the plant is actually killed, and the nodules are broken open. So [this] is a way of releasing nitrogen as you go.

At the ground level, Steve’s put in other pioneers, like comfrey and vettava grass, which he uses as a border for his mandala vegie gardens.

Vettava grass is ‘used as a fodder in India for cattle’, says Steve, ‘because it’s very high in proteins, and it makes a very good mulch. It breaks down into straw, and that’s what I’m talking about in terms of not having to bring in inputs. So all I do is chop and drop it into the soil. It’s got nitrogen as well, and a high mineral uptake.’

The comfrey serves a similar purpose, and is also highly recommended for making a compost tea, together with a bit of seaweed, and the odd biodynamic prep. Another good ‘chop and drop’ is pidgeon pea, which also yields a crop of lentils. Other food-and-pioneer plants are sweet potatoes, which as a ‘ground cover [creates] a habitat for the microbes and bacteria to do their work’; and mint, which also deters pests.

The result of these years of soil preparation? ‘I now have six inches of soil’, says Steve, ‘which I didn’t have before.’

Talking of food, Steve has Decassis and Cavendish bananas, apples, peaches, pears, citrus, pawpaw, nectarines, almonds, macadamia, a dwarf pecan, hill gooseberry, South American cherry, passionfruit vines, and many other species. And that’s before we get to the vegies…

Steve’s new projects for his garden are the native bees, and aquaponics, which we’ll discuss in future columns.

If you would like to visit Steve’s garden in Korora, please put your name down for a tour with the Coffs Coast Ambassador programme, 6648 4676. For those interested in finding out more about the Coffs Regional Community Garden, please visit www.coffscommunitygardens.org.au, or contact Adam Curlis on 0424 989 979.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Collaborative cultures and networks, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, Retailers

The Happy Frog

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 14.5.11

This is the second of a two-part interview with Kim Towner, owner and manager of Tangellos and Happy Frog, and Coordinator of the Sunday Harbourside Markets.

Happy Frog was born two years ago, because Kim felt that Coffs Harbour was lacking a place ‘where you can go and buy the local fruit and veg all the time’, and help build a culture of sustainability – both social and environmental.

Kim chose the Frog because ‘it’s a measure of environmental health. I wanted to get everybody here, not just the vegetarians. I thought, let’s replace two meals a week with vego stuff, and let’s not have bottled water, let’s just look at those two things. And see what we can do differently.’

Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour
Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour

She gets as much local produce as she can, but not as much as she would like. At first, she bought largely direct from growers, but eventually logistical difficulties meant she had to rely on the services of a local wholesaler: Phil at A & D down at the Jetty. She speaks very highly of him – ‘he’s honest and fair and passionate’ – as do other businesses that preference good quality, fresh and reliable local produce.

The business has been very successful since opening – ‘people latched on to it really quickly, [they] heard about it through word of mouth’ – but Kim feels it’s still ‘really difficult to get people to buy here, and not buy in the supermarket’, even though the produce compares well on price.

‘I remember when we’d opened a few months’, she says, ‘and Woolies were offering a huge discount – 30 cents a litre on petrol – if you spent $300. I went and looked at their tomatoes and cucumbers, and worked out that if you bought tomatoes and cucumbers here, which were both local and beautiful – you would have saved $8, just on that one purchase of a kilo each of those two items. That [just] blew me away.’

The most profitable part of Happy Frog is the café. Thursday is always a busy day, because of the city centre growers’ market; Kim says other local businesses should ‘stop whingeing’ about it and look at their turnover on a Thursday.

One recent popular option has been a take-away dinner offer of $25 for four people, which is excellent value if you have tasted the many salads, lasagnes, lentil patties and kofta balls the café offers. The menu for the week is sent out each Monday to her growing email list of 150 people.

Kim and her team are now looking to expand on this by moving into catering: ‘We do party salads in bulk, and also funerals, and from that we do lots of meetings. This is a growing part of our business. It introduces a lot of people to the taste, and to the vegetarian thing.’

Kim is full of ideas for the future, both for Happy Frog and the region. There’s local value-adding: ‘We’ve just started our own dukkhas, semi-dried tomatoes, and I want to do jams, and relishes, and salad dressings.’ She also wants to ‘get in to school canteens…at Toormina High School – I’d love to do a Jamie Oliver-type thing, we could do some really good stuff, with the crew we’ve got.’

Her ‘favourite vision’ is to create a ‘shopping centre with a difference – a blend of shopping centre and markets. So that you had everything there – great big kitchens that made pasta, and bread, and jams, and you had a nursery, and a healing section where you got your hair cut, a massage – and you open the whole front of it up, with glass – and you played live music every day, and you had a kids’ playground there. And you had hand-made shoes, and clothing, and it was all there so people good see it. I reckon that would go so off – it would be like, this is how can you do it, a community shopping centre, but modern, and cool and funky.’

Her other big dream is ‘to see a hemp and bamboo industry [for Coffs Harbour’.

These plants grow abundantly, ‘they make beautiful fabric and great sustainable products. Coffs Harbour for ever has been flogging this tourism thing. I’ve got nothing against tourists – but it goes up and down, and changes. But let’s have something that’s really sustainable, for the long term….We could come up with some great name for hemp clothing that was made here, and exported to the damn world!’

These dreams will probably be for someone else to bring to reality, because there’s only so much one person – even one as energetic and visionary as Kim Towner – can do. But she and her team are living proof that the future here can be very bright indeed.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Farmers Markets, Local and regional food economies

Pragmatic Idealism

Kim Towner – the ‘pragmatic idealist’

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 30.4.11

This is the first of a two-part series on Kim Towner, owner and manager of Tangellos and Happy Frog in the Coffs Harbour CBD, and is also the coordinator of the Harbourside Sunday market. The story of Happy Frog and Kim’s thoughts on the future will be in the next column.

Kim Towner, proprietor of the Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour, NSW
Kim Towner, proprietor of the Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour, NSW

Kim Towner, in her own words, has ‘been to corporate scum and dirty hippy, and lots of things in between’. She’s a great asset to the city, and is exactly the sort of enterprising individual we need if we’re going to meet the challenge of building a sustainable and resilient food system.

Kim has always been a strong believer in supporting local farmers and growers: ‘I’ve always enjoyed shopping that way, going to the markets, knowing the peoples’ names whom I’m buying from’, she says. With Tangellos, she was able to put those values into practice, and combine it with a business savvy that has seen the juice and coffee bar more than double its turnover in only a few years.

As she got to know the stallholders at the central growers’ market, she heard that were unhappy about the then Sunday market, because they felt they couldn’t compete ‘against all the seconds coming out of Brisbane’. Kim, being the energetic person she is, decided to do something about it – she started her own market at the Harbourside.

‘I wanted to make it more than just a growers’ market’, she said. So ‘it has growers’ stalls, live music, a wine producer, an olive stall – and most produce there is grown or made on the mid-north Coast, or with connections to here’, with strict rules about no re-selling and no imports.

And once again, she did it well, with perhaps a dash of luck thrown in – fortune favours the brave: ‘There’s been very few days when it hasn’t felt really good. A Koori elder said to me that it was an old trading ground, “You dream them markets did ya?” The tribes from the north and the south and the west used to meet there. And the currents meet there too, which is why it’s so good for fishing’, Kim adds.

Reflecting on her experience with the market, Kim says that ‘there’s two levels of growers that I’ve found. You’ve got your bigger high-end growers, who just want to ship everything off to the [Brisbane or Sydney] market – they don’t want to come to the market. And other level of grower is very small – and they have to hold down a full-time job, as well as grow, and they can’t come to the market either.’

‘So the ones who come to the markets are the in-betweeners – they’ve got a small farm, they make their living out of it, but they’re not huge – Chris who does my fruit & veg, he’s like that, he’s grows tomatoes and herbs and he’s got a bit of a job. They’re the sort of people who can do markets. And often sell their produce locally.’

‘We’ve tried to accommodate these different levels, and the best we’ve come up with is this lady, who goes around and gets what she can from the different growers, and even then she struggles – with a local mushroom grower here will only deal with the wholesaler. So we can get local mushrooms, but only through the wholesaler. And there’s something to be said for that.’

Always looking to improve, Kim’s next goal for the market is to add workshops to the experience – ‘arts and crafts, yoga and so on – I think it’s an opportunity to create something really different, a combination of a market and an event, and tie in to local activities like the buskers or whatever’s going on.’ Watch this space!

advocate, Co-operatives, Coffs Coast, Fruit growing

Unity is power

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Bananas in Coffs Harbour – will the Big Banana be all that we have left?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 2.4.11

Bananas have left their mark on Coffs Harbour. Our local credit union, the BCU, was established by banana growers in 1970, by members of the Banana Growers Federation who, according to the BCU website, ‘found it difficult to get finance through the banks of the day [so] they pooled resources, and formed a credit union, locals helping locals’.

Forty-six years ago, the Big Banana was inaugurated as one of the first of Australia’s ‘Big Things’ attractions. The very first, according to Wikipedia, was the Big Scotsman in Medindie, Adelaide, built in 1963.

Isn’t Wikipedia a goldmine of information? A wonderful modern resource at our fingertips, perfect for finding out all the facts about obscure and not-so-obscure people, phenomena and places. But beware: you can’t always trust everything you read in Wikipedia.

Take its entry for Coffs Harbour, for example. It says that the town ‘is the hub for a thriving banana industry’. The page was last modified on 16 March, 2011.  Whoever the contributors are to that page, they obviously haven’t spent much time – or any time – talking to a local banana grower, or looking at what’s been happening to the industry.

Coffs Harbour was the hub for a thriving banana industry – several decades ago. Today it’s the hub for what some are saying is an industry in terminal decline.  South Boambee grower Ted Knoblock, with over 30 years’ of experience in the local industry, is phasing out the last half dozen acres on his family property, because, despite Cyclone Yasi, ‘the long term future for bananas here is zero now’.

Ted acknowledges the role played by the mega-production in North Queensland in the local industry’s decline, but he also says that the local growers have to shoulder some of the responsibility for their current predicament:

“[The decline is] not all do with North Queensland, it’s to do with the incompetence of growers here who just won’t move on. They won’t use new ideas, and new ways of marketing. They want to be individual, but unity is power – and they won’t accept that, so they get stung every time in the markets.”

Unity is power – the phrase that echoes down the centuries, and is still rich with meaning today. For the alienated youth and workers of the Middle East, it means millions of people in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and Sana’a, bravely staring down the guns and tanks of repressive dictators. For fruit growers on the Coffs Coast, it means organising into cooperatives, agreeing a single marketing strategy and sticking to it, so you can be price makers, not price takers.

That was the role played for 71 years by the Banana Growers Federation. At the time of its winding up, seven years ago almost to the day, long-time Woolgoolga grower Jim Limbert said that ‘without the BGF, the banana industry in NSW could not have prospered…The BGF was essential for the establishment of the industry in this state’.

There was no more powerful symbol of the decline of the banana industry than the decision by the-then remaining 428 members of the cooperative – down from 30,000 in the early 1970s – to wind it up in 2004. As to what’s replaced it, Ted Knoblock says that:

“We’ve got a marketing group at the moment – but one’s dropped out, and a couple don’t have any bananas. We’re not big enough to have any effect… If Yasi hadn’t come along, the industry would have been dead by the end of March this year. It’s that bad, nobody can afford to put fertiliser on ‘em…We used to put up to 800 cartons a week out of here – now we’re struggling to do 80…its uneconomic to irrigate them, with the high price of power.”

Can anything rescue an iconic industry that appears to be one step away from the grave? Ted reckons that a fair price for the grower might – if it was achievable:

“You’d need $16 a carton to make it viable, with the consumer paying $2.50 a kilo. Which is no different to what they’re paying now. But somebody in the middle’s getting a lot of it.”

advocate, Coffs Coast, Fruit growing

Commercial fruit growing in Boambee

The ups and downs of lychee growing in Boambee

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 19.3.11

This is the first of a two-part interview with long-time lychee and banana grower Ted Knoblock. The second part will be published in a fortnight’s time.

Ted Knoblock, his wife Liz and their son Steve operate a family farm in the South Boambee Valley. When they first moved in back in 1977, Ted recalls, ‘there were just bananas and a few young avocadoes, with lantana, and tobacco bush and weeds down the front, and a few miserable cows.’

After considering and rejecting snowpeas, they decided to plant lychees, based on the advice of a member of the local Chinese community. ‘I didn’t know what a lychee was [back then]’, says Ted. They sourced cultivars of two varieties – the Bengal and the Tai So – from Mullumbimby. The first did very well, but the second ‘turned out to be a disaster’. A cyclone arrived in 1986 and blew down many of the Tai So trees, and ‘actually did us a favour’, says Ted, because ‘we replanted them with the Kwai-Mae Pink and the Wai Chee, which have both done very well’. Ted and Liz have also planted some of the newer varieties, like the Salathiel, although they are still too young to be producing as yet.

Ted and Liz have 2.7 hectares of their 60-acre property dedicated to lychees, around 500 trees in total. They are the southern-most lychee growers in Australia, although Ted reckons they could be grown as far south as Merimbula, because ‘they are a sub-tropical fruit.’

The lychee orchard of Ted and Liz Knoblock, in Boambee South, mid-north coast NSW
The lychee orchard of Ted and Liz Knoblock, in Boambee South, mid-north coast NSW

The Knoblocks have their orchard fully netted, an investment of around $100,000 which took several years to recoup. Prior to the netting, they were up more or the less the whole night during the season, trying to drive the fruit bats and rainbow lorikeets away from their crop. It became unbearable, hence netting was the only option. Other lychee farms have had to close down because they couldn’t afford to net their trees; in Ted’s view ‘you’ve got to net if you want to grow [fruit] commercially’ in this region. The net doesn’t just keep out the bats and the birds; it’s also saved the crop from hailstorm damage on two occasions.

Their average yield is now around 12 tonnes a year; they used to obtain up to 17 tonnes ‘but it was too much to handle’, says Ted, ‘so we reduced the size of the trees to reduce our workload a bit, because it’s just not economic [these days] to employ labour. If you can’t do it yourself, you might as well not bother.’

Most of the lychee crop goes to Sydney and Melbourne – apart from the delicious seconds, which are sold for a very reasonable price at the farmgate. The Knoblocks market share increased recently when a major grower on the north coast with several thousand trees went bankrupt.

Pest and an early experience with a non-performing variety aside, lychees have been good to Ted and Liz.

‘The [market] price has stayed pretty reasonable, and some years [it] has been excellent’, says Ted. ‘We can make a good living out of lychees – but at the end of the day, it’s only six weeks a year, and the rest of the time, you do something else – hopefully go down the beach! If I ever get to see the beach again’, he adds with a wry smile.

Lychees produce their first commercial crop about 10 years after planting, but can live as much as 200 or 300 years, and still be producing, Ted says. ‘I’ve got some photos of Chinese up lychee trees on the end of ropes – 1800 foot up!’

There is however a significant disease threat to the industry in Australia, ‘an unknown pathogen that attacks them – it’s a bit like phytophthora but it’s not phytophthora’, says Ted. ‘We’ve got about 16 trees affected at the moment, and we lose about 5 or 6 a year. And that’s a big loss, because a 30 year-old tree is probably worth a couple of thousand dollars a year. And you can’t do anything about it, there’s no solution’, because no-one yet knows what the pathogen is.

Let’s hope they find a solution soon, because many of us would hate to see the end of the Knoblocks’ beautiful lychee orchard. It would be a great loss for future generations of Coffs Coast residents too.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Small-scale farming

The decline of the big banana – Part 3

The story of Bill O’Donnell – Part 3

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 5.3.11

Bill O'Donnell's property today, near Bundagen, Coffs Coast, NSW
Bill O’Donnell’s property today, near Bundagen, Coffs Coast, NSW

In the last of a three-part interview, veteran Coffs Coast fruit grower Bill O’Donnell shares his reflections on the future of agriculture in the region

Bill has spent a lifetime growing fruit in the region – first bananas, then tropical peaches and nectarines – and he has seen the changes ringing over the last 50 years. Unfortunately, they’ve all tended to be in one direction, and it hasn’t been favourable to the growers of the Coffs Coast.

We’ve already talked about the deep crisis in the local banana industry. The massive Queensland industry and the uniformity in appearance demanded by the supermarkets quite simply means that – in current market conditions, cyclones aside – it’s uneconomic to grow bananas on a commercial basis in our region. The industry is literally in its death throes.

The relatively high cost of labour is a major impediment to viability. As Bill says, bananas are physical work in this region, where the plantations are on slopes, compared to the heavily mechanised Queensland industry.

“When I was involved”, he says, “we could afford to hire workers and pay ourselves a fair wage, because we were getting a decent price from the wholesalers. These days you just could not afford to do that, because the price hasn’t gone up while the costs have. I heard the other week that they were getting $8 a box. I can remember in the mid-1950s we were getting 8 pound a box – that’s $16, and the wages were 5 pound a week. You only needed one case of bananas a week to pay the wages. And in those days we might do 100 cases of bananas a week.”

How times have changed.

Cost-price squeezes also turned Bill away from the central markets with his tropical peaches and nectarines.

He believes that if they wanted, the supermarkets could set a minimum floor price at a level which would keep fruit growing viable. ‘But they won’t’, Bill says. ‘They’re chasing the farmers out of it. They really are.’

Another serious problem in Bill’s view is the death of publicly-funded experimental farms, which used to import and test the new varieties, and share the knowledge with the growers. Now it’s all privatized, says Bill, with the supermarkets buying up all the plant variety rights and licensing them to selected growers only.

‘It’s a nasty one, that’, says Bill, ‘I don’t care what anybody says. Those PVR rights, that’s where they squeeze the little bloke out, because you just cannot get the raw material. They will say, we don’t buy that variety.’

Increasing costs, low farm-gate prices, low bargaining power, lack of public investment – these are all serious challenges for agriculture in the region – and the country as a whole.

Blueberries are doing alright, says Bill, ‘for now’; but he puts at least some of that down to the cheap labour that a genuine family farm operation enables. ‘But you can see the writing on the wall with them’, he adds, because you can grow them from Atherton right down – so there’ll be an oversupply. They’re having prosperous days at present, but it’ll be like the bananas in ’59.’

The result is that agriculture is an aging industry, ‘and that’s a real problem for the country’, says Bill. The only real key to it I think is the local markets. You’ve got to be able to sell locally, because the grower has to be able to get a retail price…the killer for the retailer is the rent. In the old days, shopfront rents were next to nothing for greengrocers. ..Half the cost of fruit and vegetables I think is the rent that these people have got to pay. It’s just – well I think it’s criminal.’

Farmers themselves though can be their own worst enemies – in their refusal to cooperate with each other.

‘ I’ve seen them’, says Bill, ‘they had the banana growers’ federation for years – and that was one of the most successful co-ops that ever was. It was fantastic. But it took one bloke to ruin it… He worked out that he could make a dollar a case more if he took it to Adelaide – money was all it was. The answer to everything’s money, somewhere along the line. That’s how things can fall apart.’

If nothing changes, in Bill’s view, Australia will ultimately ‘depend on imported produce.’

advocate, Coffs Coast, Cost-price squeeze, Fruit growing, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The decline of the big banana – Part 2

The story of Bill O’Donnell – Part 2

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 5.2.11

In the second of a three-part interview, veteran Coffs Coast fruit grower Bill O’Donnell talks about his peach and nectarine orchards, and how his lifeline to farm-based economic viability was ultimately ended by the inflexible application of regulations.

Bill left banana growing in the early 1970s and took himself off travelling for some years. He also kept up his passion for fun-running, and even the occasional marathon – hence the nick-name, ‘Runner Bill’.

On his return to Australia and the Coffs Coast, he took up professional book-making, which he continued, fairly successfully, for the next two decades. Bill wanted to go back to fruit growing, because, as he puts it, he had ‘too much physical energy’.

He purchased a badly run-down 200-acre dairy property a few kilometres from the Bundagen multiple occupancy community. He spent the first few years cleaning up the farm, and then he had to make it pay, because the book-making started to go bad – ‘the crowds weren’t going to the races any more’.

Bill tells how he made ‘a couple of false starts’:

“I put in an orchard of oranges, which was alright, insofar as you could grow lovely oranges, but you couldn’t sell them. I had the first lychee plantation in the district, but that got wrecked in a gale – so I gave that away, and anyway I had the wrong variety.”

It was the local rep from the Golden Dawn agent who then advised him to go for tropical peaches and nectarines, early fruiting varieties. Bill put in 2800 trees – 1800 peaches and 1000 nectarines – in 1986, and they began fruiting two years later. But he was caught unawares by a ‘real stinker of a problem – the [fruit] bats’:

“.. I could sit at my place, and it was like watching the Luftwaffe coming over in the Battle of Britain. The first three or four would come, and then three or four hundred, and… then 30 and 40 thousand. You couldn’t sleep at night. And they broke the trees down… they’d just get so full of peaches and nectarines, and they were that heavy, and [the bats would] just break the branches down. It was just a complete disaster – I spent maybe $70-$80,000, looking to get a return, and I just lost it all. Never got a quid… There were peach seeds on the highway, from the Sawtell turnoff to the Bellingen turnoff – it was awful, a horrible experience.”

Not a man to be deterred, Bill committed himself much more deeply to his new orchard:

“So I had to net them. We had to trim all the broken branches, and it cost $90,000 to net the place. This was before I got any return. It took me a long while to get over that – that was when we were paying 16-17% interest. And I had to do it in one hit, if I wanted to survive, I had to protect the trees. It was crippling. But we overcame it…”

The trees recovered quickly, and Bill harvested a good crop the next year, which he sold through Paul Bayliss at Golden Dawn, of whom he speaks very highly. When Paul left, Bill sent his fruit to Melbourne through a ‘terrific little Italian bloke’ that Paul recommended.

And for a while all was good – but then Bill found that while his costs – wages, freight, packing – were rising, the price wasn’t. Why? “Because the supermarkets [have] conditioned the people to pay bugger all for their fruit.”

So at that point the ‘only solution for me was to go local, with the roadside stall in Bonville [8 weeks a year], and the Sunday markets, and that kept the show going.’ Bill’s roadside stall out of the Bonville caravan park was highly successful, and extremely popular.

The stall lasted 14 years, but ultimately its success was its undoing, as other fruit vendors complained to the council that Bill’s stall was a ‘traffic hazard’. The first council officer to investigate the complaints took a reasonably relaxed approach, but in the last couple of years another officer took a very hard-line approach, and Bill was forced to close the stall.

And the trees? All bulldozed, and the netting’s gone too.

Bill O'Donnell in the field where his peach and nectarine orchard used to be
Bill O’Donnell in the field where his peach and nectarine orchard used to be
advocate, Coffs Coast, Fruit growing

The decline of the big banana – Part 1

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Former banana grower Bill O'Donnell
Former banana grower Bill O’Donnell

The Story of Bill O’Donnell, Part 1

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 22.1.11

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Bill O’Donnell has been a banana grower, a tropical peach, nectarine and Japanese persimmon grower, as well as a bookmaker and professional punter. In the first of a three-part interview, Bill talks about his involvement in the banana industry in the Coffs Coast, and some of the reasons why it declined.

Bill O’Donnell comes from one of the original banana families of the Coffs Coast. His family moved to Woolgoolga from Sydney in 1930 and his father began growing bananas in 1931. Bananas were so central to the regional economy in the decades immediately prior to and after the Second World War, Bill says, that the first Australian post-war census (1952) revealed that ‘Woolgoolga had the highest per capita income of any town in the country – out of bananas, it was all bananas.’

Bill’s father bought, sold and worked a number of small banana plantations, around 10-20 acres in size. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Bill says, ‘bananas were perfectly adequate to make a living’. Bill’s family always sent their produce to the Melbourne markets. In those days, Bill says,

‘the bigger agents always had a local representative…he’d tell you whether there was going to be an expected higher volume over the next few months, and what the price would be. They really had their finger on the pulse, it was a very good service. The price was always fair.’

When he left school in 1956, Bill joined the ‘family firm’. Those first few years were the peak of the industry in NSW, when, Bill remembers, there were ’31,000 acres of bananas in NSW’, and the state produced around 80% of Australia’s supply.  Now the industry here has dwindled to a few thousand acres, with Queensland now producing three-quarters of Australia’s bananas.

It was however during the years of greatest glory for bananas in our region that the seeds of destruction were sown in oversupply. There was a ‘bad glut in 1959’, Bill recalls. ‘Everyone wanted to grow bananas, just too many came onto the market – and that caused a lot of angst. That was the first big shake the bananas had since the end of the Second World War. We had fifteen years or plenty, and then it became a bit of a roller coaster ride. And from the 1980s on, it just became steadily worse and worse and worse.’

Bill recalls that the Queensland industry was really begun by Italian growers from Coffs Harbour. In Coffs their properties were right in town, and due to the demands of urban development, they were under pressure to sell. So they did, and with the cash, ‘they went up to Ingham and Tully, and bought big farms, for next to nothing. And with modern transport, they revolutionised the industry. Just gradually, everything started to fizzle out around here – it’s hard to believe…’.

Bill himself left the industry in 1972, but his father stayed on till he turned 81, in 1981. It was hard going, and Bill says that in the last 10 years his dad ‘barely left the shed.’

The huge volume coming from Queensland – ‘some growers will grow half a million trays a year’ – combined with the buying power of the big supermarkets, has meant that the price for growers is ‘disastrous now, relative to the cost of living… The only thing that keeps the local industry going [now] is the odd cyclone in Queensland. The locals get a go on, for about two years, and then they have five bad years, and half of them disappear in that time.’

As for flavour, Bill is scathing about the produce north of the border:

‘[The supermarkets want] to buy volume, they want every banana looking the same.  Bugger the people, whether they’ve got any flavour – the Queensland bananas are like eating rubber, no flavour, too big to eat. They’d sell twice as many bananas if they scrubbed the Queensland industry and re-started the NSW industry. You’d get a nice banana, six-8 inches long, which is just a nice meal.’

Meanwhile, the local banana industry keeps dwindling by about 5% per annum, according to Coffs Council.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Bellinger Valley, Self-sufficiency

Self-sufficiency in the Bellinger Valley

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Living off the bounty of the land in the Bellinger Valley

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 4.9.10

Fears over food price inflation are back in the news. We haven’t yet reached the convulsions of May-June 2008, when there was rioting in over thirty countries. Though the situation in Pakistan, where nearly 25% of the country’s crops have been destroyed in the ongoing floods, is extremely precarious.

This time, the sharp spike in wheat prices has not been caused by a run-up in oil futures. It’s because Russia, having lived through its hottest summer on record, has imposed a ban on wheat exports until November 2011.

As a result, prices for consumer staples like bread, beer and meat will all rise in the coming months.

These events are leading many people to see the sense in embracing older traditions of at least partial self-sufficiency: the backyard veggie plot, and keeping a few chooks for eggs.

Other reasons for this trend include well-founded concerns about food safety and quality. The recent salmonella outbreak in the US, which has led to thousands of cases of food poisoning and the recall of more than 500 million eggs, is only the latest of numerous food scandals.

Some residents of the Coffs Coast however take the embrace of self-sufficiency much further than a few herbs, lettuces and tomatoes in the summer. Nell Haydon, for instance, supplies most of her food needs, with plenty of surplus to spare for others, from her half-acre garden and citrus orchard on her property, a few minutes drive out of Bellingen.

Nell, who hails originally from the NSW Central Western town of Grenfell, was raised in the traditions of self-sufficiency, family industry and generosity. Her father was a market gardener, who died when Nell and her three siblings were still young. Nell’s mother and the children worked her father’s two acres, feeding themselves and sharing their surplus with their neighbours.

Later, when she worked in public health administration in Papua New Guinea from 1968 to 1982, Nell’s experiences with villagers who largely followed self-sufficient, traditional lifestyles, and yet enjoyed higher standards of health than many ‘richer’ people in the cities, confirmed for her that this was the path she wished to follow.

She returned to Australia with a dream of buying a small piece of land that had decent soil and a good aspect. Connections through friends drew her to Bellingen, and she paid the deposit on what is now her home on the same day that Australia won the America’s Cup in 1983.

When you walk into Nell’s garden, you can really feel the thriving abundance of 25 years’ worth of loving care of the land. Everywhere you turn something is growing, a fair amount of it self-seeded, according to Nell: chillis, butternut lettuces, potatoes, three varieties of sweet potatoes, sugarsnap peas, broccoli, cauliflowers,  Pak Choy, papaya, strawberries, Italian garlic, leeks,  Russian shallots, yarrow, hibiscus, and the exotic-looking Cape Horn cucumber, amongst much else. The orchard has various varieties of grapefruits, limes, lemons, oranges, mandarins and tangellos.

The marvel is that, apart from an initial tractor run to create the orchard, it was all done by hand. Yet now, Nell spends no more than an hour a day in her garden.

Her garden is also spreading. Since an initial visit organised by the Bellingen Local Food Network two years ago, she’s had numerous visits from the North Bank Road Community Garden and the Bellingen Seed Savers. Cultivars and cuttings from her garden are now growing in various homes throughout Bellingen and beyond.

So Nell, who is now 74, finds herself part of a growing network of Coffs Coast residents keen to embrace the ways of self-sufficiency, and she’s an inspiration for many of them. “People are happy when they come out here”, says Nell. “[That first visit in 2008] has allowed me to meet up with like-minded people. It’s broadened my life.”