Tag Archives: Small-scale farming

advocate, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Ecological constraints, Food sovereignty, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly

The poverty of farming in the Tweed

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The poverty of farming in the Tweed

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, on 10th December 2011

Last time I introduced Tweed mango grower Mike Yarrow, whom I met recently while in Murwillumbah as part of a team working with the Tweed Council to prepare a strategy for sustainable agriculture.

Mike would like this process to be a success, but he believes that it’s ’30 or 40 years too late’, at least in the case of him and his wife; and other farmers of their vintage (Mike is 67), which is the vast majority of farmers in the region.

Your problem as I see it”, he told us, “is that we, the farmers, have reached the end of our working lives. There are no new young farmers.

The aging of the farming population is an issue that affects the country as a whole. By far the largest category of farmers in Australia is in the 65+ age bracket. In this as in other aspects of food policy, the Federal Government has made the complacent assumption that there is really nothing to worry about, and that what objectively appears to be a demographic crisis will simply correct itself over time. Projections issued after the Australia 2020 Summit in 2008 saw the age of the average Australian farmer peaking in 2011 at just under 55 years, and then gradually declining past 2030.

mangos

Yet no convincing explanation was given as to where the next generation of Australian farmers would come from. On the contrary, all the indications are that the decades-long trend of an aging rural workforce is likely to continue. According to Mike Yarrow, the heart of the issue lies in what he calls ‘the deliberately destroyed profitability’ of farmers.

In Mike’s view, successive Federal Governments wanted ‘to keep the lid on industrial unrest by keeping the gap between a worker’s income and the cost of living apart’. He recalls that when he and his wife arrived in Australia in 1974, petrol was 7 cents a litre, and the minimum wage was $1 an hour. Both have since risen about 20-fold, in line with general cost of living increases. A box of fruit, on the other hand, was $10 in 1974 – and hasn’t gone up much.

You could take issue with Mike; dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist; say that the Government has never intended to screw farmers; that it’s simply a case of the way the markets (and supermarkets) operate. But that’s exactly his point.

By de-regulating rural industries, opening Australia to cheaper imported produce, and generally ‘letting market forces rip’, the market has done what it always does. It’s a competitive system, and it produces winners and losers. In this case, the losers happen to be the majority of Australia’s farmers, and the big winners have been Australia’s two major supermarkets, whose market share has more than doubled since the mid-1970s.

You could argue that in delivering ‘cheap food’ for shoppers, the Australian public as a whole have also ‘won’ in this process.  Yet as five farmers continue to leave the land every day, and very few are stepping into their shoes, the question remains: who is going to produce our food for the rest of this century, and beyond? Agriculture may be less than 3% of Australia’s GDP, but to understand its significance only through an economist’s eyes is unbelievably naïve and short-sighted.

At a deeper level, Mike is quite right. The market system – capitalism – has always depended on ‘cheap food’, in one form or another, to drive its major cycles of expansion. In the Industrial Revolution, it was sugar from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Last century, it was the mountains of corn made possible by hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals and cheap oil. This century they tell us agricultural productivity will be driven by ‘environmentally-benign’ GM technologies. Meanwhile, food prices are starting to rise, and food riots are becoming more common. Food is too important to take for granted, and so are farmers. We need to be asking some hard questions.

advocate, Cost-price squeeze, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming

Sustainable Agriculture in the Tweed

Sustainable Agriculture in the Tweed

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 26th November 2011

The Tweed Shire Council is preparing a strategy for Sustainable Agriculture. This is part of the multi-faceted Northern Rivers Food Links project, in which the seven councils of the Northern Rivers, together with Rous Water, have been working together for the past three years on more than two dozen food security and sustainability initiatives. These include a source identification project, a Sustainable Food Directory, a sustain food website and ‘virtual marketplace’, the promotion of land-sharing to connect would-be growers with land-owners, a local government resource toolkit showcasing best case policy development across the region, and support for a number of community gardens and farmers’ markets.

Mount Warning, near Murwillumbah
Mount Warning, near Murwillumbah

The Strategy aims to set out a vision and a pathway in which the whole of the Tweed community can work together to ensure that agriculture remains economically and ecologically viable in the Tweed shire, contributing to the economic vitality and food security of the Tweed and beyond.

As I discovered through listening to the concerns of farmers and growers in the Tweed over a number of days, bringing the community together for this purpose will be no simple matter.

There is amongst many farmers a level of distrust and suspicion of the Council’s motives in preparing the Strategy. Specifically, there is a feeling that the Strategy may be used to further entrench existing restrictions on the subdivision of agricultural land.

For many farmers, in the Tweed as elsewhere, being able to sell part of their land is fundamental to their retirement plans. Restrictions on sub-divisions are seen as almost callous indifference to the huge burdens that farmers have been under for the past several decades.

This is a complex issue, because what typically happens with subdivisions is that they are purchased in five-acre lots by lifestyle ‘tree changers’ who spend a great deal of time mowing, slashing and fighting a largely losing battle against environmental weeds. After a number of summers spent that way, many urban refugees throw their hands up in despair, put their properties on the market, and gratefully return to the city. Sound familiar?

The one remaining agricultural machinery dealer in Murwillumbah confirmed this pattern. Whereas 15 years ago there were five dealers and most of the machinery sales were to commercial farmers, now it’s just him, and 90% of his sales are to lifestylers.

This pattern is resulting in the progressive loss of productive agricultural land, and so you can understand the Council’s reluctance to permit further subdivisions. But you can also understand the deep frustrations and bitterness felt by many farmers. These are the words of mango farmer Mike Yarrow, who has lived and worked in the Tweed since the early 1970s:

The core of our complaint [is] in relation to our deliberately destroyed profitability, which has left us at the end of our working lives – I am 67, whilst many [farmers] here are nearer 80 – with no super, no health insurance, no holiday houses by the sea, no life insurance, no income, no stocks, no shares…the list goes on…all we have left is our land, and many in places of power, or in the community, with no understanding of our deliberately induced poverty, call us ratbags for trying to take the only path out of this mess. I survive on a pension of $250 / week…

Mike has a quite sophisticated theory of what he terms ‘the deliberately induced poverty’ of smaller-scale farmers in Australia, and I’ll discuss that next time.

The Tweed Sustainable Agriculture Strategy Discussion Paper can be downloaded here: http://www.tweed.nsw.gov.au/Agriculture/default.aspx

The Northern Rivers Food Links project can be visited here: http://www.northernriversfoodlinks.com.au/

The Sustain Food website is here: http://www.sustainfood.com.au/

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, Coffs Coast, Nut growing, Small-scale farming

Pioneers of the pecan industry in Australia

Reaping the Golden Harvest – Rosalie and Mark Nowland, Summerland Pecans, Nana Glen

Nick Rose

The article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 4.12.10

You don’t need to have been brought up on the land to be a successful farmer – or pecan grower. In the case of Rosalie and her son Mark Nowland, you start off as a nurse and a photographer.

Now, with nearly twenty years’ behind them in the pecan industry, they are two of the most experienced growers in Australia, and amongst the first to secure organic certification.

Asked why they went into pecans back in the early 1990s, Mark says it was a methodical cost-benefit analysis of the options that were available to them at that time:

I checked off different things that would work for us…And pecans were the only things that had every box ticked, basically.”

The key criteria, Mark says, include the soil and the climate – particularly the cold winters, as pecans need a certain chill factor in order to flower – as well as the ready availability of irrigation. As an infant industry, pecans also made sense commercially, as compared to macadamias which Mark says had been over-planted, leading to ‘turmoil’ in the industry.

Mark and Rosalie in their processing shed
Mark and Rosalie in their processing shed

Mark sees nuts trees as in many ways a more sustainable agricultural product than crops which require frequent cultivation.

“Trees”, he asks, “how much better can you get for your paddocks?”

And the beauty of the pecan – a tree that lives for 200 years, and is productive for 100-150 – is that while its productivity increases over time, the work it requires reduces.

So “the older we get, the less work we have to do”, Mark says. “Once the trees are a certain size there’s not much real pruning you have to worry about. It’s just a matter of feeding and watering them, and shaking them”, he adds.

Mark and Rosalie planted their first trees in 1991, and now have an orchard of 685 trees on 6 hectares of their 34 hectare property in Nana Glen. Their first ‘proper harvest’ was in 2004, which was about 3 tonnes, and this past year, with 9 tonnes, was their biggest so far. However the harvests have only just started their upwards curve, as Mark explains:

With 9 tonne, that’s only 10-12 kilos per tree. Generally they talk about 40 kilos per tree, when they’re fully mature…So we’re looking at working up to around 35 tonne eventually.”

There is, as with any crop, a sustainable level of production. It is possible to push the tree too hard, and there are risks in doing so. Ideally, according to Mark, you should be aiming for about 60-70% productivity.

“Otherwise”, he says, “you can really affect the physiology of the tree, and it can go into [a period] of shock, which it can take several years to recover from. During that time, it won’t bear a nut”, he adds.

So it’s better to work within the reasonable limits of nature by not aiming for excessively high yields.

Rosalie and Mark have seen their returns from their Coffs growers’ market stall rise over the years, especially when they started selling bagged kernels, rather than whole nuts. This is definitely what customers prefer. “We’ve got some regular customers who get upset when we finish the harvest”, says Rosalie.

Rosalie on the ride-on
Rosalie on the ride-on

Their main market, however, is overseas – exporting to China. They sent 7 tonnes there this year, the third year they’ve been exporting, at a price of $3.60 per kilo for whole nuts. It’s this bulk order which allows them to pay the running costs of the farm, and make some additional capital investments in machinery.

Next year, with the premium that organic certification attracts, they anticipate that this per kilo price will increase by 50-80%.

Australia is still a very small player in the growing global pecan industry. The biggest producers are America  – the native home of the pecan is the Californian floodplains – Brazil, and China itself, which has devoted massive acreages to pecan orchards. When these start producing to their full extent, Mark and Rosalie will have to look to other markets – they also sell to Pakistan, Korea, Singapore and America – as well as those closer to home.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Bellinger Valley, Seed saving, Self-sufficiency

Seed saving – the foundation of a democratic food system

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Preserving the Genetic Base of Tomorrow’s Food – the Bellingen Seed Savers Network

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 6.11.10

If a system is going to endure long periods of time, i.e. be sustainable, then it has to be able to withstand external and internal shocks, i.e. it must be resilient.

Dealing with the lack of resilience in a globalised food system structured largely around the processed products of corn and soy is one of the biggest challenges we face.

A resilient system is diverse, and that’s why diversity – and diversification – are central to the transformation of the food and agricultural system that is now underway.

One manifestation of this transformation is the recovery of the traditional farmers’ practice of seed-saving. While an estimated 1.7 billion farmers still save their seed, they’re now supported by local and national seed-saving initiatives, such as the Navdanya project in Uttrakhand, Northern India. Founded in 1984 by Dr Vandana Shiva, Navdanya has conserved over 5000 crop varieties and set up 54 community seed banks in 16 Indian states. It’s also trained over half a million farmers in seed and food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture.

In Australia, the Byron Bay-based Seed Savers Network was founded by Michel and Jude Fanton in 1986. The SSN website lists 76 local seed saver groups around the country, including in Coffs Harbour (CROPO), and the Bellingen Seed Savers Network (BSSN).

Established in 2008, the BSSN is coordinated by Irene Wallin. Irene, herself a relative late comer to food growing, fell into the role of coordinator almost by default, when the first volunteer for the job had to pull out.

Under Irene’s guidance, the group has prospered. It now has a ‘core’ of 30-35 members, and an email list of 150 people who want to stay informed of its activities. The members come from Coffs Harbour, Dorrigo, and Valla Beach, as well as the various valleys around Bellingen.

A key moment was when a number of keen and experienced local growers and gardeners joined the group – like Peter and Beryl Judd, from Dorrigo. They were able to supply a good stock of seed to share with the other members.

The Judds hosted one of the group’s first garden visits. “It was amazing”, says Irene. “[There were] huge, long rows of everything.”

When it comes to sustainable living, the first step is simply to begin. “You’ve got to make a start”, says Irene, “and we have. Here we are, two years later, and when I think about the number of seeds that we had to share with people at the Bellingen Plant Fair this time [September 2010], we’ve made really good progress.”

The group’s main focus is to collect and share seeds. “Our main objective is to get the seeds out and moving among the community”, says Irene. “The seeds we’re focusing on are edibles, and companion plants. It’s all to do with future food security”, she adds.

The loss of diversity in edible food crops is a real concern, and a key motivation for the group.

“You can look at the catalogues of the seed companies over time, and see how the seeds have just disappeared”, says Irene. “It’s the concern about the availability of food for everybody – it’s also about finding the varieties that will grow well here, and growing them, so they will adapt to the conditions.”

The visits to members’ gardens, and the informal sharing of seeds and knowledge that takes place during them, is the cornerstone of the group, and what has made it so popular.

“The host will talk about what’s working for them, and what problems they’re having, and how they’re overcoming them”, says Irene. “We all love being in one anothers’ gardens, it’s so interesting”, says Irene.

advocate, Bellinger Valley, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms, Small-scale farming

Discovering the secret of being able to live your passion

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Small-scale farming in Thora, near Bellingen

Nick Rose

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 25.9.10

It’s no secret that small farmers are an endangered species. The logic of food production worldwide is ‘get big or get out’. Estimates suggest that Australia alone has lost as many as 50,000 farmers in the past 35 years.

 

The so-called ‘cost-price squeeze’ bears a lot of the blame. The cost of farm inputs, freight and packaging costs keep rising – particularly when the price of oil shoots up – while the farmgate price has barely moved for many items since 1980.

How do most farmers survive? Through off-farm income.

So it’s both refreshing and remarkable to discover small-scale growers who are now managing to support themselves entirely through the sales of their farm produce. This is Kathy Taylor and Bob Willis, of the Thora Valley, about 20 kms from Bellingen.

Their secret? Biodynamic methodologies, a willingness to experiment, and finding a reliable market in Melbourne through the Demeter Biodynamic Marketing Company.

Kathy and Bob have approximately one acre under intensive cultivation, with another acre used for mulch: the ‘agricultural silver’, as Kathy calls it.

Like many growers in the region, their principal commercial crop is garlic, a mix of Italian and Russian varieties. In the past year they’ve experimented with two other crops, both of which have been very successful.

The first was broccoli, a sprouting variety that produces side shoots after the initial head has been taken off. Kathy and Bob sowed 800 seedlings in March, and began harvesting in May. They sold the big heads locally, and since then have been sending the shoots – the ‘tender tops’ – down to the Demeter wholesalers in Melbourne, at a wholesale price of about $10 a kilo.

Why were the shoots not sold locally? Two main reasons. The first is the absurdities of the freight system, the logic of which is centralisation in the big wholesale markets: it costs Thora growers $8.80 to send one five-kilo box to Coffs Harbour, while they can send up to 11 boxes to Melbourne for a standard charge of $18.50. “It’s quite difficult to go against [the logic of the system] and do something different”, says Kathy.

The second reason is simply that Kathy and Bob’s tendertops would be perceived as competing against standard broccoli heads, whose price was much lower. But as Bob points out, normal broccoli production – whether conventional or organic – is highly energy intensive:

“They use a tractor to cultivate…a tractor to plant, and to weed [and] to mulch-mow…And to help them harvest…And the output of that is a head which is anywhere between 200 gms to 400 gms. And then it all starts again…”

Independently of fuel usage, there’s a lot of waste in such a system, because anywhere from 25-40% of the broccoli sold in retail outlets is the stalk, which most people just throw away. With tendertops, everything is used.

The system is labour-intensive rather than energy-intensive, as Bob explains,

“We cultivate with a tractor, but then we plant by hand, we weed by hand, we harvest by hand, and once the main head’s gone, we can get the secondary side-shoots. And that allows us to have these plants in here [for a whole season] – with one use of the tractor, and not multiple uses, and we get five-six kilos off a single plant.”

Their other main crop this year was tumeric, which they also sent to Melbourne, again at around $10 a kilo. Tumeric is a highly nutritious root that can be eaten fresh and added to almost any savoury dish. Unlike garlic, it can be left in the ground until the grower is ready to sell it.

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Ideally, Kathy and Bob would like to sell locally, and they have began experimenting with veggie boxes on a small scale, collaborating with a few other local growers, and with a small buyers’ group. They want to expand this in the coming years.

“I really think that in the future, the local sustainable seasonal veggies has got to be the way to go”, says Bob.