All posts by vivalarevolucion13

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, Food policy, National Sustainable Food Summit

Conversations for transformation?

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The National Sustainable Food Summit

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 16.4.11

On 5th and 6th April, I joined 320 others at the Etihad Stadium in Melbourne’s Docklands for the very first National Sustainable Food Summit. The Summit, presented by event organisers 3 Pillars, and sponsored by the likes of the Meat & Livestock Association, the Australian Food and Grocery Council, and the National Farmers Federation, was remarkable in several respects.

First, it managed to bring together, in the same room and quite often around the same discussion table, representatives of the biggest corporations in food and agribusiness (e.g. Coles and Woolworths); state, federal and local government officers; individual farmers; scientists and academics; and members of the growing community food sector. Every state and territory was represented. This was in itself a major achievement, which would have been inconceivable only a few years ago.

Secondly, the messages delivered by all keynote speakers were uncompromising in their honest presentation of the reality that if Australia wants to have a secure food supply – and above all one based on a healthy diet, produced in ways that restore rather than further degrade soil, water tables and ecosystems – then business as usual is simply not an option. More than that, it is quite simply not going to be possible to continue to produce current volumes of major agricultural commodities.

This seems counter-intuitive, given that Australia exports 60% of our agricultural produce. Yet, as speaker after speaker reiterated, there are several key limiting factors which will constrain the viability of large-scale monocultures in particular. They include: high levels of degraded soils; reductions in irrigation quotas to restore the health of the Murray-Darling system; the re-forestation of some agricultural land to meet emissions reductions targets; the impacts of peak oil, such as the diversion of food crops into feed-stock for biofuels; and the price and crop yield implications of peak phosphorous, given Australia’s dependence on imported fertilisers.

Add to this the pressures of the cost-price squeeze to which Australian farmers have been subjected for decades, and it’s not hard to picture the doom and gloom message promoted by science writer Julian Cribb, who was talking to his latest book, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It.

Thirdly, the solutions presented were also far-reaching and quite radical in their implications. A number of speakers questioned the knee-jerk response which always looks to greater volumes of production as the answer to any food-related issue.

Rather, as Professor Richard Hames said, we should be looking to produce more of the right foods, in the right places, by the right people. In other words, less subsidised over-production of corn in the US, and more food crops grown by small farmers in the developing world. This applies also to Australia, where most of us consume an inadequate amount of fruit and vegetables for a healthy diet, and where we import a growing percentage of these fresh foods.

The need to progressively eliminate the tremendous waste in the food system, to invest much more heavily in agricultural R & D, and to move away from a pervasive culture of cheap food that devalues farmers and the work they do, also featured prominently in the ‘to do’ list. Myself and many others were pleased to see that food localisation was widely seen as an obvious and necessary pathway forward, with strategic land use planning – urban and peri-urban agriculture, community gardens, edible streetscapes and so on – identified as an urgent priority for all local and state governments in the coming years.

Yet in spite of so many positives, there was a noticeable lack of political realism that pervaded the Summit. Yes, the challenges are immense; yes, change is unavoidable. But nobody wanted to ask the hard questions: how do we confront the entrenched economic interests that profit so handsomely from the status quo? How do we regulate food and farming markets so that they deliver the outcomes of human well-being, ecosystem health and farmer viability as first priorities, rather than shareholder value?

Maybe it’s enough for now that the conversation has started. But if history teaches anything, it’s this: necessary change doesn’t happen just because a group of well-intentioned people say that it should.

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.

Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?

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This well-written post poses a question that in my view will increasingly come to dominate political discourse in the coming years: in the face of growing constraints on cheaply-available energy, is GDP expansion as we have known it effectively over?

Which in turn raises a second, fundamentally important question: If ‘growth’, measured in quantitative terms, is coming to an end, how can we reconfigure our social measures of ‘progress’ in order to ameliorate the suffering that would otherwise come with a more or less permanent ‘depression’?

Roger Baker’s concluding paragraphs point to the urgency of the task ahead. The final paragraph shows why the People’s Food Plan, and the principles of food sovereignty, provide a sensible and prudent foundation for building resilience in highly uncertain times.

Nobody can accurately predict how long the current situation can be maintained but, given the facts of the matter, we can see that there is certainly going to be a global economic crisis. Only the timing, which is based on investor psychology and the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep the game going, is uncertain.

To sum up the situation we face, the scientists are warning us that even at best, a well-managed global economy can only avoid a severe environmental crisis for perhaps three more decades, because of the fundamental limits of nature. However, the chances of our poorly managed system of global capitalism lasting even that long are slight. Given the time typically needed to recover from a severe economic crisis like the Great Depression, this suggests that a severe global economic crisis or collapse must put an end to capitalism as we know it in the not very distant future.

Local economies centered around local agriculture and local production of the goods needed for survival are likely to be an important part of our future. We cannot start planning soon enough.

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?.

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, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Demographic crisis, Small-scale farming

The real costs of cheap food

Food Inc - lifting the lid on the industrialised food system
Food Inc – lifting the lid on the industrialised food system

The real costs of ‘cheap’ food

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 19.2.11

There’s been plenty of talk over the past month or so about the impact that the extreme weather events north of the border will have on food and grocery prices, vegetables and bananas especially.

There’s lots of things to say about this, beginning with the fact that if the mid-north coast still had a viable banana industry, and if production wasn’t so centralised and concentrated in cyclone-prone areas of north Queensland, then consumers might not be so vulnerable to the sorts of price spikes we’re likely to see in the coming months.

Be that as it may, there’s a bigger question at stake which is rarely addressed, and that’s whether the ‘normal’ price we pay for our groceries is sufficient to maintain a healthy, diverse and viable agricultural sector in this country over the medium and long-term, given the way that current market mechanisms operate.

It’s hardly any secret that many farmers are doing it tough, and have done so for a long time. So it should come as no surprise that Australia has lost around 50,000 farmers since the mid-1960s, and the exodus continues, with five farmers leaving the land every day.

Nor should it be any surprise that the average age of the Australian farmer is approaching 60. There simply aren’t the incentives for young people to want to embrace agriculture as a career and lifestyle choice. Which begs the question: who’s going to do the work of feeding us in 15 or 20 years’ time, when most farmers will be approaching 80, and there’ll be 35,000 fewer of them?

Does this sound like a crisis-in-the-making to you? It certainly does to me. In fact, it’s a crisis that’s been with us for many years now.

Which brings us back to the central issue: the proper cost of food. Through the centuries, farmers have always sought a fair price – a just price – for their produce. The trouble in recent decades is that they simply have not been getting it. At the heart of the global crisis in agriculture – Australia is but one of dozens of countries affected – is that farm-gate prices have failed to keep pace with the rising costs of inputs, freight and labour. In many cases farm-gate prices have barely risen at all.

Alongside this cost-price squeeze, we have seen an equally strong trend towards the concentration of ownership and control of most aspects of the food-value chain: from seed, to agro-chemicals, to grain trading and meat-packing, to food processing and manufacturing, and to retailing. We have witnessed the corporatisation and monopolisation of food and agriculture.

Many would say that the two trends  – the farm crisis, and the growth of agri-food monopolies – are closely linked. So closely, that the latter brings about the former.

There’s no simple answer to this, and I’m certainly not advocating a big price hike in groceries for consumers, least of all the many millions of middle and low-income Australians who are experiencing cost-of-living pressures already, with electricity and petrol price rises, not to mention the constantly rising cost of housing. But the question remains: how do we make farming viable – especially for smaller scale, bio-diverse farms – and yet keep food affordable?

We do need to move away from the culture of cheap food, where price is the sole criterion for making purchasing decisions. The logic of the food system as it stands points in one direction: the factory farm. And if you want to know why that’s a future we ought to say no to, come and watch Food Inc: see the interviews with factory farmers and workers in the United States; the conditions in which the animals are kept; the phenomenal waste that is generated, and the severe consequences for human and environmental health. The good news is that there are alternatives, and they’re being implemented all over the world, including on the Coffs Coast.

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