Tag Archives: Regional food systems

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.