Category Archives: agroecology

Agroecology, according to one of the world’s leading researchers and practitioners in the field, Professor Miguel Altieri, is ‘the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agro-ecosystems’. It is a method of agricultural practice that eschews the uncritical embrace of corporate-led ‘high’ technology and large-scale mechanisation, in favour of a reliance on building and sustaining local human capacity and peer-based exchanges of knowledge.

According to Altieri in his seminal work, Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture, agroecology is aimed at developing ‘agricultural systems in which ecological interactions and synergisms between biological components provide the mechanisms for a system to sponsor its own soil fertility, productivity and crop protection’.In other words, farming systems operated according to agroecological principles increasingly become self-sustaining, thereby reducing farmers’ dependence on synthetic inputs, whilst diversifying their production and raising yields. These practices represent what Jules Pretty terms ‘sustainable intensification’; that is, ‘making better use of existing resources and technologies’ in order to increase agricultural production.

It is this capacity to combine high levels of production, whilst progressively reducing the ecologically destructive impacts of agriculture that gives agro-ecology its potentially ‘revolutionary’ character. In contrast to the privatization and commodification of knowledge associated with large-scale industrialised capitalist agriculture, the techniques associated with agroecology are an expression of what Ernst Friedrich Schumacher calls ‘intermediate’ or ‘appropriate, people-centred’, and locally-controlled, technology.As a labour and knowledge-intensive, rather than capital intensive, mode of production, agroecology encourages the development of ‘autochthonous technologies’ based on ‘diversity, synergy, recycling and integration’, as well as locally-available energy resources.

Agroecology is one of the foundational pillars of food sovereignty.

Topics in agroecology: [suffusion-categories child_of=181 title_li=0]

 

All articles about agronomy

advocate, Aquaculture

The prawn mafia

Sustainable aquaculture?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the the Coffs Coast Advocate, 1.10.11

Commercial fishing in Australia is a major rural industry, ranking fifth most valuable after beef, wool, wheat and dairy. While the wild fish catch is declining, the shortfall is being made up by a booming aquaculture industry, which, according to DAFF, has grown exponentially, at an average 12 per cent per annum since 1992-93. This mirrors the phenomenal rise of aquaculture globally, from a baseline of less than 1 million tonnes in the early 1950s, to nearly 52 million tonnes by 2006. Aquaculture now accounts for more than half the world’s supply of fish, and more than three-quarters of the world’s fresh fish, with China being the largest producer.

The total value of the aquaculture industry to Australia was approaching $900 million in 2008-9. Fish farming – salmon, tuna, oysters, prawns, abalone, barramundi, and many others – is big business. The industry in NSW is currently worth $54 million per year, with the bulk of that – $40 million – derived from oyster production, including businesses on the Bellinger and Nambucca Rivers. Across the state, aquaculture employs 1500 full and part-time jobs, according to DPI.

Many concerns have been raised about the social and environmental impacts of intensive fish farming, such as the discharge of waste water, the destruction of coastal ecosystems, and the excessive reliance on fish meal as the primary feed. In particular, the practices of sectors of the prawn farming industry in Asia and Latin America have attracted strong criticism, as well as being the focus of protest and resistance from many civil society groups.

In Chilika on the Bay of Bengal, for example, hundreds of square kilometres of coastline have been enclosed by a ‘prawn mafia’, who produce high value tiger prawns for export. The feeding and spawning areas for local fish species have been severely reduced, and waters polluted, threatening the livelihoods of 250,000 artesanal fisherfolk. According to some local fisherman, over ten years the average catch has dwindled by 90% or more. Many of the prawn farms are illegal, and the fisherman (see picture) are threatening to demolish them, even though the repercussions from the ‘prawn mafia’ could be violent.

Chilika fisherfolk protesting
Chilika fisherfolk protesting

In NSW, regulators are conscious of the environmental concerns, and so commercial aquaculture operations have to comply with the requirements of the State’s sustainable aquaculture policy, incorporated into SEPP 62. Amongst other things, this planning instrument restricts the sites on which aquaculture can be located, prohibits the location of aquaculture ponds on any permanent water courses, and requires that no farmed stock escape into natural water bodies.

Yet one of the biggest questions regarding the sustainability of aquaculture concerns the amount of fishmeal used to produce the farmed fish. While the commonly quoted figure is a feed conversion ratio of 1.6, i.e., it takes 1.6 kg of fish meal to produce 1 kg of fish, fish meal is dried and pelleted. Making 1.6 kg of dried fish meal actually takes about 8 kg of wet fish. This suggests that in much commercial aquaculture as it currently operates, there is a net loss of 7 kg of fish protein for every 1 kg produced.

The fish commonly used for fish meal are edible species, such as anchovies and herring. Given that global hunger is a major problem which humanity has not solved, the ethics of grinding up mountains of anchovies to produce high value farmed species such as salmon and tuna are questionable, to say the least.

These are the sorts of issues that Steve McGrane, who is studying aquaculture at the National Fishing Education Centre at Trenayr Campus of North Coast TAFE, Grafton, is thinking about. Steve, who is the coordinator of the Coffs Harbour community garden being built at Combine St, wants to produce fish, but he’s not planning to embark on commercial aquaculture. He’s experimenting with solar-powered aquaponics systems in his backyard; and in another column I’ll explain how he’s doing it.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Native bees and food security in Korora

A native bee hive in every garden…

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 6.8.11

There is in many people’s minds a link between, on the one hand, food security, and, on the other, sustainable, resilient and fair food systems: building greater levels of self-sufficiency amongst growing numbers of people. In other words, raising our individual and collective capacities to meet at least some of our own food needs, and so reducing our levels of dependence on external market actors and systems.

A few weeks ago I profiled Steve McGrane, newly appointed coordinator of the 5000m2 Coffs Harbour Community Garden in Combine Street. His vision is of a growing network of thriving, diverse and self-sustaining food gardens across Coffs Harbour’s suburbs, and he’s putting this vision into practice with his own garden in Korora.

Steve doesn’t do it all alone. He’s working closely with his neighbours, and a small army of tiny helpers, in the form of a hive of native bees.

The bees’ main job is not to produce honey. It’s to pollinate the many species in Steve’s expanding fruit and nut orchard. As Steve explains, the bees only have a range of about 500 metres, and ‘the further they have to fly, the greater the amount of energy they use, so the more food you can provide locally [for them], the better.’

Because of their small size, relative to the European honey bee, native bees have a high commercial value in pollinating fruit and vegetable species with small flowers, such as tomatoes and blueberries. And they’re actually much more efficient and productive workers than the European bee, which, says Steve, ‘pollinate only about 30% of plants’, compared to a pollination rate of around 70-80% for the native bee.

Native bee hives, Steve McGrane's garden, Korora, mid-north coast NSW
Native bee hives, Steve McGrane’s garden, Korora, mid-north coast NSW

While the native bee has not, so far as Steve is aware, suffered the colony collapse disorder that is decimating many populations of European bees, it is under threat from its larger cousin. Steve explains why:

“European bees are very messy in the way they obtain the pollen – they buzz and they just destroy the flower. Whereas when the native bee comes along, it’s very delicate, and there’s no pollen left for it, so they’re actually killing the food sources of the native bees.”

European bees can also out-compete native bees for food because they can tolerate much lower temperatures. In our region, they remain active for most of the year, whereas native bees go dormant during the colder months.

But with European bee populations in decline, native bees may well have an increasingly vital role to play in ensuring our future food security. All the more reason for backyard gardeners to take the plunge and get a hive, in Steve’s view.

And while their main job may be pollination, they do, as Aboriginal people have long known, provide small amounts of delicious ‘sugar bag’ honey. This honey, because of its comparative scarcity, can retail for as much as $100 a kilo. Steve and his neighbour Peter are prototyping a way of extracting the honey in small plastic containers. This avoids the need to split open the whole hive, which can be a very messy process.

Native Bee Hive Honey Container
Native Bee Hive Honey Container

If keeping native bees takes your fancy, the cost is a reasonable $450-$500 for a hive, and ‘it takes zilch knowledge’, says Steve. The most important thing is to have a diversity of flowering plants in close proximity, so your bees have a reliable food supply.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Self-sustaining systems for the backyard gardener

Sustainability in Korora

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 11.6.11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

advocate, Co-operatives, Coffs Coast, Fruit growing

Unity is power

2 Comments

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

3 Comments
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.