Category Archives: Small-scale farming

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, Alternatives, Coffs Coast, Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Local Food Film Festival, 2011

LOCAL FOOD FILM FESTIVAL

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 29.10.11.

Last Sunday the Coffs Coast Local Food Film Festival was launched at Bellingen’s Memorial Hall. In previous years the Festival has featured documentaries and short films from overseas, covering topics such as the collapse of global fisheries due to over-fishing, the inequities of the global coffee trade, the multi-functionality and vibrancy of community gardens, and the fundamental role that healthy soil plays in human well-being.

We continue that tradition this year, with two excellent feature documentaries. The first, Vanishing of the Bees, tells the story of the not-so-mysterious reasons for the collapse in bee populations worldwide, and the dangers this poses for food production. The second, The Economics of Happiness, argues that humanity must urgently find ways to transition away from the narrow focus on economic growth, and towards economic systems that place human and environmental well-being at their centre.

A big change this year is that, having successfully run the first-ever local food film competition, we are able to present some excellent short films made by residents of the Coffs Coast, telling local stories about the challenges and joys around growing, preparing and eating food. Entries came from Nambucca, Sawtell, Coffs Harbour and Bellingen.

The winning entry – The Bushman of Tamban – tells the story of Damien Mibornborngnamabarra Calhoun, as he provides the audience with a tour of his property outside of Eungai Creek, showing the abundance of tasty and healthy bush tucker that is seemingly everywhere he turns. Damien laments the widespread loss of knowledge about these sources of food, especially amongst indigenous people, who as a result suffer disproportionately high rates of diseases linked to poor diets.

Sharing this knowledge is very important, both to pass on this culture and keep it alive, and for food security. As Damien says, nearly all of us take our food for granted, but what will we do if the systems and shops that we have come to depend on so heavily should break down, for any reason?

Damien, and the winning film maker, Fil Baker, were at the Festival’s launch on Sunday; and Fil was happy to receive his winner’s cheque of $1000. Another surprise guest at the Festival was ‘the grandfather of Australian cuisine’, celebrity chef and owner of the newly re-launched Number One Wine Bar and Bistro at Circular Quay, Tony Bilson.

Chef Tony Bilson
Chef Tony Bilson

Tony and his wife Amanda, who were holidaying with a friend in the Bellingen area, prepared a special local snack for film goers: steamed garlic flowers with a rich avocado mayonnaise. If you can find these flowers (try the Coffs Growers Market) I thoroughly recommend this way of preparing them: it was absolutely delicious.

Tony was also there to tell the 70-strong audience about the publication of his new book, Insatiable, an ‘autobiographical review of contemporary Australian cuisine’.  Tony says that ‘a lot of people don’t understand contemporary Australian food, so what I’ve done is give it a context and a narrative’. ‘The biggest change’, he says, is that now ‘food doesn’t need geographical references, such as beef bourguignon, or chicken provençal. Now food is much more individual, and people are much more interested in texture.’

In partnership with the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, the Northern Territory Education Department and the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Tony recently launched a 10-year horticulture, healthy eating and educational project. By creating communal and market gardens, and combining this with cooking and nutrition classes, the project aims to address health inequalities, improve community self-reliance and create jobs.

Local food, says Tony, is ‘one of the things that give food its true character’; and in his view, the movement for local food is ‘very significant’.

Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Interview: Nick Rose

Thanks to Juliette Anich for the opportunity to create this portrait. Being able to explain at length my motivations is a rare opportunity and much appreciated.

advocate, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Local and regional food economies, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly, Uncategorized

Of thuggery and utopia

16th October – World Food Sovereignty Day

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 15.10.11

16 October is World Food Day. It commemorates the day in 1945 on which the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations was established. The FAO is the pre-eminent global institution charged with working towards universal food security: its mandate is to ‘raise levels of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the growth of the world economy’.

This year, the theme of World Food Day is ‘food prices – from crisis to stability’. Food price volatility in recent years has seen the numbers of malnourished increase significantly. Commemorative events will be held around the world, such as the ‘World Food Day Sunday Dinners’ being held across the US.

Some social movements believe that such actions are no longer sufficient, and that a rather more dramatic change in direction is needed. So they are now commemorating 16 October in a different way, by renaming it, ‘World Food Sovereignty Day’.

Two months ago, 400 (mostly young) people from 34 European countries, met for a week in Krems, Austria, to talk about what was happening to Europe, their futures, and their food systems, in the context of the increasing application of austerity programs being dictated by financial markets.

Food Sovereignty Forum in Krems, Austria, 2011
Food Sovereignty Forum in Krems, Austria, 2011

Prefiguring the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement a month later and its focus on the unfairness and inequalities of what Dick Smith calls ‘extreme capitalism’, they denounced the ‘model of industrialised agriculture controlled by a few transnational food corporations together with a small group of huge retailers’. This model, they said, had little interest in producing ‘food which is healthy, affordable and benefits people’, but was rather focused ‘on the production of raw materials such as agrofuels, animal feeds [and] commodity plantations’.

In Australia, Dick Smith has recently been talking about the ‘thuggery’ practiced by major supermarket chains, and how this silences and intimidates processors and farmers. In other countries, such as Honduras, there is thuggery of a rather more extreme version. There, following a military coup in June 2009, dozens of farmer leaders have been assassinated by private and state security forces, as they have tried to resist being evicted from their lands by companies in charge of a rapidly expanding palm oil monoculture.

Such examples suggest that the dominant global agri-food model almost seems to have zombie-like characteristics. Unsustainable from every perspective other than corporate balance sheets, it still manages to spread its talons around the world, draining life from ecosystems, forests and rural communities. Its ‘export vocation’, as scholar and food sovereignty activist Peter Rosset puts it, is effectively a ‘model of death’, and contrasts sharply with the ‘food producing vocation’ of smaller-scale farmers.

So what do the young people who attended the European Forum for Food Sovereignty at Krems propose in its stead? In the first place, they demand the democratisation of food and agricultural systems, according to the principles of fundamental human rights, cooperation and solidarity.  Secondly, they want ‘resilient food production systems’, which utilise ecological production methods, and are based on ‘a multitude of smallholder farmers, gardeners and small-scale fishers who produce local food as the backbone of the food system’.

Thirdly, they are calling for decentralised food distribution networks and ‘diversified markets based on solidarity and fair prices’, with ‘intensified relations between producers and consumers in local food webs to counter the expansion and power of supermarkets’. They want dignified and decent working conditions and wages for all food sector workers.

Next, they oppose ‘the commodification, financialisation and patenting of our commons’, including land, seeds, livestock breeds, trees, water and the atmosphere. And finally, they are calling for public policies to support such food systems and food cultures, based firmly on the universal right to food and the satisfaction of basic human needs.

Is all this hopeless utopia, or grounded realism? Increasingly, the growing global food movements are providing the answer to that question.

advocate, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms

Local Food = Jobs + Health + Sustainability

The Economics of Food Localisation

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 28.5.11

Local food and food sovereignty advocates identify many social and environmental reasons as to why the shift to local food systems is necessary and urgent.

And as I discussed a few weeks ago, this message is increasingly being heard and understood in government and policy circles, if the outcomes of Australia’s first-ever National Sustainable Food Summit are a reliable indicator.

The economic benefits of food localisation are also substantial, but there is little research on this area in Australia. Thankfully, this gap is now being filled by the pioneering work undertaken in the United States by Michael Shuman and his colleagues at BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

Shuman, who visited Bellingen and Coffs Harbour in 2009 as part of a speaking tour of Australia, recently co-authored a report titled, ‘The 25% Shift: The Benefits of Food Localisation for Northeast Ohio & How to Realize Them.’[1]

Michael Shuman
Michael Shuman

As the title suggests, the centrepiece of the report was an economic impact modelling exercise. The authors examined the flow-on effect of all the economic actors – households, restaurants, grocery stores, wholesalers and distributors, and food manufacturers – of the 16 counties of the Northeast Ohio region (population, 4.14 million) increasing by a quarter the percentage of their food needs with produce sourced in the region itself.

This part of the US is economically depressed, with unemployment in excess of 10%, and major centres like Cleveland losing up to half their population since the 1950s, in the wake of the downscaling of the automobile and other heavy manufacturing industries.

At the same time, the local food movement is flourishing, with hundreds of established community gardens and urban farms in Cleveland and its surrounding towns, and dozens of new ones appearing each year; a ‘diversity of agricultural systems’, including ‘robust and cohesive farming communities’ such as the Amish and the Mennonites; innovative models such as farmer-consumer co-operatives; and ‘a rich history of businesses that support [these] farms through local purchasing and investment’.  The authors highlight many examples which reveal ‘the wholesale, restaurant and institutional buying power for local foods’.

So what did the study find? The conclusions were startling, showing that the 25% shift could:

  • ‘create 27,664 new jobs’, slashing the unemployment rate by an eighth;
  • ‘increase gross regional output by $4.2 billion’ and local and state revenues by $126 million;
  • ‘significantly improve air and water quality, lower the region’s carbon footprint, attract tourists, boost local entrepreneurship, and enhance civic pride’; and
  • ‘increase the food security of hundreds of thousands of people and reduce near-epidemic levels of obesity and type-II diabetes.’

Given its well-deserved reputation as a pioneer in local food, and given the thousands of dedicated individuals and businesses already working in the sector, one could be forgiven for thinking that the 25% shift would happen just by sheer momentum. But the authors highlight several weaknesses and barriers, including extensive poverty, significant numbers of food deserts, infrastructure gaps in wholesale, distribution and processing, a sceptical public, a lack of financial support for existing initiatives, and supply constraints.

Shuman and his colleagues are not fazed by the challenges, and offer 50 recommendations for how they can be overcome. These include innovative financing initiatives such as ‘revolving loan funds, municipal food bonds and a local stock market’; the creation of local business alliances to ‘facilitate peer learning and joint procurement co-operatives’; and the ‘deployment of a network of food-business incubators and ‘food hubs’ to ‘support a new generation of local food entrepreneurs.

 

This excellent study covers much more ground than I have described here; and anyone with a keen interest in this area should spend some time reading it.

[1] The full report is available for download at the following address: http://www.neofoodweb.org/sites/default/files/resources/the25shift-foodlocalizationintheNEOregion.pdf

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
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, Bellinger Valley, Collaborative cultures and networks, Community gardening, Food sovereignty, Land sharing, Small-scale farming

Sharing our land

Landsharing Australia

 Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Advocate, 9.10.10

The soon-to-be launched Landshare Australia (www.landshareaustralia.com.au) is the work of ABC’s Garden Guru Phil Dudman and a partner, themselves inspired by the rapidly growing landshare movement in the UK.

Launched barely 18 months ago through the popular UK TV series River Cottage, Landshare UK now has over 55,000 growers, sharers (i.e., landowners) and helpers registered on its site, and many thousands more joining each month.

What the Landshare movement aims to do, according to the site, is “bring together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food.” As Phil says, there’s been a tremendous loss of knowledge around food growing from the time when everyone either had their own veggie patch or knew someone who did. Together with closely-related movements like community gardening, Landshare is about recovering that knowledge and unleashing the spreading passion for food growing.

Landshare Australia is already generating great interest, even though the website will not be live till later in October. “We’re getting emails every day, especially from people with land to share”, said Phil. “That surprised us, because we thought that might be the most difficult part of it.”

The philosophy of Landshare, Phil says, is about sharing, i.e. making land freely available to individuals, families and community groups who want to grow food. In particular, Landshare Australia will be targeting church and other groups, encouraging them to embrace the challenge of making more of Australia’s idle agricultural land productive.

The focus on making land freely available doesn’t of preclude commercial leasing arrangements, although that is not something in which Landshare Australia will become involved. One such local arrangement which has been in place for 18 months is the leasing of five acres of Tom Hackett’s Kiwi Down Under farm at Bonville, by the specialist training and employment provider CHESS for its ‘Innovation Farm’. The five-year lease is a deal that “works very well for both parties”, said Tom.

The website will contain forums, blogs, tips and information about the Landshare movement. Importantly, it will also provide guidance for agreements between growers and landowners, setting out the rights of both sides. For example, says Phil, the guidance states that the grower must be working the land well and caring for it properly. It also recommends the inclusion of exit clauses, if the arrangement is not working out for either party.

There are a number of examples of non-commercial landsharing initiatives already underway in the Coffs region. Perhaps the best known is the North Bank Road Community Garden in Bellingen. Started by a small handful of individuals about two years ago on land owned by John Lavis and Hilary Weston-Webb, this garden now has around thirty regular gardeners and attracts large crowds to its local music and pizza oven evenings.

North Bank Rd Community Garden, Bellingen
North Bank Rd Community Garden, Bellingen

Crucial to the garden’s success, according to John and Hilary, has been the strong horticultural knowledge and expertise of the core group. John and Hilary have long wanted to share their land with local people to grow food, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts they appear to have got it right this time. “It’s not hurting us, it’s not hurting the land – they’ve enhanced the land”, said John.

His advice to any landowners thinking of sharing some of their acres or even their backyards to enthusiastic people wanting to grow food? “Just go for it!”, he grins. “It’s good for the young people, and for the little kids – why go to a supermarket and spend dollars, when you can grow things far better, and you know what you’ve done to them? And what you can’t eat, give it away, or sell it”, he adds.